Meeting social media contacts face to face

By Caitlin Kelly

According to WordPress statistics, Broadside has more than 20,000 followers worldwide.

I’ve met only a handful of you face to face, in Paris, New York and in London.

In the past week, I sat down face to face with five men I previously knew only through social media — one from a writers’ listserv and the other four all met only through Twitter.

The meetings, of course, were purely professional for me — and for them — held in daylight in busy public spaces.

Viv is a super-talented writer, stand-up comedian and new friend — who followed me on Twitter from her home in London and hired me to coach her.

 

Every meeting went well and I learned about a new-to-me person and their world.

One is an African-American man who runs a thriving national program recruiting new professionals into radio work. Reassured by having a mutual NPR connection, we spoke on the phone a few years ago. He was wary, cool. Not unfriendly, but cautious.

We only see one another once a year or so when he comes to New York, but this time — our third — felt like old friends, with hugs and happiness at our chance to spend some time together and catch up.

Another is a man from my hometown, Toronto, who worked for years in my field of journalism, focused on financial news — but who I met through our frequent participation in multiple Twitterchats on travel, like #CultureTrav, #TravelSkills and #TRLT. Retired, he now travels the world, often on someone else’s dime, promoting cruise ships or hotels.

Another, decades younger than I, is a fellow member of a writers’ listserv who divides his time between his native Australia, Latin America and New York. Like me, he’s worked for both a broadsheet newspaper (like The New York Times) and a tabloid (like the New York Daily News.)

 

This amazing conference, Fireside, came to me through an email from a stranger — one of the best experiences of 2018

 

I met four of them in one day; the final one works in public relations in New York City, a field I hope to find more work in as a strategist.

And the fifth is a Florida man my age working on innovative ways to re-invigorate journalism; we met this week for coffee in my town while he and his wife were visiting.

Many people, I realize, are much happier remaining forever behind the screen, anonymous and safe, already too busy or overworked to add more to their plate.

As someone wholly self-employed, such enhanced and deeper connections can also lead me to paid work and new opportunities — a good personal meeting builds trust. My goal with social media is to connect intellectually, emotionally and professionally.

For me, social media is social, not just a place to scream and shout and rave.

I enjoy putting a face and character to a name, even if the person isn’t quite what I expected or would later consider as a close friend.

It does require a spirit of adventure and an open-ness to disappointment/delight. But working alone at home since 2006 can leave me lonely and isolated otherwise.

 

Have you met anyone face to face that you only first knew through social media?

How did it turn out?

The allure — and falsity — of Instagram

all images: Caitlin Kelly

 

By Caitlin Kelly

Are you a big Instagram user?

I only started posting — usually three to four images a day — about a month or so ago. My long-term goal, possibly, is to sell my images to interior designers and stagers, people who furnish and decorate homes for sale. I began my career as a shooter, and have sold my work to The New York Times, Time and the Washington Post,  so we’ll see.

 

My work: @caitlinkellynyc.

 

I’m enjoying it for a few reasons, which are very different from my frequent use of Twitter and (sigh) Facebook, whose behavior has proven so deceptive and appalling it’s difficult to use it now in any good conscience.

 

 

What I like about Instagram:

 

— Non-political. It’s not filled with people ranting endlessly, let alone arguing with others, about their specific causes.

— Global. I’ve been stunned (and delighted) by literally instant responses to my images, from a 13-year-old fellow baker in Britain to an auto body shop in Brazil to an Istanbul photographer.

— Not just photos, but photos of some of my favorite passions: pilots and their airplanes (especially women!), vintage clothing, jewelry and flowers.

— Creative inspiration. Photos of places I long to visit; interior design; terrific art and ceramics, like the guy from Australia who hand-painted exquisite blue-on-white tall vases. I found a young British art student, Kat Thomas, (katt_artt)  whose work is spectacular.

— Playful connection. I snapped a pair of studded black leather boots on a red carpet at the Met Opera in Manhattan, then spotted an almost identical image, by an Italian man, of his cool studded black boots on a red carpet. I suggested he check out my picture, and he did. Silly? But fun!

— It’s sharpened my own gaze. Thanks to the camera in my cellphone, an IPhone 7, I’m forever seeing, appreciating and capturing beauty around me, night or day, rain or shine. On a recent foggy, rainy morning I hastened to get out to our local reservoir to snap some images. I’m so glad I did because by afternoon, skies were clear and the mood was gone.

 

What I dislike:

— Selfies. Just stop. Seriously. I don’t get why people keep posting image after image after image of themselves! When someone follows me, and I see nothing but selfies, I’ll never follow back.

— Endless self-promotion. Yes, Insta is a great place to promote your product or brand. But enough!

— Too much photo manipulation. I’m old school! I began my career shooting film, so when I see images that have been heavily manipulated and filtered, I often flip away fast.

— Too much lifestyle content, posed and perfect. Many of the most popular sites are perfectly posed and lit, whether of people carousing (usually white, thin, young people) in trendy/cool places or of food or tourist-y moments. Insta is a place for people to escape into fantasy, but it’s also feeding some tremendous envy and resentment.

Why can’t I ditch my messy life today and live on a Greek island, too?

 

 

Do you use and enjoy Instagram?

 

Is social media really social?

By Caitlin Kelly

I really enjoy social media — but I see such mixed results.

Women who speak up about contentious issues are harassed, bullied, doxxed. Some, in desperation, end up fleeing Twitter and other platforms, blocking everyone who attacks.

I’ve had a few bad experiences there as well, but thankfully most of my social media experiences have been pleasant.

I recently started using Instagram.

My site is caitlinkellynyc...and I’m enjoying the wild mix of people who like my photos — from an auto-body shop in Brazil (a photo of a vintage air machine) to a trekking company in Nepal.

I have, as you know from reading here, extremely eclectic interests, so my Insta feed includes flowers, vintage clothing, travel photos and lots of female pilots.

Thanks to this blog, and through reading theirs, I’ve made friends in real life with  Cadence, author of Small Dog Syndrome in London and Kate Katharina Ferguson in Berlin.

Thanks to Twitter, I also met up in Berlin with Jens Notroff, an archeologist who works on Gobekli Tepe, a 12,000 year-old Neolithic site in Turkey and Dorothée Lefering, a travel blogger whose post about Rovinj, Croatia impelled me to stay there for a glorious week last July. I’d never even heard of it before!

We all met for lunch at Pauly Saal (a trendy restaurant) in Berlin last July, thanks to “meeting” them regularly through several weekly Twitterchats focused on travel — and Jens and I bonded for certain after trading the lyrics to the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Who knew?

 

 

Now, thanks to Insta, I’m reviving my photography skills; I began my journalism career as a teenager selling three cover photos to a Toronto magazine, then sold to Time, The New York Times, Washington Post and more.

I love how my Smartphone has made me hyper-aware of my surroundings once more. The glossy perfection and waayyyyyyy too many selfies of Instagram don’t appeal to me, but I’m loving the global reach it offers.

I also spend a lot of time on Facebook participating in online-only women’s writing groups, where we find friendship, freelance work, staff jobs, mentoring and moral support. At worst, it can get ugly and weird, but at best it’s my daily water cooler, as someone who works alone at home in the boring suburbs of New York.

(It costs me $25+ in train and subway fare into New York City to meet people face to face, so social media offers us all an easy and affordable option.)

But I also plan play dates — this week an Oscar-viewing night with a neighbor, lunch here with an editor, a Canadian consulate event at the Tenement Museum in New York City, and meeting friends for dinner in Harlem at Red Rooster.

My weekends are also filled with in-person social activities from now through mid-April, so I don’t feel isolated and lonely, which social media can create online interaction is all you do.

Facebook was also useful recently in a highly unusual way — with a local woman reporting to our town in real time that a woman had been shot in an apartment complex nearby, that the shooter was on the loose (!) and that’s why we heard police helicopters overheard for hours.

(She died and he was captured in New York City at the bus station.)

The hashtag for our town’s zip code, whose Facebook page has thousands of members, was the single best place to find out what was happening.

 

Are you using and enjoying social media?

 

Which ones do you enjoy most and why?

Time for a digital detox?

By Caitlin Kelly

Great piece, from Outside magazine on one man’s year of digital detox:

At the time, I was a journalist covering climate-change politics for a nonprofit Seattle news site called Grist. I’d been with Grist almost ten years, and as my job had transitioned into full-time writing, I’d lived through—indeed, built a career on—the rise of blogging, social media, and hyperspeed news cycles. By the end of 2012 I was, God help me, a kind of boutique brand, with a reasonably well-known blog, a few cable-TV appearances under my belt, and more than 36,000 Twitter followers.

I tweeted to them around 30 times a day, sometimes less but, believe it or not, gentle reader, sometimes much more. I belong to that exclusive Twitter club, not users who have been “verified” (curse their privileged names) but users who have hit the daily tweet limit, the social-media equivalent of getting cut off by the bartender. The few, the proud, the badly in need of help.

It wasn’t just my job, though. My hobbies, my entertainment, my social life, my idle time—they had all moved online. I sought out a screen the moment I woke up. 
I ate lunch at my desk. Around 6 p.m., I took a few hours for dinner, putting the kids to bed, and watching a little TV with the wife. Then, around 10 p.m., it was back to the Internet until 2 or 3 a.m. I was peering at one screen or another for something like 12 hours a day.

Does this sound familiar to you?

We now spend — North Americans anyway — seven hours a day staring at a screen of one sort of another: laptop, phone, Ipad, desktop or television.

We now live in an era of CPA, continuous partial attention, a world in which we’re all one click away from the next cool thing, awaiting the next text or sending one while (yes) driving or sitting at the dinner table or (yes, even) shooting a selfie at a funeral.

Sherry Turkle, a psychologist, has studied our use of technology for decades:

She is particularly concerned about the effect on children. “I am a single mum. I raised my daughter, and she was very listened to.” Today our phones are always on, and always on us. Parents are too busy texting to watch their kids, she cautions. There’s been a spike in playground accidents. “These kids are extremely lonely. We are giving everybody the impression that we aren’t really there for them. It’s toxic.” This is what she means by “alone together” – that our ability to be in the world is compromised by “all that other stuff” we want to do with technology.

I have a horror of the fully-mediated life, one solely conducted through a glass screen, one in which full, physical attention from another human being is a rare commodity. (Now that I’m teaching college, I am acutely aware how rare it is for a room filled with young people to focus for two hours without sneaking a peek at their phone. I insist on it, but am also grateful for their attention.)

Because I now spend so much time on-line — like many others — I’m finding my ability to focus on one issue for long periods of time degraded, so I’m being more conscious about reading books, on paper, to rest my eyes and do one thing for an hour at a time.

I also make a point of meeting people face to face over a meal or a coffee, to read their facial expressions and be able to share a hug.

How about you?

Does the digital life satisfy you?

But what if they don’t “like” it?

By Caitlin Kelly

From The New York Times about our addiction to being “liked” on social media:

Walking through an airport newsstand this year, I noticed a novelty. The covers of Inc., Fast Company and Time all had female executives on the covers: Sara Blakely, Angela Ahrendts and Janet L. Yellen. I quickly snapped a photo and sent out a tweet to my modest list of followers: “Women on the cover. Not just for girlie magazines anymore.”

Then I waited for the love. I checked the response before passing through security. Nothing. I glanced again while waiting for the plane. Still nothing. I looked again before we took off. Nobody cared. My little attempt to pass a lonely hour in an airport with some friendly interaction had turned into the opposite: a brutal cold shower of social isolation.

A few days later, I mentioned this story to my wife. “What a great tweet!” she said. She then retweeted it to her larger list of followers. Within seconds, it scored. Some Twitter bigwigs picked it up, and soon hundreds of people had passed it along, added their approval and otherwise joined in a virtual bra burning. Though I should be above such things, my wisp of loneliness was soon replaced with a gust of self-satisfaction. Look, I started a meme!

We are deep enough into the social-media era to begin to recognize certain patterns among its users. Foremost among them is a mass anxiety of approval seeking and popularity tracking that seems far more suited to a high school prom than a high-functioning society.

It’s interesting where this stuff ends up — one talented young photographer, a friend of ours working in Chicago (who has not even finished college) — was recently offered a full-time staff job by a major newspaper after editors kept seeing his excellent work on Instagram.

Here is his astonishing collection of photos of a train ride from Chicago to New Orleans in a recent New York Times travel section. Go, Alex!

Do you care if people “like” your posts on Instagram or Reddit or Facebook or Pinterest?

Do you get re-tweeted?

Or does “real life” still matter more (or as much) as approval on social media?

Oh, no! FOMO!

By Caitlin Kelly

Instagram in Instagram. Also: insomnia. (Photo credit: thatgrumguy)

Is your life (yet) dominated by FOMO — fear of missing out?

Funny/sad story from The New York Times about the insidious effects of Instagram:

For many urban creative professionals these days, it’s not unusual to scroll through one’s Instagram feed and feel suffocated by fabulousness:There’s one friend paddling in the surf at Positano under a fiery Italian sunset. Another is snapping away at a sweaty Thom Yorke from the third row at an Atoms for Peace concert in Austin. Yet another is sipping Champagne in Lufthansa business class en route to Frankfurt, while a fourth is huddling with friends over omakase at Masa.

Members of the Facebook generation are no strangers to the sensation of feeling a little left out when their friends post from that book party they weren’t invited to, or from someone’s latest transporting trip to the white sands of Tulum. Yet even for those familiar with the concept of social-media envy, Instagram — the highest achievement yet in
social-media voyeurism — presents a new form of torture.

I confess, I have yet to start using Twitter, Pinterest or Instagram. I’ve been enjoying photos snapped by a young pro photographer pal in Chicago on Instagram — but only when he posts them on Facebook as well.

Facebook is bad enough, thanks.

I have a few acquaintances or professional contacts whose updates are sufficiently envy-inducing as it is — the best-selling authors crowing about their latest Hollywood movie deals, a writer friend who boasts, almost daily, about the deluge of assignments landing, unbidden, in her lap, and a therapist who seems to spend all her time on vacation in places like Venice, Africa and Paris.

I love how every new iteration of status markers simply keeps evolving — from Chinese rank badges to the sedan chair to nose-thumbing via pixel. It seems as primal as breathing to show off how fantastic your life is.

Do you end up gnashing your teeth, (even just a little), at all the too-perfect photos of smiling babies, immaculate houses and glam vacation spots cluttering your feed(s)?

The unliked life: How long can you stay off of social media?

By Caitlin Kelly

I recently took a week-long break from blogging here, the longest since I started this in July 2009.

I got a lot done in real life, mostly work-related, with a few meetings with new contacts and possible clients.

It was an interesting experience to turn away from the putative gaze, and potential approval, of Broadside’s readers. I know that some bloggers like to post every day. I just don’t have that much to say.

More to the point, I try hard to maintain a balance between my life online and my life…in real life.

Social media is ubiquitous, and for some wholly addictive. We all like a hug, even if it’s virtual. We all like an  ego-stroke, and getting dozens, or hundreds?

How can that be a bad thing?

I still prefer being liked in person — last week over half-price cocktails with my friend Pam, trading notes about high-end travel with a new client, wooing a local PR agency, hanging out with my husband.

English: Infographic on how Social Media are being used, and how everything is changed by them. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here’s a fascinating/sad story from Bloomberg Businessweek about a camp created for adults who need to digitally de-tox:

It’s Digital Detox, a three-day retreat at Shambhalah Ranch in Northern California for people who feel addicted to their gadgets. For 72 hours, the 11 participants, who’ve paid from $595 for a twin bed to $1,400 for a suite, eat vegan food, practice yoga, swim in a nearby creek, take long walks in the woods, and keep a journal about being offline. (Typewriters are available for anyone not used to longhand.)
The ranch is two-and-a-half hours north of San Francisco, so most guests come from the Bay Area, although a few have flown in from Seattle and New York. They’re here for a variety of reasons—bad breakups, career
troubles—but there’s one thing everyone has in common: They’re driven to distraction by the Internet.

Isn’t everyone? Checking e-mail in the bathroom and sleeping with your cell phone by your bed are now
considered normal. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2007 only 58 percent of people used their phones to text; last year it was 80 percent. More than half of all cell phone users have smartphones,
giving them Internet access all the time. As a result, the number of hours Americans spend collectively online has almost doubled since 2010, according to ComScore (SCOR), a digital analytics company. Teens and twentysomethings are the most wired. In 2011, Diana Rehling and Wendy Bjorklund, communications professors at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, surveyed their undergraduates and found that the average college student checks Facebook 20 times an hour.

Twenty times an hour?

This is just…sad.

There was a time when being with other people meant actually being in the same room — and that meant possibly having to walk, run, bike, fly, cab, drive or climb to access their companionship.

You know, make an effort.

We also used to live lives that we decided were intrinsically satisfying or they were not. We didn’t spend hours seeking the approval of thousands, possibly millions, of strangers — people who we’ll never meet or have coffee with or visit when they are in the hospital or attend their wedding or graduation.

There is genuine affection on-line, I know — but I wonder how many of us now do things now just to see how much they are “liked”.

Much as I enjoy social media, I’m old-fashioned enough to want to be in the same physical space as the people who “like” me and want to hear, first-hand, what I’m up to and how I really feel. There are many things I’ll never post here or on Facebook, where my “friends” include several high-level professional contacts for whom a brave, competent face remains key.

To me, face to face “liking” is truly intimate — like the seven-hour (!) meal at Spice Market that Niva and I shared when she came to New York and we finally put faces — and lots of laughter — to our names for the first time. (She writes the Riding Bitch blog.)

We had a blast.

It was much more fun than endlessly hitting a “like” button.

SPEAKING OF SOCIAL MEDIA — DON’T FORGET TO SIGN UP FOR MY NEXT WEBINAR, BETTER BLOGGING, ON SUNDAY NOVEMBER 10 AT 4:00 P.M. EST.

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