Vlogging and Death

On my very (very) long flight to Europe, I managed to digest a book by John Green called The Fault in Our Stars. Rather shamefully, I found it in the "Young Adults" section of the Kinokuniya in Sydney. Of course - the book is classified as young adult fiction and therefore would be in the teenager section (which is incidentally next to the brightly coloured kiddy section) - but it doesn't change the small amount of shame that a 20something year old alternative wannabe feels when taking a book from that shelf.

Why am I reading a book for teenagers? Other than the fact that the book was profoundly moving and made me emotional in a way that made me slightly embarrassed during the flight, John Green, along with his brother Hank Green represent the very essence of what makes awkwardness, geekiness and nerdiness so awesome.

Below is a video that combines two otherwise annoying things into one of my favourite past-times - Twilight and being a smartass:

A brief history - in 2006 Hank and John Green started a project called Brotherhood 2.0. The aim of the project was for the two brothers was to abandon all forms of  "textual communication" (being mail, SMS, E-Mail etc.) and to communicate purely via video blog posts on Youtube.

Such was the magnetic geeky charm of Hank and John Green that over the years of 2006 and 2007 the video channel gained popularity in it's own right - that is, beyond the novelty of the project. Thus evolved the Vlogbrothers. A quick skim of their youtube channel and it becomes clear how hard it is to resist their geeky charm. As their video blogging has evolved they've gotten a solid grasp on how to pace vlogs and keep people entertained.

More to the point though - to almost literally a legion of fans (dubbed "Nerdfighters"), they have become champions of geekiness and awkwardness everywhere. Hank and John were the awkward kids who sat in the corner, read books instead of playing sports, got beat up by the jocks and all those other nerd clichés. Except they grew up without growing up. Their Vlog is a celebration of harmless intellectualism. The kind of intellectualism that makes you wonder why barns are uniformly red and what happens when a completely physically inept human being attempts to tear down a wall.

Hell - it's worth subscribing to their channel just to get an explanation on the importance of the Higg's Boson that not only is entertaining, but actually stays somewhat true to the physics:

But back to where this post started - The Fault in Our Stars. 


John Green (the elder brother) makes his living by writing novels - and good ones at that. And the reason why his novels are so good is for the aforementioned reasons for which his and Hank's Vlogging is so engaging.

The Fault in Our Stars portrays young teenage cancer patient, Hazel Grace and her romance with Augustus Waters, an equally young recently recovered cancer patient. What follows is  a story that is brutally honest and quite profoundly moving on a very visceral and emotional level.

The beauty of the portrayal of the tragedy in Hazel's life is in the manner-of-fact way in which Green portrays her condition. The struggles of cancer take on a uniquely cynic-but-sweet twist which could only be achieved through the eyes of young sassy teenager. Hazel, despite her age, has come to a thorough acceptance of her condition. Even then, she isn't portrayed as the clichéd bright 'trooper' or the emotionally distraught heroine you might come to expect. She accepts that she will die, though she chooses not to give into becoming chipper and to attack every day 'like her last'. She treats her life with a maturity, that is incidentally made terribly fragile by how young she is. With this attitude, Green does an amazingly good job of making her honest and relatable whilst putting her through an experience that almost none of us have gone through.

What comes through in this novel, and his others (Looking for Alaska, Will Grayson, Will Grayson and others which I have still to read) is that same celebration of being the awkward teenager. Hazel Grace defeats the sadness of her situation with craziness and a weird, meandering imagination I get quite a lot. There's a subtle honest optimism to his writing which seems to resonate not only with myself but all of Nerdfighteria.

Even in a book with subject matter as potentially depressing as The Fault in Our Stars, John Green in his writing and his Vlogging scream a message of meaningful enthusiasm for the world. It's ok to be 30something year old nerd who loves Harry Potter and gets excited about science you don't understand. To Hank and John - the world is a giant playground where its ok for two married men to engage in a noodle war. More people could do with that kind of attitude.

The final pages of The Fault in Our Stars moved me to tears, but it left me with more faith in the ability for people to be happy than before I read it.

Doing Stuff For Free

I've been in a number of situations where I've had to sit down and really question why people would bother volunteering. The most obvious answer to this is purpose and belief - that is, having a firm belief in the mission of the body that you are volunteering for. Falling back on this and this alone, however, has been the downfall of many university based societies that I've witnessed. Not only do you have to put effort into reminding people of this purpose, but you have to put a lot of legwork into making sure that your volunteers are happy campers.

This, then, begs the question - what keeps a person working hard for no pay?

Certain clichés in American High School film tend to portray students who put significant efforts into extra-curricular activities as being inherently self-serving. Community Involvement in a lot of literature has been portrayed as way to accrue entries on a resumé leading to favourable scholarship or employment opportunities.

Whilst I certainly know a few cases where this is only motive, this isn't the case for a lot of people who volunteer their time for clubs and societies. Far from being involved in such things for tangible gain, my experience has led me to believe that the drive to volunteer or be involved is deeply psychological. Many of people I have come across actually express their desire to volunteer as fulfilling much the same psychological needs that would make a paid employee happy in the framework of a bigger company.

The Aspiring Pragmatist explains in her post (on Wikipedia as representative of a new marketing paradigm) that in order for an individual to feel happy they must feel fulfillment in three distinct psychological needs: autonomy, competency and relatedness. That is, feeling like you're in control, feeling like you're able to do something, and feeling that by doing something you will impress yourself upon other people or the world. 

By natural selection, corporate evolution or just plain common sense, it is somewhat fascinating to note successful management of volunteering bodies have more or less pinpointed these exact three things.

Let us start with the easiest to digest - relatedness. Volunteering bodies and extra-curricular activities by their very nature fulfill this psychological need without too much fuss. Putting time into aiding the disabled, protecting the wildlife or even putting a satellite into the sky not only obviously makes you feel as if you're contributing toward something, but also draws you to others who want to achieve similar things. Careful encouragement of purpose and cause reminds volunteers that they are contributing in a meaningful way to something significant. Organisation of social events and fostering a community culture makes people feel as though they've found a fulfilling group of friends.

Competency comes about with somewhat more effort. On a very straightforward level, simply gaining experience in doing certain things, be they directing foot traffic, or cooking meals en masse for the homeless, will increase your feeling of mastery of certain skills. You inevitably gain more and more expertise in the area that you chose to pursue in your activity. In addition to this, many programs offer the opportunity to gain training in entirely new skills altogether. Tangibly, this manifests itself as a significant entry on your resumé as well as being something that you can simply be proud of - a reason to keep on volunteering.

Autonomy is the hardest facet to actualise, though the arguably the most fulfilling. The ability to feel as though you're in control of a situation is hard enough in and of itself, let alone trying to make someone else feel like that. Achieving this successfully however, (the methods by which is a complex field of psychology which I don't have the expertise to go into) is confidence building, character building and opens you up in a way that few other things can. The feeling of being able to do achieve something significant by your own means and solving a problem with your own mind makes you feel profoundly useful.

Beyond the altruism of volunteering, there are benefits to doing so. It makes you feel good, it lets you gain experience in things outside of your normal life and it connects you to people who are enthusiastic enough to do stuff for free. And take it from someone who knows these kinds of people quite personally - they're awesome. And most of the time, you grow to love the cause you're working for - it can be a fundamentally eye opening experience.

Try it out, give some of your free time to a good thing.

On Facebook

"Being added as a friend has always meant very little. Being deleted however seems to mean a lot - why would you delete someone from your facebook unless you truly disliked them? We seem to have come to the conclusion that adding someone is such a casual and disinterested action that to delete someone must suggest some kind of abnormal dislike." - CC

This post is in response to a recent blog post by CC. In it, she speaks of Facebook within the context of the internet deadening our connectedness with the real world, be it socially with other people, or in a more physical sense wanting to explore the world outside and experience real things. It is a thoughtful post, and you should read it - it'll put this post into somewhat better context.

In order to contextualise my own viewpoint on this matter, though, I will start with something of a personal anecdote. 

The internet was not a friendly place in high school. I had started a blog and participated in a forum here or there because, for the same reason I started this blog, it seemed like harmless fun. What I didn't count on, though, was two things: one - how brutal people (particularly teenagers) can criticise each other out of either spite or their own need to feel superior or dominant in some way; and two - how tender I was to this kind of criticism, being a teenager myself. 

I was hurt, more than I should have been, and I retracted myself from the interwebs. For a very long time I refused to put any of my personal input into the internet.

My addendum to CC's thesis on the effects of connectivity is that both benefits and detriments of this phenomenon are strongly affected by the way in which we, the user, choose to receive them. This is not to say, though, that the responsibility of all the rage and emotive content that is inspired the internet lies solely on the reader. 'Social Enabling' tools and particularly Facebook have evolved to a point where we are being unintentionally drawn toward certain things in ways which we can't resist because of how subtle they are. 

Inevitably, the more 'user friendly' or 'easy' posting your thoughts on the internet become, the more what you do and read is manipulated by social trends. The solution to handling this is to maintain an awareness of what is going on and then by your own judgement choose how to receive information. I hope that this blog post will raise that awareness, if only by a little.

Over time, the successive developments of Usenet, Blogs, Micro-Blogs and finally Facebook have each successively been touted as the downfall of thoughtfulness in print. 

Usenet and the start of the internet were (admittedly very mildly) seen as opportunity for uncensored, unedited and unthoughtful content to be published. This occurred to the ire of those who believed in the robustness of hard print. The ease with which Usenet allowed for people to 'post' their thoughts into a widely proliferated medium lacked the editorial processes that hard print used to filter out the crap. The logic was that the hard work you put into trying to get something printed in a book or in a newspaper meant that not only was your work reviewed (and therefore worthy of being distributed), but that you earned it. No wonder then, that people in the early 80s would view this as a sad descent into anarchy with the masses being given an accessible tool to proliferate their unfettered thoughts and opinions.

The rebuttal to this argument, however, is a phrase (that may or may not be stolen) that I often utter to my friends in this situations: "there have been long haired youths since the beginning of time". The point being that however debaucherous higher ups view whatever is happening now in society, once upon a time they were in that situation with their progenitors, and in about 10 years time something will come along that will make this all seem civilized in comparison anyway.

For the most part this has rung true as 'opinion proliferating' has become easier and easier with the invention of more enabling media. Once Blogging became a thing, blogs then became the target of this level of criticism. Where Usenet, forums and website-making required some foreknowledge of how and where to write things down, Blogging meant that any person with a web browser could write basically anything.  Then, micro-blogging in the form of Twitter made this even easier - 'thoughtful' sentences with a click of a button and hundreds, even thousands of followers instantly read and digest. 

Twitter - short and apparently significant ramblings

But so far, this is (relatively) okay. Control for us users remains clear because we can identify what content is genuinely intellectual and what isn't particularly thoughtful. It's still relatively clear on what level we can choose to react to these things by judging their form or theme. This selectivity, however, has become infinitely less clear with the union of social networking and micro-blogging that is Facebook. 

Facebook is a complex beast. The concept of 'social networking' by itself was a complicated enough process without the internet stepping in and shoving in our faces things that we might not otherwise see. As CC points out, most of the content is made up of in-jokes that can fly over our heads, the 'friend-defriend' dynamic becomes randomly complex and we become depressed when our witty remarks don't garner attention from our supposed 'friends'.

The shiny 'f' that makes Facebooking so easy

A particularly interesting point comes from the fact that a lot of these Facebook emotional by-products come as a result of what Zuckerberg and others in the Facebook think-tank are doing to prevent it. Although much of Facebook's success can be attributed to the nature of the user interface and (supposed) accessibility much of the website's sticking power comes from the metric that governs what gets put into the top of your 'feed'. The website has evolved to the point where it employs complex but rather effective algorithms that essentially deem what has happened in your 'social network' that should be most important to you.

Facebook distinguishes between what is a 'top story', and everything else

The critical mistake with this is that in order to invoke an 'effective' algorithm, you need to generalise the emotional response of very individual human beings. The result? For a lot of users, fun, meeting people and starting conversation - as the website makers intended. But for others (who make up a significant portion of Facebook) alienation, sadness and ennui for a number of different reasons. As sophisticated as the Facebook programming can be, it will not be able to predict exactly what will make us feel better in moments of non-typical emotion. And sometimes it can step badly wrong.

I am not arguing that Facebook will be 'the downfall of this generation' as some older stuffier schoolteachers (who are now on Facebook) have preached to me in the past. At the end of the day I have gotten a great deal out of Facebook - some of my greatest friendships were initiated by 'friending' them after meeting them casually (an exercise without which I possibly would not have continued further contact). I was connected to my ex-girlfriend via a mutual acquaintance through Facebook - what turned out to be a happy and long relationship.

So how are we to treat Facebook then? We treat it like how we have treated micro-blogging, blogging, the internet, newsprint and television - with necessary and selective detachment. As self-serving as it may seem, I emotionally connect with Facebook when it makes me happy, but as soon as something that provokes an unsavoury emotion from me crops up, I remind myself that it's 'just Facebook'. It's harmless to use these things to amuse ourselves day to day, but we should leave serious discussion and the confrontation of our own emotions to more severe forms of communication.

Those who are happiest using something like Facebook will by and large have healthy lives off the internet and with real people. At the end of the day Facebook should be treated like any other media which is slightly mindless - as harmless entertainment. Nothing more.

Take Facebook with a grain of salt.