When we have no project to finish, no friend to visit, no book to read, no television to watch or no record to play, and when we are left all alone by ourselves we are brought so close to the revelation of our basic human aloneness and are so afraid of experiencing an all-pervasive sense of loneliness that we will do anything to get busy again and continue the game which makes us believe everything is fine after all.

This quote comes from Henri Nouwen by way of an amazing blog post by Nate Grubbs about his recent experience going offline. Read it.

Daniel Greene has an interesting post about the need for offline conversations that can help us make sense of our lives online. As he puts it:

I need a forum for discussion– a structured, moderated, real life, real time conversation about social media. I need to listen to people’s personal experiences with social media and I need to talk about mine. I don’t want the conversation to be about how to “drive traffic” and “target markets” and “strengthen your brand.” I just want to sit around with people who create and share a lot of stuff on the Internet not because they want to make money but just because they want to share. The question for me is: how do we share things with other people. I don’t think that reading another article or attending a social media lecture or listening to a panel discussion is going to satisfy me. I want a rap group with an agenda. Anybody know of one?

Commenters have suggested the Social Media Club along with other social media events you can find on Twitter. But speaking from personal experience, I find there’s a big gap between Social Media Events per se, and the kinds of gatherings where you can actually talk thoughtfully about social media and how to make sense of it.

I love my fellow social media pros, but when we flock our conversations often unfold a lot like our blog posts or twitter conversations, devolving quickly into link exchanges and debates over software or communications best practices. The conversations I have that really change how I think about social media — as opposed to how I practice it — tend to happen more informally. They’re the conversations that begin with my “civilian” (as opposed to social media) friends asking me a question about Facebook, or with me talking with a friend about something I’m dealing with online, or even (as happened recently) with me inserting myself into an overheard conversation about the impact of social networking.

But I don’t think the impact of these conversations lie in the fact that I’m getting an outside or man-on-the-web perspective. I think it’s that official social media gatherings are still so focused on the business and organizational impact of social media that we aren’t talking about our personal experience and personal use.  Yes, there are plenty of mommy blogger panels or first-person presentations by social media adventurers. What I’m talking about — and what I think Daniel is talking about — is the need for gatherings among social media users, where we can talk about our social media lives rather than our social media practices.

Like Daniel, I’m delighted to get suggestions.

No one is perfect and you can’t expect to please everyone all the time, so the best trick is to be prepared for how to handle things if your company finds itself under attack in the social realm.

That’s the core of Mashable’s advice in a piece running today, How to respond when social media attacks your brand. The story looks at three recent examples of social media crises in which companies had to respond to online criticism. What’s interesting about these three stories (though not discussed in the Mashable piece) is that all three revolve around weight issues:

• Ann Taylor, challenged to show that a new style of pants could look good on “real” women and not just models
• Southwest Airlines, challenged to appease filmmaker Kevin Smith after booting him off an airplane for being oversized
• Pretzel Crisps, pilloried for running ads with the tagline “You can never be too thin”

While there’s no shortage of social media disasters in which weight played no role, it’s worth noting that weight may be a particularly challenging issue online. Perhaps it’s simply a reflection of the shifting politics of weight overall: as Americans grow steadily larger, weight has become both a major public health challenge and the basis of a new consumer and citizen constituency.

Take that issue online and it has the power to become even more inflammatory, because the core dividing line — size — becomes completely invisible. It’s easy to say something insensitive when you are  speaking to an audience you can’t see: getting your hands on a stock photo that represents the variety of body types among your likely audience is one way to intuitively recalibrate. It may also be easier for people who feel marginalized by their size to speak up online, since you can complain about that size 4 model without anyone knowing whether you are yourself a size 2 or a size 20.

But I wonder if the most significant factor may be in how we expect to be treated in online conversation. For all that we talk about the rough-and-tumble of the Internet, there’s still a sense in which the online experience is very intimate. There you are, alone, in the privacy of your own home: who is Ann Taylor, Southwest or Pretzel Crisps to make fun of your size?

If you’re trying to develop a consistent voice, brand or set of relationships across the social web, it’s very useful to choose a username that is available on all the major social networks and use that as your consistent handle online. (I’m awsamuel, everywhere.) But as much as I believe in using one username across the web, there are times when one username is not enough.

Here are six social web services where I hold multiple accounts:

1. Gmail. You need a new Gmail account every day. OK, not quite, but multiple Gmail accounts are really useful for creating multiple identities on other web sites: for example, both Facebook and Twitter limit you to one account per e-mail address. In a lot of cases you can use the trick of creating additional pseudo-addresses on Gmail by prefixing your real Gmail address with “label.” — for example, specialaddress.alexsamuel@gmail.com. But if you are setting up a bunch of social media accounts for a specific client or project, it’s best to start with a dedicated Gmail account that you can use to register all the social media identities you’ll need for that project (the Twitter account, Facebook page, Flickr account, etc.) so you can turn over the Gmail account to your client or collaborator and give them the keys to all their accounts at once.
2. OpenTable. Since OpenTable only lets you reserve one table for any given evening, it can be handy to have a second account so that you can reserve a couple of different options and make a final decision closer to the date when you will be dining. Just remember to cancel your unused reservation.
3. Delicious.You need separate delicious accounts for the 3 Cs: classes, clients and collaborative projects. If you’re teaching a class, creating a delicious account just for that class is a way of collecting all the resources you’re sharing with your students: for example, the Web 2 and You class I taught a few years ago. If you’re creating a collection of resources for a client, creating a separate delicious account for that client helps them get started with resources relevant to their work and keeps their initial collection confidential (as long as you save all their bookmarks as “do not share”). And if you’re working on a collaborative project with a bunch of colleagues, you could choose a tag to use in common, but if your colleagues are new to delicious it may be easier for them to get started if you set up an account you can all share.
4. Twitter. If you’re Guy Kawasaki or another mega-tweeter you might want a separate Twitter account just for your replies to other people’s tweets about/to you, so that you don’t have to clutter up your main Twitter feed with replies. If you’re me, you might want a separate Twitter account for each of your kids, which you can use as a kind of virtual baby book to track the HILARIOUS things they do or say, and which you only allow a small number of trusted friends and family to follow. You might also want the occasional special-purpose accounts for crank tweeting people.
5. Flickr. If you use Flickr to organize and share pictures of your kids, and to collect or share photos professionally, use separate accounts for each purpose.
6. Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg only wants you to have one Facebook account, as your own real self, but if you do any marketing or development work on Facebook you’ll need at least a couple of totally fake accounts to test out what kinds of context are visible to different kinds of connections. And even if you’re not doing testing for professional purposes, you may find it useful to have a couple of fake Facebook accounts: one that you friend and one that you don’t, so that you can periodically check out what your profile looks like to other people. Finally, even though Facebook lists make it possible to restrict specific content to specific lists of friends, you may find it easier to have an entirely separate account for sharing news and photos of your kids, with only a very limited number of friends.

What are other web services where it’s handy to hold multiple accounts? I’d love to hear your suggestions.

Last night I went to see Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball in concert. The last performer I saw at an arena-sized concert was Madonna, to whom Gaga is often (appropriately) compared. That was 15 years ago, and at the time I was the age that Gaga is now, Madonna was the age that I am now, and social media had yet to be invented.

I layer those chronologies because the differences between Madonna and Gaga, or at least in the way I see them, seem to be inextricable from the birth of social media culture. When I was in my early 20s I was fascinated by Madonna, and in particular by the lively debate among feminist scholars over whether and how to engage with her as a phenomenon. In retrospect that whole conversation about Madonna feels very of the moment: characteristic of the seriousness (read: humorlessness) that tortured progressives and feminists in particular, and one of the earliest incursions of pop culture into the sacred terrain of academe. It seemed like every facet of Madonnna was up for analysis: her embrace (or was it critical engagement?) of the male gaze; the merits of the music itself, and the question of whether those merits were even relevant; her sexualized self-image; her sexual orientation and her role in the LGB (“T” not yet part of the acronym) community.

Everything, it seems, except her fame itself. A fame that was so big, so constitutive of what Madonna was, that we didn’t for the most part think to name it: so obvious that it eluded the scholarly discussion entirely.

Fifteen years later and the Madonna for our time is a performer who explicitly called her album The Fame. And fame is what last night’s show was all about: in the lion’s share of dialogue from Gaga herself (reflecting on her fans, her need for her fans’ love, her fans’ reaction to seeing her, her love of being famous) but most of all in the meta-narrative of a spectacle that made 20,000 people into something that felt more like a collective ego — Gaga’s — then an assortment of individuals.

Gaga’s ability to bottle fame — the experience of it, the desire for it — is inextricable from her mastery of social media. She’s at the top of the Twitter charts, described as a social media genius and a transmedia storyteller. But seeing her in concert, it’s clear that this is a performer for whom social media is not a tool: it’s a mirror.

Gaga in concert feels like nothing so much as a social media presence come to life. Everything is credited to her fans — her success, her performance, her ability to write quickly. She isn’t a person we are engaging with: she is a persona we are creating. The question of authenticity (so dear to social media pundits’ hearts) never comes up: “I hate the truth,” she says. “I choose bullshit every time.” Without truth, without authenticity, we can give ourselves over to the social experience of Gaga as a creation that we own, as much as we own and create Flickr or YouTube.

That’s the universe that Gaga invokes herself:

There’s something heroic about the way my fans operate their cameras. So precisely, so intricately, and so proudly. Like Kings writing the history of their people. Its their prolific nature that both creates and procures what will later be perceived as the “kingdom.” So, the real truth about Lady Gaga fans, my little monsters, lies in this sentiment: They are the kings. They are the queens. They write the history of the kingdom, and I am something of a devoted Jester. It is in the theory of perception that we have established our bond. Or, the lie, I should say, for which we kill. We are nothing without our image. Without our projection. Without the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be, or to become rather, in the future. When you’re lonely, I’ll be lonely too. And this is The Fame.

(Thanks to James for that transcription.)

As enthralling and energizing as it was to be part of a social media community come to life (what we used to call, “a community”) the transformation of fame from context to subject left me uneasy. The word that springs to mind in describing Lady Gaga’s persona (no need to separate it from her person, as she’s made clear) is narcissism: how else can you describe the choice to talk relentlessly about your fans (or “little monsters”)?

But it’s the relentlessness of that conversation that pushes it into new territory: where the narcissism is text instead of subtext. Yes, I feed on my fans, Gaga says. And we feed on her feeding on us. We create our own celebrity and then rejoice in our celebrity celebrating us, an endlessly reflecting mirror. What we see is not simply Gaga’s narcissism but our own: the transcendent narcissism of an audience that can no longer separate the adoring fans from the adored (and adoring celebrity).

That’s the same transcendent narcissism that drives social media: a culture in which we all strive to be mini-Gagas, building our followers, responding to our commenters, embracing “audience engagement” as the highest good of a conversational medium. The Fame isn’t something we give to Gaga, or buy from her: it’s something we try to create for ourselves, online.

The launch of Facebook Places, which lets people “check in” to geographic locations the way they can with FourSquare, Yelp or Gowalla, has provoked a fresh round of reflection on how Facebook affects our lives and relationships. Here are 5 problems that Facebook could cause for you — and not all of them are related to Places.

1. Job-endangering embarrassment

At ZDNet, Mary Branscombe addresses the dangers of embarrassment due to location disclosure:

Think of the number of people who’ve managed to commit resignation by Facebook update when they forgot their boss was reading their updates. Do you want someone you haven’t seen since college checking you in at a bar – whether you’re there or not? The whole idea is bound to cause embarrassments and arguments – and yet the response doesn’t seem to have any of the fervour of the criticism of Buzz (and I’ve seen more complaints about Facebook squashing Foursquare than I have about the problem of letting other people say where you are).

2. Defamation
Julie Hilden at FindLaw offers a legal analysis of the prospects for defamation suits based on Facebook updates, and suggests an intriguing solution:

Should Facebook institute a response rule — under which users agree to waive their right to sue other users for Facebook defamation, in exchange for the right to respond to any statement that they think is defamatory by contacting the very same set of “friends” who originally saw the allegedly defamatory statement?…It’s always been a little strange for our defamation-law system to compensate reputational damage with money. Matching speech with counter-speech makes more sense, and Facebook has the specific ability to match a speaker to a specific audience. Thus, one way to end Facebook defamation suits, if they do arise, would be simply to moot them by agreement. In this way, Facebook users could create a litigation-free zone, and ensure that disputes on Facebook, stay on Facebook — rather than leaking into the courts and chilling Facebook users’ speech in the bargain.

Hilden doesn’t discuss the potential impact of Places, but I wonder if it opens the door to a new type of legal action based on the unwanted disclosure of 3rd party location.

3. Complicating commitment

In her delightful reflection on social media and online dating, The Miss E writes:

Now there is this whole pressure of changing your fucking Facebook status because that makes it “official”. Change it too soon and you’re crazy possessive. Change it too late and you’re cheating. It suddenly made the whole “boyfriend/girlfriend” thing so much more charged than it was previously. I never thought having a boyfriend or girlfriend meant “OMG WE R 2GETHA 4EVA.” No relationship is forever. But I always approached them with the “I am committed to this and no one else until such a time that I/you/we see an end date to it.” I’m very blunt and very honest. If my relationship gets to a point where we are unhappy, I’d rather break up and salvage a friendship than stay miserable and romantic. But that was something that you have to worry about if you hit that hump and not something you should worry about when starting a relationship. Now, just answering the question of “are we even in a relationship?” is a hump that everyone hits.

4. Impair your ability to make friends offline

At Psychology Today, Jen Kin writes about the rise of friend matchmakers: people who help other people make friends. She argues that these services are emerging because of the impact of social networks:

Nearly everyone– from pet dogs to octogenarians– has filled out a profile on Friendster, MySpace,Facebook or Linked In at some point in their lives. While the intention behinds these sites may have been to help sustain meaningful relationships, the actual effect has been to help online relationships supplant real life ones.

5. Bombard your friends

Lawrence Coburn reflects on his first encounter with Places, noting that

As I went about my business in San Francisco this past weekend, of course I was looking to log the places I went via check-in. When it came time to choose between Facebook Places and other check-in apps, I found myself reaching for the dedicated location networks.  Why?  Because I didn’t want to bombard my 500+ Facebook friends with my check-ins, and I didn’t want my Facebook profile to be dominated with only check-ins.

That’s one Facebook problem for which there is an immediate solution: if you have a list of your closest (or local) friends set up on Facebook, you can limit your visibility to that list of friends.  Here’s how:

1. Go to Account/Privacy Settings.
2. Under “Places I check into”,  select “customize”.
3. Select “make this visible to”….”specific people…”
4. In the field that appears, type the name of the list of friends you want to share your location with (in my case, that’s my “Kid-sharing friends” list).
5. Select “save setting”.
6. For even more control, uncheck the “Include me in “People here now” after I check in, and under “Things others share”/”Friends can check me into Places”, select “disabled.”

Do you have solutions to the other Facebook problems described above? I’d love to hear them.

I just got off the phone with Betsy Karetnick of Martha Stewart Living Radio, talking about how people can get the most out of social networking. We covered a lot of ground, beginning with one key point: You’ll get the most out of your time online if you are really clear about what you hope to accomplish.

From there we covered a range of practices that can help people stay on top of social media, from social media monitoring with iGoogle to e-mail triage with Gmail filters. Along the way, we covered a bunch of simple practices for staying safe online while getting the most out of your online experience. I’ve rounded up some of the key points we covered, along with a few bonus ideas for managing your social network presences.

1. Using the same username on every site — or maybe 2, one for personal profiles & one for professional profiles — makes it a lot easier to remember how to login, and to build relationships across sites. Remember that just because you use a different username doesn’t mean you’re anonymous: your boss at Best Buy may still figure out that you’re IHateBestBuy21@yahoo.com.
2. Be clear about what you are “about” and keep that identity consistent across all sites that you are using for professional purposes.
3. Keep one “master” contact list on a service like Gmail (best) or Yahoo so that you can find your friends on other networks you join.
4. Keep separate, high-security passwords for 3 types of accounts: your banking info, your web server (if you have one) and your email.
5. Don’t use a password based on any guessable information, or based on anything you’d blog about like your birthday or your dog’s name. Twitter had its inside information exposed because someone got access to an employee’s Gmail account by guessing her password in just this way.
6. Don’t friend anyone who asks.
7. Create different lists of friends on Facebook and Twitter for different purposes, and share different amounts and kinds of information with different people.
8. Don’t bother un-joining sites. If anything, join ASAP to get your preferred username.
9. Don’t share any photos or identifying info about your kids (names, school, after-school classes) unless you really have a high level of knowledge about what you are doing online.
10. Don’t share info about your travel plans if your house is empty.
11. Don’t let fear keep you from enjoying social networks.

You can find additional tips on coping with social media here, and I hope to share more at SXSW 2011. Please take a moment to vote for my proposal, Sane + Social.

It was 9:15 a.m., and the Eiffel Tower had barely opened for the day. Nonetheless, we faced a 90-minute line-up before our two young kids — ages 4 and 6, respectively — would get to take the trip up the tower that they had been begging for since the moment we landed in Paris. But half an hour into the line-up, their patience (though not their enthusiasm) was wearing thin. So we did what any rational, tech-centric parent would do: we produced a pair of iPads, and handed one to each kid.

Five minutes later, peace was restored. In fact, the kids looked so happy in their distraction that we decided to follow suit. Each of us took out an iPhone, and there we stood, inching forward in line, playing on our respective screens.

Then we made the mistake of looking up.

All around us, the tourists of the world had been distracted from the prospect of their Eiffel Tower visit by an even more amazing sight: we four and our four screens. A German couple elbowed each other and pointed. A pair of Spanish kids craned their necks to see what our kids were playing with. And a family of Japanese tourists pulled out their cameras and took our pictures.

When your family’s technology use starts to compete with one of the world’s most beloved tourist attractions, it could be time to re-evaluate the role of technology in your travels. Or it could be the time to embrace your geekiness and incorporate it into your travel planning.

You’ll be shocked to hear that we took the latter route. If anything, our two weeks abroad gave me an even greater appreciation for the miracle that is the smart phone, and its ability to make travel with kids a whole lot smarter. The last time I was in Europe was not only pre-iPhone, it was pre-kids: and now that I’ve braved (and enjoyed!) international travel with two young children, I feel thankful that I got to do it with an iPhone in hand.

Here are 10 ways you can use your smartphone to get the most out of travelling with your kids:

     Jet lag cure

1. Stimulant: If your travel involves a major timezone change, you may find it hard to get your kids past their jet lag. In our case, the challenge was keeping the kids awake late enough on their first couple of nights in Paris. But for the very reason that most experts recommend against letting your kids play video games close to bedtime — the overstimulation makes it hard to fall asleep — we found our iPhones to be a great ally in keeping the kids awake. When we reached the droopy end-of-day when the kids just wouldn’t keep their eyes open, we handed over the iPhones and encouraged them to play high-stimulation games like Implode and Frogger.
2. Travel clock: One challenge in adjusting to a new place and time is figuring out when it’s appropriate to wake up. When our four-year-old woke me up our first night in Paris, I had no idea if we’d just fallen asleep or if it was close enough to morning that I could let him get up. From then on, I used the Theme Clock app every night: it keeps the hour on permanent display, so that when we woke up in the night, I could instantly see if it was an appropriate time for a snack, potty break or morning wake-up.
3. Night light: It’s scary for kids to wake up in an unfamiliar location, and tough for them to find their way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. But we were leery about leaving lights on, since darkness helps with the adjustment to a new time zone. The gentle illumination from our iPhone clock provided just enough light to make them comfortable during middle-of-the-night wake-ups.
   

   Guidebook

4. Kid fun: Our Paris explorations were targeted at sights and activities our kids we hoped our kids would enjoy. Appls like DK’s Top 10 Paris (which included a list of top 10 kids’ attractions) and Lonely Planet Paris (which let us look up details on major attractions) helped us find our way to attractions like the Musée des Arts and Metiers, which was a huge hit. And the dedicated app for Paris Plages, the family-oriented riverfront festival that happens in Paris each summer, helped up discover the street performance that was a highlight of the trip.
5. DIY Guidebook: Before leaving home, I did lots of research on topics like the best kids’ attractions in Paris, the best places to eat with kids, and the best restaurants in the neighborhood where we were staying. I used Evernote‘s web clipper to save the results of my research into an Evernote notebook called Paris, and I used Evernote’s settings on my iPhone to select the “Paris” notebook for offline use. If I used my computer to find a new activity or a fresh set of restaurant options, I added that to my notebook too; if I looked up a bus route, I took a screen shot of the results using Skitch, then dragged it into Evernote, too. As long as I remembered to sync Evernote on my iPhone before leaving the house each morning, I had a constantly up-to-date guidebook tailored to our plans for that day.
6. Portable highlights: In addition to the iPhone guides, we purchased a couple of guidebooks dedicated to kids’ fun in Paris. Rather than schlepping these everywhere we went, I began each day by snapping pictures of the relevant pages with my iPhone, and using my Photos app as a kind of mobile guidebook.
7. Snack finder: Traveling with kids changes your perception of a “close” location for the next snack or meal. Traveling solo or with Rob, I’m happy to walk fifteen or twenty minutes, even when starving, if it means my next bite will be something special. But even two blocks can feel like an impossibly long walk if you’re with a tired, starving and cranky kid who insists on being carried. Thank goodness for Yelp, which lets you search for cafés or restaurants, sort them by distance, and filter for those that are open now.
   

   Entertainment

8. Navigation lesson: When our daughter got impatient with the time it took for us to plan out each Metro route, we included her in the planning by handing over an iPhone. The GPS locator made it easy for her to figure out our location on the Paris Smart Map; we used the iPhone to teach her how to navigate to the nearest Metro using the map.
9. Local flavor: While searching for Paris-related apps that would help us navigate or find restaurants, I came across a few games and activities that were aimed at kids. The iPétanque app harnessed our little ones’ gaming to the characteristically French game of boules; Paris Concentration got them playing the usual card-matching game against a backdrop of Paris monuments.
10. Dinner companion: We wanted to enjoy some serious meals out, but knew our kids wouldn’t have the patience to sit through a three-course meal at a nice restaurant. Thanks to the iPhones, we made it work: when the kids got antsy, we let them play games as long as they kept the sound off.

With the iPhone in such heavy rotation, you might expect that the Eiffel Tower wasn’t the only place we drew stares. And it’s true that our use of smartphones (not to mention the kids’) was more anomalous and conspicuous in Europe than it is in North America.

But for the most part, I felt like the iPhones made us less conspicuous as tourists than we would be without them. Instead of standing on a street corner with a map and guidebook, I stood there with an iPhone — just as I would here in Vancouver. Instead of eating in the touristy cafés, we found our way to the local watering holes. Instead of being Those Horrible Tourists With Their Noisy Children, we were Those Weird People with the iPhones.

In other words, ourselves.

If the Internet is addictive, then how come there’s no withdrawal symptoms?

I’ve been on vacation for three days and haven’t blogged, barely tweeted, barely Facebooked, and have yet to check into a single location using the local version of FourSquare. It’s hard to imagine anyone a lot more compulsive than me so my ability to go happily silent is a bit of a surprise…and I think, good news at a mental health level. Maybe I’ll feel differently when I’m back and see my blog flat-lining.

Unplugging is not the only way to take control of your relationship to the Internet. If you want to create a more meaningful life and a healthier world, there are ways to pursue that online as well as offline.

But you need to find tools that are more nuanced than the off switch. If you’re turning off the computer because you want to spend your time with intention and integrity, that’s terrific; just remember that same motivation the next time you turn your computer back on.

That said, the off switch has its place, and for the next two weeks, I’m trying to rediscover mine while we take a family vacation. Nothing as extreme as going offline – I said this was vacation, not torture – but definitely spending few hours at a desk and more hours with my kids. And that means less time writing.

So I thought these next two weeks would be a good time to go back into the archives and dig up some of the ideas I’ve played with over the past five years of blogging, and particularly over the past three years in which I’ve been focused on this question of meaningful living online. In the next two weeks I’ll share a series of short posts that present practices or tips for meaningful living online, as blogged over the past several years here, with reflections on how these practices have played out for me personally.

I’m going to start with a practice that I included in my post on 5 ways to shape the soul of the Internet, which was kind of the grandmother to my recent post on 10 reasons to stop apologizing for your online life:

Fuse the power of money and technology. The soul of the Internet is not just analogous to the soul of money; they’re interconnected. The Internet is our bank, our shopping mall, our charity box. Taking our financial transactions, shopping and giving online is an opportunity to transform our dysfunctional experiences on those fronts into more meaningful and effective interventions. You can shop at Etsy instead of Overstock, or supplement habitual workplace charitable giving with personal investments on Kiva.

That idea, along with the post it came from, was inspired by The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist. Give it a read…and let me know how you bring intention and integrity to the way you spend money online.

Most people don’t even read the blog they’re responding to.

That’s one of the comments that came up during my interview yesterday on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show. I spoke with Amy Eddings (sitting in for Brian Lehrer) about my recent post for Harvard Business Review on how to stop apologizing for your online life.

Not surprisingly, some of the comments that came in on the show’s site were delighted. Others echoed the concern of the caller who bemoaned the web’s propensity for inflammatory exchange in place of real dialogue. And I’ll admit that I’m a bit more sympathetic than usual after the past couple of weeks, in which I’ve contended with the predictable sprinkling of dismissive criticism along with the overwhelmingly constructive response to my HBR post.

But I realize that our tendency to focus on the inflammatory parts of the web are an extension of our human preoccupation with risk avoidance. Anything that feels like a threat — for example, a hostile response to something we’ve written online — gets magnified. Anything that feels friendly occupies a far smaller part of our consciousness.

No wonder that so many Internet skeptics or newbies get put off by the hostility of online conversation: human beings are programmed to notice threats. But this is yet another case of our online experience being shaped by where we put our attention: focus on the hostile, thoughtless, knee-jerk responses your blog post or tweet gets, and you’ll experience the web as a hostile place. Focus on the tweets that thank you for sharing your thoughts, or the blog post that riffs on your own latest idea, and you’ll experience the web as a community of warmth and collaboration.

I’m not suggesting that you turn a blind eye to real threats online or pretend the trolls of the web don’t exist. But it’s like your mom used to tell you about ignoring the sibling or friend who was teasing you: ignore them, and they’ll go away.

Don’t give your very precious attention to the trolls who — as the caller said — aren’t even reading what they are responding to. Give your attention to people who are ready to engage constructively. It’s a better investment of your mindshare and time, and it makes for a way better experience online.

I talk about my own experiences as a thin-skinned blogger, as well as other reflections on my life online, in the full interview. You can listen to it here:

#thankyoujesus for irl and online friends. Couldn't live w/o either.

Laptop down. It's IRL Face Time!

it was so cool meeting you irl! :)

IRL: In Real Life. It's used as shorthand all over the Internet, to distinguish what happens online from what happens offline.

And it's a lie.

If we still refer to the offline world as "real life," it's only a sign of deep denial — or unwarranted shame — about what reality looks like in the 21st century.

The Internet's impact on our daily lives, experiences and relationships is real. Our world is deeply affected by networks. From the moment you wake up to news that was gathered online to the minute you fall asleep listening to a podcast, the Internet shapes how you experience the world around you. From the lunch date you make with your BFF ("r u free 4 lunch 2day?") to the colleagues your company recruited online, the Internet shapes who you interact with. And from the boss who fills you in on a Twitter rumor to the kid who fills you in on her Facebook activities, the Internet shapes how you interact with them.

And yet many of us feel like we don't have a lot of choices about the role of the Internet in our lives. We spend more and more time online, but feel less and less connected. We resent our Blackberries but feel terrified if we end up somewhere with no cell phone coverage. We may have occasional moments of delight when we find an online video of Shiba Inu puppies (awww......) but they're overshadowed by the relentlessness and vacuity of an online world in which teens can be literally bullied to death.

Still, the fact that life online can occasionally surprise and delight us points us towards the truth: it's not the Internet itself that leads to pathologies like cyber-bullying, spam and identity theft. Rather it's our decision — individually and collectively — to separate the Internet from the context, norms and experience that guide human behavior. It's our decision to engage in online interaction as if it were fundamentally different from offline conversation. It's our decision to label the Internet as something — anything! — other than real life.

There's no denying the differences between life online and off. In our online lives we shake off the limitations of our physical selves, perhaps even our names and consciences, too. What remains are the fundamentals: human beings, human conversations, human communities. To say that "reality" includes only offline beings, offline conversations and offline communities is to say that face-to-face matters more than human-to-human.

It's time to start living in 21st century reality: a reality that is both on- and offline. Acknowledge online life as real, and the Internet's transformative potential opens up:

1. When you commit to being your real self online, you discover parts of yourself you never dared to share offline.

2. When you visualize the real person you're about to e-mail or tweet, you bring human qualities of attention and empathy to your online communications.

3. When you take the idea of online presence literally, you can experience your online disembodiment as a journey into your mind rather than out of your body.

4. When you treat your Facebook connections as real friends instead of "friends", you stop worrying about how many you have and focus on how well you treat them.

5. When you take your Flickr photos, YouTube videos and blog posts seriously as real art, you reclaim creative expression as your birthright.

6. When you focus on creating real meaning with your time online, your online footprint makes a deeper impression.

7. When you treat your online attention as a real resource, you invest your attention in the sites that reflect your values, helping those sites grow.

8. When you spend your online time on what really matters to you, you experience your time online as an authentic reflection of your values.

9. When you embrace online conversations as real, you imbue them with the power to change how you and others think and feel.

10. When you talk honestly about the real joys and frustrations of the Internet, you can stop apologizing for your life online.

If this sounds like the kind of reality you want to live in, I've got great news: you can move in today. All it takes is the decision to treat your online existence seriously, honestly and attentively, and you will find that the Internet is RLT: Real Life Too.

“I don’t understand how you can spend so much time online. Most of what I see online sickens me.”

“Like what?”

“Oh you know…porn. Spam. Stupid Facebook quizzes. Endless advertising.”

I couldn’t help smiling as this conversation unfolded at the café table next to mine. It’s a conversation I’ve heard all-too-often: less-wired friends condemning the online activities of more-wired friends…and in the process revealing their own browsing habits as an assortment of porn, shopping, and time-wasting.

My latest post for the Harvard Business Review looks at what all that careless clicking does to the net. It builds on my 10 reasons to stop apologizing for your online life, and offers 6 practices that let you deliver on this reason for feeling good about your time online:

When you treat your online attention as a real resource, you invest your attention in the sites that reflect your values, helping those sites grow.

My HBR post ends with one of my favorite all-time quotes:

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” That Annie Dillard quote applies as much to our time online as our time offline. When you direct your attention towards the sites that reflect your values, you’re not only shaping the Internet: you’re also shaping your own life online.

That leads directly to the 8th reason to stop apologizing:

When you spend your online time on what really matters to you, you experience your time online as an authentic reflection of your values.

There’s no surer way to turn an Internet skeptic into an Internet enthusiast than by encouraging them to focus their online attention on the sites and activities that reflect their values. The practices that I outline in my HBR post today can help do that, but they’re focused primarily on how to treat your attention like a garden hose, watering only those sites you want to see more of. My 8th point is more self-directed: it’s about re-orienting your online time so that it strengthens and nourishes you instead of leaving you with that sense of being slightly dirty and used.

Here are 5 practices that will help you align your time with what matters to you, and enjoy your online time more as a result:

1. Big rocks first. Steven Covey’s productivity book, First Things First, talks about your schedule like a pile of rocks you’re trying to fit into a jar: put the big rocks in first, and the little rocks will squeeze in between. The same is true for your time online: start by making time for what’s most important to you — your best friend, your photos of your kids, your poetry club. Give it your best quality of engagement with whatever discretionary time you have, whether it’s that hour you steal online in the morning before anyone else wakes up, or the time at the end of the day before you leave the office. Then let all the little ditzy Internet distractions (checking your Twitter follows, looking up today’s WOOT, sorting through the latest round of Facebook requests) fit into the interstitial moments that are too brief to be really useful.
2. Stifle your curiosity. Our dog is named Sisko, after the Star Trek character, and at one point I thought it would be cute to get him a Star Trek-themed dog collar. (See, this is why it’s good that we had kids and stopped obsessing over the dog.) Let me tell you, googling “star trek” and “dog collar” produces some fairly intriguing links. I clicked. I regretted. Don’t click just because you’re curious.
3. Groom your browser bar. Your browser bar likely has room for 8-14 links: these will be the sites that are easiest for you to click on and visit, and which you’ll therefore visit the most. So don’t just choose the ten you already visit the most often — choose the ten that reflect your top priorities, the things that are really important to you. You’ll naturally shift your time towards those sites once they’re in reach.
4. Focus on your most important relationships. When I realized that updates from my dearest friends and most respected colleagues were getting lost in a sea of tweets from people I barely knew, I created a set of Twitter lists for people I love, people I want to connect with in person, and people who inspire me. You can read my full methodology here — but the bottom line is that you’ll find it easier to focus on the things and people that are important to you if you make them more prominent in the applications and sites where you spend your time.
5. Assess yourself. When you close your computer at the end of the day or evening, take a moment to think about how you feel about the time you’ve just spent online. Does it leave you feeling tired or empty? Inspired and recharged? Take note of the occasions that leave you thrilled or fulfilled, and think about which sites or activities bring out that kind of response. Then cultivate the habit of checking yourself whenever you’re starting to feel dulled by your time online, and redirect your activity towards something that makes you feel deeply and wonderfully like yourself.

Bear in mind that your initial experience of these practices may be a bit ambivalent — a lot of our less value-driven activities are compulsive, like online shopping, gaming or gossip. Forgoing Perez Hilton in favour of a long and thoughtful blog post may feel less appealing at the end of a long day….but give it a try and see how you feel after. My bet is that the more you devote your online time to what really matters to you, the more you will find your online time rewarding, enlightening and replenishing.

After spending the past week in Portland I could wax rhapsodic about OSCON, Zoo Camp, We Village or the Ultimate Sandwich. But what I really have to coo over is my new iPad.

That’s right, I said new iPad.

Admittedly, it’s only been a little over three months since I got the first iPad — a 64 GB WiFi-only model that I picked up the day they were released because my usual anxiety about waiting for the latest device was amplified by a course of antibiotics. As cures for antibiotic-induced-anxiety go, it was pretty expensive, but it made the kids happy, and since they were also cranky from their antibiotics it actually felt like a good, or at least justifiable, investment.

But I’ll be honest. As much as I’ve enjoyed playing Mirror’s Edge, my WiFi iPad felt like a big toy. A big, super cool, expensive toy. I found myself wondering: why did I spring for the most expensive model? If this was going to be a mostly kid-oriented device, couldn’t I save some bucks and get the least expensive model?

As with so many of my efforts at economizing technology, these self-doubts instead led me to spend even more money, upgrading to the 64 GB iPad with WiFi and 3G.

And let me tell you: that $129 is worth every penny.

The difference between a Wifi iPad and a 3G iPad isn’t a quantitative difference in how much you can use your iPad. That’s what I’d assumed it would be: just the same device, but connected to the net more of the time.

It’s an entirely different device.

Here are some of the things I’ve been able to with my iPad now that it’s got 3G:

1. Navigate: This was the top use case for the iPad. By looking up destinations on Yelp (sadly no iPad app, just web or iPhone app running on iPad) and then choosing “Directions to Business”, we got our route mapped to each Portland restaurant or shop we wanted to visit. It was a heck of a lot easier to navigate with the Maps application for iPad than the Maps application on iPhone, simply because the screen is so much larger!
2. Drive: Our 4-year-old is obsessed with BrainPop, the awesome educational website with free, fantastic iPad app. But it only works while actually connected to the net. During the Era of the WiFi-Only iPad, the phrase “it’s not connected” entered his vocabulary as his explanation for BrainPop’s failure to load outside our house. His delight at being able to watch BrainPop anywhere, anytime let us drive with far fewer stops!
3. Eat: I didn’t want to spend my last day in Portland at the same wifi cafés I’d frequented earlier in the week…but I had a blog post to write. Thanks to the iPad and keyboard dock, I was able to blog from Ken’s Artisan Bakery, using 3G to connect to the net. It took a bit longer to write my blog post (it turns out that the ability to have side-by-side windows is pretty crucial to my blogging workflow) but I got to eat a Salted Caramel Coffee Macaron that is now in my list of top 10 all-time most delicious food experiences.
4. Travel: The 75 MB data plan that I bought from Rogers (my Canadian wireless provider) got used up within a few days of getting to the US. Buying AT&T’s $14.99 plan for 250 MB of data on my iPad got me through the rest of the week. I’ll cancel the plan now that I’ve left the country, and re-activate it when I’m next visiting the States, though if I go to the US for more than 3 days I’ll spring for the 2 GB plan. The money I save on data during my 4-6 US visits a year will easily cover the difference in costs between the WiFi and 3G models — and free me from my fear of the dreaded (but not unprecedented) 4-figure post-travel cell phone bill.

I’ll be interested to see whether the 3G iPad is as life transforming when I’m in my own hometown. My guess is yes…if only because it’ll free me from the need to organize my café work days around my favourite Vancouver wifi cafés. (But that shouldn’t worry the folks at my new favourite, Oz Coffee: they’re good enough that I’ll keep visiting, even with 3G.)

And if you’re now kicking yourself for going WiFi-only, I’ve got good news: Apple’s supply chain woes are your best friend. Because it’s so hard for people to find iPads in stock at the Apple Store, a Craigslist ad offering to sell your used iPad at a modest discount (try knocking $50-100 off what you paid originally) will likely find takers. You can then upgrade to a new model by pre-ordering a 3G version: while the Apple Store said it would likely take 2-3 weeks for a 3G iPad to arrive, it actually only took 2-3 hours! I’m sure that was exceptionally good luck, but the point is to avoid getting discouraged by Apple’s estimated shipment times: place your order and your Craigslist ad at the same time, and you’ll have a buyer for your old iPad lined up by the time your 3G model arrives.

What do you risk when you express yourself online?

That’s the question I found myself asking after reading Jason Sanford’s brilliant and thoughtful post about opinions, risk and social change. Here’s a taste:

Thanks to Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets, we are constantly surrounded by people venting their opinions. If we agree with said opinions, we post our glowing support. If we disagree, we post an angry rebuttal. The result is the internets constantly getting riled up over some idea or injustice and the resulting emotional response spreading through comments and posts and tweets…And in the end, what has changed? Most of the time, the answer is nothing. Because inaction thrives in an instant-response world where we don’t risk anything by stating our opinions…

But when a friend or family member stands before you and says they disagree with one of your core beliefs, your emotional response differs. Because of the relationship and bond between the two of you–and the fact that your friend or family member is risking your relationship by expressing a difference of opinion–you consider their words differently than those of an online stranger…To express a difference of opinion in person always carries risk. To act on an opinion carries even more risk. And how people accept and deal with those risks creates the only true change in our world.

Do take the time to read the entire post, which offers a much more nuanced take on the risks that people do take online, and how those compare with the risks of face-to-face disagreement. But the argument that I found most fascinating is contained in the paragraphs above: the idea that the weight of an opinion exists in relation to the costs of expressing it.

People ask me constantly about online risk management, whether they’re thinking about managing online risks to their organization’s reputation, or managing risks like identity fraud or data theft. But Jason’s post points out that risk has its own reward: the reward of forcing us to think carefully, to consider the impact of our words, and in particular, to think about the impact of what we say on the relationships we care about.

Seen from that perspective, risk may not be something you always want to limit online. In fact, you could make an argument that by raising the stakes of your online participation — by posting under your own name, by giving your blog’s URL to your colleagues, by being more candid and authentic in what you say online — you increase the value of your online engagement. It’s the risks of communication that give it value and power, that force us to think about what is worth saying, and that discipline us to communicate with care. When we deceive ourselves into thinking that nobody is reading what we’re writing, and that nothing is at stake — that’s when our online communications fail the reality test.