Why Bilingual Blogging Sucks

Image: Kuli, CC0

This is a rant. And a whiny one at that. With the internet so free and international as it is, there is one problem it hasn’t solved: the language barrier. Sure, computer translators like Google Translate do an okay job at translating the gist of foreign websites, but they will never give you the real experience of reading something in a language you actually understand. They still produce too much gibberish for someone to actually enjoy an article written by someone in a language that’s foreign to the reader.

Which puts people like me in a strange predicament: What language should I use for publishing on the internet?

I can only work from my own example here, because I have not heard anyone else complain about the topic so far, but I am sure there must be others that feel the same way. Having studied the language in college and spending some time abroad, I think that I speak and write English well enough for others to understand me and for me to be able to express even slightly complex thoughts in it. Since English is the language understood by most people around the world, the logical conclusion should be to keep my writings in English. This way, I will reach more people, right?

However, my native language is German, and I know that not only can I express myself better in German, I also have a different style in each language. When I write in English, I can also never be absolutely sure that what I am writing sounds “natural” and not like a foreigner who is trying to impress native speakers with his English. (I recall giving one of my essay papers for proofreading to my English flatmate in Edinburgh. He started reading it and then stopped, unnerved. “I don’t know what to say”, he said, “nothing you wrote is actually wrong, but it just doesn’t feel like something a native speaker would write.”)

While I have been writing mostly about films recently, I started this blog while I was still working full-time as a media journalist. And there’s a lot of topics where I just doesn’t make sense to write in English, because they concern the German media landscape or debates going on in the German blogosphere which concerns itself a lot with developments in media and the internet (and not much else).

Okay, you might say, write in German, then. Do what you do best, link to the rest.

Really? But Germany has no real movieblogging scene to speak of. Most of the people blogging about movies in Germany either just review what they last watched, link to the newest trailers or translate news from English movieblogs. Almost no one in Germany just writes about the stuff that interests them in that half-academic, half-nerdy way that is so popular (and often so good) on British and American blogs. Why would I want to alienate these people that I admire and miss the opportunity to enter into a dialogue with them. “Great post, here’s my thoughts on the topic translated into English by Google. Nevermind that most of it doesn’t make any sense this way.”

Right, then. Blog in both English and German, depending on the topic.

That’s what I am doing at the moment. Stuff that concerns only Germany, I write in German. Everything else, I write in English (although sometimes, I wish I could just write it in German because it’s so much less of an effort [told you, I'd be whining]). I’ve also switched my Twitter account to be (almost) exclusively English, because most of the people I follow speak English.

This solution, however, is adequate at best, neither fish nor fowl at its worst. If what you read is true, a personal Internet “brand” is at its strongest when it is at its most recognizable. Bilinguality does not help. If I was a reader of, say, a blog written by a Spaniard, I would regret every post she writes in Spanish, because I don’t understand Spanish. On Twitter, there is some German topics I would really like to write about sometimes, but I would feel silly writing them in English (especially when replying to a German tweet) and I don’t want to “break character” by writing in German.

The only “real” solution, I guess, would be to split my online persona, have an English blog and a German blog, an English Twitter and a German Twitter. But with my output as irregular as it is, I feel it would be very stupid to not put everything in one place. I could also code this blog into parallel sites in English and German, but with only 25 hits a day, I don’t think it would be worth the effort. And it still wouldn’t solve the Twitter problem, because unlike Facebook or Google+, Twitter doesn’t allow you to sort your followers into groups or circles and broadcast only to some of them.

Whichever way you look at it, one thing or another always looks askew. I have no solution. Which is probably why I am so frustrated. If you have a solution, or a comment, please post it in the comments. In any language you choose.

Navel Gazing – Part 4: Social Networks

Image: Wikimedia Commons

I’m not usually an early adopter. I am too stingy for it. Spending large amounts of money on a new thing that hasn’t proven it will catch on yet and whose subsequent generations will fix all the faults the first one had? Lunacy! But there is one thing about which I can still tell the tale that I was there before most everyone else I know – and that’s Facebook.

I got lucky, though. In the fall of 2005, I moved from Germany to Edinburgh to spend a semester abroad. Conveniently, this was after Facebook had expanded to UK universities but before it opened up to everyone everywhere, one year later. So, while everyone in Germany was still connecting on the German Facebook Clone StudiVZ, I was already using the Next Big Thing to hit Germany. And that’s my claim to early adopter fame.

Facebook

It’s true what they say, Facebook is creating a sort of second, parallel internet. If you are using it, you notice stuff that you don’t notice when you are not using it. I have basically stopped using e-mail for communicating with people I know on Facebook. Instead of sending out invites to communal activities, I just create an event. And the sort of private blogging that I used to do before I started this “serious” blog (on Livejournal, I dare you to find my blog, it’s still up) has migrated to Facebook as well. Mostly in short status updates, of course, but sometimes I also still use Notes, the almost-forgotten Facebook blogging app.

Don’t listen to the haters. For me, Facebook has gotten better with every update. Now, with the introduction of Timeline and the revamping of Groups, it is finally a real “best of both worlds” experience. Before, I politely declined friend requests from people I didn’t know too well, because I am still using Facebook for lots of pretty personal stuff. Now, I’m fine with friending colleagues and distant acquaintances, because I simply move them too the appropriate list. Lists also helped me cope with my internet bilinguality (more on that next episode). I can finally write updates in German and not spam my English-speaking friends’ news feeds with them. At the same time, timeline now finally has become a reliable archive of my life and online activity and will probably come in handy some day – if only they added a good search function soon.

What does Facebook do for me, newswise? I sometimes pick up stories from there that I missed elsewhere. My friends’s status updates sometimes alert me to topics, blogs, etc. I wouldn’t have caught without them. I follow several bands, which is great for not missing when they go on tour, and movie projects (although most of them don’t really do that good of a job). Mostly, though, it still connects me with personal friends on a personal level. The few times that I have actually entered into discussions with people didn’t go so well.

If you want to discuss stuff with me, feel free to do so. Some of my profile is actually public and I allow subscriptions. The fact that I haven’t enabled public search, however, shows that Facebook is still more of a private medium for me.

Twitter

While Alex and Facebook were a natural fit, it took Twitter and me a while to become friends. I needed to read about it for a long time before I decided to try my luck there. As you might tell from this blog, expressing thoughts in 140 characters is not really my forte and I am witty only very occasionally (terrible, terrible puns are more my specialty). I also have a really old smartphone that takes ages to even load the Twitter app (I had a newer one but it got stolen – the difference on my Twitter behaviour is palpable). So I don’t tweet too often and I have few followers and even less who follow me because of what I tweet (I guess). Even though this scratches my ego somewhat, I have since found that you don’t need a lot of followers to use Twitter as an awesome cherry on the media cake.

Twitter is my serendipity machine. In its own very limited way it breaks through my filter bubble and points me to things I wouldn’t have noticed without it. Even though I follow mostly people who are either famous or from my field or both, there are enough of them and the connection with them is weak enough to transcend the feedback loop of social networking. Whenever I feel like finding something new or leftfield, I head to Twitter.

I also love to use Twitter as a running commentary on current events. The best experience I have probably had was watching the Oscars this year (always a very lonely affair in Germany because of the time difference). I had my Twitter feed running the whole time, tweeted myself and somehow felt like I was watching the ceremony with a circle of cool friends.

Twitter is not an essential part of my media diet. I also think it is a much better tool for freelancers than for regular employees – I’m not allowed to tweet about most of the interesting stuff that happens to me – and I have found that I am simply more of a blogger than a microblogger. But I wouldn’t want to miss Twitter in there. It makes for some very interesting flavouring.

The Rest

I registered on StudiVZ, the dying German copycat-cousin of Facebook, with an e-mail-address that has since been deactivated. I can’t remember my password so I haven’t been able to log in and see the devastation for some years now.

I try to use Xing, the German copycat-cousin of LinkedIn, as a business profile, giving people who don’t know me personally an alternative to Facebook. I hardly ever use it and I wouldn’t know why I should start, especially since Facebook made the list feature more prominent.

I have a Google+ profile, but I have yet to use it. Why the heck should I hang around two sites with almost the exact same functionalities? I hear people say the conversations on Google+ are better. I was never unhappy with the conversations on Facebook.

That’s about it for my media diet, but I have one more topic left to cover, so there will be a part 5 about the pain in the ass that bilinguality can be.

Navel Gazing is a multi-part blog series about my personal media consumption habits, meant as a case study and a moment of self-reflection on account of Real Virtuality’s third birthday.

Stuff I learned this week – #7/11

• Tim Smith watches us watching There Will Be Blood.
• 2011′s release schedule sets the record for most sequels.
• Why Gnomeo and Juliet has hideous protagonists.
• There are six giant blind spots in every movie alien’s invasion strategy.
• There are four stages of “getting” Twitter (and I’m not sure, which stage I’m on).
• John Swansburg hates his iPad and gets a lot of sympathy.
• Matt Zoller Seitz takes a look at revisionist fiction.
• “Walk like an Egyptian” stands in a line of ad-hoc protest songs.
• Has Language Log already found the correction of the year?
• 3D-Videomapped living is kinda cool.

• Laut Michael Reufsteck ist es Top, dass der Thommy geht.
• Schnell reagierende Werbeagenturen sind Gold wert.

Stuff I learned this week – #48/10

• We don’t have enough late sequels yet.
• Some nifty stuff was shortlisted for the short film Oscars
• Hitchcock would have had a website.
• There is more in store for Social Media Movie Marketing.
• Jon Favreau has actually thought a lot about how he can make his films appeal to both niche and mainstream audiences.
• Disney Princesses are not dead.
• Politicians still haven’t understand the web.
• The Wikileaks-kerfuffle could be a result of oversharing.
• There’s still undiscovered music around.

• Wie so oft, war die ganze Hysterie vermutlich unangebracht
• So funktioniert Twitter nicht.

Stuff I Learned this Week – #47/10

Mind over Meta!

• I have only seen 11 of the 19 Films that deconstruct film.
• Someone at “Entertainment Weekly” really likes Harry Potter.
• Scorsese likes 3D.
• Disney has decided to try Perfomance Capturing and I don’t like it one bit.
• Other people listen to audio commentaries as well.
• Twitter “lacking a long term vision” could also mean they are ready for whatever the future brings.
• Investigative Journalism works well with the social web (and I would love to try it some time).
• You can make great videos about the ties in Zodiac.
• Mark Twain can give you advice on blogging.
• I have to think of a late film to blog about.
• In the future, I will be an old media journalist (both denominations).

• Walter Benjamin, Leo Trotzki, Paul Klee und F. Scott Fitzgerald werden 2011 “gemeinfrei”.
• Pressesprecher und Journalisten wissen nicht, ob sie Kollegen sind.
• “Gamification” klingt cool.

Oh, ich bin öffentlich. Medienkunst und Social Media

In unseren Köpfen existieren nach wie vor verschiedene Konzepte von Öffentlichkeit, die mehr aus einem vagen Bauchgefühl und weniger aus tatsächlicher Zugänglichkeit rühren. Die gesamte Debattensau um Selbstdarstellung in sozialen Netzwerken, Google Street View und Verpixelungsrecht, die in Deutschland immer wieder durchs Mediendorf getrieben wird, dreht sich letztlich um nichts anderes. Wenn meine Hausfassade in der physischen Welt öffentlich ist, macht es dann einen Unterschied, wenn sie auch im Internet betrachtet werden kann?

Weiterlesen in epd medien 91/10

Real Virtuality Podcast #2 – CYNETART 2010: Jens Wunderling, Default to Public

Gestern gab es schon einen Foto/Video/Audio/Text-Post zur gerade stattfindenden CYNETART in Dresden, heute kommt noch der zweite Real Virtuality Podcast hinzu. Er enthält ein Interview mit dem Berliner Medienkünstler Jens Wunderling über sein Projekt Default to Public.

Die neueste Inkarnation dieses Projekts namens “Audience” lädt sich automatisch öffentliche Selbstporträts aus den Weiten von Flickr, zeigt sie auf einem Bildschirm, fotografiert die Betrachter und sagt den Fotografen bescheid, dass ihre Bilder angesehen wurden.

Zuvor hat Jens schon Tweets an Hauswände projiziert und auf Sticker gedruckt und die Twitterer mit ihrer eigenen Öffentlichkeit konfrontiert. Seine Projekts stellen interessante Fragen über digitale und analoge Öffentlichkeit, den Begriff “default to public” hatte ich vorher nur bei Jeff Jarvis gehört, der ja demnächst ein Buch zum Thema auf den Markt bringen will, und dem Jens’ Projekt vermutlich viel Freude bereiten würde.

Hier ist der Podcast:

[Download]

Das Projekt, das Jens Wunderling im Podcast erwähnt, heißt übrigens Buscando al Sr. Goodbar von Michelle Teran.

Are Magazines Dead or Do They Just Smell Funny?

It’s not every day that you get challenged by Jeff Jarvis. Very well then, I accept. However, I’m not sure that I’ll win. There is more of an olympic spirit posesssing me right now.

A bit of background: Jeff took three tweets (1, 2, 3) to attack a Newsweek article that basically says that the amount of people using the internet to do meaningful interactive things in their free time (Blogging, Wikipedia, News Commenting etc.) is shrinking and gives the reason simply as “sloth”. While I certainly wasn’t fully convinced by the article I think it did make some points that I think might be true, and that scared me.

Like Jeff, I have always been adamant that people love doing things for free and can be just as good as professionals. However, I could imagine with (a) the web becoming more and more mainstream and part of our lives and more and more people using it that don’t want to contribute to it and (b) the web growing larger and larger, becoming ever more differentiated – that the actual amount of peopleactive at any one site goes down.

However, that was not the challenge. The challenge was to convince Jeff that magazines are not dead. Well, I don’t think they are, at least not for a while. While I am a supporter of a lot of the Buzzmachine theories, especially the one that the future of Journalism lies in ecosystems and not monoliths, I just don’t want to go along with the one that in essence says that journalists should stop presenting finished articles to audiences – which is what magazines do.

While I would say that written articles should be open to debate, change, admittance of mistakes and dialogue between author and audience in the wake of their publication, I also believe there should be the right to say “I like this article I have written as it is; I will gladly correct factual errors or supplement interesting addendums but I don’t want to crowdsource the whole thing until it is no longer mine but the crowd’s”. I don’t think that this is arrogance, it is artistic freedom.

But journalism is not art, you say. Indeed, most of it isn’t. I worked in a news agency for a year and I found it fascinating how we produced truly mutable articles that might begin with a quick announcement at the start of the day and end up as a summary with a completely different focus at the end of it. Then, the newspaper journalists would go and change and mold it once again for publication. A kind of b2b-crowdsourcing, if you will. I gladly accept that this process should continue down to a level of mutabilty that is indeed not restricted to journalists but open to everyone. That’s why I think Newspapers are definitely dead. The kind of articles they present us with were made to be changed all the time.

However, magazine articles and indeed a magazine as a whole, are different. They are much closer to an artistic statement than news are. A good magazine’s contents are carefully curated, designed and sometimes even timeless. The articles are long statements about “big pictures”.

I, for one, like being presented with a magazine like this as a finished – or at least mostly finished (see above, factual errors) – product, whose life cycle is a bit slower than that of an online news article. It means that I can also take the time to enjoy it because I know it won’t change for a while and the authors like their articles as artistic statements that might be refuted (or refudiated) and should please spawn debates – but for now they should stand as they are.

And because I think that a lot of people would agree, I believe that magazines are not dead yet.

I do agree that magazines have to change, shouldn’t rely on print, shouldn’t rely on advertising, build a community around their brand etc., but I still can believe that a particular form of curated, bundled journalistic content with a longevity that makes it closer to art/literature than commodity, will persist.

“Guten Morgen, Haiti”

Bei Frederic Dupoux verwandelte sich Twitter innerhalb einer Stunde von einem Spielzeug des sozialen Webs in einen Nachrichtenkanal. Noch um zehn vor vier Uhr Ortszeit alberte er mit Freunden herum, mit denen er über das Mikroblogging-Netzwerk verbunden war. Doch dann, um kurz vor fünf am 12. Januar, drei Minuten nach Beginn des Erdbebens, schrieb er plötzlich: “Oh, Mist. Schweres Erdbeben gerade! In Haiti!” Eine halbe Stunde später: “Der Mist bebt immer noch! Großes Erdbeben in Haiti!”

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Blick in die Kluft

Das Internet ist ein Imperator. Es teilt und herrscht. Der “Digital Divide”, die digitale Kluft, wie Fachleute den Problemkomplex nennen, schlägt sich in vielen Bereichen nieder: Ärmere Länder haben einen schlechteren Zugang zum Internet als reiche. Ältere Menschen tun sich schwerer damit, online zu brillieren als junge. Fraglich ist, ob die Wissenschaft mit der These recht hat, dass irgendwann abgehängt wird, wer sich der Herrschaft des Internets nicht unterwirft.

Immer wieder interessant zu beobachten ist, dass die Kluft zwischen den Liebhabern der digitalen Schönen Neuen Welt und ihren überzeugten Skeptikern auch unter Journalisten so deutlich ausgeprägt ist. Ein besonders gutes Feld für soziale Beobachtungen auf dem Gebiet sind Journalistentagungen wie die DJV-Veranstaltung “Besser Online” am vergangenen Wochenende. Weiterlesen…

Erschienen in epd medien 93/09