Is it really weird that I use a number of social media sites more for some sort of personal record keeping than for actual socializing and networking?  Am I alone in engaging in this type of activity?  Are you not sure what I am asking?  Here are two examples that I feel are pertinent:

1. I have only one friend on Gowalla, one of several location-based social networking apps that are battling it out for user adoption right now.  This one friend of mine lives two states away from me, so it is not likely that we will see that we are in the same neighborhood at the same time and meet up for lunch or something.  Nevertheless, for a few weeks now I’ve been checking in my locations with that service semi-faithfully.   I like how it gives me a fun little icon “stamp” on my “passport” whenever I visit a new location, and I like to look back over all the locations I’ve been recently and think about places I might go soon.  I’ve even added several new venues to the Gowalla system, and I recently reported a problem to their customer service when I discovered that some of their venues in Provo, UT were labeled as being in Springville, UT.

2. I don’t know a single soul in my real life that uses last.fm, a music-based social networking app that pulls played tracks from iTunes and other digital music players.  Using the stats of those pays, it compiles charts showing what you and everyone else on the system listen to most, creates recommendations and custom listening streams for you, shows you how much you have musically in common with any other user, etc.   I watch the charts of my own weekly listening with fascination. I ensure that all of my iPod and iTunes plays are faithfully transmitted to the site, even if, and perhaps especially if, I listened to an album on vinyl or CD (in which case some quick tracking-through in iTunes or on my iPod is afterward required to “get credit” for my listening.)  I have no clue if anyone else has ever looked at these charts, and yet I think about them a great deal.

Of course I would love to have more friends (or any friends) involved in these sites, but they just aren’t there.  (Please feel free to join any of them and there declare your friendship for me.)  But even without friends to share my info with, I think I will happily continue to use these sites.  With or without a sharing audience, one may of course describe this as geeky behavior, and I would for the most part agree with you.  However, I am going to argue that this geeky element of social networking extends far and wide, even in places that on the surface seem much more social, and that it is simply the latest manifestation of a very old and renowned geek activity.

On social media services in which I do have a number of friends, I still find that, more often than not, we end up sharing most of our information with each other through conversations rather than through the interface of the site.  While using the site, although sharing with each other, we are all basically talking to ourselves when we don’t pay attention to what our friends are sharing with us.  I have many work friends on Goodreads.  Even though I rather faithfully update my account with what I am currently reading, what I have read, and what I want to read, and so do several of my friends, I find that more often than not this information tends to be shared while visiting someone’s cubicle to discuss a work issue, or during a telephone call with a librarian in a school.  They don’t seem to know that I put that book up on my Goodreads already,  or I am oblivious to what book they just put on their Goodreads.  Many of us do spend time on Goodreads, but it is usually to organize, explore, and read reviews by strangers, apparently not so much to interact with and look at what our friends are reading.

And now let’s be honest with ourselves; in certain cases this same lack of sociality goes for the juggernaut, that most social of media, even the dread Facebook.  Stop and ask yourself these questions, if you haven’t before:

1. Have you ever logged into Facebook and not actually interacted directly with another person?

Perhaps you are there to play a game, or perhaps you updated your status but didn’t make any response or comment to anyone else.  It’s okay to admit it.  I know I’ve done it.

2.How many people have you friended on Facebook and never yet had a conversation with on Facebook?

I know I’m not the only one that does this, because a lot of people have done it to me, too.  I’m quite okay with it, but I find it an interesting phenomenon.  Uncles, old roommates, cousins-in-law, work colleagues, and kids we sat by in classes in high school: we friend them and then they only sit there in our little box of friends.  Perhaps we look at their photos and see if they ever got married or had kids or whatever, and maybe they pop up in our news feeds every once in a while asking us for help planting Enchanted Kumquat Bushes on their DesertIslandVille, but in many cases we never really interact with each other until the next extended family get-together, or when we run into each other randomly at a store, or never really at all.

So if my theory is correct and we are often not all that interested in interacting with people on social media sites, and we engage in these activities and games whether or not anyone else is actually paying attention to what we are doing, what is going on with all this “sharing” on social networking sites and why do we do it?

Here’s one reason I’ve come up with.  I’ve determined that one of the underlying compulsions that motivates my continued usage of social networking sites is a longstanding propensity to collect.   Many of these sites and services allow us to collect and quantify and share things that have previously not been collectable.  Actions, relationships, feelings, almost anything ephemeral or abstract can be commoditized or can be made into an item that can kept, recorded, or transferred, shown to others forever after. Here is my collection of friends, family, and acquaintances.  Here is my collection of places I’ve been.  Here are my favorite restaurants.  Here are all the books I have read in the past year.  Here is the music I listen to the most.  Here are all the jobs and skills I have collected in the past five years.  Here are the games I play and how well I do at them.  Here are the movies I watched last month.  Here are the people and organizations that I admire.  Here is what I read in the newspaper today.  Lookit!

Instead of rocks, stamps or Precious Moments figurines, we can now collect all these little icons that represent little pieces of our lives.  We then use and share all these things in an attempt to define ourselves, or to attempt to dictate how we should be defined or perceived by others.  And now people don’t even need to come over to our house to see what books we have, or wait for us to go get that special shoebox out from under our beds.  It’s all out there for them to look at if they are interested.

Another aspect of this collecting that I’ve been thinking about is to what extent this desire to share or the anticipation of sharing something effects what choices we make on where we go, what we do, what we eat, what we read, etc, even if we are not quite consciously thinking about whether anyone else is paying attention to our collections.  In my case I think it does sometimes affect what I do, but not necessarily in a bad way.  When I get involved in these services regularly there follows a self-consciousness and an accountability that I think is mostly positive in forcing me to not get too habitual, to try new things, to finish reading that book, to not eat lunch at Wendy’s or in the cafeteria every day, etc.  It seems to work regardless of whether anyone is actually paying attention or not.

Of course if these activities were only about showing other people then I could just as easily be tempted to start lying about things.  But collections have never been entirely about sharing or showing off.  Many of our collections are entirely for our own benefit, and never get shared with much of anyone.  And that’s why we keep doing these things online, even if no one is watching.  We collect mainly for ourselves, because our collections please us.  However, I think even the most private of collectors with the most obscure of items has that small hope or daydream that one day the collection will someday be seen by someone else who will truly appreciate it.  Our collections, like journals and photographs, always have some audience in mind, even if entirely theoretical.  When we put our collections online, that audience may be out there somewhere right now.

I know there are also other reasons and desires that lead us to engage in social media networks, but I think this desire to collect, consume and display people, actions, places, words and feelings, now transmuted into electronic trading cards, is a definite reality.

So, what do you think?  Are you collecting your friends?  Did you go somewhere just to be able to say you went there?  I want to hear about it.

I am going to close with a link to a nice little song by Here We Go Magic, off their recent album Pigeons.  The song is called “Collector,” and seemed quite appropriate.

Here We Go Magic – Collector (link to download MP3)

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Some people collect pigeons, you know.

Our little house in Vivian Park (Provo Canyon) is now officially for sale. My wife made this awesome web site about it. Check it out and call her if you are interested:

http://vivianparkcottage.com

For the next month or so, what you can mainly expect to find here are random photos I take with my iPhone.

A couple of weeks ago, when I decided to post the Beehive book award nominees, I knew that move would bring some renewed traffic to this site. At that time I made a new commitment to post here regularly, tweet frequently, and generally engage in all those other good social media activities. I fully intended to commence writing and posting numerous reviews and commentary on literature, music and whatever else I might happen to be doing or thinking about. This wasn’t the first time I made such a commitment to myself, nor shall it be the last.

However, the sudden immediate necessity to enroll in an adolescent literature course, the need to study for a serious test in a month, my taking of a little second job as a software tester, and preparations to sell our house in Vivian Park have all combined to thwart my recreational writing. Believe me, I am going to be doing a lot writing for that literature course, but I will be sending it all to a teacher, rather than out here to bloggie land. (Watch out after my class is done, though; I may have a truckload of reviews and pieces that I can re-appropriate for the purposes of this site.)

So, enjoy the photos. I hope they bring you as much small satisfaction as they bring me. Happy springtime.

As you may or may not know, I am a wanna-be school librarian. As such, Friday I had the opportunity through my work to attend the UELMA conference (Utah Educational Library Media Association) at Mountain View High School in Orem (“Family City U.S.A.”), Utah.  This was my first time attending such a conference, and I actually enjoyed it.  My boss won an award based on a nomination letter that I drafted (well, and maybe partly based on all the great things he’s done for libraries in our school district that made it easy to draft said letter).  Plus, I got paid to be there and I got a free lunch out of the deal.

Examples of things I learned

• All kinds of great and wacky ideas for programs and events to do with students in a library, which got me all excited, until I remembered I don’t have a library to do them in or students and teachers to do them with.  This plethora of ideas came courtesy of Lanell Rabner, librarian at Springville High School and also the current president of UELMA.
• It turns out that Dickens’ Great Expectations and the beginning novel in Stine’s Goosebumps series are basically the same book.  Seriously though, I learned a bunch of cool ideas about archetypes and the universality of narrative, and the importance of libraries/librarians refraining from putting up any impediments to a child’s choosing a book to read, even (and perhaps especially) if it is something lame like Goosebumps.  This came from a session by Clint Johnson, a writer and writing teacher at Salt Lake Community College.
• Not every session you attend in a conference is great.  This realization helped me begin to understand why a few conference-goers seemed so jaded about the whole thing.  I am still a rookie and I mostly drank up the kool-aid  the whole time.
• Perhaps most importantly for my current job, I learned  how to steal MARC records from the Canadians.  (Thank you, Summer Cornelius of Hurricane High School.)

So that was basically my freshman UELMA experience.  Stay tuned for my next post, in which I reveal to the web some exciting information to which only I and a few hundred others were privy as attendees of the conference.

It’s halfway gone.

(Pat’s B.B.Q. in Salt Lake City)

Yesterday morning, having the day off from work, I finally got out of bed at a decent time and got myself on a little hike. It is intolerable how few times I have gone hiking since I moved into Provo Canyon. (It’s also intolerable that, although I live yards away from the Provo River, I’ve never been fly fishing, but that’s another story. Somebody help me, please!)

I went to explore a nice little side fork into the cliffs on the North side of the canyon.

There is a mysterious parking lot on the north side of the canyon, across from what may or may not be called Upper Falls. I have never seen more than one car at a time parked in this lot, and for the most part it is a ghost lot. At some point I noticed a little trail running up the hillside through the grasses and into the cliffs, and I have always wanted to try it. I have no idea if the parking lot is designed as a trailhead for this trail, or as a viewing area for Upper Falls, and I have no idea if this fork or trail has a name. I know I could look at a USGS map and research the trail, but that would ruin much of the allure of my random morning excursion. Even having been there I’m not sure if I’m ready to let go of its unnamed status. I may not be living in this canyon forever, so I chose this as my first of (hopefully) many hikes since it is kind of a wild card excursion. It seemed the place I would be least likely to plan and drive back to hike if I no longer lived close to it, so it was an appropriate and easy place to start.

As it turned out, my hike didn’t last all that long. The canyon soon narrows into a creek bed surrounded by steep rock faces, and the creek still has a respectable amount of water rushing down it. Some of the rock walls were mossy and weeping. I’m no rock climber, and I hadn’t come prepared for going through much water, so eventually I chose to turn around. I didn’t really want to risk ruining my camera. That’s a good excuse, isn’t it? The shot at the top of this article is the view down the canyon from the point that I turned around. It would be fun to splash up the rest of this hike, and I might try it again in a month or two if we haven’t gotten snow yet, and see if the water flow has reduced, or maybe sooner were I to get some fancy hiking sandals. At any rate, I did take some pictures, as I am often wont to do, and a few of them will be popping up here on the Freez in the next couple of days.

I have a a whole list of hikes that I feel it would be unconscionable if I did not attempt while living in this beautiful area. The list includes a possible climb to Cascade Mountain and/or Provo Peak, but culminates with ascending Mt. Timpanogos, something I have never done. I mainly posted all of this for selfish reasons; I want to provide myself some accountability for these hikes. So, I hereby announce my plan to hike Timp sometime in the next month or two, before the snow arrives. So let it be written, so let it be done.

I absolutely love music, but apparently I do not often respond to its performance with prescribed, socially-sanctioned behaviors.   Although I have vague memories that, at least in the context of compulsory elementary school performances, I may have actually been a decent dancer and furthermore that I may have actually enjoyed dancing, I don’t dance at all. I might occasionally take the liberty of nodding my head or tapping my feet to some music, but that would most likely be in the privacy of my own home, or the false privacy of my own car.  My preferred stance for watching a musical concert is to sit or stand, probably with my arms folded. Symphony or jazz performances work out pretty well for me, but moving beyond those genres I am kind of at odds with the rest of the audience.

This stoicism with regards to musical performances has given me much social trouble and internal anguish for many years (cue the sorrowful strings and/or alienating electronic soundscapes). The first time I remember being cognizant of my socially-maladaptive-live-music-behavior was at a Yes concert my friend and I went to in high school. Even at that time, I was given to understand that going to a Yes concert as a teenager in 1996 was a somewhat nerdy thing to do. And yet as it turned out, I was far too cerebral even for this crowd. Throughout the opening set, played by none other than The Alan Parsons Project, (APP, as I have just monikered them, is the 80s band famous for “Sirius,” that dramatic arpeggio synth/guitar intro that they use to announce the home team players at every Utah Jazz game ever played, that also, when played on the classic soft rock radio stations, leads directly into their proto-Radiohead/Coldplay song “Eye in the Sky,” featuring the chorus, “I am the eye in the sky / Looking at you-ooh-ooh / I can read your mind?”  That’s the Alan Parsons Project, and you’d better believe I saw them do it live), this fifty-year-old drunk guy sitting next to me was absolutely spazzing out, dancing, yelling, and swinging his arms all over the place. He inadvertently hit me a few times, and every time he did this and saw that I didn’t really appreciate it I received remonstrations from him and his wife for just standing there and not dancing or being more excited. Apparently I was not simply allowed to freak out and have a seizure over The Alan Parsons Project as they performed their opening set, but I was expected to do so. Also, apparently I’ve never enjoyed life.

Fast forward through the years, and I’ve only gotten worse in regards to correct concert behavior. A year or so after that Yes concert I saw Pearl Jam play a huge benefit concert at High School Memorial Stadium in their home town of Seattle. Pretty cool, right? I haven’t told you how at this General Admission concert, with plenty of room everywhere, I was sitting far, far away from the stage up in the bleachers of the stadium. Also I have not disclosed that I was sitting next to my parents in those faraway seats; they came not for even the slightest love of Pearl Jam or rock music, but because while on family vacation they wouldn’t let me go to a concert by myself in a strange town. Not wanting to destroy my hopes of seeing my favorite band (at the time) perform, they insisted on coming with me and were extremely nice in their paranoid over-protection. To be honest, though, I’m not sure if my behavior at that concert would have been any different had I been there by myself. I may have wandered around the stadium a bit more, but I’m not sure if I would have dared descend to the field in front of the stage where all the action was, among all the people who really “loved the music.” The concert was alright. The sound was tinny, I could barely see the band, and Eddie embarrassed me by swearing a whole bunch in front of my parents, which was kind of lame.

Since then, I have pretty much never gone to concerts. Like I said, I do love music. I have daydreamed and conjectured as to how certain songs or bands sound when played live. I’m curious to see how people manipulate their instruments, and how their voices sound live. I even made this list about a year ago, after finally going to see one of my favorite bands (Broken Social Scene) perform live at a free concert.

But when artists whose records I have pined over for years roll into town, I suddenly find that I am not that interested in going.  I fear that they may not live up to my expectations.  I don’t have anyone to go with, or I don’t know where the venue is, or I am afraid I won’t know how to navigate all the weird private club business in Utah because I never do it otherwise, or I won’t act appropriately. I won’t dance when I’m supposed to dance. I won’t be wearing the right clothes. I’ll be too old, or too young. I won’t be drunk. I won’t be screaming at the top of my lungs. I generally just won’t fit in with the theoretical crowd of my imaginings.  I can think of tons and tons of reasons why I might be uncomfortable and not enjoy the concert, and these worries combine to ruin whatever positive experience I might have listening to the music and watching the musicians.

A case in point would be the aforementioned Broken Social Scene concert. They performed an outdoor concert at the Gallivan Center in Salt Lake City, part of the city’s free summer concert series. For years I had wanted to see BSS live. From what I had read in a couple of interviews and reviews of their concerts, I had intuited that certain songs that on their records featured inscrutable vocals buried low in the mix, or that had been otherwise remixed and deconstructed into oblivion, would be recast as dynamic rockers when played live. On this count my intuitions were correct: the Scene contrast their occasional “shyness” on tape with a robust, celebratory, collective performance. They interact with the crowd, they are good showmen, they have great energy and a strong collection of songs, and musically they have a looseness and a swagger, operating practically like a jam band without the long, tepid noodling. In other words, they are a great rock group.

But the crowd ultimately kind of ruined the concert experience. Before the concert started the people around seemed like good enough folks. There were people who looked to be regulars of the concert series, younger and middle aged couples, a few young families. Hanging around in front of the stage there were a lot of kids who may or may not have been hipsters, I really can’t say, but many were the type of kids that I imagine as filling up a Kilby Court concert (I’ve never actually been to one) and making me feel not very cool, clothed in what I intuited were the latest anti-styles (in this case a year ago it was v-neck t-shirts and tight girls jeans for the guys, unflattering retro-styled dresses for the girls).  These were the types of people one would expect to see viewing and enjoying this concert, and that’s great.  However, as the concert progressed we stayed in the same spot but everyone who had been around at the start of the concert seemed to have disappeared. In their stead were seething masses of high school kids that seemed to be there just to hang out and didn’t really care about the band or the music at all.  It was mystifying to me how quickly the concert mutated into a high school stomp.  There were tons of kids up in the front moshing and crowd surfing.  There were lots of thuggish kids moving through the crowds, oblivious to what was going on onstage.  These guys in front of us took their shirts off and performed dances that looked like aerobics routines, and random girls just came up and danced with them.  Where did they all come from and why were they there?

I enjoyed that concert, but over the subsequent months the memory of the crowd has worked on me to the point that I am afraid to go to a concert again.  When this year’s Gallivan Center concert lineup was announced, it included several of my current favorite musical artists, including Sonic Youth, who you may notice are prominently included on the above list I composed one year ago.  Would all those kids show up and try to push Sonic Youth into playing punk-pop like they were part of  the Vans Warped Tour?  (Not that Sonic Youth would cede to such a push; that may have been an interesting confrontational concert to watch.)  Would they try to crowdsurf to M. Ward’s easygoing folk-rock singer/songwriter stylings?  I was afraid to even find out.  Because of a busy schedule, but mostly out of fear of a negative experience, I didn’t go to any of these concerts this year;  not even my favorite Sonic Youth.  Chicken.

* * *

Last Friday evening I walked out into the backyard of my in-laws house, just to feel the cool, rainy air for a minute. After standing out there for a second, I noticed music emanating from somewhere in the neighborhood. It sounded very much like live, amplified music. This was intriguing to me, as my in-laws home is nestled in the middle of a suburban neighborhood, nowhere near any place that would be considered a concert venue. Furthermore, it seemed to be trying to rain, not necessarily the ideal condition for an outdoor performance. Curious, I walked to the front of the house to look for any indications of what was going on. I walked down the street, towards the source of the sounds. The cars parked up and down the street convinced me that it was definitely a party, but I still wasn’t entirely positive that they weren’t just blasting a CD out over a great sound system, because the music was spot-on. As you’ve probably determined by now, I’m not much of a partier, so I just walked around the block for a minute, listening to a really tight country-funk-southern rock groove and the sounds of someone absolutely killing on the electric fiddle floating around the neighborhood. There was no questioning at this point that it was a live band. The only question was, who the heck was this band and why were they playing someone’s backyard party in Holladay?

I went back to my in-laws’ house and found Gin, and asked her to come on a walk with me to see what she thought of the music and to see if she by chance would be able to figure out who these people were and what was going on. As we reached the house, she, being much more socially brave and nonchalant than I, pulled me along and we followed some guy through the garage of the party house and out onto a balcony deck, where we found ourselves overlooking a giant pool party and backyard filled with people of all ages. The band was set up beneath the balcony right by the side of the pool, and an advertising slideshow on a TV set up next to their equipment informed us that they referred to themselves as Bonepony. This seemed a familiar-sounding name for some reason.

So we stood up there on the deck and watched them for a few minutes. This was the first time I had ever crashed a party. At first I kept expecting someone to come and ask us who we were and be irritated at our presence, but the whole thing was very casual. Nobody paid us any mind. There were people playing around in the pool, some of them dancing to the music. There were people sitting in lawn chairs, watching the band. There were people standing in groups talking and drinking beers. I actually saw a guy come up to a woman and say “Do you come here often?” and he wasn’t joking.  At one point, the singer invited all the neighbors to come over, rather than call the cops.

Thinking about this house party concert, it is totally illogical to me that at this gig, which looked to be very much a party, rather than a concert, it was easy to just watch and enjoy the music without ridiculous distractions from other crowd members, and without any social pressure to get rowdy.  The crowd was not pushing one way or the other; everyone was able to do their own thing and enjoy the experience in their own way.  In contrast, many crowd members at several of the concerts I have attended attempt to hijack the concert and turn it into some wild party.  I guess what those great men once said is true, “You’ve got to fight for your right to party,” even at a rock concert.  I guess it turns out that while I look at a concert as an opportunity to hear and watch some music performed, many people take a concert as nothing more than an opportunity to dance, drink, goof around, grope somebody, whatever. The music and musicians that may be playing are simply incidental to the main purpose: to act like an ass. It turns out you can party to the Alan Parsons Project if you are loaded enough.  You can mosh or get crunk to Canadian indie rock collectives.  I suppose you can party to Sonic Youth or M. Ward.  I guess while you’re doing all of that, I can stay home and listen to my records.

[The title of this post comes from "Do the Standing Still," an entirely appropriate song that the Dismemberment Plan were nice enough to write about me. Listen to it below. At one time, the Dismemberment Plan were my favorite band, but sadly, if nonetheless inevitably, their plan came to completion, and they no longer exist. It must be noted that one of my most regretted concert misses ever was their Death and Dismemberment Tour with Death Cab for Cutie, which happened before the Plan broke up and before Death Cab became kind of like a big deal. This song comes from the Plan's second album, The Dismemberment Plan Are Terrified. I think that album's kind of hit and miss, but their third and fourth albums, 1999's Emergency & I and 2001's Change are stone cold classics of post-emo indie rock hipster geekery. They are sorely missed.]