I Love Web 2.0

I just read Linnea Sinclair's note in the comments on her post The Buddy System.

Linnea wrote:
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If one person has survived it, you can survive it.

One person.
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Rarely have I heard a summation of the basic theme of "our" kind of literature, the binding theme between SF, Paranormal and the general Romance field.

Heroic Fiction belongs to the "Romantic" category -- in the literary sense of "larger than life" -- and that's how most people view stories about those first, or only, "one person"s Linnea is referring to.

This is a point I neglected to make in my blog post here about why we have such a perception problem with Romance.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/why-we-love-romance.html

And you'll notice that blog post also starts with a comment Linnea Sinclair made!

And that point is that the reason we read these stories, and the reason we prefer characters we can identify with, is that we, ourselves are tasked, perhaps karmically, with being one of those "one persons" who do "it" to demonstrate that it is possible.

We need to break through the barrier around the possible -- mostly because it's a barrier. As people climb mountains because they are there, we hurl ourselves into impossible tasks (such as finding a soul-mate and raising his kids "right") because the task is there.

Yes, SF and Romance are both genres that are about doing the impossible -- finding a Soul Mate or inventing a gadget like the Universal Translator (rumored to have been invented by Spock's human mother, Amanda Grayson) or the Internet or the Web, invented by groups of people desperate to communicate in an "impossible" way.

They did it. Now we do it without even thinking about it.

When I first heard the term e-mail, I had to ask what that meant. The explanation didn't thrill me. It sounded cumbersome and awkward. Today, there's an insurmountable barrier between me and envelopes & stamps!

I remember the wonderful Romantic Comedy, YOU'VE GOT MAIL.
http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=You%27ve+Got+Mail&x=15&y=6

WATCH OUT at that link above for pop-ups and pop-unders circumventing your anti-popup software.

Two people meet via chat online, fall in love, and later discover they already know each other but don't "like" each other all that much in the real world. At the time that movie came out, it was thought "impossible" for real love relationships to begin online.

That movie is a "show don't tell" for a lot of truths about internet socializing that non-netizens deny vigorously.

Text-only communication can reveal the true depths of personality never visible in "live" contact situations. The "sub-text" of Relationship becomes undeniable in text-only. Great movie! Powerful truth. I actually know a couple happily married for more than 10 years who met in an online fandom chat!

And that was chat by text-only! Not even video conferencing. Just text.

I think another such huge chasm as we saw between those just getting online and those who would not or could not attain internet access is opening. It is opening between e-mail and social networking online. Between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

Social networking got its start as mostly a kiddie thing for wasting time. MySpace and so forth provided the youngest web users a way to communicate with their peers and play online.

There's nothing wrong with playing -- it's what kids have to do to become effective adults. Note Luke Skywalker's jetting around pot-shotting local vermin -- eventually, he used the same skill to take out a Deathstar. How you play and at what affects what you are able to do, and how you can do it as an adult.

So we have a generation-gap chasm opening between those who played their way to adulthood online and those who got online in adulthood. And yes, a chasm between adults who did take the plunge and adults who just have not.

Watching over their kids shoulders, the adults who dabbled online or perhaps used a computer only at work soon saw that this social networking thing is the work-around, the dodge, the cure for SPAM!

If you use, say, LinkedIn.com (professionals only; no kids, no playing) to send a message to a friend, it works just like email except that it lands in their inbox without a ton of e-spam stuck to it.

If you need to tell a few friends something quick, you can twitter or plurk or use one of the other microblog services. I'm sure three more started while I've been typing this.

Texting by simple phone connection is good, too. I worked the election Nov 4th with 7 older people and a 17 year old (Arizona program to allow youngsters to learn to work the Polls).

The 17 year old spent the intervals between voters texting with her hands under the table, looking attentive to her job. The older folks were bemused. One told a story of her college age kid who racked up a couple thousand text messages a month - until he broke up with his girlfriend, and it dropped to hundreds. Texting-romances no doubt abound!

The world is abandoning e-mail and Lists and Newsletters as fast as it can because of the spam load. Life is too short and that stuff is too putrid.

Meanwhile, personal communication has gone multi-media. Sound, images, animation -- it's all at our fingertips. Skype is very popular for international families. And I'm sure it's supporting a lot of romances.

Websites that sell things for a profit are fully interactive, some with a live-chat feature. This personalizing, multi-media, interactive approach to web applications is what they loosely term Web 2.0. Much of it functions as "plug-ins" to a browser.

The lexicon gurus still disagree about the exact definition of Web 2.0 -- but they agree that it takes a broadband connection to get the most benefit out of it.

The internet evolved into the Web which became a personal communication tool swamped by toxic waste, and cleaned up by -- SOCIAL NETWORKING.

Now I've been getting dozens (if not hundreds) of e-mail pitches from people who want to sell me lessons (webinars) in how to use social media to promote products -- some even specifically for how to promote your books if you're a writer.

First the kids, then the adults, now the merchants invade social network spaces.

Where will folks go to get away from the sales pitches?

Or the world might change in even more drastic ways as the online generation takes the helm.

I saw a TV News item where the reporters were discussing how Obama's administration can use Information Technology and the Web to create a more "transparent" government -- and one younger reporter went a step farther, pointing out that with the interactivity available online now we can have a government that we not only look in on but actually interact with.

Whether that's a good idea or not -- the public micromanaging government -- is a subject for another Worldbuilding post about Aliens and Hive Minds.

Where will people go to get away from government issues invading their private communications? I can just see pop-up ads from the government soliciting your opinion on this or that! "Help your Congressman; take this two minute survey!"

Maybe it would be illegal to block those popups!

Well, just as I couldn't resist the lure of email once I got online (my first service was called Prodigy - anybody remember that?) -- now I can't resist the social networking craze.

I'm on a whole lot of them, YouTube etc., so many I can't remember them all until I get an email that someone new wants to be my friend or link with me or whatever that service calls it. I'm active on several social networks, while lurking on a whole bunch.

Meanwhile, in addition to social networks, I've discovered ancillary Web 2.0 services that help you sort out the information blitz of the internet, especially the blogosphere. Joining this blog has led me to explorations of RSS FEEDS, bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, slashdot, -- there are more than 48 very popular ones, each with a specialty.

If you missed the step-wise development of the Feed services, you might be as overwhelmed and bewildered as I was when I started investigating RSS FEEDS. At first I thought I understood when I first saw the little orange icon. But when I asked myself how does it work and tried to do it myself -- I discovered I was totally clueless.

So I asked on LinkedIn what the best "feed reader" is and got back that Google's reader is good. Meanwhile, one of the "build a successful business online" Newsletters I get sent a file to install on the Google Reader that I could configure to track my own name as it gets mentioned on various blogs and web pages. Wow, I had no idea!

Someone on LinkedIn who is very knowledgeable recommended FeedDemon. So I went to feeddemon.com and downloaded their feed reader -- and I think it's better than google or yahoo, but each one has its strengths. So I use all 3!

Eventually, one or two of these services will emerge as dominant and providing all the tools we need to live online.

Simultaneously, via one of the e-mail Lists for professional writers that I'm on, I discovered an online interview on a blog with a woman who gives webinars on how to use social networking to promote books and other products. I learned about another service that helps consolidate all your services. It's called friendfeed.com

So I signed up for friendfeed, (where I'm JLichtenberg) and discovered that you can put a swatch of javascript on your homepage (see the bottom of http://www.slantedconcept.com for an example) or blog site like this one that will list at least some of the icons for some of the better known services that you use to post notes, messages, and even blog articles.

You'll see the new friendfeed icons for Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Rowena Cherry lower down on the right side of this blog, so you can see what I'm talking about.

This blog also has atom and RSS enabled -- you just need to put our URL into the appropriate field on your Feed Reader (click search for or add feeds -- this blog is a "feed").

If you click "subscribe to me" in the friendfeed icon you can see every time I post on facebook, amazon blog, this blog, microblog or whatever I've put into my list of places where I post things. I don't have all my places in friendfeed yet. When I do, you don't have to chase all over looking for what I'm doing, and you don't have to subscribe to a Newsletter and hope it doesn't get caught in the spam trap.

And once you've subscribed to someone via friendfeed, it's very easy to subscribe to someone ELSE -- thus consolidating the scattered postings of all your friends, or just people you want to follow.

http://friendfeed.com/jlichtenberg

http://twitter.com/JLichtenberg

This blog is registered with technorati.com which I've seen links to all over the place, but didn't understand what it is until I went there and poked around. It's huge. But the most valuable thing I've found there so far is a long article on the shape and development direction of the blogosphere.

A graphic image of what "blogosphere" means is posted at:
http://datamining.typepad.com/gallery/blog-map-gallery.html

And the technorati article on how things change (they survey once a year) is posted at:
http://www.technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/

As Linnea Sinclair said, there are dozens, maybe thousands, of valuable "get started" tools available to new writers today that didn't exist when we started. But there are even more tools available for those who have started and now need to progress up the vertical learning curve. Those tools come effortlessly to the hands of those who grew up online, but we have to work at it.

Also from LinkedIn I discovered a website called pingomatic.com which lets you list your blog and then auto-updates a number of Feed services (there are more services than readers and like search engines, feed services don't all return the same results for the same query). Technorati.com does something similar with blogs.

I still haven't mastered astrogating around Web 2.0 -- things don't work as I expect them to, and I can't tell if that's because I did it wrong, don't understand what it should do, or it really didn't work right. I sometimes feel very much like the first time I wrote a novel on a computer: spikes of I LOVE THIS embedded in a sea of confusion and bewilderment.

Still, I posted a tweet on twitter and saw it come up immediately on my friendfeed.com page. But I had to click the link labeled "ME" that I see on the left of my page (I don't think you would see my ME link, but rather your own ME link). However, the Diggs I did yesterday don't seem to be on friendfeed -- but older diggs of mine are there.

Social Networking and "feeds" are the work-around we need until the internet infrastructure can be totally redesigned (from the hardware level) to wall out "spam." The resistance will come not just from the cost of doing that, but from the commercial interests that don't want to be walled away from your inbox.

Nevertheless, I am thrilled to discover this Web 2.0 level of the new world we're building and appalled at how I'm about 4 or 5 years behind leaping the chasm (again)!

As writers, we find social networking just the thing to promote our books and keep the wheels of imagination greased. However, I don't think it will last long. With the invasion of commercial interests, people will flee again or just turn off awareness of any kind of promotional material.

As writers, we need to think about YOU'VE GOT MAIL, and how to use the platform of Web 2.0 to tell a whopping good Romance that reveals some hidden truths people would prefer weren't true. Such as the one I discussed in my post
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/why-we-love-romance.html

As SF-Romance writers, we need to think about YOU'VE GOT MAIL as it might have been written before the word e-mail was first coined and get a grip on the sociological implications of communication advances such as maybe Web 4.0.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/

"You've Got Mail" 1998 Award Winning film

First I have to thank (once again) Rowena Cherry for posting my entry of Tuesday April 22, 2008.

I was offline and in the midst of the Passover Holiday. We do a lot of "scratch cooking" for Passover -- though packaged everything is available many places.

So I spent a good amount of time thinking about "women's work is never done."

And I thought back to raising my daughters who were born in the late 1960's, almost before the women's movement got a name. Even teaching them to walk, to play with toys, to take the knocking when falling off the sofa, I tried to foster a kind of independent strength only boys were taught then because I knew (as an SF writer) what they'd face in the world as it was shaping up (and I was right).

Passover is about "freedom" -- it's the commemoration of leaving slavery for real freedom of choice, and about the consequences of making a choice, about Honor (the stuff of Alien Romance Adventures, of Heroism).

It occurred to me that you can look at spending a multiplicity of hours scratch-cooking and hassling around a kitchen BECAUSE YOU ARE FEMALE as a step back into slavery. And that's not what the holiday is about. That's not where it's "at" philosophically.

In what way is being chained to a kitchen sink freedom?

The story/parable of leaving Egypt is commemorated by eating matzah - unleavened bread -- (i.e. crackers made from flour and water only -- baked so quickly it can't rise even if some yeast lands on it from the air.)

This is a more primitive or basic form of bread. It takes away something you don't even know you have. It's kind of like Rowena's novel where the male and female leads get stranded on an island and don't have what they're used to and have to "relate" in that context.

Or like going on any vacation -- away from your ordinary haunts. Going on an Adventure. Take AWAY what you normally have, the normal way your kitchen is organized, and your mind can open up to receive new ideas.

This morning I heard President Bush chanting his usual line about liberty and freedom and democracy bringing peace. To me, he seems to chant this -- like a liturgy. It's so strange to really listen to that man without thinking about whether you agree or not.

I heard Bush right after watching a movie I'd recorded a couple weeks ago on The Family Channel -- YOU'VE GOT MAIL. The two items juxtaposed were illuminating.

YOU'VE GOT MAIL is a nice romantic comedy that was made in 1998. It depicts the difference between how we relate via chat and email and how we relate "in person" with an accuracy that holds true today. The only two anachronisms that will eventually make this film grate on our nerves are AOL dialup email and the lack of cell phones with internet service and texting.

Today they'd be texting buddies and it would be a more intimate relationship because they would interface during the day. I assume you all remember the film. If not -- well, if you like alien romance, you gotta see this film.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0128853/

Also read Hal Clement's novel MISSION OF GRAVITY. Put the two together and you've got a springboard into a whole bunch more novels you could write. In MISSION OF GRAVITY we have an alien and a human boy making friends despite living in different atmospheres. Clement wrote a lot about friendship over impossible gulfs, which is what Star Trek is ultimately about.

The relationship between friendship and romance, the differences and similarities -- the question of whether there is a necessity for friendship underneath romance -- all that is discussed brilliantly in YOU'VE GOT MAIL.

What's this got to do with Passover and Bush and Freedom of choice?

Bush assumes that any human being would choose freedom, what he calls Liberty and his version of "democracy" (note he never discusses the concept Republic).

In YOU'VE GOT MAIL, Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) makes some whopping assumptions, too, and his assumptions and Bush's may actually be coming from the same place.

Joe Fox presents Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) with a choice at the end of the movie, or rather it seems to be a choice.

In the middle of the movie, she discovers that "Joe" is THE "Joe Fox" who is opening a book selling superstore around the corner from her children's bookshop. When he first met her, he didn't let on that he was "THE" Fox. But he didn't actually lie about it, just omitted this bit of information. She insists he was lying to her by that omission and is pissed. At the end of the movie, Joe reveals one more piece of information he's been withholding, and she is NOT pissed, doesn't call him down for it, and just totally accepts him as who he is.

The email relationship she's developed with this "stranger" (Joe) is rooted in "Psychological Visibility" (google that if you don't know what it is). The real world relationship is rooted in Mortal Combat between business owners (he puts her shop out of business and it's "nothing personal" but like me, she says everything is personal.)

So in the end of the movie, she gives up a certain FREEDOM or LIBERTY by surrendering to the controlling decisions of an information-withholder who manipulates her by keeping her ignorant and using what he's learned of her inner psyche as a weapon to get what he wants (and she doesn't seem to understand that's what happened).

It's a great movie, lots of awards attention, well made, stellar cast, GREAT script, addressing a hot topic of the day (the transition in relationships to electronic communication and how that changes "who" we are to others). But coming out of Passover, I found the ending very disappointing.

Must every pair-bonded relationship between humans have a dominant party?

Is manipulating by using information gained while looking into a person's soul an aggressive act?

It seemed to me in the movie that he knew more about what made her tick than she knew about what motivated him. She was responding to being seen -- and didn't notice that she wasn't seeing into him.

He used what he learned about her to get her to do what he wanted her to do. She didn't use what she learned about him to get him to do what she wanted him to do.

He dominated her. She joyfully submitted.

Now that made it a popular movie because that's what our society expects and lauds. But it's not what I tried to raise my daughters to be.

It was a good movie because it raises a lot of interesting questions about sexuality and social norms. There's an important bit of dialogue missing (from the televised version) in which he wonders if she's a he -- and she wonders if he's a she. By email you can't really tell and they don't ackowledge that at all.

I keep thinking of the e-mail relationship as a telepathic relationship, perhaps conducted across interstellar distances. Or perhaps two empaths kept in adjacent cells "for their own protection" and relating through empathic fields without words.

So what has that to do with Passover? Well, slavery to freedom. Right away as the people left Egypt, some of that rag-tag band were bemoaning the lack of water and meat and wanted to return to the cushy life in Egypt. Freedom is hard work, full of decisions.

Remember a generation had to live and die in the desert before the whole people was free enough of slavery to plunge in and govern a country.

Can a society have "freedom" at all if half the people willfully submit to the other half?

You don't think that's an Alien Romance question ripped from today's headlines? Go listen (really listen) to Bush carrying on then go learn something about the history of the people's he's talking about. Dominance and Submission - Sexuality and Religion -- Biology and Reproduction.
What kind of biology would an alien species have to have to avoid this submission-for-fun-and-reproduction dilemma humans face?

Would you give up your freedom for psychological visibility? Would you let yourself be "visible" to someone who would use that data about you to put you in a cage you couldn't even see was a cage?

Does aggression cause defensive action -- or does defensiveness cause aggression?

Even if you've seen YOU'VE GOT MAIL a few times, go watch it again.

Oh, and the other reason it really grabbed me - it's about my own bread and butter, the publishing and marketing of books. There's a line in that movie I'll bet most viewers don't notice -- that the big chain book sellers destroyed the mid-list, which they did.

If you're a mid-list reader like me, you might consider that all bad. But in truth, I'm wondering if the death of the mid-list just pushed a lot of mid-list writers and readers into the Romance field and started the proliferation of sub-genres of Romance?

So YOU'VE GOT MAIL is a movie that says a lot, very elegantly, so it's worth a writer's study.

Live Long and Prosper,
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/