Tag Archives: community

Offline conversations about online conversations

Share photos on twitter with Twitpic

Sometimes I want to talk with people in person about how we talk with people on the Internet. I know I can get very “meta”– I mean, look at my website, where I sometimes blog about blogging—but I think it’s very important that we take some time to talk about how we’re talking. When I say “blogging” and “talking” I’m talking about any kind of media that you share with people on the Internet. Whatever you put out there, you are in effect “talking” to people. When you write comments, fave or “Like” something, rate something, etc., you’re talking to people. You produce and consume enough of these social media (photos, videos, stories, updates, links, comments, etc.), and you’re talking with people. But you’re not talking with them in real life, and you’re not even talking with them in real time. The communication is abstracted and asynchronous.

This evening, I went out with my husband Andy to a local brewery for something called #evfn, or East Valley Friday Night. As the description says, “Some folks calls it a tweetup. I calls it an #evfn. Remember the agenda: no agenda. Have fun. Meet people. Party on!” I’ve been to several of these, well, I calls ‘em Tweetups, and sometimes they can get pretty meta about social media. How do we share updates? Photos? Videos? Personal stuff? Work stuff? What kinds of relationships are made, bettered, or broken online? How do we bring those online relationships offline and vice versa? Continue reading

My experience dancing with black people at the NAOBI conference

One more thing I must share about NAOBI— something that moved me and touched my heart. Now, I know it sounds funny to talk about “black people” and point out the differences between their culture and mine— black people’s and white people’s. It seems “politically correct” to be hush-hush about the differences between black people and white people, but I want to tell you some positive things about what’s different about black culture! And this is so neat. It seems — now, I interpreted for a full week last year at the NBDA (National Black Deaf Advocates, a deaf association) conference, and at the end of the week, we danced!— It seems to me that black people cannot get together and not dance. It seems that every conference I’ve been to — and that’s only two, but still — in my experience, when black people gather for a conference, they’ve got to dance together. And it’s so much fun! They had a DJ playing music loud, and everyone danced together— deaf people, interpreters, everyone. And they line up facing each other while people dance down the aisle, you know, like Soul Train. That’s where everyone lines up in two lines facing each other, forming an aisle, and as people move up to the front of the line, they dance down the aisle and do their own thing, show their personality, express what they’re feeling. Everyone on the sidelines cheers them on, goads them on, and roots for them. You strut down that aisle, you dance, you swing, you move your body, and you do your thing, you express yourself. Oh, it’s fun! And people are fiercely supportive.

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I Don’t Represent the Deaf Community

I was criticized by a deaf person for posting a one-minute long closed-captioned spoken video on YouTube the other day. The deaf person said that they were disappointed that I didn’t sign my video and that, being a sign language interpreter, I “represent the deaf community.” This is my response, signed and closed-captioned.

Struggling to Manage My Use of the Internet

I have struggled to manage my time on the Internet ever since I first got online in 1995. I hesitate to say that I have an Internet addiction, because I don’t like all the baggage that comes with the term “addiction,” but I will say that there are times I spend too many hours on Web sites. And maybe I do have an Internet addiction.

Lately, I notice — especially with Facebook — that I get pain in my elbow and wrist from so much mouse clicking to follow everyone’s posts. I read all my Friends’ postings, regardless of how well I know them, and I just keep reading and commenting and reading and refreshing pages. There are people in my Friends list that I’ve spent more time with on Facebook than in real life. But no matter what our relationship in real life, I find myself reading everything they post. It begins to seem as though my “best friends” are the ones who interact with me the most on Facebook. Yet that’s insidious, because it doesn’t mean they’re closer to me; it just means they’re on Facebook a lot and they like to interact with people on it. It’s seductive to sit there clicking, clicking, clicking on everyone’s content, yet I have to do something about my overuse strain. I am, after all, a sign language interpreter, and I have to save my hands and arms for work.

And speaking of seductive, it is so tempting to add all the people Facebook suggests to me as Friends– well, all the people I know, anyway. I never went and added all my friends Friends or anything crazy like that, but I did add almost all the classmates, coworkers, and friends I recognized. It got to the point where I had 378 Friends! As I started following more closely, I realized that I hadn’t even remembered some of my classmates correctly. In one case, I thought I was following a guy who was one class ahead of me until I realized that I was following his brother who was two classes behind me. He seems like a great guy, but the last straw was when he made that “tell me something you remember about me” prompt in his status message, and I realized, well, I didn’t remember anything.

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What I’m up to these days. Just a wee bit busy!

I crave excitement and I have a need to achieve. Sometimes, though, it seems that all my projects overlap and the pressure feels crushing. One way that I handle the pressure is to avoid it, which in turn makes the pressure even worse by the time I get back to work on what I’ve been procrastinating.

So, what are all the things I’m doing (and/or avoiding doing) right now? Well, there is the matter of taxes. My husband’s employer somehow forgot to take out any taxes for him in 2008, and he somehow never noticed this. So I have to pay his tax debt with my tax refund. But to get my tax refund, my tax accountant needs to return my phone calls and e-mails, which so far he hasn’t. The sooner I get my taxes filed, the sooner I get my return, and the sooner we can file my husband’s taxes along with the money he owes. I would be nice if filing jointly were an option for same-sex couples.

Then there is the Arizona RID State Conference this weekend. I am presenting a workshop on Saturday afternoon titled “Knowing What They’re Going to Say Before They Say It: Using Genre Recognition to Improve Your Predictive Skills.” I’m in a competing time slot with Ari-Asha Castalia, Sharon Neumann Solow, and Teddi Von Pingel, so no pressure there. ;-) Continue reading

Steph tributes Daniel Greene

My friend Robert, who took this photo of his daughter after a self-portrait of mine, writes:

I’ve wanted to take this pic for a long time. I saw Daniel’s pic and thought to myself “I have one of those whistles somewhere around the house.”

My daughter didn’t need any coaxing to pose for this as she’s always had a very high opinion of Dan. She’s in good company.

Wow! I’m flattered. When someone takes what you’ve created and creates something else in response, that’s interactive, co-creative art! That’s community. I love it!

P.S. I’ve met Robert and his daughter Stephanie on a few Flickrmeets and photo strolls.

I thought I was a social outcast. Then I came to my senses.

This evening I had a brief bout of self-doubt, a fear of social ostracism. It began when I considered going to #evfn (East Valley Friday Nights), a Twitter gathering or “Tweetup” organized on Twitter and taking place, this night, in Chandler. Mind you, Chandler is pretty far from my home in Phoenix, and just last Friday night I passed on driving out to Paradise Valley to attend shabbat services because it was “too far.” So I was already questioning my motives. Why was I willing to consider driving out to Chandler to meet some “tweeple”? Could it be because I saw a tweet earlier today from Rene Gutel saying, “@evo_terra Mind if I join y’all?” (Rene Gutel is a local freelance journalist who often contributes stories to NPR, so I thought it would be neat to meet her.) Could it be because I see businesses bending over backward to support Tweetups in ways I’ve never seen them support Flickrmeets? (When local Twitter members went to a Phoenix Suns Game recently, they all got matching (free?) t-shirts and a welcome on the JumboTron. And at the #evfn Tweetup at Whole Foods in Chandler tonight, the store actually printed a gorgeous sign to welcome them.) Could it be the age-old yearning to hang out with “the cool kids”? Well, it could be any or all of those things. But something kept me from going… Continue reading

Chained



Chained to the Sea
Originally uploaded by Daniel Greene

Just as a boat is chained to the sea, sometimes I feel chained to Flickr.

I am now going through the 420 photos I took during the six days of my trip. Four hundred and twenty photos that all came out well. Yes, there are some things that I took multiple shots of in order to get the best one, but still… how do you work your way through all that and post it on Flickr without boring people? I’ve been limiting myself to posting only three or four photos a day so that people will look at them, which seems to be working, except I have to ask myself why I share all these photos with the world. I took this working vacation on my own, and one of the reasons I took these photos was to share them with my husband, Andy, who couldn’t come on the trip with me. That makes sense to me– to want to share with my husband everything I wish I could have shared with him while we were apart. And I suppose it makes sense to want to share photos with family and close friends. But I’m starting to wonder why I care whether people I’ve never met will stop and look at my photos. I hardly make any money giving my photos away. I could write travel articles and get paid for the work I put into taking, geotagging, editing, organizing, naming, describing my photos… but I don’t. Instead, I spend several hours each day on the computer and on Flickr. I post photos and look at other people’s photos. I enjoy this, but often it seems like work.

I sometimes look at what I do as a creative outlet and a chance to share information with others just for the sake of sharing. I guess there’s a part of me Continue reading

Antiwar Candlelight Vigil



Antiwar Candlelight Vigil
Originally uploaded by danielgreene.

I’m posting this photo to commemorate the efforts made four years ago by American citizens to show the U.S. government that its people were against going to war with Iraq. This vigil was sponsored by MoveOn.org, and it took place in Balboa Park in San Diego, California. Sadly, it’s been over four years since then, and so many thousands have died, so many billions have been squandered, and so many people worldwide have been turned off by Americans. But, “It’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness,” eh?

I submitted this to a photo contest after the protest. I never heard anything about it that I recall. I do think it captures a moment well, though.

Working on Bylaws in HTML and CSS

Yesterday, I spent some time revising the bylaws I wrote for SDCRID so they could be repurposed for AzRID. The AzRID president asked me to do this, because she had heard from a little bird (Rob Balaam, RID Region 5 Representative) that I had done the bylaws for SDCRID. Since there are some interesting lessons to be learned from my work about bylaws and, incidentally, about HTML and CSS, I thought it might be beneficial to share them here.

First of all, my sources for the bylaws were the RID bylaws, the RID Affliate Chapter Handbook Sample Bylaws (pp 238–257), and the AzRID bylaws (which link will probably be broken soon when they upload the new ones). I also consulted Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised when I was writing the SDCRID bylaws. I pretty much followed the Sample Bylaws except when I felt the RID bylaws were clearer or more up-to-date. I also, of course, checked the AzRID bylaws for any special bylaws that needed to stay. That takes care of the bylaws part of it.

I also had an interesting challenge and a gratifying success with writing the bylaws in a plain-text editor (BBEdit) using XHTML 1.1 and CSS. I did this because I wanted tight control over sectioning and listing. Bylaws documents need to be very structured. One can write in all the sections, subsections, and list numbers, but that is a waste of time, especially if one ever wants to rearrange the order of sections and list items. If one does use styles in a word processing program, sometimes formatting can become corrupted during routine editing operations such as cutting, pasting, deleting, etc., and then one can lose the document structure. Besides, I enjoy the challenge of hand-coding HTML and CSS, and I like to demonstrate the power of these structural and presentational markup languages working hand-in-hand.

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