Tag Archives: twitter

24 Hour News Has Ruined Us

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During the last century, one of the great “innovations” on the horizon was that we would move from a news model that reports twice at night to one of 24 hour, nonstop coverage. This brought about the advent of CNN, which ushered in this new era.

Fast-forward to today, and our news is somewhat worthless. Part of the advantage of the previous model was that our news took time to vet, so that reporters could check through stories and we knew we were most likely getting the real story. The new model doesn’t have time for that, so that instead of vetting the news, we print it, televise it, and then just hope that’s the truth. Otherwise, we print or air a retraction. Sometimes.

News agencies are doing that less and less these days because admitting mistakes is akin to guilt, so quite often, unless there’s outcry, you often hear nothing.

Thus, the moniker of fake news, which only makes the news that much weaker than it used to be before.

But one of the more recent problems our news has started to show is with the news itself. Because of the immediacy of the news these days, we often don’t have time to investigate and just print. Forward just a bit further to where we are, and we’re now literally regurgitating prominent Twitter feeds as actual news stories.

Here’s an example. CNBC reports on president’s Twitter story.

Think about that for a moment. Basically, what has happened is that we’re no longer going after stories, but we’re becoming the agents of anyone with a press release disguised as a Twitter feed. If you read the nightly news these evenings, they’re essentially just showing little graphics of tweets and then waxing philosophically about something really stupid someone might have said.

Today, we have a president announcing government policy by Twitter. Think about that now. And then when someone calls him on his promises he makes in Twitter, he denies ever having said it in the first place, literally calling everyone else liars.

That’s where we are. Welcome to 2019.

If You Want to Make America Great Again, Have Media Outlets Stop Using Tweets As Actual Stories

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I don’t even think people realize the problem that exists today with media. It’s not that media is wrong, false or lying. It’s that it’s lazy. And yeah, I know a big reason behind it is the consolidation of media outlets to get rid of people and save money. So, the problem has emerged to the next logical step: Find media anywhere you can get it.

And tweets is where they’ve found it. Because, let’s face it: It’s easy, it’s free, and it requires absolutely no work to put together a story that consists of someone’s response on Twitter.

But let’s also face the fact that it’s not actually a story. It’s a reaction from someone to something. And most likely, it’s irrelevant to practically everything.

Let’s take the Tweeter-in-Chief that gets quoted on Twitter the most. Instead of paying attention to actual policies the president is enacting or proposing, we get knee-jerk reactions from him at 3am in the morning when he’s just watched Fox & Friends and wants to let the world know that we must stop illegal aliens from stealing the world’s toilet tissue. or whatever stupid idea the bottom of the barrel commentators on that show have proposed at whatever time they actually air.

But the media eats this stuff up and actually reports it as a legitimate news story.

When news is dull or boring, we suddenly start to see “news” whenever one of the Kardassians picks a fight on Twitter with Taylor Swift, or whatever other shenanigans occur during that news cycle. The “famous for being famous” celebrities plan these stories for maximum coverage, and our media, realizing they don’t have anywhere near the amount of coverage to fill a 24 hour news cycle, eats it right up, and suddenly a turf war between two aging rappers ends up being a leading story. So, instead of reporting on something legitimate, or important, like anything written by Nicholas Kristof, or Rebecca Solnit, we get nonstop nonsense about the Kardassian sisters or “news” about toddlers in beauty pageants.

This morning, I woke up to read a “news” story about a Tweet from the president saying how much he believes that….

Not a story. It’s a moment of thought about something that is not a story. A story would be something actually happened. Legislation got passed, someone died, someone was arrested, an accuser was heard and listened to, a country declared war against another, a country attacked another, etc. Someone’s thoughts on something, especially something that came as a reaction to hearing an actual news story IS NOT NEWS.

So please. Stop passing drivel off as news.

And people, stop listening to it. When you hear it, turn it off because you didn’t get news. And better, contact the news agency and complain. Otherwise, it’s ALL you’re ever going to see and hear.

Just saying. I’ll tweet it for you, if it might cause you to think of it as real news.

Why Twitter Should Be Seen As A Complete Failure

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Joshua had a few things he needed to say

As much as it saddens me to say this, I’m more and more convinced every day that Twitter has failed as the communication vehicle it originally set out to be. You see, the original idea for Twitter was that it was going to create an atmosphere where people could communicate with lots of people AND as a result, give those people an opportunity to communicate back. Whereas television, radio and rallies tended to present one sided conversations, Twitter was going to offer the opportunity for the channel to go back and forth. Granted, it would be mostly pointed out from the person being followed, but that feedback was an essential part of the dynamic.

Fast-forward a few years, and what we have is a social networking system that has become mostly one-sided. For an absurd example, but one that points out the problem first-hand, look at the account of Kim Kardashian West. She has 58.4 million followers. But more significantly, she follows exactly 131 people. While she does retweet people from time to time, the chances of actually getting a specific reply from her are about as likely as getting a date with Taylor Swift (translation: not likely). If you look at the most retweeted account, that of our current president, it’s interesting to note that he is followed by 47 million and only follows 45 accounts. If you look through some of the most popular accounts on Twitter, you see something very similar to just that.

What this means is that Twitter is not a communication process but a megaphone for people who are popular entities already. Some entrepreneur still needs to invent the process for people to actually have a voice in conversation with others, but Twitter is not it. If you look at the average account, people tend to have at most 100 followers and generally follow a few more than that.

The moral to this story is that quite often people follow the individuals they respect because they wish to interact with that person. But Twitter doesn’t really make that a part of its process, even though it often acts like that’s exactly what is supposed to happen. An example is a celebrity like William Shatner who has 2.57 million followers, follows about 500 and generally has somewhat of an adversarial relationship with anyone who would like to converse with him.

That’s not to say that there aren’t those who don’t communicate with their fans. I’ve followed Marina Sirtis (Counselor Troi from Star Trek the Next Generation) for some time now, and she’s very friendly to her fan base. From time to time, she responds directly to things people say to her. But to be honest, she’s a rarity, whereas most celebrities treat it as a segment of their entourage that they allow tiny morsels of information.

Unfortunately, it’s all we got right now, but it’s so inferior to what I really wish it could be. So, that’s for someone else to invent and bring to the masses. I’ll wait.

Why the Idea of Celebrities on Twitter Drives Me Nuts (and why it should do it to you, too)

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For those who don’t know it, I have a Twitter presence (@duanegundrum). It’s not extremely popular, and I’m lucky if I get a “like” here or there. Mostly, it’s me ranting or making jokes, and no one in the world knowing the difference. As a writer, I have about 5,000 followers. I follow about 500 people. Not great, but not bad either.

At the same time, someone like Kim Kardassian has 54 million followers. She only follows 104 people. Compare that to the most popular writer in the world, Stephen King, who has 3.48 million followers (and follows 63 people). If you go through the lists of really famous people, they tend to have millions of followers and really don’t follow anyone else. In case you haven’t figured it out, they use Twitter as a megaphone, not a tool to communicate with their followers.

When Twitter came about, the idea was that it would be a great place for celebrities to communicate with their fans. But instead of actually “communicate”, they pontificate and there’s little communication that takes place. To make sense of that, you have to understand what communication means to begin with.

Communication, as explained by professors today, involves information exchange between at least two entities. But what’s important about that model is that it’s not just one side speaking to a listener. It’s an exchange of information, so that the receiver then becomes the transmitter and the process continues until the channel is finally closed. In other words, a telephone is used for communicating; a television is not.

When I got involved in Twitter in the early days, I had about 25 followers. They were mainly friends of mine. Over the years, fans and acquaintances joined those numbers, and now I have about 5k, which is a larger number than most people who aren’t straight out celebrities. But part of the “drug” of social media is the desire to constantly improve those numbers so that more people are listening to you or (in my case) having a conversation with you.

There are few people on Twitter I’ve come across who are actual convervationalists. They write stuff, and they respond to stuff. Generally, they have a lot of people who they follow. Others tend to have fewer people they follow but they respond quite often to people who respond to them (which is actually a pretty healthy conversation). George Takei (of Star Trek fame) is one I’d consider in this category (@GeorgeTakei, 2.44 million followers and follows 643 people).

This has often left me wondering how to break into this category of actually making my voice heard. And then I reached a crappy conclusion as an event occurred that I didn’t even realize was happening to me.

I often respond to celebrity posts that are of interest to me, specifically anything that is communication-related, political, or involves writing topics. One pretty famous celebrity (known for his role as one of the current crop of superheroes) posted something about media, and I responded with a Twitter message, basically pointing out how certain messages are put forth by media outlets by using specific phrases, like “some people say”, which is a common vernacular of “Fox News”, brought up often by Jon Stewart of the Daily Show during his years heading that show. The celebrity responded with something like “that’s like what they do on Fox News”, as if it was a new insight. That response received no small number of “likes” from his fan base.

So, since then, I’ve been receiving nonstop “like” notifications of his response while not a single one of them has actually come across from my actual post, meaning that the likes weren’t for the idea but for the fact that someone famous repeated it after me. It’s like the old infamous adage in the science community of how a great idea is irrelevant; communicating it, however, is what’s more important.

So, for all of you out there trying to get your voices heard, this is somewhat of a sobering thought. You can have the greatest ideas and insights that have ever existed, but if you don’t have a megaphone to let anyone know, your idea will never be heard. McLuhan’s idea of “the medium is the message” couldn’t be more significant than today because it may be the only way you will ever be heard. And with all of the noise of Kardassians and reality star driven, your chance of being heard is only going to get that much harder.

 

Martha Stewart loses it on Twitter and CNBC thinks it’s a big enough story to do an entire story on it

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This block of wood is more newsworthy than those tweets
This block of wood is more newsworthy than those tweets

The other day, Martha Stewart lost it on Twitter. The upside (or downside) of it is that she dropped her Ipad and then threw a fit because she doesn’t understand how technical support works (in that they usually don’t send someone to your house to fix something you broke, especially when it was given to you for free, even if it was given to you for free by the founder of the company). Basically, the title of the story, if it was worth the time, should have been “Old Female Celebrity Doesn’t Understand How Business Works” or my other favorite: “Old Woman Yells At Kids to Get Off Her Lawn”. Neither is appropriate but they’re probably better than the drama that ensued.

You see, CNBC, and I”m sure many others, seems to think it is a big enough story to have five news pundits sit around a desk and discuss it on national television. Really. 5 of them. What it boils down to is that five highly paid commentators sat around a table and discussed an old woman’s tweets about how she broke her Ipad. We have fewer commentators at one time discussing whether or not the US should get involved in a war in the Middle East. This should tell you what kind of priorities our national news have.

I think that any time a news program starts off a story with a caption showing you what someone tweeted, that station should be taken off the air indefinitely and should be replaced with footage of goldfish swimming in a bowl. Only if the goldfish learn to tweet can the station be allowed to air news again.

I’m just saying….

What is the Future of Government in a Twitter/Facebook World?

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We keep hearing stories of how governments are being toppled by people armed with Twitter and Facebook accounts. While these accounts keep forgetting to point out that you need more than Twitter or Facebook to topple an oppressive government, what we should take from these examples (like Egypt, Tunisia, currently Libya and possibly a future Iran) is that revolutionary movements have been assisted by these social networking technologies. And that’s no small deal.

What doesn’t get addressed is something I find even scarier, but seems to be completely off the radar (or gps) of everyone involving this issue. What these technologies definitely do is provide immediate access to higher up entities than have ever been experienced before. What do I mean? In the olden days, a king communicated with his people by throwing up broadsheets that people would read by wandering out into the village square where they were posted. If they were lucky, a town crier would yell out the messages to people as well, which mainly assisted a population that was generally illiterate. As education has emerged and moved from the upper class to the middle class and now finally to all of the classes, people are capable of reading their own messages, so that town cryer is no longer necessary. And because technology has emerged alongside this development, people are now able to receive instanteous communication from higher-ups. This was the paradigm that brought us up and through the 19th and 20th centuries

But Facebook and Twitter also do something else that 19th and 20th century technology did not allow. Instead of just reading messages from leaders, we now have the innate ability to communicate BACK to our leaders. Add email to the mix, and our ability to actually speak to a previously untouchable leader has completely evolved into something kings and queens never imagined (and certainly never wanted). Today, we are moving from a receptive community to a community that is able to push rather than just receive.

What are the implications of this? Well, for one, it means that our need to rely on government is quickly diminishing. In the old days, we had government developed for us because basically we weren’t smart enough to maintain affairs on our own. That’s not the case today. In an enlightened society, or one that may soon be one, the need for government is minimized, which means that those people who have gained access to the halls of power are now seen as oppressive entities rather than those who serve the public good. Right now, we have a debate going on between Congress and the President of the United States as to whether or not government is even necessary (they’re thinking of shutting it down because they can’t pay their bills). What no one is addressing is the reason why this is happening. Those who advocate big government are pretty much behind the idea of needing government to take care of every need and desire, and I’d argue they’re not wrong in that a lot of people DO need government, but there is another segment of society that is slowly divorcing itself from the constraints of government, and unknown to a lot of average people, a whole bunch of them were actually elected to national office. We call them the “Tea Party”, and even though progressives use them as the butts of their jokes. a real movement is taking place right now in this country that should be seen as very dangerous to the natural order. If you want to understand why a lot of Republicans believe that government should be shut down, perhaps people should actually listen to the Tea Party instead of just making up jokes about them and figure no one takes them seriously.

Personally, I think the message that is being put out by the Tea Party is premature, in that I don’t believe the country has moved to that level of sophistication yet. Yes, believe it or not, I actually see their arguments as highly sophisticated; unfortunately, the ones receiving the majority of attention are the most unsophisticated ones imaginable, which is ironic just on that level alone. Only about 70 of them are in power right now, and that’s nowhere near enough of them to make the impact they want to make, so all they’re capable of doing right now is disrupting government, rather than shutting it down.

But what should be seen is the longer term implications from ideas that they do espouse. Our Twitter and Facebook technologies have actually developed movements that coincide with this attitude of the people believing themselves to be superior to government. Granted, another irony is present as well, as most of the Tea Party thinkers are usually way behind the learning curve when it comes to emerging technology, but that’s really for criticism and derision more than an argument. What we should be focused on is that that these types of movements (the usage of technology in its ability to supplant government rather than supplement it) tend to grow, not go away.

My more important question is the one that fronts this entire essay: What is the future of government in a Twitter/Facebook world? In other words, if we finally reach a point where people feel they are on the same level as government, rather than recipients of messages from government only, do we present a new paradigm for the future? Essentially, does this equal status present a situation where people can finally rise above government, believing themselves to be superior, and thus, believe government should be eliminated, or at least changed drastically to reflect the submission of government to the people, as was originally intended by the Founding Fathers? Or do we end up becoming the enemy of government, which will hold onto its last grip of power until finally removed by those who have deemed it no longer worthy?

Personally, I don’t think anyone is thinking this way yet. That’s okay. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Although it was destroyed in one.

The Independent Writer’s Dilemma

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There’s a great article on Nathan Bransford’s site about e-book publishing. For clarification, I received this article following a link from an article by Elijah Rising’s blog (I give credit where credit is due). But what I wanted to talk about is something this article brought up as an issue for me, and it’s one that I think more writers are probably thinking about themselves, and an issue that really needs some kind of attention as we move forward.

The issue is simple. How does a writer who is unknown, independent, and did I mention unknown?, get any attention in the first place so that an e-book isn’t just seen as yet another announcement in the ether that disappears like a Twitter post on, oh, say my Twitter feed with its awesome 38 followers (that tend to be ready to drop me at a moment’s notice if I post a topic that displeases them in any way…I’m just saying)? As one of those writers myself, who has been trying to build an audience for himself for about as long as he’s been writing, I am constantly left wondering if somehow I missed the boat, and that a writing career just isn’t possible.

How does the independent writer create an audience, or at least set up marketing so that it’s productive and leads to sales (and, obviously, readers)? It seems like there’s a variable missing in the game, and that so many of us are trying to figure out what it is while so many others are easily making it through life without any effort, like a teenage girl who makes a Youtube video about a horrible song that ends up getting endless play because of how horrible it is (and then a record deal). I mean, what planet are we living on when this sort of thing happens in such Bizarro style?

It’s almost as if you need to be famous already in order to make it as a writer, and that basically writing isn’t the thing people are looking for in the things they read. I know it sounds ridiculous, but what am I missing here? When Snooki can write (if you call it that) a novel and it becomes somewhat of a bestseller, and a dedicated writer can’t sell more than two copies of a novel in a month, I’m left wondering what’s wrong. It would be one thing if I knew my writing sucked, but it doesn’t, and fortunately I’m way past the self-incriminating stage of my writing career. But it is so easy to be sniped at by other people when someone with very little writing talent gains a writing career when someone else can spend his or her entire life trying to do the same thing, and the only difference is I didn’t first get famous by having sex in a hot tub with social misfits first.

But I’m not making this post to complain about that. Such things are always going to happen, and we know it. What I’m trying to do is work out, in my writing, or my head, what it takes for the average, yet decent, writer to make it as a writer in today’s atmospheric dynamic. Part of me still clings onto the belief that a traditional publishing company is the way to go, but when that doesn’t seem to be working out, you have to keep trying something or you give up. And I’m not ready to give up.

Yet.

Twitter: The Technology Everyone Uses Yet So Many People Hate

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Recently, I’ve gotten into the whole Twitter thing. Before that, I was strictly a blog guy who swore he would never really get into Twitter. But a few years back, I opened up a Twitter account because I’ve always been one of those “well, everyone else is doing it, so I should, too” kind of guys. Like most people who join Twitter, I followed a few people, waited for the throngs to follow me, realized no one was going to follow me and then just stopped using it. I figured, like so many other people do, that it obviously doesn’t work because it wasn’t working for me.

Yet, since then, a few nations, including Egypt, collapsed because of the use of Twitter. No matter how I tried to ignore the story, it was HUGE, and the fact that this strange technology was used to bring down a powerful dictator really was hard to pretend it wasn’t this massively large elephant in the corner, practically taking up the whole room. So, recently, I decided I would go back into the technology to see if maybe I might have been missing something.

What I have discovered is that there’s a lot of very interesting information that gets shared on Twitter, but you have to be patient to realize it. If you go into the game with the thought that you’re going to get instant satisfaction or quick results, you don’t understand Twitter. And I didn’t understand it. Now that I’ve started to follow a bunch of people, I’m starting to realize that it’s a pretty interesting way to view the world. Therefore, I’ve decided to give some advice to those of you who may be thinking about getting into it yourself.

1. Follow people you are really interested in knowing more about. This is really important because one of the mistakes I was making was trying to “sell” me and then getting people to start following me. It rarely happens. It actually looks desperate, and who wants to follow someone who is the equivalent of the loser in a bar trying to pick up on anything that walks in? No one does. However, what I did start to discover is that because I’m a writer, and I’m interested in all things writing, I’m going to find a lot of interesting people to follow who actually might have useful information. You also quickly discover who is just there to use it as a marketing tool and who is there to use it as a communication vehicle. Some writing Twitterers I followed, like Publisher’s Weekly, have interesting information they share with their followers. Others, which I won’t name cause this isn’t really a “diss” kind of article, weren’t all that helpful and turned out to be really annoying more than anything else. The hardest thing I found myself having to do was unfollow someone, but sometimes, you need to just because the amount of spam that someone clutters up your channel with can be overwhelming, especially when it’s not helpful.

2. Some people are on Twitter because their egos need to be checked. A lot of celebrity Twitterers are like that, and it’s unfortunate. But it also tells you a little more about them and lets you realize that you’re probably better off avoiding them. One person I started following in the beginning was Felicia Day, who is the creator of the series The Guild. She doesn’t Twit that often, but when she does, it’s usually interesting and worth following. About half of what she has to say is interesting. Mindy Kaling, however, who is the girl who plays the Indian girl on The Office, I thought would be interesting and funny to follow. Personally, she’s not. I found her attempts at humor to be really attempts to try too hard to be cool, and pretty soon I’m probably going to unfollow her. An interesting celebrity I’ve been following has been Wil Wheaton, who is the man who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I haven’t come to a decision on him so far, as I’m suspecting he’s still looking for validation, as I noticed when some of the senior members of the Star Trek franchise were twittering and left him out, and he actually made a bit of an appeal last night, practically begging for attention. He’s an interesting case because he tends to float between a Felicia Day (interesting to follow) and Mindy Kaling (not worth the time). So the jury’s still out on him. However, it should be pointed out that if you’re hoping to be followed by a celebrity, or even have one actually pay attention to anything you write in response, it rarely happens. I used some of my best funny material in responses to Felicia Day, and I was pretty much ignored, which is probably no different than it would have been had I met her in public. Unfortunately, the lowly among us remain lowly.

3. If your goal is lots of marketing potential, then yes Twitter is a great tool to use, but you’re going to have to put in a lot of work and a lot of time before it ever pays off. If you spam your messages into the channel, people will dump you in a heartbeat, which means you have to use the technology to actually communicate. And like most avenues of communication, if you’re only projecting and not listening, people stop listening to you. Granted, the celebrities still get attention because they’re celebrities, but the average person, like me, is only really going to get attention as long as he has something interesting to say. So if you’re just there to build followers, you’re going to have a hard time unless you can provide something interesting to say. I started off with very few followers, and slowly, I’m building a bit of a following, but I’m not fooling myself into believing I’ve somehow tapped into the Duane-amaniacs. Therefore, I have to make sure that what I have to say is as interesting to me as it is to them, kind of like regular writing is. People avoid spam and really want something interesting to read. Otherwise, why follow you?

4. The social implications of Twitter are huge and have already proven themselves to be excellent. Like Egypt discovered, Twitter gives the average person a voice he or she might never have had before. When people were looking for information about Egypt and the revolution, well, that was an audience just waiting to hear what had to be said. Twitter was perfect for that. What happens to that Twitter audience now is probably even more interesting, but I doubt too many people will study that as researchers always look for that pivotal event, not the continued ramifications of a pivotal event that has run through its play in the media.

5. The complainers and the critics. There was an interesting article today on CNN’s site about the 5 ways Twitter changed how we communicate. What was even more interesting were the comments from the readers. Most of them were from what I like to call the old grandfather who lives in the house that no kid likes to go near, constantly yelling, “damn kids, get off my lawn!” Rather than read the article and be interested in the new technology, the haters showed up and posted responses like Shawn777: “Twitter? I don’t even use that crap” and Guest119 ‘s “200 years from now, provided humanity doesn’t blow itself up with nukes, Twitter will not even be a footnote in tech history.” My personal spin on this is that the majority of the complainers are people who tried it out on a weekend, didn’t get a million followers and then figured it was a dead technology.

6. What is the future of Twitter? Who knows? Certainly not me. I’m pretty late getting on the bandwagon as it is anyway. I do know that somewhere down the line another technology will replace it and be the next “in” thing. I’ll probably be late for that one, too. But right now, Twitter is serving as an interesting way to communicate, and as a writer and a communications professor, it’s hard for me to continue to ignore it.

For the record, if interested, follow me on twitter at DuaneGundrum.

Stop me before I buy more books! And other complaints when it comes to running a blog.

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For some reason, I’m a glutton for books. I buy them even when I don’t need them. Case in point: Today. I was at Barnes & Noble just wandering around, minding my own business, when out of the blue BAM! Another book came at me from behind and forced me to buy it. I didn’t even get to the cash register before another book, hiding behind the greeting cards and magazines jumped out WHOOSH! and there I was at the counter with two books I didn’t need. But no matter how hard I tried to get them out of my hands, they wouldn’t leave, and I ended up having to shell out another forty some bucks to the evil cash register lady for the purchase of said books.

I had actually gone into B&N looking for a specific book on Twitter information. I recently realized I had this Twitter account that I never really did anything with, so I decided I would see about optimizing Twitter to see if it might actually benefit my blog. My blog has been one of those underperforming vehicles that has been driving me nuts for some time. I write posts constantly, and I seem to have a massive amount of phantom traffic, but I’ve never really been able to do anything with my blog to make it worthwhile to me. I’m not talking about making money, like others try to do with their blogs. I’m more interested in just getting people to read my stuff, and I’m constantly struggling to do so.

Some months back, I joined Open Salon and started blogging there, and what I discovered was that if I didn’t spam the crap out of people, I really didn’t get any real traffic to my blog. And that bothered me. I decided to stop emailing people every time I wrote a post because I started to feel that it was bothering people rather than letting them know that I had more posts for them to read. I know that I have started to get annoyed at the amount of emails I get from people who post every day (and then email me every day), so I decided I didn’t want to be one of those kinds of bloggers. Unfortunately, the alternative is even worse. My blog is practically invisible as a result.

It’s partly frustrating because it kind of falls into the same paradigm problem I have with my writing career. I know I’m good at writing, but I can’t get a career jumpstarted no matter what I do. So I end up writing for myself or for the wind (or whatever other dorky metaphor fits the situation). My main blog site has been active for years, and it’s almost like I started it yesterday, judging from the amount of communication that comes across it. It’s a lot like my life these days. I get the idea no one even knows I’m alive, even though I’m still kicking and screaming. Just screaming in silence with the volume turned way down so as not to wake up the neighbors.