New Yorker: Twitter Replaces Rubber Band Balls and Paper Clip Chains as Procrastinator's Best Friend

George Packer writes an occasional blog on the New Yorker's website called "Interesting Times," as in the Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times." In a February 7 2009 posting called Stop the World he rises up in rebellion against Twitter and other social networking tools that tempt him away from his privacy, tranquility and sanity.

"Every time I hear about Twitter I want to yell Stop," he laments. "The notion of sending and getting brief updates to and from dozens or thousands of people every few minutes is an image from information hell." Worst of all is its seductive - no, corrosive - drain on our time. He cites David Carr, the New York Times's media critic: “There is always something more interesting on Twitter than whatever you happen to be working on.”

"This last is what really worries me." comments Packer. "Who doesn’t want to be taken out of the boredom or sameness or pain of the present at any given moment? That’s what drugs are for, and that’s why people become addicted to them."

"Twitter," Packer concludes, "is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I’m morally superior to it, but because I don’t think I could handle it. I’m afraid I’d end up letting my son go hungry."

Authors take note. Finish your book and tweet about it. Then turn service off and start a new manuscript.

How did I learn about Packer's article? Why, Twitter, of course.

Richard Curtis

You and What Army? Neil Gaiman Clustertweets Story for Audio Outfit

Lynn Andriani of Publishers Weekly reports that "Fantasy writer Neil Gaiman is writing a new crowd-sourced short story on Twitter. Starting tomorrow at noon EDT, the author—and well-known Twitter fan (@neilhimself)—will Tweet the first line of a new story, and fans can continue it with their own 140-character contributions. BBC Audiobooks America will then compile the contributions—they expect about 1,000—into a short story that will be recorded by a professional narrator. The audiobook will be available for free download at BBCAudiobooksAmerica.com/trade and at iTunes and other audiobook retailers before the end of the year. There are no plans to release the story in print."

I have a capacious 10 gallon hat that I am prepared to eat if no more than 1,000 fans contribute. I won't be surprised if the number goes deep into the tens of thousands or even exceeds 100k. This is Neil Gaiman, people!

To participate, fans should follow @BBCAA and Tweet with the hashtag #bbcawdio. Official participation rules and a legal waiver are posted on the BBCAA blog. We suggest you read the legal waiver.

Logical next step - a vook? (Would-be vookster Gaiman pictured at left).

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Publishers Weekly.

Stop Me Before I Procrastinate Again! YouTube, Facebook, Twitter 21st Century Equivalent of Pencil Sharpener

Back in January we told you about app addiction. Not everybody is hooked on Apple applications, however. Some are addicted to Twitter, others to Facebook, still others to YouTube. Writers are addicted to anything that will divert them from the work at hand. You go on Google to research a fact for your book and, well, one association leads to another and pretty soon you've drifted far, blissfully far, away from your book.

Authors have procrastinated from time immemorial, and their excuses have evolved with the available technology. In the 20th century the usual dodge was a trip to the refrigerator or pencil sharpener. Today's authors still go to the refrigerator, but as for pencils many don't know which end the writing come out of now that they have spellcheck and other computerized editing tools. So they seek distraction on the Internet. And its seductions are far more addictive than anything ever offered on street corners.

"You get to your PC every morning with hours of productive time ahead of you," writes Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times. "Next thing you know, it’s 5 p.m. and you’ve frittered the day away on Digg, Hulu, Wikipedia and your fantasy football league. And no wonder — how can anyone expect to get anything done when you’re plying your trade on one of the most distracting machines ever invented? With so much available on your PC — your friends, blogs, games and even TV shows — working in a modern office can often seem as rattling as working on the floor of a Las Vegas casino."

If you're highly motivated and disciplined you can govern temptation, or you can ask your spouse, boss, friend or business partner to make sure you don't stray from your purpose. That seldom works. Any chain smoker who has given a pack of cigarettes to a friend and ordered him not to give him one knows why. But now there are computer programs to monitor or curb your obsession. There's even one that virtually pries the mouse out of your hand and redirects it to the book you're supposed to be working on. Manjoo, himself a victim of wandering attention, tried some of them:

I've been using a slate of programs to tame these digital distractions. The apps break down into three broad categories. The most innocuous simply try to monitor my online habits in an effort to shame me into working more productively. Others reduce visual bells and whistles on my desktop as a way to keep me focused.

And then there are the apps that really mean business — they let me actively block various parts of the Internet so that when my mind strays, I’m prohibited from giving in to my shiftless ways. It’s the digital equivalent of dieting by locking up the refrigerator and throwing away the key.

Of course, if you're as clever as Manjoo - he's Slate's technology columnist - you can find the key after throwing it away. You can just hack the blocker app until you you're back on YouTube or Twitter wasting hour after blissful hour. Goodness, where did the time go!

Read Taming Your Digital Distractions and prepare to take - or download - the cure.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

How Safe Are Clouds?

Here's an email you hope never to receive:

Dear Subscriber:
We send greetings to you and to your mother, whose maiden name is Tondelea Farbstratten and whose birthday you celebrate on February 19th. Also greetings to Pippsie, the first pet you ever owned. And is The Maltese Falcon really your favorite movie? We like Witness for the Prosecution ourselves. And is the combination to the safe in the false wall behind your boiler still L-34, R-15, L-2? Oh, and more thing - do you want to use another password besides your spouse's birthday? It's a good idea, because the next time you hear from us it will be to learn that we've stolen your identity, emptied your bank accounts and purloined your company's trade secrets."

Can't happen here? Actually, something along those lines recently befell Mrs. Evan Williams. Who is Mrs.Evan Williams? She happens to be the wife of the CEO of Twitter, whose personal Internet, Amazon and PayPal accounts were also hacked. The New York Times's Claire Cain Miller and Brad Stone report that "A hacker calling himself Hacker Croll broke into an administrative employee’s e-mail account and gained access to the employee’s Google Apps account, where Twitter shares spreadsheets and documents with business ideas and financial details."

Wait a minute - did they say Google? We were under the impression that our information and documents are completely secure with Google, home of cloud computing. Well, they are - but with an asterisk. If you click on the Google page entitled Is It Safe to Upload Private Documents on Google Docs? you'll get this answer from Neil Fraser, Official Rep,

There are two tips which can greatly improve your safety:
1) When using an unencrypted wireless connection or some other network you don't really trust, use https://docs.google.com instead of http://docs.google.com. The extra 's' means 'secure'; all traffic is encrypted. The only down-side is it's a little bit slower.
2) When you use someone else's computer (especially at an Internet cafe or at a hotel), don't forget to logout of your Google account. And when logging in, don't check "remember my password". Pretty obvious.

Here at Google we use Docs to store all our confidential documents, spreadsheets and presentations. We use the same servers and we have no worries about people being able to see our data.

Official Rep Fraser assures us these precautions are "pretty obvious," but if they weren't obvious to the CEO of Twitter, what makes Google think they are obvious to us lesser mortals? Twitter's security firewall does not appear to have been breached by some fiendish Russian geek hackster. Instead, says the Times, " the Twitter hacker managed to correctly answer the personal questions that Gmail asks of users to reset the password." In other words, while everyone was barricading the back door, Hacker Croll strolled in the front, sauntered past the empty security desk, and walked out with the family jewels.

Evan Williams probably should have read the Google page instructing Docs users on how to change your password. Good idea for you to read it too, and read it often.

For details of the Great Twitter Heist of 2009, read Twitter Hack Raises Flags on Security.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Is Gazing at Your Blackberry Grounds for Divorce?

Let's test your RQ - your rudeness quotient. On a scale of 1= No Problem and 10=Hanging at Dawn Without Benefit of a Trial, rate the following:

• You go to a business lunch and your dining companion puts a BlackBerry on the table and checks it compulsively throughout the meal.
• While you're conducting a seminar you notice that half the attendees are staring at smartphones and some are working them with their thumbs.
• You're out on a date and you reach out to grasp your lover's hand, but there's a cell phone in it.
• Your wife is discussing resort plans for your second honeymoon. She asks you something important. You ask her to repeat what she said because you were too absorbed checking fantasy baseball scores on your Palm Pre.
• The bored concertgoer beside you is checking his email during a tender pianissimo passage of your favorite symphony.

These vignettes exemplify an evolving crisis in etiquette prompted by a new generation of smartphones and other handheld communication devices. New York Times reporter Alex Williams has chronicled the challenge of holding the social fabric together while gamers, bloggers, tweeters, and email checkers succumb to the temptation, if not the compulsion, to indulge their private pursuits in public.

Obviously your RQ depends on which side of the device you're on. "A spirited debate about etiquette has broken out" Williams writes. "Traditionalists say the use of BlackBerrys and iPhones in meetings is as gauche as ordering out for pizza. Techno-evangelists insist that to ignore real-time text messages in a need-it-yesterday world is to invite peril." Like it or not, the field is tilting in the direction of the techno-evangelists. Williams reports that a third of some 5300 workers pulled by a job listings website said "they frequently checked e-mail in meetings." However, out of those that do, "Nearly 20 percent said they had been castigated for poor manners regarding wireless devices."

You may be lucky to get away with mere castigation. Employees have been fired when caught using their device frivolously. Business leaders instruct attendees to turn off all electronic devices at meetings on pain of ostracism or worse, and visitors to President Obama's Oval Office are required to leave their BlackBerrys with his secretary (though its well known the President himself is addicted to his). Fistfights have broken out in theaters over cellphones ringing at critical moments in a performance.

And inappropriate use of a device can be fatal. A growing number of car crashes involved drivers talking on cellphones or looking at text message screens, and these practices are being banned in several states. A fatal train accident in California was traced to the engineer's being distracted by text messages.

And concentration on the screen of your gadget instead of the eyes of your beloved is wreaking havoc in relationships and can contribute to breaking up. On the other hand, if you're determined to break up with someone, a cell phone can come in handy. A Malaysian government official notified his wife that he was divorcing her - via cell phone. (An Islamic court overruled him, but nice try, huh?)

You can read both sides of the debate in Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners. Then let's review the score on our RQ quiz. How'd you do?

Richard Curtis

Every blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Twillers: the Literary Equivalent of Gamma Rays

Whole Foods uses it to update product information;
The L. A. Fire Department uses it to alert firefighters to blazes;
NASA uses it to break news of Mars Lander discoveries;
And a certain presidential candidate used it to update voters on his political activities.

Now Twitter is being used by would-be novelists to blast installments of their books in progress to friends. Twitter is the social networking service that enables users to blog in microbursts of no more than 140 characters. To give you some sense of what that means, the previous two sentences are 187 characters long, meaning that if they were a scene in my novel I would have to trim 47 characters to bring it down to the length of an acceptable "tweet," as Twitter posts are called. If you tend to logorrhea, Twitter is an excellent antidote. I have revised the above two verbose sentences and pared them down to a 139-character miracle of concision:

Pre-Twitter:

Now Twitter is being used by would-be novelists to blast installments of their books in progress to friends. Twitter is the social networking service that enables users to blog in microbursts of no more than 140 characters.

Post-Twitter:

Now Twitter, the social networking service, is being used by novelists to blast installments of books in progress to friends. Blogs must be less than 141 characters.

It's possible that, at 140 characters per installment, a work of Jamesian length and quality is achievable, but don't count on it. In fact, authors are loath to dignify their creations with the term "novel". Even "novelette" may be far too grandiose. Teeny-Weeny Novelini? Actually, there is a word for the new genre, according to Matt Richtel, writing about the phenomenon in the New York Times. It's called a Twiller - that is, Twitter-thriller. The author - or perhaps tweeter, to avoid confusion with such practitioners as Tolstoy and Balzac - delivers blasts to other users signed up to receive them, and voila! - in three or four centuries, you have a full-length book! Here's the plot of Richtel's story:

It’s about a man who wakes up in the mountains of Colorado, suffering from amnesia, with a haunting feeling he is a murderer. In possession of only a cellphone that lets him Twitter, he uses the phone to tell his story of self-discovery, 140 characters at a time. Think “Memento” on a mobile phone, with the occasional emoticon.

Where can I sign up? Here.

We've been updating you on the Japanese proclivity for cellphone fiction, but it would seem that our Asian counterparts are far too long-winded for American twiller tweeters impatient to claim their Nobel Prize for Literature.

So, tweeters, work on discarding those adjectives and adverbs. And while you're at it, cut down on those character-bloating verbs and nouns. And I've always wondered just what the hell we need pronouns for, anyway.

Richard