Blog – Page 41 – Sonya Ellen Mann

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Schedule Changeups & Five Recommended Essays

Posted on February 13, 2015February 13, 2016 by Sonya Mann

Sleepy vs. Bedtime Bear (265/365) — Photo by JD Hancock.

Geez, I’m tired. Working is hard! Every time my schedule gets more rigorous, I’m newly astounded that people manage to work full-time—or longer. There are industries where sixty-hour workweeks are common. Ugh, no thanks. (Not that anyone is begging me to join their tech startup, lol.)

Anyway, getting a gig with Bustle has put me in the weird position of having a weekend. Well, it’s weird for me. I haven’t had periodic two-day breaks since… high school. I am accustomed to working roughly three hours daily, instead of concentrating my efforts during a certain chunk of the week. Now my days off are Friday and Saturday. Accordingly, today I am lazing instead of furiously typing. Gotta take a break, right? I still feel absurdly guilty, like I always do when I don’t measure up to my own arbitrary standards of PRODUCTIVITY.

Even when creating is too energy-intensive, curating is pretty easy. Inspired by a combination of my love affair with Instapaper and Meshed Society’s recurring link lists, here are five essays to serve as food for reflection (pun intended):

* “The outsider” by caustic British novelist Rachel Cusk, on joining a book club and finding it beneath her. Notable quote: “we learn to surrender the sense of our own importance, but the writer does not. He continues to pit his private world against everything, to fend it off.”

* “Scorched Earth, 2200AD” by Linda Marsa, a dystopic take on what will happen during the next couple of centuries as climate change continues unchecked.

* “I Made $570K Last Year, But I Don’t Feel Rich”, interview by Logan Sachon with a wealthy man who doesn’t appreciate his luck because of lifestyle creep. Attitudes to guard against!

* “J-School Confidential” by Michael Lewis, about how Columbia’s much-touted journalism program is an overblown mess. Good schadenfreude read, especially if you’re in media but lack the credentials.

* “The incredible story of the Dirty Dozen Rowing Club” by Erik Malinowski: ten amateur athletes from the Bay Area decide to become Olympic rowers; they are more successful than you’d expect.

Instapaper Saves You from Terrible Web Design

Posted on February 10, 2015August 24, 2016 by Sonya Mann

I have vehement feelings about web design, especially since I read a lot of articles online. The overall principle is that simplicity trumps everything. Well, everything except functionality. I wanna be able to frickin’ do whatever I’m trying to do on the website!

Usually all I’m trying to do is read something. However, most online publishers don’t prioritize my ability to process the content they post. I find this astounding. Don’t they want me to derive value from their sites and feel motivated to return? Apparently not. It’s baffling.

Here is my rubric for judging a website:

Large font. Like, 16-point Times New Roman or larger. (Unfortunately, text is almost never big enough. Luckily I can fix the problem with Ctrl+.)
Black-on-white text. Any other combination is less readable. Pale grey text, even on a white background, is especially obnoxious.
Minimal visual clutter. Adblocking is a phenomenal help, but I do feel guilty about using it on websites that I want to support.

According to these rules, The Awl is a good website, but not a perfect one. Its sister site The Hairpin sucks. Medium is even better than The Awl. (I considered taking screenshots to document the websites’ current forms, but on the other hand, whatever.) The rest of the internet publishers range from “mediocre” to “I can’t believe this is a professional endeavor; shoot me”.

AND YET! THERE IS HOPE. I recently started using a service called Instapaper, which Ryan Holiday suggested in one of his articles. Instapaper exists as a website, Chrome extension, and phone app. The service enables you to save articles to read later and has an adaptable interface similar to the Kindle app. In their own words, “Instapaper is the simplest way to save and store articles for reading: offline, on-the-go, anytime, anywhere, perfectly formatted.” Usually a brand’s self-description is hyperbole, but not in this case. Instapaper is right on the money.

But wait, are they? Without running tons of ads, how can Instapaper be financially sustainable? The answer is Instapaper Premium, an upgrade that costs $29.99 per year, which I just bought. I don’t even want the expanded features, although I may use them now that I have them. What I want is to support technologies that make my life — in this case my media consumption — better.

Curious about the articles that I’ve been queueing up? Check out my Instapaper profile.

The YouTube Response

Posted on February 9, 2015April 2, 2015 by Sonya Mann

The following essay is a response to “The YouTube Effect” by Moises Naim, which you can read online at Foreign Policy or the Los Angeles Times.

Since the invention of Gutenberg’s legendary printing press, human communication has only kept speeding up. The advent of the internet and widespread use of smartphones mean that anyone in the world can connect with anyone else, across oceans and continents–provided that they have good tech support, of course. Our global communication infrastructure continues to expand, followed by equally momentous sociopolitical ramifications. YouTube exemplifies this phenomenon, reigning unchallenged as the most popular video-sharing website. Aside from hosting a prodigious number of cute cat clips and one-person comedy efforts, YouTube has proved to be the place where “the revolution will be televised.”

Critics are alarmed by the gore and horror waiting just a few clicks away from any web-savvy kid, but they forget that human violence has always been accessible to those who search for it (as well as accessible to unlucky bystanders and civilians). The content on YouTube is nothing new; humans have been interested in the same topics for centuries, and will be for many more. What is significant is that YouTube is Marx’s means of production pressed into the hands of the people. The website provides a publishing venue for anything that regular citizens see, hear, and think, available almost instantly to anyone anywhere–provided that they enter the right search term.

To be fair, YouTube only permits an illusion of democratized communication. After all, it is owned by Google, a company analogous to an online government: you can choose to operate outside of its strictures, but most people don’t bother with the hassle. Google doesn’t entirely choose what succeeds on YouTube, but they can make something popular or simply remove something else, at will. For the most part they don’t, because any content that draws traffic will lead to advertising revenue. YouTube doesn’t exist to give people a place to freely share what they’ve documented. Rather, it exists to make money for Google.

Nevertheless, YouTube provides both theater and audience for a flourishing short-form art scene. Web series have made the jump to TV, and careers have grown out of the ability to speak well into the webcam. Financial requirements for film production have plummeted, especially now that everyone’s phone captures video and myriad editing programs can be downloaded for free. Journalism is no longer exclusively professional. Big websites and TV channels routinely source content from YouTube (and their segments are parodied in return).

In “The YouTube Effect”, Moises Naim points out, “It is now harder to know what to believe.” Thank goodness! It is far better that people question what they see and read, cultivating healthy, inquiring skepticism. No one should simply accept whatever The New York Times publishes as unassailable fact. Prestigious news hubs are just as susceptible to bias and hoax as are individuals on the street. Later in the essay, Naim concludes, “the good news is that the YouTube effect is already creating a strong demand for reliable guides”, meaning trustworthy entities that will help us sort through the sheer volume of media being produced and shared.

The better news is that YouTube is just like every other advance in communication technology: it provides a quick, colloquialized way for people to share and connect. What brings us together? The same interests that always have: cute babies, money, sex, music, laughter. YouTube is simply part of the centuries-long trend of these topics 1) being shared faster and 2) being produced by more average Joes.

Book Review: Through Eyes Like Mine, A Memoir Of Oregonian Girlhood

Posted on February 8, 2015April 2, 2015 by Sonya Mann

First I gotta ask: is anyone even interested in book reviews? Personally, I never read them, except occasionally after I finish a horrible book and I want to find out if other people hated it too. Besides that circumstance, why would I read a book review? I have no shortage of reading material, so it’s not like I need to find books to add to my list. But I guess some people like them, and at least it gives “Google juice” to an author I like.

Through Eyes Like Mine, a memoir by Noriko Nakada

Noriko Nakada’s memoir Through Eyes Like Mine describes childhood as an introspective Japanese-American tomboy in the semi-wilderness of Bend, Oregon. For those who don’t know, Oregon isn’t famous for its racial diversity. I don’t want to one-dimensionally cast this as an Asian-stuck-among-white-people story. Purely logistically, it is that story.

However, Through Eyes Like Mine is also about the social pressures of being a girl, about navigating siblinghood. It’s about how children deal with deaths in their communities, coming to terms with pain and mortality. It’s about the strain of monitoring your parents’ marriage, which every kid does but especially kids whose parents are tense with each other. I enjoyed the book and immediately bought the middle-school sequel, Overdue Apologies, which hasn’t arrived yet from Powell’s, alas.

In other reading-related news, I started using Instapaper. Prolly gonna like it. Thank goodness that spellcheck accepts “prolly” as a word now! Not to mention “spellcheck”. I don’t remember right-click educating Chrome on those terms but I must have.

Aggressive Inspiration Provided By A “Growth Hacking” Master

Posted on February 6, 2015October 31, 2015 by Sonya Mann

I just read a bunch of Ryan Holiday articles. For those who don’t know, this guy was the marketing director for American Apparel and the reason Tucker Max’s book sold. Holiday is not a good person — he employs the shock tactics that he claims to abhor — but he is very talented and industrious. Any writer who gets me to open a bunch of browser tabs is talented, because I hate keeping more than three tabs open. I endured the visual mess in order to keep track of all the different things this guy has written that I want to read, notably a lot of posts for the Observer.

Here’s my conclusion from Holiday’s various you-suck-here’s-why advice pieces: the only way to get ahead in life is to work. Okay, that’s obvious. And yet it’s not. As Holiday writes, almost with incredulity, “The energy [that people] waste on fad diets and gear and figuring out how various unnecessary technologies work. The resources and creativity that seeps out telling people (or themselves) stories about themselves or projecting an image to the world.” The only successful strategy is to work, observe the response, restrategize, work more, and keep working. You can still fail if you work hard, but you can’t succeed without doing it.

Last night, devouring all this stuff, I had kind of an internal crisis about the publishing industry and my place in it. I asked myself, is it actually a good idea to start writing for Bustle? Is that how I should spend my energy? The answer is probably a combination of “no” and “yes”. The answer is that it can be the right decision if I work hard enough and smart enough. I can use Bustle’s higher traffic to increase my personal audience. That is the only worthwhile way to approach this gig.

Work, observe the response, restrategize, work more, and keep working.

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