Hey everybody!
by Dano on October 3, 2011
Yes, I know I don’t update this site very much… yet. But it’s going to get going again in the next week.
The Social Network (and You)
by Dano on June 23, 2011
These are the slides and text from a presentation I gave last week on the importance of social networks in the modern publishing (and self-publishing!) space. There’s a lot to chew on here…
This was Storey’s third lunchtime digital media presentation. The first was an introduction to ebooks and reading devices. The second introduced an ebook beta program that familiarized the office with using these devices, and with the kinds of products Storey currently has available.
This one was about social networks. So, we may as well start at the beginning…
Literally, just like the kind of net you use to catch a fish or a butterfly. A network is a net-work, the linking together of knots and lines that creates a coherent interconnected whole.
Most networks that grow organically aren’t as structured as a fishing net. They are wilder and less evenly distributed.
Network nodes can be ordered by their degree of connection. Their number of links is their degree of connectedness. I wanted to use the word “connectedness” and not the word “power” — there can be powerful nodes with only limited connectedness, and hugely connected nodes with only minimal power. There are also different kinds (and strengths) of links, but it’s too much to get into in this forum… I’ll mention it briefly below, when I discuss the difference between different directional links, but getting into power relationships is a discussion of its own!
The idea of a network effect is a very potent one for me. That the number of possible links between nodes increases exponentially says something profound about social networks of all varieties. It says that there is a power in groups different from the power in individuals. Any network that depends upon distribution of information, whether it’s packets of data over the phone line, cat memes through the internet, or social reforms through entire nations and regions, is made stronger through connection. That we, as a social species, derive so much evolutionary success from our network of communication and social memory means that there is real species-wide value in connectivity. We see this value expressed in the form of morals and social etiquette. The mathematical truths of network effects are thereby encoded into our human culture. Wild, huh!
I could not resist a 2001: A Space Odyssey reference here!
That is, links that point into a node are what a node consumes… Examples of this are feeds you read in a feed reader or twitter accounts you follow.
…and links that point out of a node are what the node produces. Examples include blog posts that others link to, or your own Twitter or Facebook feed.
Now, admittedly, a two-headed link is not
This is pretty much the supply chain.
And this is what the internet has wrought…
…short circuits and direct communication!
I think it’s important to make this distinction between new media and social media. It’s the new notion of the supply chain (new media) that makes new kinds of consumer-facing channels possible, but it’s the bi-directional linking (social media) that changes the lifestyle environment. The former changes business models and the latter changes lives.
I think of the circle of one’s Facebook friends as a club. When you establish a Facebook friendship, you establish a mutual connection, you both join each other’s circles. And Facebook is like a clubhouse, with games, friends, and chatting. It’s made up entirely of mutual friends.
Twitter, on the other hand is not reciprocal in the same way. That is, you don’t need to follow your followers. Twitter has a basic social hierarchy that coalesces around specific nodes, people, or entites. And Twitter is structured entirely around sharing and communication, you accumulate social status similarly to traditional social pathways: pre-existing fame, being interesting, being helpful, being enthusiastic, providing a service. Twitter networks can be seen like cults of personality, where the relationship between the leader and the follower is distinct and powerful. At a less sinister level, Twitter can be seen as a clique, that giant high school in the cloud, where social groups coalesce around personalities and types. The important thing to realize, however, is that this is one darn big high school! There are plenty of cliques, groups, cultures, and subcultures to go around. Andy Warhol notoriously quipped “in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” There’s truth in that, but the Scottish performance artist Momus delivered a more accurate and prescient mutation of the remark in 1991: “in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people.”
So, if Twitter and Facebook are the conversations, then what are we sharing and talking about? The answer, often, is links. And those links are frequently links to blogs. Blogs are the ground level of the social economy, the place where ideas are given the room to become complete thoughts. Perhaps a better phasing for this slide would have been “the beef”, because it’s the answer to the famous fast-food question. We need blogs. We need all the rest of the content of the internet, but blogs are most relevant to this discussion because they’re the most common method of personal long-form content production. It may be silly to say it out loud here in 2011, but blogs are for the people.
They do, however, require writing, and writing tends to require thinking, and thinking is hard. Is it too much to say that blogs are the books of the now? Will a book, as it evolves, have real differences from our current conception of a blog? Craig Mod (of Flipboard and other smart things) recently wrote about the “post-artifact” book — the way that the idea of the book changes in the digital environment. He makes the point that the life cycle of the book is extended, outside its moment as a physical thing (the “artifact”), into a timeline that includes its own writing and production and continues through (and folds into) the communication and community surrounding the social experience of the artifact, into an idea of a book that feels a lot like a blog with a souvenir. (Which is something Seth Godin has been arguing for years.)
So, as the media landscape changes, the blog model retains its power and relevance. Now, as much as it’s ever, to be a blogger is to be a publisher, and vice versa.
A little view of the social media petri dish under the macroscope. Twitter is the connective tissue. Blogs are food sources. Facebook is the encroaching crystal structure.
It may be self-evident, but it’s worth stating explicitly: not everyone is equally well-suited to each and every aspect of the social network. When starting down any of these paths, consider your individual strengths and work with them. Participating in the social network takes time and energy. Oftentimes, it’s real work! It doesn’t make sense to half-ass it. So focus on your strengths, otherwise you won’t be able to continue. And once you stop, you fade away and disappear. This isn’t to say that someone couldn’t, or shouldn’t, participate in multiple channels. This is often a great idea, and the only option for an individual, but for organizations with staffing considerations, hiring for social media cannot be an afterthought. It often can’t be an add-on job for the webmaster or an editor.
Some qualities are common to most successful participants in a social network. Those qualities are directly correlated to traditional standards of social etiquette. It makes sense, a social network is a social network! Participating online can be more of a challenge, however, because the contact happens at a remove. It isn’t physical. It usually isn’t direct. And your go-between is something I’ll refer to as “the great unblinking eye of the internet.”
(An artist’s representation, and the second explicit reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey!)
The great unblinking eye of the internet can be many things, but it often takes the form of a browser window, a field in a form, or a pop-up window. You may even see your own reflection in the glass barrier of your interface. But this unblinking eye, like the lesser unblinking eye of the video camera, is not your audience.
Performers know that it takes a certain kind of talent to imagine the audience behind this eye, to look into a camera and talk to a person who isn’t there. There’s a similar talent to communicating through the internet. It’s important to remember that your audience is made up of real people. (Since you’re actually reading this now, hi there! Thanks for getting this far. I really appreciate it!) They aren’t abstractions.
Know your audience, and speak to him. Speak to her. Can you picture this person you’re writing for? What is she wearing? Where did she just come from? What kind of room is he sitting in? Is he even sitting in a room? Is he standing in a train? In a field? What is he doing tomorrow? Again, this isn’t just an exercise and these aren’t abstract questions. They need real, concrete answers.
— “I am not your audience.”
Consider the following social suggestions:
Credit for this last slide belongs with Tim O’Reilly, who really practices what he preaches.
You can also find me at @thisisdano…
At Storey, we have the challenge of bringing our organization into this new environment. As publishers, we have a huge amount of experience with the challenges of creating great content and packaging that content for our readers. We know a lot about books. We have a large network of authors, experts in their fields, passionate people driven to communicate those passions. What can we do to bring those passions to the social network? How can we be the good, smart, reliable neighbors that we so clearly are in our books? Storey can, and should talk directly with our readers. We should start discussions with our readers. We should make ourselves open and available. We should, as they say, take it to the next level.
So, let’s get involved! At our meeting, I passed out this great introduction to Twitter, written by Jessica Hische (@jessicahische who also happens to be the illustrator behind Happy Dog Happy You, Happy Cat Happy You, and Happy Baby Happy You — I’m sure she’s done some other great things as well… 
) Download it, read it, sign up for an account with twitter.com and explore a bit. Try it out — it’s fun!
Of course, you don’t really have to unfollow them!
But… think critically about what you read and whom you follow. What makes one person more interesting than another? Who seems like they’re really relevant to your life? Who seems like a real person? Who would you like to emulate?
Feedback is the best. Worse, even, than bad feedback is no feedback at all. Nobody wants the sadness of a vacuum, that feeling that you’re just launching the things you post into the ocean, like a burial at sea. I had the experience of being a DJ at a local college radio station. It’s so fun to play records! It’s fun to share that infectious enthusiasm! And it’s so disappointing to realize that you have no listeners. Passion lost to the vacuum is draining. It’s energy that vanishes, never to return. Feedback is the energy that returns, and it’s reciprocal: the more you give, the more you get. And in the end, to paraphrase, the feedback you take is equal to the feedback you make.
Finally, I presented some of the results of our ebook beta. What did Storey learn from familiarizing ourselves with reading devices and ebooks? What’s working? What can be improved?
That, my friend, is a topic for another post!
The Social Media Food Chain: Part 2
by Dano on June 23, 2011
How is the internet like a dinner party? What is the nature, and even ethics, of a complex network? A system of vices and virtues. The second of three parts.
A Reciprocal Relationship
The internet isn’t simply for consumption. This idea isn’t necessarily new — in any medium, there are production channels as well as consumption channels — but the internet has made it simpler than ever before to produce as well as consume. This reciprocal relationship is what differentiates the network of the internet from the media that came before it. It is a complex network, as opposed to the simple binary relationship of traditional market economics (goods or media are produced, and the consumer chooses either to consume or not consume). The network of the internet is not simply a more complex market, it is a different thing altogether. Every second of every day, scores of new voices are added to the network, countless volumes of information on every topic imaginable are added, edited, and transformed. And, unlike television or radio, they are also archived, available instantaneously, at any moment.
That this is happening around us is amazing and exhilarating, but the burden of all this swirling, churning data can also be unbearable. If the internet were simply an undifferentiated pile of documents, it would be impossible to navigate. But the internet is a network (as we discussed in the first post), what defines a network is the way the parts are related. Each point of connection is a link (or, in slightly outdated language, a hyperlink). Links are like the strings of a net, connecting the knots. The knots and the string work together, one without the other is no longer a net, but something different, likely an undifferentiated jumble. And each knot is a node.
Links and nodes, nodes and links, one without the other is just some tangled string.
The Network and the Node: A Moral Tale
For a node to be a node, there needs to be a link in, and for a node to be a functional part of a network, there need to be links out. This can be seen as a rough social model of sharing, that is, you take but you also give back. Sharing, and positive (you give at least as much as you take) reciprocal relationships, are what give strength to a network, whether this is a network of websites, plants, workers, or soldiers. Network strength is the reason for generosity and altruism, behaviors often described as anomalous by strict behavioral geneticists like Richard Dawkins. Network strength is responsible for our system of social codes and customs, of etiquette, and even morality itself. The similarities between a complex network like the internet and a complex network like our human social order are direct and explicit. These complex networks are not only similar, but identical.
Think of what it means to be a good or bad citizen in society, this is what it means to be a good or bad participant in the internet (or any complex network).
The following binary pairs describe healthy and unhealthy behavior patterns.
Humility/Pride
The prideful entity exists in a network of its own regard. Pride and narcissism are close siblings. To be prideful is to see the world in your own reflection, and to seek confirmation instead of information. An example of this kind of pride is something called confirmation bias: an unhealthy network trait in which one’s network is preference filtered, and the information that passes through this filter serves to confirm those preferences. Political polarity can be seen as an expression of pride. And pride is rightfully the first on this list, as pride is the elevation of the node over the network. A prideful network is isolated.
Humility can perhaps be best expressed in the metaphor of the scientific method — that there are few definite laws, and everything is subject to the proving ground of experience and experiment. Humility is an openness to possibility, but also conversely to the limits of one’s specific life in the context of the network. A humble network is flexible.
Generosity/Covetousness
To be covetous is to want. Specifically, it is to want a property of another entity. You cannot covet that which does not exist. It is to idealize an object and transfer part of onesself into it. The idealized object thus becomes a severed aspect of the self that needs to be reclaimed. It is idolatry. The idol has power because it is untouchable, if it could be incorporated, it would lose its power. Covetousness requires strict boundaries. It is hands-off, and discourages interaction. It is fundamentally one-directional. A covetous network is restricted.
To be generous is to give. But why give? In the last post, I described a phenomenon called the network effect, where a network’s links have measurable value. Adding new links and nodes can cause a network’s value to increase exponentially. As the network’s value grows, and the costs remain relatively fixed, the relationship between the cost of adding to the network and the overall value of the network shifts. At some point, the benefit of adding to the network is greater than the cost of that addition. Because of the nature of network effects, it is always a good bet to give to a network. The benefit to the whole exceeds the value of the gift. That’s generosity in a nutshell. Giving makes sense in the long run.
Additionally, a gift is more than a contribution to the network. A gift can be more than an act of transference, it can be an act of creation. Creativity is an expression of generosity, and a generous network is necessarily a creative place. It can’t be fully generous without allowing this creative space. A generous network is allows creation and permits additions. A generous network is open.
Empathy/Lust
Lust is reductive. If you remove the sexuality from it, lust can be understood as the reduction of an entity’s complexity to a single aspect — and not just in the object of the lust, but in the subject itself. Lust is the denial of interconnection and complexity, it thrives on simple one-to-one relationships and shuts out any experience that falls outside that relationship. To lust is to see only the trees, and not the forest, only the strings and not the net. A network of lust is fragmented.
Empathy is the expression of the Golden Rule, one of the most powerful expressions of healthy reciprocal network relationships, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” Empathy, then, is an awareness of others as an awareness of onesself. It asks that look to your own complexity to understand the complexity of the network. It asks that you know yourself, not in the simple nature of Pridefulness, but with continual questioning. It demands personal truth. It always asks why. Empathy engenders complexity, it maintains and encourages connections. A network of empathy is integrated.
Grace/Anger
What is anger? To be angry is to feel intentionally wronged. It is a feeling of injustice, that a wrong exists without its corresponding right. It is the friction of imbalance and inequality. This imbalance in itself is not anger, but it is a necessary precondition. Anger grows from awareness but flourishes in powerlessness — anger, like friction, is the directionless, wasted heat of interaction. Just as in an electrical system, this heat is a function of impedance, of how much restriction there is in the network. Can anger be controlled or directed? Friction exists in all physical systems — can its heat be recaptured or is it simply wasted? What are the waste products of a system? Where do they go, and how are they used? A system with too much waste is leaky, inefficient, and unsustainable. It creates more heat than light. An angry network is wasteful.
To be graceful is, seemingly, to move without friction. But, since friction exists in all systems, to be graceful is to incorporate, redirect, and transform friction, as in the martial art Aikido. To be graceful is to be conscious of economy, here used in the sense of “thrift,” an awareness of the energy inputs and outputs of a system. To be economical is to be a careful conservator of resources. Economy is efficiency — not just how much you can save, but how much you can re-use. A graceful network conserves.
Distinction/Gluttony
The glutton consumes for the sake of consumption. It is not for the food, it is for the act of eating. It is not for the item, it is for the consumption. At the core of gluttony is indistinction, that the specific makes no difference. There is no “why” in gluttony, no reflection, and no feedback. Gluttony is a kind of routine, done in isolation from reality. A gluttonous network has no feedback capability.
Distinction answers the question: why this and not that? Distinction is evaluation and reason. It is the answer to the “constant why”. Throughout this discussion of healthy networks, this “constant why” is a recurring theme. It is the endless adaptation and self-interrogation of the network. Networks need to adapt because conditions constantly change, both internal and external. A complex network cannot be both healthy and static. A distinctive network learns from itself.
Confidence/Envy
To envy is to see the reduction of the self in the gain of others. It is a zero-sum framework. Where covetousness is the a part of the self “pushed” into a non-self entity, envy “pulls.” Envy takes from the self, and is thus perceived as an injustice: a theft. Where resources are limited, envy grows. An envious network is fixed.
Confidence is security in the self. This can come in the guise of fortification, or overwhelming power. But this kind of security is temporal and paranoid. A threat often has no fixed form — it grows and changes. There are also no impermeable boundaries, and eventually every wall crumbles, or is breached. Thus, true confidence comes not from power and fortification — it comes from flexibility and adaptation. In a complex system, threats can be managed, limited, or made irrelevant, but rarely be destroyed. Confidence transforms threats into alliances. A confident network incorporates and expands.
Vigor/Sloth
Sloth is the burden of self-imposed limitation. It is the failure before the attempt, and the self-fulfilling prophesy. Sloth is acceptance of an existing condition, given the knowledge of its inadequacy. What does it come from? Sloth is not the same as cowardice, and it does not come from fear. Rather, sloth is self-satisfaction in opposition to one’s own life: it is self-negation as navel-gazing. It is a cynical, cyclical, masturbatory ouroboros. A slothful network is pointless.
What is the point? What is motivation? What is the motive, or reason, to take action? The reward of an action has to be greater than the reward of inaction. It would be nice to think that there are motivations separate from selfish reward, that altruism exists, or a greater good to direct our action. The vigorous network is aware of the utility the network’s health. To be vigorous is to attempt to embody the healthy qualities I’ve discussed above. This is the greater good. We are elements of systems, and systems of systems. The social system, the social networks, we form are living entities of their own. What has life, has life in degrees. It is self-preserving to strengthen the life of things. Health, the vigor of life, is ethical, perhaps the essence of ethics. A vigorous network’s focus is its sustained health.
The Path
While these virtuous ideals are noble goals, the path of a life is nothing so tidy. A life is a complex thing, and its dangers are dangerous because they are real, tempting, and pleasurable. The human mind is a flawed judge of its own health, and our human networks suffer from the same limitations. To simply be aware of these limitations is a honest first step toward a realistic self-image. This path is a guide, not a stricture.
In the next (and final) entry, I’ll come down from the philosophical clouds and discuss some realistic tactics and strategies. I’ll describe the relationships between different social networks on the internet (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Foursquare, Instagram, etc., etc., etc.), and how to engage with these networks in a relevant, realistic way.
To be continued.
Social and Not Social
by Dano on June 17, 2011
Maybe I should get this on a T-shirt?
I gave a little lunchtime talk yesterday on social networks, cribbed and modified from the larger series of posts I’m composing for this blog. I think I’ll post more slides soon, but here’s a teaser!
The Social Media Food Chain: Part 1
by Dano on June 10, 2011
The first of three posts on the interrelationships within the social media ecosystem.
What Is the Internet, Anyway?
What is the internet all about? What, in fact, is the internet? You can answer this question by listing everything that the internet allows you to do — check stock quotes and the weather, read the news as it happens, watch videos and download music, chat with friends halfway around the word, or share and send documents quickly and easily. Is there more than that? You bet. Is there much more? Probably more than we can imagine. It’s many things to many people, and the scope of its utility is far from fully explored.
To describe the internet at this level of detail would fill our lifetimes with list making. How can we shave a few lifetimes off this time commitment? To find the essential character of the internet requires another level of analysis.
The Internet is a Network
This might seem obvious enough. The word internet is nearly the same as the word network. And our contraction of internet to ‘net makes the connection self-evident. So what is a network? At its most fundamental level, you can look to the origin of the word. A network is the physical construction of a net. Good for catching fish and butterflies, to know about a real-life net is to know a lot about a digital network. A net is much more than a string. A net is a system of intersections or nodes. The way that each node relates to the others gives the entire structure purpose and meaning. An individual node is less important than number of nodes to which it connects. The denser the network of nodes, the more it can capture.
This is, roughly, known as a network effect. Here’s what wikipedia says:
In economics and business, a network effect (also called network externality or demand-side economies of scale) is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people.
So, at some point, the value of joining a network exceeds the cost of joining. As an example, it may be expensive to buy a phone, but it makes sense because everyone has one, and to be connected to that network means you’re connected to the entire world. The cost of each node is fixed (or declining) but the value of the network rises with each node added. This can be expressed mathematically by something called Metcalfe’s Law: the value of a network is equal to the square of the number of users in that network.
More to the point: If you value a network, do everything you can to grow it.
To be continued.
It’s Hard to Break Habits
by Dano on June 9, 2011
It’s hard to be stuck in between thinking big and sweating the details. What’s the proper balance?
When I left my job as Art Director and moved upstairs to a new desk and a new position, it felt like a perfect opportunity to make a change in my workstyle. A change can be a sort of metaphysical haircut — a way to look at yourself differently, if only for a brief period (until you get gnarly, shaggy, and unkempt once again). I hoped that I could do many of those things that sit at the top of life goal lists: be more organized, make more time for myself, use good communication skills, adopt an open and outgoing attitude, throw away dead flowers, use throw pillows. Those were all possible, right? They’re all part of what I’d imagined in my ideal self, and they shouldn’t be unreasonable requests.
Surprisingly enough, this sentence doesn’t begin “Boy, was I wrong. . .”. I think I was actually right — with the proper context and good motivation, I was able to make real, measurable changes. And my life actually improved!
It was not, however, completely smooth and perfect (the fact that I might have expected this perfection of myself is one of those things that’s a little more difficult to stop than eating at my desk). The challenge comes from balancing thinking big and thinking small. How can I keep sight of both the big strategic picture, while remaining obsessed with the tiny details of microtypography, background noise, hovers, and opacity? The most vexing and galling question is: why is it not possible to do everything and do it all perfectly?
Some of the problem, of course, comes from just not being able to work constantly. Is it so wrong that I wish I didn’t have to sleep and could work two days in one? But I also love not working! Time and energy can’t be the whole solution. There will never be enough hours in a day. Some projects (most of them, it could be argued) are too big and complicated to be done alone. The real challenge is getting beyond the personal work ethic to a team ethic, to be able to attack problems with coordinated effort from multiple fronts. The benefits of teamwork are so clear. The necessity is obvious. What kind of haircut do I need to give myself to make it happen? Do I need to actually ask for a haircut and stop using the Flowbee? (I don’t use a Flowbee.)
It’s a question that’s bigger than my own simple problems. Teams can be motivated by passion or duty (by fear as well, I guess), but articulating this passion (especially if you share it) is a frightening thing. What if you go charging forward and nobody follows? It’s more than a personal humiliation. What if you write a blog an nobody reads it? What if you have a Twitter feed with no followers? What if nobody will be your Facebook friend? The terror of loneliness and failure is deep in the heart of social media. It’s a place where the importance of teamwork, friendship, and leadership is as clear as it is on the battlefield. The connection we crave goes beyond jargon, search engine optimization, and check-ins on Foursquare. This connection is at the heart of the teamwork necessary to the survival of our social species.
The more we’re alone (even if we’re ostensibly working together), the more we will fail to do great things.
Digital is…
by Dano on April 28, 2011
So, what do you think about this wild new world? Just what is Digital?
“Interesting.”
“A waste of time.”
“Inevitable.”
“Really complicated right now.”
“Transformational. If we think about digital as simply a distribution mechanism, it is a more evolution than revolution. It’s a faster, more efficient way to connect a reader to a work. But, if we think of Digital as a new medium then the change is more radical. If it is, as I believe, changing not only the distribution but the form of the conversation itself, then it is changing what we say and how we say it. That’s something new, untested, and difficult to predict.”
“Audio and video.”
“An opportunity to engage more directly with the reader, and a chance to start an almost personal connection.”
“An ecosystem — you could call it a medium, but I think it’s a bigger idea than that. A medium is something like television, radio, or the printed book. Those aren’t things you live in, those are ways of consuming ideas, memes, what have you. The digital ecosystem is an augmentation of reality, a companion; it’s an actual place to live. So to participate in a digital environment, you create “spaces,” or connections between spaces. You create ways to integrate the digital into the physical, not as passive (or even active) consumption, but as something more like a virus, that wiggles its way into your life until the spaces between you and it are erased. It’s a seamless tool, like contact lenses, or an artificial heart. Does that make sense?”
“Flexibility.”
“Free stuff paired with really expensive stuff.”
“Nothing like old media.”
“Very much like old media.”
“A new way of thinking.”
“A fad.”
“Something for my kids, but not for me.”
“Amazing and inspiring. Really! A lot of the connections you make on Facebook or Twitter are kind of fake, people who you would never talk to in real life, friends that aren’t really your friends, etc. But just the fact that you’re connected in some small way, even if it isn’t that meaningful, is so important. For me, these little icons and news feeds from people I barely remember from high school are important because I’m able to remember that they’re real people. It might be easy to forget that there’s an actual person there, someone who gets sick, falls in love, watches her grandfather die, stands silently in afternoon sunlight, gets so angry he can barely speak and shuts off the television in disgust, is addicted to pain pills, has a new granddaughter, is worried that his car won’t start and he won’t be able to pay for a new one, tells a story to her daughter before she goes to sleep. I find it’s hard to really like people — to feel empathy — in “real life,” but for me my social networks are a reminder of the humanity of those I can’t really care about any more. It sounds paradoxical, and I’d understand how others might feel the complete opposite, but I’m inspired to feel closer to others by these quasi-relationships. These Facebook friends.”
“An incurable addiction to Twitter.”
“I don’t think about technology. I’m a luddite.”