Ein2

I’m an early adopter of Google’s new social media service Google+. I’ve just realized that one of the advantages of Google+ is that I can write something blog-like but limit the audience for it. Intellectually, I knew that before, but it’s just really hit home because I wanted to share something but at the same time I wanted to limit the audience. It therefore shouldn’t go on my blog, because potentially anyone can see that. Google+ is a good solution.

However, it does leave me wondering how to structure this particular type of sharing. Most of my circles were set up around my various interests or social groups. As surprising as this may sound, for a person who seems rather open (or maybe I misperceive myself?), I feel I’m intensely private with a very, very small circle of people I consider friends. I’m therefore not sure how to share this particular thing. Yes, with that small group of people—who don’t even have a Google+ circle!—but I do want it to go a little wider than that. There’s a line to be drawn somehow between privacy and over-familiarity when sharing. Things to make you go, “Hmmm…”

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I’ve been experimenting a little (ha!) with microblogging at Twitter. Microblogging is like blogging, except extremely succinct–140 characters to be exact. They call these little updates “Tweets”. The web site allows you to submit new “Tweets” via instant messaging (Jabber), SMS, or the web. Other people can then “follow” you around as you post your updates throughout the day. Some people are following thousands of people. I’m not that ambitious. I’m only following a small group of people, mostly people from Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms.
If you want to follow my adventures, my Twitter address is @Eingang.

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Although I’ve bene quite successful for years at keeping my inbox to fewer than 20 messages at any one time, I have to confess I’ve been having a lot of trouble with this, especially in the last few months. Caught up in an endless loop of going from one crisis to another, I just haven’t seemed to have much time to sit down and catch my breath, never mind keep my inbox at a manageagable level and the effects are sadly showing in missed deadlines.
More than once I’ve had 100+ messages pending in my inbox. Even today, as I type, I have 64 messages waiting for me to do something with them, whether that’s “Junk” it, file it, or deal with it and file it. Why should this be so hard, you ask? I do receive more mail than the average person and definitely more spam than the average person as a result of holding down multiple roles (technical support, domain registrar, Ph.D. student, university lecturer, friend, technology advisor). According to Eudora, I receive 12, 145 messages on average per month, of which about 74% is spam. Of that 74% that’s spam, half of that is tagged as spam automatically by SpamCop and Eudora, but I’m manually junking the other half. Hmmm! That might explain a lot! I’m manually junking just under 4500 messages a month!
Nevertheless, I still need to reduce the amount of mail sitting in my inbox. Some of it, I notice, is mail I need to habitually do something with, like search report results from Atomz For these, I’m going to write some new Eudora rules to auto-file them. I don’t actually need to read them—I just need to be able to get at the information later, if it’s required. Done. That should make a small dent and I should look for others too. Master the mail!
See more progress on: keep my inbox to only 20 messages

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I was listening to my ’50 Least Played’ list in iTunes a few weeks ago when it rotated to a Disney soundtrack song called Femininity from the 1963 movie Summer Magic. Talk about lyrics from an age with a different set of values:

Let him do the talking
Men adore good listeners
Laugh, but not too loudly (Haha)
If he should choose to tell a joke
Be radiant, but delicate
Memorize the rules of etiquette
Be demure, sweet and pure
Hide the real you

Can you imagine the damage done to an entire generation of young women upon being advised to “hide the real you”? So you would have a private personality that you could maybe share with your close girl friends and a public personality on display to your husband and his male friends or colleagues. I know I would find it very difficult, cultural expectations and conditioning or not, to go through life projecting a fa�ade so much at odds with my inner self-image, although even I admit to tailoring my self-expression somewhat for the audience at hand. Still, spending a large portion of your life suppressing your natural self sounds like the sure road to psychotherapy and confusion, because you feel that your ‘true self’ is not worthwhile or valued.

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