Anti-Social-Networking

Or: why I quit facebook and don't tweet.

A couple of weeks back I deleted my facebook account. I don't miss it. I hardly ever used it, and each new "update" just made the web page more painful. Besides, I really don't like the "all your data are belong to us" attitude betrayed by the steadily less private privacy controls.

Which brings up a question: we writing types tend not to be social butterflies. We're not going to write a novel in tweets or facebook updates. Heck, most of us won't write one in blog posts (and we won't mention my collection of dust-gathering blogs...). Where that gets fun is the ever-increasing requirement of publishers that their authors do their own publicity.

That's not the question. The question is this: in a massively networked future society, what happens to the introverts who don't want to be networked every which way? While there's always been an element of "who you know" to success, it's been possible to slip past that gateway and do well anyway, whether by luck, competence, or some other factor. When it's all networked together and your network is what determines if you can be trusted with anything from a McJob (if they still exist) up, what happens to the person who doesn't have and doesn't want a network?

It's an interesting thought, isn't it? For me it comes down to the question of whether the future that seems to be approaching at speed is one where I have a place. And that's before you consider the question of control - which is a minefield all by itself.

I like instant messaging because I can control who I see and who sees me. I'm not splatting something to the entire world. If I make a blog post, I know beforehand it's going out to the whole wide world (or the portion of it that's interested in what I write, which is a rather smaller group). I like knowing which is what, and having control over how much of it random strangers can reach. Or maybe that's just illusory - but the issue of virii and hacking is a different one again.

Is this a writer thing, or is it a geek thing? (Geeks will often choose to have more control even if it means more complexity, where the general population tends to go for simplicity at the expense of control). Or is it an introvert versus extrovert - or, just possibly, a Kate-weird thing?

What do you think? What do you want out of the facebooks and the twitters and whatever replaces them?

Exeunt the Annus Horribilis

So, 2009 ends with a whine, which is probably pretty apt, all things considered. From my perspective - which is, admittedly, a wee tad biased, it's been a true Annus Horribilis (with options on a 'orrible anus as well) with the constant question of whether my day job will still be there, economic woes, the publishing industry playing lemmings when not doing things that - at best - leave people scratching their heads and wondering where they can get whatever these people were on at the time.

Since I have issues with late nights, I'm not likely to do anything dramatic like stay up and watch anyone's fireworks or anything, unless I get sucked into the current WIP.

So... gazing into zee crystal ball (genuine imitation crystal, $1-99 at Wal-Mart!), what do you see for 2010?

I see ebook readers becoming a more mature technology, maybe one showing up that actually does what I want it to. EBooks becoming more prominent - and more contentious. Someone is sure to try to claim that they own ebook rights for anything they published in dead tree lo! these many years ago, especially if the author has sold the ebook rights to someone else after untold years of out of print-ness (if they haven't already done so, which wouldn't surprise me).

I'm not sure when it will happen, but someone, somewhere, will go big with DRM-free eBooks, and begin the slow cracking of the DRM Curtain (this is a little like the Iron Curtain and the Bamboo Curtain, only messier and full of holes - if you know where to look and what to do with the finger you poke through one of the holes). By the end of the 'teens, eBooks will probably be bigger than dead tree, or close to it, and will be predominantly DRM-free.

What are your predictions? And how happy will you be to kick 2009 out the door in the hope that 2010 will be better?

P.S. Me being me, I'm a tad reluctant to say 2010 couldn't be worse - if I say something like that, the universe goes out of its way to prove I'm wrong.

New Scientist Sci Fi Special

New Scientist has a special featuring flash fiction from eight modern British SF authors.

http://www.newscientist.com/special/sci-fi-the-fiction-of-now

They were asked to visualise the world 100 years from now.

The results are very pessimistic partly, I suspect because the authors are British and partly because they often have scientific or technical backgrounds. Looked at through the eyes of a natural scientist, western civilisation seems to be in a 'progress trap', heading for a disaster that our political institutions are incapable of solving.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

New Scientist also have a writing contest for unpublished authors.

In the meantime, here is a photo of the city in which I live. No really, you are looking at a city. If you blow the picture up you can just see our church tower. It is clad in scaffolding for repairs. The church is 800 years old so it does need a bit of tlc from time to time. This is the Saxon Shores, once ruled by the comes litoris Saxonici.