The Long Walk Backwards - Leaving Facebook

I have said in the past that I would like to leve Facebook. In fact, in one post I even said that I would start retreating from the behemoth, but I never really wanted to. I think that Facebook served a purpose – you know, reconnecting me with Connie and giving my future wife. So I can’t be too harsh on the place, really. Though, despite this incredible gift Facebook has eroded all things that make it likeable, and slowly and surely it’s became a waste of time and space.

The first thing that Facebook did wrong was become so powerful. Successful websites come and go, but I feel that Facebook has reached a critical mass – it is so big it can’t really fall down now. It’s unlikely to go the way of Myspace and Lycos if they keep doing what they are doing right now, which is pervading all aspects of someone’s life before putting it into monetary terms. Like the Open Graph sharing aspect, or the ability to link almost all types of media using Facebook (but with an interspatial link that registers with Facebook anytime someone goes through it).  Then there are the games that million of people play that will keep people coming back to Facebook and keep companies developing games for that.

The funny thing is that this is exactly the problem I have with Facebook – on my feed there are people sharing nonsense and fluff, apps adding updates about things I have no interest in, and even worse the site has started to look so dreadful and bloated it might be impossible to find things that you want to do on it.

In a roundabout way – I am over Facebook. And slowly, over time, I am going to delete it. I am firstly going to cull a lot of my “friends”. There are four types of people on my Facebook friends list: my close friends and family, my colleagues and people I worked with, my “internet” friends from Twitter and message boards, and people I used to be in contact with but now I don’t.  Back when I used to get regular requests from people finding Facebook for the first time if they didn’t contact me within 72 hours of friending me they were deleted. I stopped doing this because I don’t use Facebook enough to be on it all the time.

The first thing that I am going to do is start removing people that I don’t want to have on there. It feels hard to delete friends (clever Facebook) but it shouldn’t be – just because I am not keeping you on my internet profile doesn’t mean I hate you. Indeed, if we are friends you already have my other methods of contact, either on my phone, email or even on the other social network Twitter (more on that below). This will mean that the network of people that I am getting information from and giving information to is limited and personal.

This step will be done and then tested – if it makes a dramatic change on the relevancy of my Facebook page then it might be enough to change my mind. If not, however (and this is where my suspicions lie) then the following will be followed.

Secondly I will stop posting to Facebook. I rarely do this anyway (bar the occasional self promoting message or the loving cross-post from Instagram) but the other things, like photos, are easier to stop. See, Facebook doesn’t have any copyright control on photos, whereas Flickr does and I prefer that one – if people want to see my photos, I’ll given them the ability to see them in High Quality with proper information about them.

Thirdly... I will stop going to Facebook. I did this a few years ago in the Exile but have already deleted the Facebook app from my phone. I don’t miss looking at no more than my hands would miss hold a cigarette – the motion of opening Facebook is more tantalising than the actual moment of opening it.

If I do the entire of the above and still feel disconnected from the site there is only one further option; deletion.

Note: many reading this will wonder a few things:

The first is surely to be “this can’t be that big a deal! Just do it already!” Well, I actually do like Facebook for contacting friends. It’s good – I just think that it’s losing its focus and I want to rein back my control to see if it makes a difference.

The second is likely to be “you have Twitter! You cried when it was deleted last year! Why not get rid of it too?”  I answer this query by simply saying that I control what happens on Twitter more, who feeds into my feed, and more importantly it’s not full of bollocks just yet. Indeed, it’s got scope for breaking this in the future, but the limitation of 140 characters ensures no games or applications fill my feed with nonsense.

Creative Commons and Piracy.

There has been a lot of learned people talking about the SOPA and PITA legislation that was being pushed through the US legal system, and there was a lot of hyperbole and bias written about why it was or wasn’t a good idea – generally, I disliked the legislation as it did indeed give powers and control to people who shouldn’t be able to wield such control. It is not, however, my place to be able to pick it apart and understand the legalese in such a way that meant I could impart new opinions on it; more verbose writers have managed to do that.

The one thing that I can do is talk from the point of a few different people that are in the argument and what my opinion is on being one of those people.  I am

1.     A consumer

2.     A creator

3.     A prior pirate

As a Consumer

I am someone who spends a lot of their disposable income on media – it’s mostly music, but also in there are films and television, as well as books and other art forms. It’s remarkably easy to spend a lot of money these days on such items for several reasons – they are expensive and they are volumous. In saying that, there is also loads of newer ways to consume. Instead of buying all my music, I have the ability to rent it and only pay once. Spotify allows me to do this and I have been doing it for a long time. It entirely replaces the need to steal music (illegal downloading is stealing, in my view) and for a small amount a month also gives you even more music that you might have came across otherwise.

The concern comes when talking to one of my best friends about this – he states that he would rather download the music for free than pay £4.99 a month to rent it. He sees no moral reason to not steal music for free than pay someone to let him listen to it. The argument is that he won’t pay for something that he doesn’t own – but the thing is that you never own the rights to anything you buy anyway. Buying music is no different to buying a ticket to an art show – just because you have the copy of it in your hands (or on your hard drive) doesn’t mean you have any licenses to do anything with it. And there is a large knowledge gap in what ownership of media means.

I cannot fathom why anyone wouldn’t use a pay-for streaming service today. I agree that the artists are dealt a bad hand when you “pay per play” on these services, but it’s a lot better than the distribution of albums entirely without cost online peer to peer networks, isn’t it?

There is a problem when you look at the implications of children and teenagers growing up with the ability to grab every piece of music or film for free instantly – and the media is right to be scared.

As a Creator

A few years ago a friend of mine stumbled onto an article posted from my blog into a German Magazine. It was this one about people’s personalities and the types ofcars they drive – a bit of fun. I was flattered at first, then I felt a bit violated. The site had reproduced my work, changed it, and then not even mentioned it was me who had created it. Of course, I had no money to be made and look to make no money from this blog (right now, heh) but the realisation that I was creating “something” and I had not adequately protected it from copyright theft.

This lead me to understand what Creative Commons was – a concerted effort to introduce the ability to share copyrighted material easily and fairly. My blog is still to this day under Creative Commons under the “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 UK: Scotland (CC BY-NC-ND 2.5)” license meaning that you are allowed to, freely, copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as you attribute me, it’s not for commercial reasons, and you can’t change or build upon the work. I only put it on for piece of mind – I don’t expect someone to come and ask to rework my text into a novel, for example.

However, on my Flickr page I do the same things – my photos are Creative Commons too. And I believe in the ease of the system allowing creators to control and understand the rights they can apply to their work and as I user of them I also am now becoming a proponent and supporter of them. I have created other works, like videos and music podcasts, and I make sure I am within my legal ability to make them – one video I made two years ago used Boards of Canada’s music without permission, and I still feel uneasy about it. The one I made about the year inTexas was made using music that I got permission from the band to use in that video. And my Radio Show is hosted on a site that claims to pay artists PRS fees (though I am unsure of exactly how that mechanism works in practice).

Creative Commons gives me the power to apply rights to these things, but can I control them? Not really. And seeing how little people pay attention to them on websites who steal photos from Flickrs and blogs I sometimes wonder if people really do care. Are we heading to an entirely free system of works that no artist can make money from? Is that even a bad thing? I am unsure.

As a Prior Pirate

During my teenage years and later I downloaded a lot of music. In fact, the majority of my musical exploration during the later part of my university career was downloaded illegally – and I will not be ashamed to admit it. I can’t really defend it, as it’s obviously at odds with my current stance, but there are two reasons why I am able to reconcile my thoughts – the first is one of means.

I had little to no money as a student and I downloaded illegally because I had internet. That’s not a defence, it’s just the reason I did it.

The second reason was that the technology hadn’t caught up with my internet – I could download an album and put it onto my phone and Creative Zen faster than people could make download controlled systems. The threat of DRM was something I didn’t really mind at first and happily paid £14.99 a month for unlimited Napster downloads... until Napster failed me and stopped doing it. I lost hundreds of albums I’d rented and downloaded to my computer. That was the problem with Napster’s idea – it blurred the idea of owning and not owning a music file.

So since Spotify I know that I don’t own the music. The line is defined. Also, technology has caught up – even iTunes sells DRM free tracks that can be moved and copied to anywhere I want them. And I can now download them again and again thanks to iTunes in the Cloud, another step in the right direction.

And now I don’t download music illegal anymore and I implore others to do the same; recently having convinced one of my friends to use Spotify on his phone. However, laws and censorship, such like SOPA won’t fix it as it is so easy to download music, and with faster internet it’s going to become even easier. What will fix it is competitive, easy and compelling reasons to not, and Spotify is one of them. 

It’s not the full answer, of course, but it’s at least a start.

The Fictional City of Yeardley: From One Source All Things Depend Part I

The start of the city, if it was going to be successful, needed to be perfect. I decided early on that if it was going to be realistic, there needed to be a reason for the city to exist in the first place, and my basic geography came back to me – the most frequently supposed reason for a city or town existing is a crossing point over a river. The first instance was to build a wide and powerful river.  The second decision was to put a bridge over the river and work from there, expanding on both sides as the two sides grew to support the population.

A second and major decision I made was the location of the city – I decided it would be in the North of England, just south of Scotland, but without thinking where it actually was.  A loosely designated area of the country. It is not based on anywhere, it is just based in somewhere. This also meant I could timeline it’s expansion, with the original bridge being built somewhere in the 1700s.

After that, I decided on a colour – white was the default background for Visio, so orange leapt out at me. If was going to go back and do this again, I’d change my colours, but once I had started there was no way to stop. Light blue for the river seemed fair, and after that I quickly started to plot roads and built the town from a small series of main roads.

The Key
Orange - a simple road.

Red - a dual carriageway A road

Pink - a Motorway (or A road classified as a Motorway)

Dark Blue - a build of importance, like a castle or sports stadium

Light blue - a body of water from rivers to lakes

Green - a forest or country park

Black - a railway line

Red Circle - a railway station

Dark Grey - a light railway line

Green Circle - a light railway station

Light Green - a future addition to the city planned, like a new road or a new railway

See the below image (click for fullsize) to see a selection of these things.

In the above shot, there are two motorways: the M768 and the A798(M). More about the numbering and naming of these roads will be mentioned when we get to the roads section. Also, the red road is the A780 which again we will discuss. Xavier is a railway station and the terminus of one of the railway lines which i will detail further in the future. And lastly, the blue is the river as you might have guessed. This area that I have detailed is to the North West of the city, and the M768 is one of the extremities of the city limits. This, if you will, is the Eastern Suburbs - a commuter area of families. But, as I said, more will be explained about that in the future.

It is exciting to note that the original roads are still there. The roads that run from the south to the north are still there, a continuation of the idea that the citry grew from nothing into something rather than just appearing there fully formed.  Which brings me onto an important point that will crop up over the next few months – the most important point of the city was to feel normal, and real. To achieve this, I had to think like a planner would have done, and as such make loads of mistakes.

Taking cues from Glasgow initially, motorways were part of a massive grand scheme that faltered and failed. Railways too were built extravagantly, before being pulled back. In fact, a regret of the city’s development is that I didn’t save intermediate versions, so I could look back upon the older versions see exactly where something came from – my memory is good, but it’s not perfect.

So once the basic roads and shape was in place, I had to start thinking about expanding – Victorian railways, canals and others suddenly were the right thing to be building, and I did this until the early 1900s in my time line, with railways and roads expanding beyond control. Remember, expressways or bypasses were post-war, so if my city was to expand, the railways needed to. Canals, something I smile at, vanished – there are none left. Ship building too was a factor, but because of the cities location and the competition from Liverpool and Glasgow, it never felt like a genuine way to grow the city.

So now there was industry, rail and factories. What could possibly happen now?  And then came two World Wars and the biggest shift in development the city would have.  And where, in my mind, the real fun began.

2012.

The new year is here. It's already heralded some lovely things... a fabulous Christmas and New Year period where I spent time with my Canadian family, lovely gifts from my family, and eternal optimism for the coming new year, something that is infectious and making my partner even more optimistic as each doay goes by. It's likely to be a good year.

Last year was an interesting one - I challenged 2011 to be as good as 2010, and it gave me my highest high and my lowest low, both chronicled on the blog here. Which brings me to my next point - more of my life has been posted on here, and more of my life has happened elsewhere, and this blog is a standing testament to my continued love of writing. As such, this coming year will see some new things.

Firstly, as mentioned last year, I will be writing about my fictional city Yeardley - it'll become more apparent what that entails shortly, but rest assured there is a lot of content there, probably more content than anything else I have written about.  Secondly, I have started to write for another website, the Canadian ran Opinionehted (get it? Opinion-"eh"-ted?) where it's mostly music right now but I am looking to expand into social media, internet and technology. So that's exciting.

So, here's to the new year - and the fifth anniversary of my blog. Wow. Five years... pretty exciting.

Mark