Homesickness

I'll admit, I've been struggling with depression for over a year. Some of it has been financial: I haven't had steady work in a long time, and we've been lurching from crisis to crisis, hoping each month we'd be able to pay the bills and keep our home. That damaged my self-esteem more than I realized, starting to wonder if I was unemployable before I even reached fifty. Some of it has been due to the ongoing legal battle over my stepdaughter's custody and medical treatment, which has taken a horrific toll on the whole family. Thankfully those issues are beginning to resolve, and I start a new job in about a week, teaching at Full Sail University.

However, it's taken me a while to realize that there's been an unseen third factor - homesickness. It seems that it's something almost all expatriates suffer from after a couple of years abroad. It can often last a year or two, after which they either recover or go home. Fortunately, I seem to be recovering.

If you're not British, you have no idea what this is all about.

One of the things you don't realize the significance of when you move away from home is holidays and other traditions. Take Christmas, for example. First time you experience Christmas in your adopted country, it's new and exciting and different. The next year, it's sort of familiar, but it's not yet part of your personal tradition. The third year, you start missing the mince pies, the sparklers, the turkey dinner, the crackers, even the tin of Quality Street and the dumb Christmas special re-runs on TV. They've been part of your life for always, and now you're conscious that they're gone.

And you miss those birthday drinks with the people you've got together with since always. The annual Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race where you pretend for a day that you care about sports. The New Year's Eve family dinner you always hated except for talking to one of the cousins, but now you see the pictures on Facebook of everyone else playing those stupid after dinner games. The coy, polite ads for Safeways instead of the brash, screeching commercials for Wal-Mart or Target. The unfulfillable cravings for your favorite comfort food when you're sick. Primroses and snowdrops on the roadside in the spring. It's the little things that slowly get you.

But perhaps most of all, for a Celt like me, living in Florida, what I miss is a sense of history. Before moving here, I owned a house that was four centuries old, in a town two millennia old, and from my window I could see burial mounds four thousand years old. I went to school and lived in buildings constructed in 1382. I studied archaeology and thought of the mediaeval period as modern. My world was steeped in mythology and folklore, in history and tradition. Solstices and Equinoxes at Stonehenge or Glastonbury were normal, and I drove past those places every week. And that was nothing unusual - the whole country was like that. Hell, the whole damn continent is full of ancient stuff.

This place is part of my soul. It's not just an image on a New Age T-shirt.

But here, anything older than me is considered "historic". American versions of European traditions seem like commercialized parodies of what I'm used to. They're fun, and they're important local traditions in their own right, but they're not the same.

I've felt, in the very truest sense of the word, rootless. America has been my home for four years, and I love it here and have no desire to return to England, but I haven't felt like I'm part of the place in the way I do in England. For a long time I couldn't work out why I felt as I did, until a chance remark from a friend, an English girl living in North Carolina, made me realize that my depression was about more than just money and stress. Talking to friends and family back home, and staying in touch, isn't the same as being immersed in the place. I guess that's why so many expats end up forming isolated communities where they can maintain the traditions of home and pretend they're still back where they came from.

Recognizing homesickness as part of the problem was a big step in addressing it. It's about understanding who I am, and where I fit in this culture, and how I can maintain my sense of identity when I'm so far from everything that's familiar to me. I don't feel British, but I'm not an American either. Instead, I'm having to learn to be just a person who has been lucky enough to have experienced most of my life in a culture that most of the other people around me have only read about or seen in books; and I have to learn to let go of my past in the same way I let go of my possessions.

As Richard Bach said in Illusions, I am here now, and that's all of us can ever be.

Autistic media

My birthday, 2009, at House of Blues in Orlando.

A case of unmistaken identities

For the last eighteen months or so, I've been trying an experiment. Being myself online. Not Matt the Mongoose, or some enigmatic avatar, just me. Here on my blog, on twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on MySpace, and everywhere else where I need to appear on the Internet, I've been plain old Matt Kelland. I've recorded and broadcast pretty much everything as it happened: work, thoughts, events, from the trivial to the life-changing. The world and his bot has been able to follow along as I got divorced, fell in love, got remarried, emigrated, underwent surgery, watched a bunch of movies, ate all sorts of food, promoted Moviestorm, became increasingly disenchanted with the British political system, and babbled inanely in my insomnia.

It's been interesting. I've met a lot of new people that way, and in the process, learned a lot about myself, a lot about other people, and a lot about modern society. As an anthropologist, it's fascinating to observe how we are becoming increasingly used to seeing each other in different contexts, and trying to understand how social structures change once you have a large-scale society with widespread intimate communication. We now have a level of knowledge about each others' lives that's perfectly normal for mediaeval village life, but completely unprecedented on a global scale. I know some people on the other side of the world more closely than I know anyone in this street. Hell, I know them better than I know anyone else in this city outside my household, even though I've never met them in person.

Conversely, of course, they know me rather well.

My birthday, 2009, at home in bed, hatless. Too intimate for public consumption?

Too well, I've decided.

It may be the way the younger generation is doing it, but, on reflection, I'm not comfortable with it. It's not that I have anything to hide, it's more that trying to present all sides of myself to everyone just doesn't work. It's even not a matter of privacy. It's just that I naturally adopt different personas in different contexts, and you can't do that when everyone sees exactly the same thing.

So-called social media can't distinguish between different categories of friends, and it has no inherent sense of time and place, let alone what's appropriate when. Effectively, it's become autistic media. We find ourselves behaving in ways that may be acceptable in some circumstances, but without any real sense of what the circumstances actually are for the reader and the appropriate etiquette.

Communication, as I keep reminding myself every day, isn't about the person communicating. It's about how what they say is received by the audience. When I use social media, the audience in my mind consists of the people I converse with most often - those who reply to me, and those who I follow. I don't really take time to consider the 80% of people who just lurk and read. That's a complete contrast to when I write professionally, when the first thing I think about is who's actually going to read what I'm writing.

At work, speaking in public.

Autistic media

Let me put it like this. The people who read my blog, Facebook or Twitter feed include: my family, my kids, my mum, my ex-wife, my boss, my investors, my colleagues, my customers, my potential customers, old school friends & colleagues I've lost touch with, new friends, people who share interests with me, and friends of friends I barely know. Some of those people are extremely close to me, others are passing acquaintances. In any given day, I could find myself talking about work, movies, food, travel, books, writing, games, music, art, politics, history, science, technology, anthropology, psychology, the occult, mythology, sport, airships, motorbikes, local events, my social & personal life, or just passing on dumb jokes & links.

In the autistic media world, I'm talking about all of those things to all of those people. Most of them, of course, aren't interested in most of those things. (And if the truth be told, I'm not interested in all of those things all of the time either.)

In the real world, I'd address that by choosing the right contexts and the right groups of people for the different subjects, and adjust my attitudes, speech and behaviour accordingly. If I were talking about last weekend's rugby, for example, I'd have a whole different conversation with the guys from my rugby club, my friends in Orlando, and my stepdad. There are some subjects I'd prefer to avoid entirely in front of my mum or my kids. And when my readers include people I know professionally, it feels like I'm at work and on show all the time.

Effectively, autistic media can't distinguish between the office and the pub, between an afternoon with your closest friends and a school reunion, or between a interest and an obsession. Your drunken weekend escapades make their way to your workplace, and your hobbyist friends have to put up with the minutiae of your work. You bombard your casual acquaintances with things they really don't need to know, and then your other friends drop you right in the shit with their comments about things that were funny at the time but which you'd rather stayed within that group.

Dressed up for a party.

General vs special relatives

In the old days, blogs were much more focused, which provided a social context. If I wrote a machinima blog, that would be my identity. Who I "really am" wouldn't matter. What you'd be interested in would be purely my opinions and what I had to say on that one subject. It's also an asymmetric relationship. I write, you read, you may comment if you wish, and I may choose to respond. I would engage my interests with a set of special-purpose relationships: a number of forums or mailing lists to chat about my hobbies, blogs to write about my interests, and a protected journal to share with those closest to me. In fact, most of the blogs I read these days are still special-interest blogs. It's not that the authors are necessarily monomaniacs, they just choose not to share the rest of themselves with the likes of me.

The generalised nature of sites like Facebook, though, changes that. By centralising all of those specialised things, it makes it much easier to communicate more, and it becomes trivial to transfer information between groups. Twitter crossposts to MySpace, my blog crossposts to Facebook and Google, Facebook feeds everything and slurps everything back out again. I have absolutely no idea where you're reading this. I don't have to cut'n'paste a link from my steampunk mailing list to the airships blog, I just hit share or retweet, and all my airship-loving friends can see the whateveritis. I don't have to tell ten different groups why I liked Avatar, I just post it once, and it goes to everyone. My readers know "who I am", and they're not getting some manufactured authorial personality, they can see the "real me", just as if they were my closest friends. In fact, they're all my friends now, aren't they?

It seems like a great idea, but imagine this. There's a huge room, and it's filled with every single one of your followers. (In my case, that's a bit under a thousand people.) Now, every time you say something, just shout into this megaphone, and it'll get blasted out on a PA to all of them. And if that wasn't crazy enough, every one of them has their own megaphone and their own PA, and they're yelling too.

That's just dumb.

That's all our social conventions shot to hell and replaced with a Tower of Babel. We're all talking, and nobody's listening.

Is this the real me? Is this just fantasy?

Will the real Matt please stand up?

So, I'm pretty much thinking that my "integrated personality" is something that doesn't need to exist online. I'd be much better off as a set of disconnected identities, each tailored for different social contexts, just as I am in real life. In those contexts, I can speak as I choose, indulge my interests as I choose, and without risk of upsetting or boring anyone else.

At the end of the day, there are only so many people I can cope with. It's about 150, which you may recognise as Dunbar's number. Interestingly, Dunbar's in the middle of a study on Facebook friends, and is likely to conclude that however many "friends" we have, we only interact with about 150 of them.

I guess the upshot is that I plan to make some major changes to my online personae. I'll probably create separate personal and professional twitter feeds & facebook accounts. I'll have a really hard think about what I want to say online, and who I want to say it to, and which of those factors is dominant. Do I select my audience to be receptive to what I want to say, or do I tailor my postings to match my audience? Probably the former, personally, and the latter, professionally. I may set up some different blogs for niche interests, and think about posting there rather than onto the more general feeds. I'm certainly planning to post a lot less until I feel like I know who's actually listening to me.

One day, autistic media will become truly social, in that it will understand social contexts and allow us to present ourselves appropriately in each. There's a lot to learn. After all, we're trying to replicate tens of thousands of years of social evolution with technology that's only a few decades old. It's a big task.

Goofin' around.