It's all Ryan Barrett's fault. "What is?" you ask. The silly push for Age of Conversation 2008 authors to publish teeny tiny excerpts from their recently submitted chapters. The book doesn't drop until August and, unless I'm mistaken, you can't even pre-order it at this point, so I'm not sure what we're accomplishing by putting teasers online now. Maybe we should have waited until right around the release date? Or maybe we AOC types are just too excitable and it's plenty good enough to toot our own horns, regardless of whether we're having any impact on book sales. Anyway...
Ryan is compiling all of the posted excerpts in one place. It looks like she has gathered up quite a few. Make an appeal to a bunch of bloggers -- 275 of us are contributing to this book -- and you're bound to get lots of cooperation. If you read the original Age of Conversation and/or are awaiting the 2008 edition with bated breath, I'd encourage you to visit her snippets page and see what some of my co-authors are saying.
Now, on to me. My original Age of Conversation chapter, "Have You Hugged a Blogger Today?", focused on the power of social media to kickstart meaningful real world relationships, and the importance of not losing sight of the fact that old school person-to-person connections trump online "friendships" any day. Or something like that...
This year, as I sat down to hammer out my chapter, I was feeling a bit less optimistic about the state of social media and the role it plays in my life. I'm probably feeling even less optimistic as I write this blog post, but that's another story for another time.
Right now, my main goal is to share a snippet from my AOC 2008 chapter. This year's chapters are divvied up into seven or eight themes. I wrote about "Life in the Conversation Lane." As co-editor Drew McLellan described it in the submission guidelines, Life in the Conversation Lane chapters are meant to bring it all back to the individual. I quote: "how is life in a digitally connected, social world impacting our lives? What is the personal cost and what is the attraction? Is there a balance or are we just kidding ourselves?"
Inspired by Drew's questions, as well as some recent goings-on in my own social media life, I wrote "White Noise, Deafening Silence." It is a meditation on social media fatigue, with a particular focus on my personal struggle to make Twitter a useful channel in my own online life. The chapter isn't all doom and gloom, but it definitely injects a hefty dose of skepticism into AOC 2008's ass cheek. I've been struggling with which couple of sentences to publish -- trying to find something thought provoking but not off-putting, something that will peak interest but not give too much away. Hard to do when the entire chapter is 400 words long -- just a single page of text.
So, for better or worse and without further adieu, here's a bit from early in the chapter, in which I express my Twitter disillusionment:
"The digital ramblings of my Twitter friends brought to mind nothing so much as the frantic clacking of 100 monkeys pawing at typewriter keys. And here I was, peeking over their shoulders, expecting to discover that they were Crowdsourcing (or perhaps barrel-sourcing) the Great American Novel. And man, was I disappointed to find that they weren’t."
Well, there you have it folks, my AOC 2008 teaser. Like I said, be sure to check out the rest over at Ryan's joint -- and keep your ears open for the official on-sale date. Peace.
