Hesitate.
In 2006 someone made a Facebook group about me called “nickd sure is into a lot of stuff,” so titled because that was the first sentence they uttered after walking into my then-apartment for the first time. The description was a list that started off like “tea, beer, design, websites, animated gifs” and deevolved into a nickd roast like “himself, giving orders, being didactic.” Har, har. But overall I think it showed that I’m really overly curious and into a big series of topics and try to learn as much as possible about them, etc – more compliment than not, right? That group was posted in the middle of a spate when my now-desiccated friends-only Livejournal was at full tilt (to which said group’s founder was very much privy), and I felt comfortable ranting about just about anything. Why? Because it was in private.
The amount of self-censorship that I practice in any public, potentially archivable communication is pretty astounding. I only write when I have something important that I want to say, that hasn’t been said by too many people before, on a topic that may be pertinent, and when the stars align such that I have a couple of hours of free time to write on something so dedicated and internally consistent. And so when Livejournal cratered in use among my friends, and as they flocked to Tumblr, which lacks any such access rights, I simply stopped posting long-form writing online. Where does my energy go now? A locked Twitter account, which has a very high follow cost, and manifests in ranting about cultural inside jokes, Chicago stuff, setting up where to drink that evening, and then drinking.
Because there is nowhere for me to write that can be read by a limited group of people that I curate, the amount of long-form writing that I put online has all but vanished.
“Sure, nickd, but you wrote a book,” you say. I wrote Cadence & Slang in one week, and spent the next two years obsessively editing it. During that period, I actually wrote almost nothing. “Fair, but you’re still eloquent.” I pour that energy into my job (which I lost on Thursday! “LoL”), instant messages, and emails. None of this serves to quell the almost completely orthogonal-to-all-that heinous discomfort that I feel with the vast majority of my public content on the Internet.
Access rights and public content have absolutely nothing to do with jumpstarting my enthusiasm for writing. I write just fine, without anybody having to coach me. I feel like Internet writing has to be refined, though, more than people give it credit for; it’s becoming more important than print, and way more copyable. “But all these bloggers say that blogging is where you put the rough drafts,” you say. “Books are for the more permanent stuff.” Believe me, I know. I’m with you on that last sentence; that’s why I revised C&S 141 times before printing it. But I disagree that blogging is where you put the rough drafts. Few people have the ability to command enough attention that their readers see a blog post twice. And maybe my worries about public online content can be chalked up to some kind of stage fright neurosis, but that’s the way it’s been for the better part of a decade.
How does Twitter differ? Sure, I post a lot of stuff on my public account, but it’s always stuff where there’s no ambiguity about where it belongs. If there’s any slight doubt, it goes private. Period. And from an attentional standpoint, reading a tweet is relatively harmless compared to making you read this far in some screed about access rights. It’s also worth noting that I’ve spent the past year hashing out the situational and attentional import of my 140-character snide ramblings to a truly ridiculous extent. If you told my 20-year-old self that I would get neurotic about crafting tweets properly, he would probably slap you.
The point here, way down at the bottom, is this: strong access rights on the Internet allow me to revise my thoughts with less risk of shame when I fuck up. My friends serve as a check on my half-formed, and sometimes entirely incorrect, beliefs about things. They excoriate me when I’m wrong, and they know how to push me to figure out the right things. This allows me to come up with solid justification for any topic before I ever publicly discuss it. It allows for trusted confidants; it allows me to become a better authority on something; and it allows me to be more comfortable with my own voice. I never feel more comfortable in my skin than I am when I’m around people I trust, and that goes just as much on the Internet as it does in person.
I’ll confess that this all is driven by half fear and half pragmatism; the problem is that it makes me appear a hell of a lot more one-dimensional and boring than I probably am. It’s a matter of perception, and of prevalent tastes: it’s somehow “better” to share a ton about yourself. People check into venues on Foursquare. I rarely want people to know where I am; they can text me if they want to know that. People write about their travels. I don’t do that much either, and I don’t even travel very often. People put all their small-talk minutiae on Facebook and Twitter, out for everybody to read. Beyond my private ramblings, I don’t get the justification for it, and I don’t buy the belief that sharing this with people is actually somehow better than not.
Which sucks because I fear that it is screwing me over in my professional dealings by failing to humanize me more than others. I come across as someone who just wants to put his head down and bang out a 200 page wireframe deck, and I think that’s a real shame, because that’s not my best skill at all, and there’s no way to articulate that beyond going out for drinks sometime and having me violate fifteen different NDAs at once. This whole dynamic of sharing online means that your friends and colleagues actually need to overshout in order to be heard among others, which is just completely fucked up to me, and I’ve grown up with computers for my entire life. By all logic, I should be the first one to embrace this, but I don’t, which just serves to make me feel even more uncomfortable and alienated. It’s something of a problem when you’re 29 years old and still don’t know how to handle online etiquette, decent protocols for sharing, or – worse – think you’ve dug a hole of privacy so deep that no light can possibly get in. Which is why I’m hitting “publish” on this, done in one take, before I think better of it.
