A SUMMARY OF 10 YEARS OF INTERNET PUBLISHING(2001-2011) & 14 YEARS WITH A WEBSITE(1997-2011)

• A SUMMARY OF 10 YEARS OF INTERNET PUBLISHING(2001-2011) & 14 YEARS WITH A WEBSITE(1997-2011)

A. MY TYPE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

Everything I do with other people online is part of my particular type of social networking. My social networking is associated with three basic activities: (1) the creation of a personal webpage that serves as a home base, a central hub, for my writing and for feedback from others if they wish; (2) the creation of a detailed personal profile which I post at over 8000 internet sites which readers at these sites can access, again, if they wish and if the site  aloows such access and, finally: (2) posting my writing at these 8000+ sites, and interacting with others about my posts and theirs. 

My form of social networking attempts to reduce the problem of having an indiscriminate on not-so-indiscriminate mass of ‘friends.’  I have, instead, a mass, an audience, of readers.  I  address myself to a circle, a crowd or single individual readers.  I try to make of my interactions more than the typical ones found at Facebook and Twitter.  These interactions or connections at these most popular of social networking sites often reduce friendship to a feeling or an image, a sense of connection to faraway or nearby friends about everyday things.  Such connections involve posts that contain little about one’s true difficulties in life, except in the briefest of ways.  A world of privacy and an image is created which, in many ways, is perfectly legitimate and quite understandable.  I post a great deal of my writing in the form of prose and poetry, and some of the posts are extensive pieces of writing. These posts are far beyond the one-liners and jokes, what I did today and what I ate for dinner, what I like and what I don’t like; I poke you and you poke me, inter alia.  Sometimes my posts, my writings, are received with interest and enthusiasm and sometimes they are not.  That is the experience of all writers who write and poets who poetize, and I am have become used to this after several decades of writing, for years offline and in the traditional print media and, since 2001, online, on the world-wide-web.

B. MY WEBSITE

My website has been on the internet for the last 14 years: 1997-2011.  It is part of a tapestry, or perhaps a jig-saw puzzle is a more accurate metaphor, for all my poetry and prose both at my website and elsewhere in cyberspace at those sites mentioned above.  I have created this warp and weft of words across the internet since leaving the world of jobs in the late 1990s.  This is a cyberspace creation by a now self-employed individual: a retired teacher and lecturer, tutor and adult educator, taxi-driver and ice-cream salesman. I am now a poet and publisher, writer and author, editor and scholar, researcher and blogman, scribbler within the immense commentariat and blogosphere that is the world-wide-web.  

I am now 67 and I attempt to endow various themes and a wide range of subjects in the arts and sciences with many layers of meaning. In these 14 years and especially since 2001 when the second edition of my website went online, I have evoked a complex, a varied, range of responses in readers who come upon my work, responses which range from lavish enthusiasm to utter indifference and quite intense criticism. The solitary work of literary creation requires a type of talent, some earned ability or unearned gift of grace which is almost never collaborative. The social networking that is used by others may expose readers to this or that book, this or that video or internet site, this or that restaurant or food dish or much else in the world of pleasurable activity as well as social, economic and/or political causes. The solitude I require to create an essay, a poem or a book then requires my ability to draw on the globally interrelated, interdependent and interlocked system of the WWW to market my wares.  Until my work is ready to be placed in cyberspace my activity, my creativity, is intensely private. My marketing is also, for the most part, private and then---the feedback comes in.

B.1 MY WEBSITE AND OTHER INTERNET SITES

I will continue to use my website as the central hub for my literary work, for my internet teaching and learning activity, for my now several million words and many books on the internet.  My writing is found in the form of: essays and blogs, poems and articles, ebooks and message boards, threads, indeed a myriad types of discussions, genres of writing and internet sites.  I do not engage, though, in any sort of aggressive proselytising or heated exchange at the more than 8000 websites that are part of this personal and industrious exercise.  When what I write produces vehemence and invective I simply leave the site or just try to cool the temperature of the critic. Sometimes I am banned before this occurs for a variety of reasons used by website administrators and moderators.

C. MY WRITING STYLE AND MY VALUES

I have tried over the last several decades of my life, looking back as far as the 1950s, to develop a writing style which, while fusing together material from many academic disciplines, from my own life as well as from my value, belief and attitude base, aims to be both provocative and intellectually stimulating on the one hand and light and entertaining on the other.  In writing, as in daily life though, one wins sometimes and one loses at other times; one’s writing appeals to some and not to others. One’s value, belief and attitude base is simply, or not-so-simply, another word for one’s religion. Faith, to put this another way, is a set of assumptions around which one places one’s emotions and then proceeds to act and argue one’s case before the court of life, so to speak.

I possess an obvious enthusiasm for my evolving values, beliefs and attitudes as well as the several causes I promote or I would not have been associated with them in their overt form---for nearly 60 years; nor would I be promoting my ideas in a multitude of forms, subtle and not-so-subtle, on the internet as I do and have done since retiring from FT work in 1999, PT in 2003 and most casual-volunteer work in 2005. I have been a member of the Baha'i Faith since 1959 and associated with it since 1953 and this new world Faith provides the core of my attitude and belief structure.

D. MY READERSHIP

I now have several hundred thousand readers, perhaps several million. It is difficult to guesstimate readership in cyberspace when there are billions of sites and users. Many of the sites at which I post my writing and interact with others keep me informed about how many people click-on to what I have written.  I am engaged in varying degrees of frequency and intensity, in parts of this tapestry, this jig-saw puzzle, this literary product, this creation, this immense pile of words with hundreds of people with whom I correspond on occasion as a result.  I keep most of this correspondence as infrequent as possible or I would drown in this new form of letter writing: the email and the internet post.

I have been asked how I have come to have so many readers at my website and on my internet tapestry of writing that I have created across the world-wide-web.   My literary product is just another form of published writing in addition to the traditional forms in the hands of publishers.   The literally hundreds of thousands of readers, as I say above perhaps even millions since it has become impossible to keep even an accurate account of all those who come across what I write, I have at locations on my tapestry of prose and poetry, a tapestry I have sewn in a loose-fitting warp and weft across the internet, are found at over 8000 websites where I have registered: forums, message boards, discussion sites, blogs, locations for debate and the exchange of views.  I have registered at this multitude of sites, placed the many forms of my literary output there and engaged in discussions with literally thousands of people, little by little and day by day over the last decade.  I enjoy these results without ever having to deal with publishers as I did for two decades without any success. 

E. THE WWW AND PUBLISHING

This amazing technical facility, the world wide web, has made this literary success, this form of publishing, possible. This teaching and learning exercise, this form of service and often social activism, among the many other functions of my writing in the now wide and extensive dialogue I now have with diverse publics is an enriching one.  If my writing had been left in the hands of the traditional hard and soft-cover publishers, where it had been without success for the most part from 1981 to 2001, these publishing results with my now extensive readership would never have been achieved.

It is my hope that what I write as a result of this self-employment, this literary vocation and avocation, this pleasurable occupation of my leisure time, resonates with both the novitiate and the veteran on the one hand and the great diversity of people who are on a multitude of paths in their journey through life.  When accessing what I write in cyberspace you can Google: Ron Price, but be aware that there are more than 2000 other Ron Prices now on the web.  Some of them are men of fame and others of notoriety. You can also google: Pioneering Over Five Epochs or Ron Price followed by many other words and phrases---literally several 1000 possibilities to access what I have written. My website is found at: http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/

Thanks, BlackyShimSham and Trevor for your responses. It is not often that I get both an administrator and a peanut farmer taking an interest in my internet work. I look forward to future interaction here at CHUD.com in this the evening of my life as I head for nightfall. I hope to drop in here occasionally from my busy life at 8000+ sites. As you say though, BlackyShimSham, I could expand my visibility. I'll post a bit of my story below thusfar in my attempts to expand my visibility. Visibility in cyberspace though, no matter how many words and images constitute that visibility, is measured in nanoseconds among billions of users and millions of sites and trillions of emails and posts. So we are, and our posts all constitute, needles in haystacks, so to speak.-Ron in Tasmania

As I indicated above, BlackyShimSham, I want to place this issue of visibility in what I hope is a helpful perspective. In my case it is a perspective going back to the middle of the 20th century and especially the last two decades. I'll post the following piece I wrote a year or so ago, expressing as I did my thanks, my appreciation, to the Google and Microsoft organizations for making my publishing possible after my retirement from the demands of jobs on the one hand and student life on the other during the years: 1949 to 1999.-Ron Price, Tasmania

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GOOGLE-MICROSOFT

In the first year after I retired from FT work, July 1999 to July 2000, Google officially became the world's largest search engine. With its introduction of a billion-page index by June 2000 much of the internet's content became available in a searchable format at one search engine.  In the next several years, 2000-2005, as I was retiring from PT work as well as casual and most volunteer activity that had occupied me for decades, Google entered into a series of partnerships and made a series of innovations that brought their vast internet enterprize billions of users in the international marketplace. I was only one.

Not only did Google have billions of users, but  internet users like myself throughout the world gained access to billions of web documents in Google’s growing index/library.  The information revolution set off in the closing decade of the 20th century by the invention of the World Wide Web transformed irreversibly much of human activity. Internet communication, which has the ability to transmit in seconds the entire contents of libraries that took centuries of work and study to amass, vastly enriched the intellectual life of anyone able to use it, as well as providing sophisticated training in a broad range of professional fields, again, to those who wanted it.  It was a finer and more useful library than any of those in the small towns where I would spend my retirement in the years ahead in the years of my late adulthood, the years from 60 to 80 according to some human development psychologists.  It was also a library with a myriad locations in which I could interact with others and engage in learning and teaching, service and social activism, in ways I had never dreamt of in the first five decades of my life as a student and teacher: 1949-1999.

This electronic system of communication, cyberspace, has built a sense of shared community among its users that is impatient of either geographic or cultural distances. This description of the sense of shared community created by the internet has proved to be a prescient insight into the evolution of internet use worldwide. It is interesting to note that Friendster began in 2001, Linkedin and Myspace in 2003, and Facebook in 2004 just at the time as I had freed myself at last from half a century of jobs and the demands of student life. I was able to use my leisure time for writing and research, publishing and poetizing, reading and editing, scholarship and communicating the products of my daily work in the world-wide-web.

The internet is a cornucopia of accurate, well-argued and knowledgeable information. But it is also a place for specious and spurious, inaccurate and beguiling arguments. People who know little about an issue are often easily taken-in on the internet. Many often believe a u-tube post they can see to one that requires study and reading on their part. The internet, like many forms of technology before it, is both boon and beast, asset and debit, to the lives of its participants. Indeed, a quite separate section of this statement on my cyberspace experience could be devoted to the negative and positive impacts of the internet. 

In 1994, at the age of fifty and as I was beginning to eye my retirement from FT work as a teacher and lecturer, Microsoft launched its public internet web domain with a home page.  Website traffic climbed steadily and episodically in the years 1995 to 1999.   Daily site traffic of 35,000 in mid-1996 grew to 5.1 million visitors by 1999 when I had taken a sea-change and retired from Western Australia to Tasmania at the age of 55.  Throughout 1997 and 1998 the site grew up and went from being the web equivalent of a start-up company to a world-class organization.  I retired from FT work, then, at just the right time in terms of the internet capacity to provide me with: (a) access to information by the truckload on virtually any topic; and (b) learning and teaching opportunities, both direct and indirect, far in excess of any I had had in my previous years as a student and teacher. 

This new technology had also developed sufficiently to a stage that gave me the opportunity, the capacity to post, write, indeed, “publish” is quite an appropriate term, on the internet at the same time.  From 1999 to 2005, as I say, I released myself from FT, PT, casual and most volunteer work, and Google and Microsoft offered more and more technology for my writing activity for my work in causes that I had devoted my life to since my late teens and early twenties. The Internet has become emblematic in many respects of globalisation. Its planetary system of fibre optic cables and instantaneous transfer of information are considered, by many accounts, one of the essential keys to understanding the transformation of the world into some degree of order and the ability to imagine the world as a single, global space.  The internet has widely been viewed as an essential catalyst of contemporary globalisation and it has been central to debates about what globalisation means and where it will lead.

There are now several hundred thousand readers, as I say above, engaged in parts of my internet tapestry, my jig-saw puzzle, my literary product, my creation, my immense pile of words across the internet--and hundreds of people with whom I correspond on occasion as a result. This amazing technical facility, the world wide web, has made this literary success possible. If my writing had been left in the hands of the traditional hard and soft cover publishers, where it had been without success when I was employed full time as a teacher, lecturer, adult educator and casual/volunteer teacher from 1981 to 2001, these results would never have been achieved.

I have been asked how I have come to have so many readers at my website and on my internet tapestry of writing that I have created across the world-wide-web.   My literary product is just another form of published writing in addition to the traditional forms in the hands of publishers.   I have literally hundreds of thousands of readers, perhaps even millions since it has become impossible to keep even an accurate account of all those who come across what I write.  The locations at which I write have become an immense tapestry of prose and poetry, a tapestry I have sewn in a loose-fitting warp and weft across the internet at over 8000 websites where I have registered: forums, message boards, discussion sites, blogs, locations for debate and the exchange of views.  They are sites to place essays, articles, books, ebooks, poems and other genres of writing.  I have registered at this multitude of sites, placed the many forms of my literary output there and engaged in discussions with literally thousands of people, little by little and day by day over the last decade.  I enjoy these results without ever having to deal with publishers as I did for two decades without any success. 

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That's all folks!