On a path

It’s raining as I sit in a coffee shop staring at a blank document. I look out the window. Across the road is an empty field. It’s an odd empty field. On one side it is bordered by the interstate. On another the parking lot of a boxy office park. On the third, way off in the distance, houses. The fourth is the busy road the divides the field from the coffee shop and shopping center.

There’s a marshy area in the field that is currently occupied by maybe 30 geese. Geese are intimidating creatures so it’s nice to watch them from a safe distance. I notice that none of the geese are moving. They are just standing, in the rain, and all of them are facing the same direction, North. Is that the direction the rain is coming from? Or the direction the rain is going to? Or is it the direction of home and the feeling or scent of the rain reminds them? I don’t know but I find it fascinating.

The geese are not still, exactly. Heads occasionally bob, some bodies wave from side to side but they all look in the same direction. I watch for several minutes and then finally turn back to my work.

After some time the light from the window is noticeably brighter, the rain has stopped. I look to the field and the geese now appear to frenetically busy. Individuals are turned toward every direction. Heads are plunging into the marsh. Backs are being scratched with beaks. A game (or battle) of follow the leader with four competitors seems to be taking place.

I suppose I could Google why geese might stand in a uniform cluster, all facing the same direction in the rain. But it’s so much better to imagine possibilities. So much better to just enjoy observing instead of necessarily knowing.

A few weeks ago a conversation I was involved with on Twitter became a news story. The details of the conversation aren’t really important but the gist of it is the Louisville Orchestra made an odd scheduling decision, I commented on it and then commented again when the LO didn’t respond. Because the conversation took place between two public accounts on Twitter other people saw and joined in the conversation. That’s the way Twitter works and it’s great. As the conversation continued and the LO finally responded quite flippantly a local arts reporter got interested.

The reporter reached out to me on Twitter for a comment on the story. I had no interest in being part of her story in any way. I also didn’t want to be rude. It seemed like common courtesy to respond to the reporter in private and decline to comment, so that’s what I did. Instead of saying something like “Michelle Jones declined to comment” the reporter copied and pasted the private message I sent her.

To recap: she asked me (through her public Twitter account) to speak with her so that my words could be included in her story, I privately declined to do so (through a Twitter Direct Message between just she and I). By publishing words that I expressly chose to be private the reporter disregarded wishes that I thought were perfectly clear.

When I voiced my displeasure about the reporter’s actions I was scolded and told “unless you expressly say ‘THIS IS OFF THE RECORD’ you have to assume a reporter will publish everything.” Aha, I see now. And I 100% disagree.

I couldn’t explain exactly why I disagree so strongly until my friend Sarah tweeted about a conference she was attending. She said:

“I’m not going to live tweet much of this conference because there’s not a culture of tweeting & people don’t realize statements [are] public”

There it is: culture. And secondarily: respect.

The statements Sarah would be hearing at the conference were in fact public but posting everything she heard would be a violation of the conference community’s standards of accepted (and expected) behavior. Though no one had said “THIS IS OFF THE RECORD” she knew that people were not expecting and did not want their every word posted. She respected the people, the environment she was in and its culture. The statements she chose not to post exist somewhere between public and private.

Now would be a good time to mention that the reporter in my situation not only published my private message but she also “outed” a friend I’ll call Jules. Jules doesn’t list her real name anywhere on her Twitter account nor does she ever mention, by name, the company she works for. Since Jules participated in the same conversation I did the arts reporter decided to play investigator. She dug around until she found some mention of Jules’s real name. From there she hit LinkedIn and found the company Jules works for and her exact job title. The reporter published all of those details in her story.

So let’s talk about culture and respect. To my mind the reporter completely misunderstands the culture of Twitter. To a “Twitter native” (for lack of a better term) it would be obvious that a direct message shouldn’t be published in a public forum. It would also be obvious to someone immersed in Twitter that if someone doesn’t use her real name on her account she doesn’t want those two things to be connected. Essentially: “if it’s on Twitter it might be public but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s for publication.” It might be somewhere between public and private.

Seemingly the reporter was observing the culture of print journalism. As best as I can tell that culture’s standard is that the reporter feels good about publishing any piece of factual information she can dig up. Essentially: “if it’s public I can print it.”

These two cultures are fundamentally different. If a reporter is going to mine Twitter for story ideas shouldn’t she learn and respect the differences? I think so.

Through user error (more on that in a minute) the database that held all of this site’s content, even the really old shit that wasn’t public anymore, was deleted. Yep, deleted. Not renamed, not misplaced, not out of reach. Deleted. Gone, forever. Technically I could have paid my host to retrieve it all from an old backup but I wasn’t compelled to do that. In fact other than one giant gulp when I realized what had happened I wasn’t upset about the loss of this site’s content. The vast majority of the content had been out of view for years. Even more of the site’s old content is actually still in a Moveable Type backup on my hard drive and in the cloud. I guess what I’m saying is that I still care about the early years of my content and since I’ve rebuilt this site I clearly care about my future content, but the middle years? Much like middle school they’re best left vaguely remembered, not documented and referenced.

While I’m not mad that the data is gone I am mad that my host made it so easy to make the error that led to deletion. It’s such a poor user experience that led to clicking the button that deleted the database. The button didn’t say delete by the way, I thought I was creating a new db with a different name. Instead I was deleting and replacing the existing one. There was no “are you sure you want to delete database X?” Just poof, gone. So while the blame for the deletion is all mine I really do wish my host hadn’t made it so easy for user error to cause the complete loss of content. But if I think about that I have to think about how I haven’t performed my own proper backups of this site in ages. And that’s no fun so let’s just move on.

In any case here we are, a new beginning.