Addicted to feedback

If I read Facebook for too long, I want to post short quips, "like" things, and generally let people know that I exist.

If I read Twitter for too long, I want to post short quips, "favorite" things, and generally let people know that they exist.

When I sit in front of Typepad ready to type, it's not always for the short post, and often it's not even for an audience. My working assumption is that unless I'm writing about something that the world cares about, only a handful of people will see it. The other working assumption is that I really don't know before I write it how it will be received, so it better be good enough for me to want to refer to again just for myself.

I've referred to Vacuum as an unpolished open notebook. It's also a place to capture "interior stories", internal monologue that makes sense about how you do things.

(Christina) Baldwin says that if people aren’t attached to their interior stories, they get addicted to feedback. Although I would have considered myself attached to my interior story, I also recognize a social-media feedback addiction in myself. I’m always curious about what kinds of comments that my, for example, Facebook status updates, have generated. (from A Storied Career,  a blog by Kathy Hansen).

Sometimes you write to inform yourself, and the goal isn't to create or please your followers, or to get new ones, or to up your page view count or close a new lead. It's just to write, and to capture what's going by in your head to the level that you can recreate it later.

Writing in a blog has always been for me an exercise in locating other people's words to help illustrate my point. That gives it some measure of similarity to a commonplace book, a traditional way to copy out bits of prose that you wish to make your own into a kind of clippings book or scrapbook of words.

I'm content, really, to be "addicted to feedback", but I reserve the right to look for the right kind of feedback to tune into. The feedback of blogging is the long, low rumble of old notebooks that have just the right relevant bits to tune into, and not just the shrill, high ping of social media contacts.

 

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