A few weeks ago I invited a young woman (oh God what does it mean when I start calling women in their 20s young women?) to a panel that I was sitting on for Girls in Tech. No, I didn't think she would learn much from me prattling on about entrepreneurship, though she had just moved here from NYC as a writer and was hoping to find work befitting a liberal arts major in San Francisco. This was as close as I could get to hooking her up with contacts.
I'm not sure if I helped or hindered her in discovering "media" in New York. On the panel were women such as Sasha Cagen of StyleMob (now owned by Glam), Sarah Lacey of Yahoo Tech Ticker/Business Week, Aubrey Sabala of Digg, and Mary Hodder of Dabble. I introduced this woman to GIT Founder Adriana Gascoigne of Ogilvy PR, thinking she may want to come over to the "dark side" as we former full-time writers call it, and try our hands at writing for brands.
The day after the panel I received a nice note from my friend thanking me for the invite and opportunity, and who also sounded a bit overwhelmed by it all. Wow, she had said. These folks sure were techie (as a NY media transplant, I don't remember too many industry mixers where all of the attendees were asked to introduce themselves and then share their favorite tech application). But, I kept thinking to myself, the girl's gotta know: This IS media out here. The folks from Digg, from Linked In, from Glam, from Facebook, from BlogHer. Get your technology on, because out here it's in the DNA.
I could totally empathize with my friend's overwhelm. Having come to San Francisco in 1999 I learned quickly that things worked differently out here. And now I'm amused to see how east coast is having to learn so much from the folks on the West Coast in terms of utilizing tech for reach, and yet how freaking difficult it is to hire people out here in CA who operate from both sides of their brains (if you know of someone who loes to Twitter AND can edit ad copy with 2-5 years of client services experience, I'm hiring!)
The other side of it is, I LIKE my print. I just don't get to read much of it anymore. I got a little nostalgic sitting with my in-laws this weekend and hearing of the stories they just read in The New Yorker. I still get the mag, but I can't remember the last time I read a whole article. All of my required reading has moved online.
And then there are the new-ish time-sucking apps/sites that I've tried to protect myself from but can't because they are so ingrained within the community I serve and am part of: Pandora, Seesmic, imeem. I realized this weekend that I couldn't hold out anymore during meetings with advertisers and claim that I knew much about Twitter without starting an account; hearing dispatches from the obsessed would only sustain me for so long. I've been holding out on this decision much like I held out when Rollerblading became popular: I thought I would wait the trend out, and then I realized that I was missing out on something that was not going away. But by that time I was waaaaay behind. I'm happy that my business partner and friend, Elisa Camahort Page, opted into being my first follower.
There's an attraction and resistance with these tools, I find, because though I took to blogging like lint to a cherry popsicle in summer. I can't deny that it's pulled me from some offline experiences that I prized in life: Reading the Sunday paper in a cafe, going out to see live music and films, picking up the phone and calling people whom I've neglected to speak to in so long. I struggle to decide whether to take on another solitary, online experience. Another obsession. And then to feel a bit heartbroken when the rigors of my work schedule keep me from fully embracing it. Try keeping up with Twitter feeds when you are on planes all the time.
I saw the fabulous piece that ABC News did on Heather Armstrong. As a blogger these stories of bloggers building their blogging actually hurt. I would love be back in the swing of writing regularly, sharing myself and my stories online. But I saw something important in building BlogHer and facilitating others' blogging. I have this bidness side that needs to get scratched. I loved blogging and the opportunities that it opened so much that it made sense to take the next step and blow it out beyond my own writing.
Even so, I miss the days when I would crank out posts that took three hours to write. You can argue that posts should not be that long. Hell, who reads long-form posts anymore? Still, I miss the indulgence.
Far be it from me to insist that the technology slow down enough to let us pick and choose apps that we really need in our lives. Far be it from me to complain about it when it's enabled my passion and my business. Still, even while sitting on a panel advocating how technology has enabled me, I'm still mostly interested in telling stories at the end of the day.
It is overwhelming sometimes.