This was a topic I was going to write anyway, but now I have an example to use with it. As so often happens in the aftermath of tragedy, false reports fly with abandon. Today, CNN reported that a suspect in the Boston Marathon attack was arrested. This same story was reposted by news outlets large and small, shared across Twitter and Facebook, and then recanted by CNN, hours later. Chartgirl has a great chart (of course) of the cluster-expletive and who posted what, if you want a visual analysis. In my second, longer post on the tragedy, I mentioned two words: “patience” and “prudence.” We need patience that the facts will shake out, and prudence in what we do and say until then.

In the endless race to be first that typifies media today, patience and prudence are oft ignored to varying degrees. While CNN’s particular rush to post may be egregious, the New York Post’s wildly inaccurate excuse for journalism in the aftermath is much worse. Once again, The Onion makes the point better than anyone else could. This occurs because news publishing on the web is so driven by the need for page views. Patient and prudent reporting that brings hard, verified facts is usually not rewarded by lots of clicks, lots of shares, and lots of ad revenue. As useful of a service as CNN and other major news networks can be, don’t forget that they are companies that work to serve their own bottom line before they serve us. It’s why even websites that don’t focus on current events news stories were posting about the attack.

On Twitter and App.net, I’ve read comments that wistfully recall the days when you had to wait a day to find out what happened in the newspapers. While the nature of that medium made a certain degree of patience a necessity for publishers and readers alike, don’t get the illusion that prudence is a necessary function of that as reports from the Titanic, over a hundred years ago show. The days of Yellow Journalism aren’t that far behind us. In fact, they never truly ended, and probably never will. Let’s not kid ourselves. As long as a sensational headline guarantees that you will move whatever commoditized thing makes you money, physical papers or ad impressions, it is in the financial best interest of media organizations to post first and fast, and to hell with accuracy.

When my Father was in the Army during Vietnam—stationed, thankfully, in Germany—he would read three newspapers: an English-language German newspaper, an American newspaper, and The Stars and Stripes. He only accepted as truth the things all three papers agreed upon. The days when we can do that aren’t over, but when everyone is getting their news from everybody else in what may be the largest game of Whisper Down the Lane the world’s ever seen. [1] You’d need a much, much larger pool of news sources to compare, and there isn’t much time for that, though there’s a potential startup company idea in there for someone. [^2]

It’s now the job of us as news and media consumers to do the heavy lifting of evaluating a story and being choosy about our sources. Blind trust in the sources of our information has never been a good idea, but now we have enough control over what we see that we don’t need to place our trust in any one source. Because of this, more than ever, we need to be patient in trusting that the real facts will come, and we need to be prudent what we consume. Media literacy isn’t being taught in schools, but it’s becoming an necessity. In the meantime, the readers, and the publishers, are all flying by the seat of their pants.

As Depeche Mode says, “everything counts in large amounts,” and the prevailing wisdom of the day for social media is to get big numbers of people who follow, like, retweet, share, pin, or whatever is you do on the buzz worthy service du jour. To this end, there are services that promise, for a price, huge numbers of new Twitter followers, Facebook likes, fans, increased Klout scores. It’s big business, but what does it get you? A big number, and nothing else.

If you’re of an “old media” mindset, you’re used to thinking of media as a one-way thing, and the value coming from the number of eyeballs looking at whatever you put out there. But eyeballs are just eyeballs, they see a lot, but the power of social media is that you can reach more than eyeballs, you can reach living, breathing people with ideas, voices, and a way to talk back to you. A propaganda mouthpiece isn’t likely to make anyone care, unless it’s doing something as bizarre as horse_ebooks, and nobody who follows that is buying anything. (I hope.) Even worse for the “old media” types, is that you can’t buy eyeballs on most social networks, only the illusion of eyeballs. If you have a six-digit Twitter follower number, and none of them actually interact with you, or your thing, all you have is a number next to your name that cost you a lot and makes you nothing.

What’s better is to have a smaller number of people who really, really, really care about what you’re doing and want to interact. Let’s call them fans. Kevin Kelly suggests you need 1,000 true fans, but the number can be bigger, or smaller, depending on what you’re doing and how engaged they are. These people are the most important. Satisfy them, and you’re made in the shade. Kevin Kelly’s piece is aimed at musicians and other artists, but this same philosophy can work for a startup company, a freelancer, or anyone else who needs to win the love of people to make their bills at the end of the month.

After all, people have no compunction towards giving money to things they truly love. Even when I was on unemployment for a year, barely scraping by, I saved my pennies to buy the new album by my favorite band, see my extremely talented friends play concerts, and support the local businesses that made my favorite coffee and falafel, and I felt no guilt. It’s the principle that makes sites like Kickstarter work. It’s how writers I admire big and not so big are making money. It’s what keeps Apple and any number of App Store apps in business. Even if money isn’t your goal, nobody wants to shout into a void. It helps when people shout back, good or bad. Now they can. Embrace it.

When tragedy strikes in this hyper-connected age, it’s easy, far too easy, to jump to conclusions. Whether you’re a professional journalist, or an armchair commentator, it’s easy to score points by posting your opinion on why and how, and all of it filtered through your own political and social views.

I beg of you not to.

In the face of disaster, we should focus not on the cause, but what we can do to help. Figuring out motivations, assigning blame, those are things that should come later. Much later.

For now, do what brings comfort to yourself and others. Pray. Give blood. Contact your loved ones, no matter how close or far they are from the horror. That is what we should do first.

To everyone in Boston, and beyond, be safe.

The Onion AV Club recently posted a gossip piece concerning members of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fandom, aka “Bronies.” The gossip piece in question was reprinting an excerpt of a letter sent from one “Brony” to another, concerning sexual fan art of a character he considered his fiancée. Leaving aside, for the moment, the idea of being engaged to a fictional character, or drawing sexually explicit fan art, the reaction of the Internet was swift—complete mockery of both parties, and of the My Little Pony fandom in general.

I am not a “Brony,” and, while I do read The AV Club, I do not partake in its more gossip-oriented articles. What raised my ire enough to write this piece was the sheer dumbfoundedness of people to this behavior, including people on sites like Metafilter [1] which tend toward a higher standard of discourse, and the immediate jump to mockery. It’s as if these sorts of people—adult fans of children’s shows, creators of erotic fan art, and people with romantic attachments to fictional characters and inanimate objects—are creations of the Internet, and, as such, aberrations. The truth is, these sorts of people existed long before the Internet. It’s just that the Internet has given them a way to communicate with like-minded people in a way that no technology has before. It has all given them a way to communicate with a larger audience than they ever had before.

After all, it’s one thing to be the only person you know who is into, well, anything unusual. In the pre-Internet days, about the only way to meet like-minded people if you were into anything outside of the mainstream, was a college campus or, maybe, a major city, and even then, only if you were lucky. The weirdest of the weirdos occupied the fringes of groups and their conventions, and maybe publishing their near-samizdat fan zines. Come the arrival of the first online services, BBSes, Newsgroups, and IRC, it became easier. With the arrival of modern social networking, however, the gates fell for good. From LiveJournal, to DeviantArt, to Tumblr, subcultures of like-minded people with their own unique interests have been finding each other, connecting, and socializing.

And, like every other organized group of people, they have their own rules, their own sub-groups, and their own conflicts. Whenever something like the aforementioned letter emerges, the most vocal members of the subculture quickly speak up to say that “We’re not all that way!” Fundamentally, the populous at large knows this already, easy as it may be to stereotype. And, let’s be fair, nobody wants to own the person who draws sexually explicit fan art of children’s cartoon characters, or the person who is engaged to marry the same character. They’re disowned by the same group they thought would let them in, which does nothing to help the issues that already come from being that far outside the norm. These people have a hard enough road to travel already. Taking their issues public doesn’t help, especially when it’s presented in the way the AV Club has, to make light of everyone involved—which is, by extension the entire fandom.

What are we getting out of this besides the cheap, visceral thrill of watching a train wreck? Can we step back, for even a moment, and evaluate the effect that bringing these people’s actions to a public audience will have? The thing about most of these subcultures of like-minded people, is that their behaviors aren’t really hurting anyone. The worst harm you’ll have from the sexually explicit fan-artist is needing a bit of eye or brain bleach if you accidentally come across their work. The man who seeks to marry the cartoon character? He’s not hurting anyone, either. Bringing their private feud, even if it happens in a public space, to the world-at-large is shameful at best. We have better things to do with all of our time.

My job involves an awful lot of typing. Often, it’s a lot of typing the same stuff, over and over again. When I catch myself copying and pasting, or retyping the same things over and over, I stop and create a snipped in TextExpander to do it for me. I’ve several specialized snippets I use for my job, ranging from typing “Read full article at” to complex, pop-up, fill-in forms. It’s something that takes anywhere from one to five minutes of my time, but can potentially save me hours in the long run.

We all have little parts of what we do that can be sped up, improved, or even automated. The hardest core of hardcore geeks often find themselves writing scripts, changing system settings, and installing new software for hours on end, with the intent of shaving a few seconds of a common, repetitious task. [1] To the untrained eye, it looks like procrastination. Actually, to the trained eye it can look like that, too, and it sometimes is. However, it’s those little (and not so little) tweaks and customizations that help us make technology our own.

I’m reminded of a comic where a person watches in mounting frustration as they watch another person try to search the Internet. It’s an exaggerated example—well maybe. I’ve never seen anyone use Google to get to Google and do a web search, but it is plausible. If you relate to the person watching, you’re probably more technologically savvy than 90% of the people in your life, if not more, and it’s all through exposure. The more we use something, the more we desire to make it our own [2], and we will often seek ways to do it.

In some cases, this is aided by discoverability in design. While using a new piece of software, you might think “Hey! There has to be an easier way to do x” so you start poking through menus, reading documentation, or pressing random keys until you find the one that does what you want. Your willingness to do so often comes the software’s friendliness. Of course, we’ve made this a lifestyle. For the part of the population where the technology is merely a means to an end, they will often stick with whatever workflow they’ve found works for them, no matter how cumbersome. There’s no incentive for them to consider doing otherwise.

This fundamental difference in mindset is caused by factors far too varied for me to get into here, what with my lack of training and experience in psychology, user experience, software development, or design. Suffice it to say that without an immediate value proposition beyond “Hey! This is easier/faster/cooler,” most users will find a way that works for them and stick to it. Watch your parents use a computer, and you’ll suddenly understand. Unless you’re that one guy whose parents are technology mavens, I guess.