Networking

It will be two months in three days.

To the faithful - or to those who are happening upon us for the first time - welcome, or welcome back. And my apologies. We'll try harder. I promise?

I was pushed to guilt - and self-recrimination - by a recent article in the New York Times about how most people who start blogs don't keep them up. Reluctant to be a slumlord, or part of yet another New York Times trend - record unemployment, lack of health insurance, wearing business suits to bicycle in, etc. - I decided the most effective path of least resistance was to get back on the stick, and write. And the reappearance of an old friend, Jennifer, who wrote, via Facebook, to tell me how much she was enjoying the blog. Woops. Obligations to readers - a mixed blessing, but sweet misery. Thank you Jennifer.

A few random notes. I was 'on hold' the other day - in the world of freelance/unemployment, this telephonic standing-in-line is a kind of enforced-suffering, forced-acceptance soup kitchen kind of experience - with an HMO, who is administering an extended-benefits package to me, with the most cheerful reluctance you can imagine. Put out your bowl. How can we help you? Dental - no. Mental health - ixnay. Doctors you have any desire, confidence or interest in seeing and entrusting your mind, body and soul too? I'll take a pass on that. Why are the doctors you used to see never on these lists? Don't they want to network? It's quite the thing in the media - see 'death of Michael Jackson,' 'crack-down in Iran.' (I recall visiting a friend in the hospital a year or two ago, and taking the opportunity to speak with his doctor, who had come into the room during the dinner hour on his nightly round. I asked after my friend's health, which was precarious, unresolved and in motion. 'Have you visited my website?' was the doctor's reply; that's where I would find the information. Today, he might well have asked me to follow his tweets. 'friend punked, TOTAL medical mystery, what do we do now, what would U do?')

The HMO rep on the phone told me she had to contact another distant corner of the vast information empire I had by the tail when my 'estimated waiting time' suddenly ended - a Mozart piano concerto froze mid-bar - and a Midwestern voice appeared (she was in Kansas; I was in Oz, as far as my sense of reasonable expectations for a solution were concerned). I had asked the wrong person the wrong question. She put me 'on hold,' and made her internal call.

Twenty minutes later - we got through a frighteningly good portion of that concerto - she reappeared. The other end of the empire had made her wait, before answering her call, and then put her 'on hold' while they looked up the answer to her question. (Or, presumably, quickly invented an answer which would hopefully frustrate and defeat their ability to help the client.)

My rep - let's call her Dorothy, from Kansas - was pissed about being made to wait and by being put 'on hold.' (Hello.) In fact, she couldn't believe it. Twenty minutes gone from her life, without retrieval. She will probably be fired for not fulfilling her answered-call quotas for that period of time by the 800 number agency that employs her. She shared her disbelief with me, before returning to my case and my question. She was stunned, like she'd momentarily left the atmosphere and seen deep space with stars.

















I couldn't help myself.

"Now you know how the rest of us feel," I said. I didn't think the comment needed much dramatic inflection; I said this with deadness, like someone who'd spent a lot - a lot - of time 'on hold' recently. And I think I have opened someone's eyes. God moves in mysterious ways. Dorothy is a changed woman. Welcome to Oz.

In other news. It's official. I'm flea-bitten. I visited the doctor yesterday - thanks to my phone marathons - and pointed out what I thought was a rash under my arm. "It's a bite," she said. I told her I had a new cat - the infamous Lucy, profiled here - and my doctor asked if she had fleas. She pointed to three consecutive bites on the inside of my arm.

"We call it 'breakfast, lunch and dinner," she said. How do you rid a cat safely of fleas? Any information, please send it in.

Social networking. We have been reading of little else recently, especially in the media that stands to be slain by it. They love to discuss the fact. Go figure. Is that a way to get readers? The New York Times has a new social-networking editor, Jennifer Preston, who was apparently tweeting about Iran, or some such teenage nonsense, when Michael Jackson died, which went unreported in the Times for two hours - that's longer than a Miley Cyrus/ Hanna Montana concert, both halves - before appearing on its website. They say, as did the Washington Post, that they were verifying it was true, which I take to mean something other than getting Brooks Barnes in close enough to the body to get a mirror under its nose.

But it raises the issue - like the restless dead - of what we want our news to be, who we want to hear it from, what we understand now by news, and what news actually is - is it 'news' by virtue of the fact that you've never heard it before, or because the New York Times tells you it's news, or 100,000 people tweet it, and essentially vote that it's important - at which point it becomes news because public attention has architected the wave and its crest. And if it's news - and everyone accepts that - then, who do you believe, when it's being generated by active social networkers? Who are they - dissidents? ten year olds? cranks? Jennifer Preston? What forms the consensus on what's going on? Editors, or the numbers of people who agree on what's going on?

I think this paradigm shift in the media - despite the desperate, slap-happy, social-network initiatives being embraced as solutions to aging and death by companies like the New York Times, or think-tanks like the Knight Foundation - is going to be a lot rougher than the high seas tossing the boats right now. A lot of boats are going to break up, into pieces that are going to be hard to stand on. It may be that everyone loses, until we re-recognize the value of leaders, as we have with government. Who will the next leaders be? And will they be new? Now that your paper boy's got a router, not a route, will he be a press baron in two years? Citizen-journalism Kane?










The lines are open. Thank you for listening, ma'am.