Category: Social Media

• December 21, 2022

  “The Evidence for Coal” Revisited

  

  There’s nothing quite like a good Christmas story. Perhaps you have your own memories of being read “The Night Before Christmas” as a kid and swearing you could hear footsteps on the roof. Or maybe your family sat down to watch Charlie Brown choose a scraggly pine to be the center of the Christmas pageant. Personally, I always looked forward to seeing the claymation TV specials like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. In any case, storytelling is a large part of the Christmas mythology in western traditions, blending old and new beliefs to create something a little more magical than our day-to-day experiences.

  Back in 2016, Creative Colloquy put out a call for Christmas-themed stories, poems, and essays. I thought it would be a fun challenge to add my own twist to the generations of Yuletide fiction that’s come before. Set in the North Pole in the days before Christmas, “The Evidence for Coal” shows what happens when jolly old St. Nick and Big Data collide. It’s a bit of a satire of our data-driven culture and a bit of a reflection on why the idea of a man in a red suit delivering gifts to children around the world is so strangely compelling in the first place — nothing groundbreaking, just some good old fashioned Christmas fare.

  READ “THE EVIDENCE FOR COAL” BY JONNY EBERLE

  This year, I decided to revisit this story, sprucing it up for my podcast on writing and the creative process, Dispatches with Jonny Eberle. I asked my friend William McDonald to narrate it and I think his acting chops really serve to bring the story to life. I can almost smell the hot cocoa wafting through the corporate halls of Santa’s workshop.

  Ready to give it a listen? You can find the episode below or check it out wherever you find your podcasts. I hope you enjoy it and happy holidays!

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer and podcaster in Tacoma, WA. His work has appeared in Creative Colloquy, Grit City Magazine, and All Worlds Wayfarer. You can follow him on Twitter, join his mailing list, and listen to his audio drama, The Adventures of Captain Radio, wherever you enjoy podcasts. Want to hear this blog post in podcast form? Subscribe to Dispatches with Jonny Eberle.
• April 27, 2022

  Twitter and the Public Square

  

  For years, Twitter was hailed as a cure-all for the ills of 21st-century life. It eliminates gatekeepers, they said. Now everyone has a platform! Writers can easily connect with their readers! Journalists can discover and report on stories as they break! Politicians will be more accessible than ever! Proponents lauded the platform as a modern-day version of the village commons where the free flow of ideas and opinions would create healthier democracies. People pointed to the way Arab Spring protestors, Occupy Wall Street, and the #MeToo movement used Twitter to organize their efforts for social and political change. Even I bought into the hype, viewing the platform as an unfiltered news source and a promotional tool all rolled into one.

  We were wrong.

  Starting in the mid-2010s, Twitter’s flaws were laid bare as demagogues and trolls weaponized it. Misinformation skyrocketed and crowds of followers were whipped up into dangerous mobs. And it wasn’t just Twitter. Facebook was hijacked by conspiracy theorists to spread lies like wildfire and state-sponsored hackers leveraged its algorithm to shape the outcome of elections. But while Facebook was vilified for its inaction and ineptitude, Twitter’s reputation survived relatively untarnished, even as it allowed the likes of Donald Trump to threaten his opponents and for legions of anonymous users to hurl abuse, slurs, death threats, and harassment.

  Somehow, the faithful convinced themselves that despite the hateful rhetoric and the real-world consequences of proxy wars being fought through its app, Twitter was fundamentally a good thing. Or at least, it was a neutral entity with a capacity for good if the right guardrails were in place.

  We came to equate Twitter — and all social media by extension — as the second coming of the Athenian ideal of direct democracy, where everyone could contribute their voice to discussions on a global scale. Then, a billionaire who disagreed with the company’s moderation practices swooped in to buy it, and I was reminded that Twitter isn’t the public square. It never was. We aren’t recreating the Greek polis¹. If anything, we are living through a resurgence of the Gilded Age, when rich aristocrats accountable to no one slandered their critics in the newspapers they owned.

  Is there hope? Perhaps Twitter’s new owner, who claims to be a free speech “absolutist,” won’t dismantle moderation policies which reign in some of the platform’s darkest impulses. Maybe there will be a renewed commitment to protect vulnerable groups from online bullying and harassment. It’s possible there will be a slow exodus to some other social media provider, or that we’ll simply retreat to our individual corners of the Internet, cocooning ourselves in a decentralized network of blogs and mailing lists. I’m not sure what I’ll do. A lot of the traffic to my website comes from Twitter. No other platform provides as big a reach for writers and artists who depend on social media for their livelihood, so many of us stay, even as it comes as an increasingly steep ethical price.

  Last week, I listened to an episode of the Rumble Strip podcast. The episode describes how, in many small towns in New England, the entire town meets once a year to debate and vote on the issues facing their community. It’s a remarkable reminder that true democracy happens face-to-face in coffee shops and high school gyms. It’s slow, hard work that relies on a common understanding of the rules of engagement, respect for those who disagree with us, and a shared goal of caring for our neighbors. As we choke on social media’s grip on our national conversation, we’ve largely lost the art of civil debate and shared governance. I don’t know if we can get back to that place, but I hope it isn’t too late.

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer and podcaster in Tacoma, WA. His work has appeared in Creative Colloquy, Grit City Magazine, and All Worlds Wayfarer. Ironically, you can follow him on Twitter, but you can also join his mailing list for more musings (which might be better in the long run). His debut audio drama, The Adventures of Captain Radio, is available wherever you enjoy podcasts.

  Further Reading: Elon Mush bought Twitter. What’s next? (PBS Newshour)

  1. Note: The Athenian system of democracy, while innovative, was far from ideal, with citizenship limited to a small group of free men allowed to participate in the political sphere, with women and slaves excluded. The ancient Greeks struggled to keep their democratic experiment alive before ultimately abolishing it in favor of rule by a small oligarchy.
• January 29, 2013

  The Best of Unfriends

  

  I unfriended you today. The reasons were complicated. We all carry reminders of the past. Childhood drawings, sports trophies, ticket stubs and faded t-shirts. We hold on to so much that is unnecessary. Now, we hold on to Facebook friends, too.

  Today, I went through all 541 people on my Facebook friends list and started unfriending (which is an abomination of a verb) until there were just 470 left. Like all things that must be done, I let this chore go for far too long.

  I had a lot of people on that list. Hundreds. The task of who to keep and who to let go of was daunting. First, there were my close friends, my coworkers and my girlfriend. Obviously, they all stayed.

  Then it got tough.

  There were high school acquaintances I hadn’t spoken to in five years. There were people I’d met during college orientation, before I discovered my real friends. There were people whom I’d drifted away from. There were people who had changed their name and photos to obscure their identity so much that I couldn’t remember who they were.

  So, I clicked unfriend. I let go. It wasn’t out of anger or anything they did. But people go their separate ways and Facebook was trying to maintain an artificial connection between me and complete strangers. Where there was no longer a pressing need to see every second of their life documented in my timeline, I cut the tie.

  Clearing out the people who were no longer my friends was difficult. And it shouldn’t be. I shouldn’t have to feel bad about moving on. That’s the nature of friendships. Some grow closer and some grow further away. But Facebook doesn’t let relationships come and go organically they way they do in real life.

  So, I had to unfriend you. In reality, we hadn’t been friends in years and seeing photos of your life was starting to feel creepy. It was time for this. After all, I don’t need a social network to tell me who my friends are.

  — 30 —

  I’m a writer in Flagstaff, AZ and in addition to clearing out my Facebook friends to make room for the important people in my life to fill my newsfeed with pictures of their pets and children, this is my 100th blog post! Thank you for reading!

  Related Posts:
  A Day Without an iPhone
  A Writer’s Identity
  Etiquette in the Digital Age
• November 19, 2012

  A Day Without an iPhone

  

  When I first realized that I’d left my phone at home, I panicked. I was cut-off from the world; isolated from my social network, friends and loved ones. For several hours, I would be unreachable by phone call or text message. I started to feel anxious, but within a few minutes, the rational side of my brain woke up. What was I doing?

  Like so many of us, I’m a little addicted to my technology. I like being connected. I like talking to friends around the world, reading the news as it unfolds and snapping shots to tweet and instagram to my followers across several social media platforms. But today, my dependency scared me. I had to ask myself: Can I function a day without my smartphone?

  I’m part of the generation that’s old enough to remember a time before the Internet invaded our homes, but young enough to have been indoctrinated in the promise of the Information Age. I remember getting my first email account in the third or fourth grade and my amazement that those beeps and chirps could transmit text and photos across thousands of miles of telephone lines.

  From there, I tumbled down that slippery slope from email and word processing to message boards to MySpace to Facebook to Twitter as my Internet devices got smaller, faster and more powerful. In the blink of a decade, my personal computing power increased about 2,930 percent.* That’s mindblowing.

  But sometimes, I worry that I’m too plugged in. I do have less face-to-face interactions. I talk less on the phone and I notice things around me less than I did before my eyes and fingers were glued to the touch screen. Can I go a day without my phone, a few hours? I thought it couldn’t be that hard.

  At first it was. It’s part of my routine; at times almost an extension of my body. But after an hour or two, I was able to focus on my work without much distraction. I have a laptop at work and my job keeps me logged into Facebook and Twitter for much of the day, so I didn’t miss much (just five text messages and a handful of other notifications). Still, not feeling the constant buzz of the phone was downright relaxing.

  Maybe I need to forget my phone at home more often.

  

  — 30 —

  I’m a tech junkie, Applephile and all-around nerdy guy, which means I really like Twitter. Follow at your own peril.

  *(Some people may want to know how I got this number. Our family’s early-90s desktop behemoth had a 33 MHz processor and my phone has processor that clocks in around 1 GHz. So, around 2,900 percent faster. Multiply that by 2.4 to see how badly my laptop tounces the old Compaq Presario. Even more mindblowingly, my hard drive space has increased 500,000 percent.)
• October 16, 2012

  An Experiment in Form

  

  When James Joyce wrote his groundbreaking novel, Ulysses, he changed novels forever. His style was wildly experimental and his themes controversial. He threw out beginning, middle and end; he replaced scenes and chapters with a stream of consciousness. Ulysses was bold. It was different. And it set the writers of the 20th century free to push at the boundaries of how stories could be told.

  For some time now, I’ve been interested in how social media is changing the way human beings communicate. He tweet instead of speak and Facebook instead of talk face-to-face. Looking back at Joyce’s revolutionary approach to storytelling, I began to wonder — could a series of online interactions carry a compelling narrative? It didn’t seem all that far-fetched that social networks could drive a piece of serious fiction. After all, books written as letters have been around for years and novels as emails are increasingly common (my favorite example being The Book I Will Write by John Henry Fleming). What could be a better reflection of reality than a story that unfolds in the digital world we live in?

  So, I decided to take on a new project: a short story where all of the main action happens in tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram photos and the like. So far, it’s the story of estranged siblings who reconnect online after a family tragedy. I’m not entirely sure how it will work (or if it will work), but I like the idea. And sometimes a weird idea is all the motivation you need.

  I think James Joyce would approve.

  — 30 —

  I’m still in the early stages of this new writing project, but you can follow my thought process on my Twitter feed, @jonnyeberle.
• May 23, 2012

  How Social Media Changes the Way We Write

  

  Social media has changed the world. In a few short years, it transformed from a novelty for angsty teens into a force that literally topples governments. It changes the way we maintain friendships, the way we look for love, even the way we eat. Now, it is about to change the way writers craft their stories (if it hasn’t already).

  Some writers are still hesitant about social networks. To them, Facebook and Twitter are part of the vanguard of an invading army seeking to destroy the traditions of the craft. They worry that readers are less likely to read a book when they have the infinite distractions of the sharable web at their fingertips. They worry that social media undermines grammar itself and dumbs us down. But where they see an attack, I see an opportunity.

  Social media is a gift to writers for three reasons. First and most obviously, it levels the playing field, allowing writers to publish without a brick and mortar publishing house. Anyone can be an author. There is instant access to millions of readers and you can skip the middle man entirely. You can discuss your work with readers or co-create new pieces in real time with collaborators all over the world.

  Second, the limitations of the technology itself could give rise to new forms. Currently, Twitter only allows you to post 140-character messages. How do you tell a story in 140-character increments? I don’t know, but I like the challenge. There’s a little more wiggle room on Facebook and sites like WordPress and Tumblr that make it possible to post entire novels on the web. All we have to do is learn how to write for these new media. In the near future, there may be an explosion of tweet-length poetry or status short stories.

  Third, the denizens of Twitterverse and the blogosphere are voracious consumers of the written word. There is a lot of bad writing online. Those few people who can actually string together a coherent thought with accurate punctuation are becoming increasingly popular. If you can use the medium and write for it effectively, you can and will find an audience waiting to devour it. If nothing else, the sheer volume of terrible content makes some people more appreciative of the good stuff.

  

  By our very nature, humans are storytellers. All of our great inventions were designed to help us share our stories and social media is no exception. The ways in which a writer can spin his or her digital yarn is literally without limit. The future of social storytelling is especially exciting when you see the new networks that are slowly gaining traction. Services like Storify allow you string together photos, videos, audio, tweets, Facebook posts and a host of other social content to tell stories on a multimedia platform. Imagine a whole new way to write that curates photos to establish setting and tweets for dialogue. Think of the possibilities for creativity.

  Now, don’t get me wrong — I love books and I don’t think they’re going away any time soon. But I foresee social storytelling establishing itself as a beautiful compliment to the traditional hardback novel. Within the decade, a new generation of writers will develop a whole new art form that combines the new and the old in ways we cannot yet begin to dream of. It’s a brave new world just waiting to be explored.

  

  — 30 —

  When I’m not busy blogging, I’m a social media manager and an incessant tweeter. If you have thoughts, responses or opinions you’d like to share, please feel free to do so in the comments or over on Twitter, where my handle is @jonnyeberle. Thanks for reading.

  UPDATE: The New Yorker is serializing the sequel to Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad on Twitter. Follow the story on their feed at @NYerFiction and learn more about Egan’s decision from the Mashable article.