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.

[Click here to read Side A - Dear Science]

In this post, I’m not going to argue the relative fidelity of vinyl LPs in comparison to CDs, MP3s, or any other medium.  I’m not going to posit what I see as the multifarious positives to vinyl records.  (If you wish to discuss these things, by all means feel free to leave a comment or call me or something.  Or maybe not; it turns out that despite getting Virginia to marry me I am still anti-social.)  This post simply describes some observations I have made in the past few months, and a couple of the thought processes that ultimately led to the decision to begin purchasing music (yes, even new music) on vinyl records, and buy a nice turntable on which to play them.

It all began a few months ago.  Virginia and I received coupons entitling us to 40% off any and all CDs at Borders for one weekend only.  Being an enthusiast of recorded music I was pretty excited about this, as was Virginia, who had not shopped for CDs in a long time.  Finding ourselves in the Salt Lake area that Saturday evening, we dutifully went to the Borders located in Murray near Fashion Place Mall. I remembered from visits in past years that this store had quite an extensive music selection, unlike our nearby Provo Borders location.  With great anticipation we climbed the stairs to the second floor, skipping the books entirely (unusual behavior, especially for Virginia).  And, where I had distinctly remembered a rack upon rack expanse of CDs in almost every conceivable musical genre, we saw only two or three pitiful racks. They were being perused on this special weekend sale night by only two other customers besides ourselves, both men in their sixties.  Virginia and I both found some CDs that we wanted to buy, and although we had fun, we thought it was rather strange and sad.  Virginia declared the place Dinosaurland.  I guessed that all the cool kids were somewhere downloading Lil’ Wayne tracks onto their phones, or something, and it made me feel stupid.  However, that idea didn’t seem any more appealing to me than shopping for CDs in an empty store.  I had the distinct feeling that something was missing, or that something had gone terribly awry with music consumption.

Since about 1993 I have been ensconced in the collection of CDs.  During that time I did occasionally buy old records for their cheapness and quaintness, but for the most part I bought CDs.  In recent times I would occasionally buy mp3s online (I have an eMusic subscription because it’s a great way to get a lot of indie music on the cheap and be legal about it), but for the most part I have been very resistant to iTunes because of DRM and the fact that you can purchase hard CD copies of albums, which have liner notes and superior sound quality, for the same or similar prices as the iTunes editions.  I mostly listen to artists who craft albums, rather than collections of singles and filler, so that makes a difference in my buying choice as well.  In the interest of full disclosure of my history of music consumption, I also confess that in my superpoor college days (2002-2004) I downloaded a large amount of music through file sharing, and I admit I still occasionally do this for evaluation purposes:  I listen once and if I like it, I end up buying it; otherwise, I delete it.

A remark made in an interview by a member of one of my favorite bands made the “CD problem” I had been ignoring for several years kind of blaring.  Referring to the large amount of album art inserts featured with their new CD At Mount Zoomer, the Wolf Parade bandmember (I think it was Dan Boeckner and I wish I could find this interview again) said they wanted to include a lot of art in it as sort of a bonus or reward for the few people who still buy albums.  With one my own bands acknowledging the demise of the CD, I quit kidding myself.  I came to the realization that almost all of my music shopping experiences at various stores for the past year or two had been “dinosaurland” type experiences.  I quit pretending that I hadn’t noticed the increasingly unaesthetic qualities of CD packaging.  I am referring to things such as the security tags that block the inner album art and that, even after you have successfully taken apart the jewel case without cracking any plastic, often cannot be removed without major damage; the increasingly large “FBI Warning” badges and banners that cover the back of the CD case and often ring the actual CD itself; the smallness of the album artwork; the gunk from the sometimes impossible to fully remove stickers on the CD cases; the ease with which the cases crack or get scuffed up, occasionally coming that way out of the package.

I began to think longingly of my old vinyl, and of the vinyl I saw being sold anew at a few good music stores.  I began to remember the warmth and ambiance of the analog sound (I know that the “warmth” is technically a “distortion,” but it’s a pleasant distortion that many musical artists seek after and consider a part of the ideal listening experience of their work.)  I remembered the pleasure of gatefold sleeves and large album covers that could be put on display in the real world, not only as a 50 pixel wide icon on an iPod screen.  Although LP sleeves are by no means infallible, they eschew many of the gunky, patronizing and ugly problems of CD packaging mentioned above, providing a far superior aesthetic package.  I realized that my CDs, despite sounding better than mp3s played through an ipod, gave me none of the pleasures of vinyl.  I noted that many new vinyl LPs include coupons for free mp3 downloads of the albums, and that even in the case of those that do not, I still have the right to digitize them myself for a backup copy.  With mp3s providing far more portability and LPs providing the most enjoyable listening experience, my beloved CD had indeed become the true antiquated relic.

Okay, so I guess I lied at the beginning when I said I would not be enumerating the virtues of vinyl.  I will end with this observation.  Recently, I’ve begun frequenting actual record stores on a regular basis.  It is very interesting and heartening to note that the experience at these stores is far from the dinosaurland feeling of Border’s CD section, or the CD sections at Best Buy, or FYE, or Circuit City, or pretty much any store.  Walking into local Salt Lake store Randy’s Records (900 South between State and 200 East) or even, on one occasion, the rather fusty and incense-filled Record Collector (2100 South in Sugarhouse) on a random Wednesday or Thursday afternoon, as I have a few times recently, I fought for browsing room with numerous customers of all ages, sexes, and ethnicities, from teenage girls to guys in their sixties.  The majority of them are, like myself, flipping through the new and old vinyl, while the CDs are pretty much ignored.  This is not just a one store fluke phenomenon: Smith’s Marketplace/Fred Meyer, FYE, and some Best Buy locations have started carrying vinyl again in 2008.  (Here is a funny article about the means by which Fred Meyer came to be selling vinyl again.)  I just prefer places like Randy’s and Slowtrain because they have far deeper selections and I like to give my money to local businesses as much as I can.

In 1993, when I felt I had finally entered the pinnacle of music consumption when I received my first CD player as a birthday present, I never envisioned that nearly sixteen years later I would find myself buying brand new albums on vinyl.

As I type these words, I am listening to a 180 gram vinyl pressing of the recently released TV on the Radio album Dear Science.  I am, of course, listening to it on my brand new Pro-Ject Debut III turntable.

O tender reader, the questions you may have!  Have I made a confusing, retrograde move to technology that is now twenty-five years obsolete?  Have I made yet another vain bid for “hipness?” Am I finally indulging a long-suppressed desire to earnestly collect vinyl, an inclination that perhaps should have been suppressed forever?  Have I chosen an aesthetically pleasing product over a convenient product?   Am I just another datum for marketing analysis, the latest trend-follower in a notable consumer buying shift that has been several years in the making?  Have I inched further down the path towards audiophilia? (Please note I’m far too cheap to ever succumb to true audiophilia.)  Have I just thrown a fit of nostalgia and sentimentality to the tune of several hundred dollars?  Will your judgment of these revelations be tempered by my assertion that I have listened to vinyl records for most of my life?  Will you believe that even from the age of five I loved vinyl, playing actual 45s on my Sesame Street Fisher Price portable record player (the cartridge at the end of the tonearm is shaped like Big Bird’s head). Will you believe that I only stopped listening to my records for the past couple of years because my turntable needed a new cartridge and the cover was busted (not the Sesame Street one — it still works great and just needs a couple of new “C” size batteries).  Will you forgive my confession that the ease of MP3 and iPod usage caused me to temporarily forget my love of analog?  Did I always look longingly from the CD section toward the vinyl bins at Slowtrain, but never dared to walk over and flip through them?  The answer to all of these questions is, of course, YES.  However, one statement is no longer accurate; not only do I now flip through the vinyl records at my favorite stores, but I also dare to take my selections up to the counter and purchase them from an actual human.

[Click here to flipover to Side B - Dinosaurland.]

Also In This Issue: Why My Twitter Updates Show Up Here As Entries On My Blog

A couple of months ago I jumped into twitter, and I liked it so much that I soon began looking for a way to incorporate it into this blog, which at the time was still unknown and in the process of being built.  Unlike, um, now?  I’ve had a couple of friends and would-be readers of this blog tell me they didn’t know what the deal was with twitter and didn’t understand why I have twitter updates on my blog.  So here are my best answers.

For those who don’t know, twitter is a little web 2.0 service that lets users publish brief comments, often referred to as microblogs.  There are numerous other microblogging formats, but twitter is a nice clean and simple one that works well, and as far as I know it was also one of the first.  Ostensibly, every twitter update is supposed to answer the question “What am I doing?,” but most people, including me, do not slavishly answer that question with every update.  An update has a maximum limit of 140 characters, which usually works out to a couple of sentences if you push it. This forces a concise brevity.  It helps comedic timing.  It forces others to read between the lines.  It usually just enough to get you intrigued.

You can and would want, of course, to follow the twitter updates of others, and when you log in to your twitter page, your updates and their updates are all racked up there together, with the most recent updates on top.  So you can visit twitter once every day or two, or every week or two, and quickly see some of the things that your friends and family members have been doing and thinking in the past little while.  I like it because I feel like the friends I follow are around and I kind of know what’s going on with them, even if I don’t see them very often or talk to them on the phone every day.  All the time I am thinking of other friends and family members that I wish were on twitter because I want to know what’s going on with them and I know they would have funny and interesting little comments to make.  A random blog entry that I happened upon one time compared twitter updates (as well as chat, to which I’ve never really been converted) to the kind of quick, useful and/or fun interactions that happen in an office of cubicles (like where I work), in which people pop their heads up or around for a minute to say hi or ask a question or just spaz out for a minute, and then after a moment everyone gets back to work.  That’s twitter.  It’s brief and informal, yet somehow intimate.  It doesn’t take more than thirty seconds to write an update, and it doesn’t take more than a minute or two to catch up on all your friends’ updates.  Much easier than reading or writing massive blog entries, like this one.

I do admit that twitter is not entirely unlike Facebook’s status updates, but it is a more pure and direct service for making concise or pithy statements about your thoughts and doings in the world, and it is much easier to find out what is really truly up with your friends, rather than how many Ghostbusters II movie quizzes they took yesterday or who gave them a virtual Dwight Shrute bobblehead.  No one on twitter will invite you twenty times to become a vampire ninja and join them in the fight against the pirate werewolves.

So, I think I’ve shown why I feel that twitter is awesome; but why is twitter on my blog?  Well, I started to  address that in a prior entry, but basically it is here because I like my twitter updates and thought they would make nice little breaks between the longer, more essay-like blog entries here at the Froz-T-Freez.  I also thought I would use them as springboards for longer entries, but so far that has only happened once or twice.  I thought it would make for a more steady stream of content, as I’m really irregular with keeping up on things here.  I thought it would be fun to practice some verbal brevity, as twitter has reminded me that you don’t always need to write paragraphs to express something well.

And with that, I’m going to sleep now.  Goodnight.