I just bought Mahabis on Twitter. Maybe it was an act of cabin fever on the second day of being housebound by icy roads. It had never occurred to me that I would ever buy anything off Twitter. I hate the presence of ads on Twitter. I’m not following the company whose ad it was, in fact I had never heard of them or seen the product, but there it was in my feed.

I had to know more.

There was something compelling about the photo and the description of these felt shoes with their detachable, taffy-colored soles and maybe whatever algorithm Twitter uses knew that I fell into the category of potential customer: people looking for slippers they can wear out of the house, things that come in sets, boxes of crayons, clogs, clever design, people who have spent more than 30 minutes studying a particular style of shoe on Zappos. I clicked. I explored the website. I looked at the pictures on Instagram. I bought a pair.

“They’re very comfortable,” I said of my new shoes when they arrived.

“They look it,” said my husband.

We used to watch a lot of Trinny and Susannah and I understand that just because something is comfortable does not justify it being hideous. (I still wish there existed a well tailored, wool- or tweed-looking suit made out of fleece, but that is another story for another day.) We watched enough women futilely defend closets full of bad choices with the fatal words, “But it’s so comfortable,” as if anyone cared. Your comfort depresses me. And so as someone who considers herself to be stylish-ish I am a stealth comfort-seeker: soft, stretchy tops and jeans, scarves, cardigans, wedge heels instead of pumps. I still mourn the demise of the Converse one star slide.

I don’t think Mahabis are hideous, but they are odd-looking, Croc-ish at certain angles. It took me a long time to capitulate to Crocs. Are these the new Crocs?

“Are those your new shoes?” asks my 15-year-old daughter. Later she says that her friend thought they were slippers.

To what extent will the “success” of these new shoes depend on word-of-mouth so that they are eventually recognized as a thing and a deliberate choice of multifunctional footwear versus the kind of mistake I have made in the past, that of leaving the house in my slippers?

I posted a link to a small, private group of trend- and fashion-minded folks. I shared my purchase just as we are always being prompted to do and now I am telling you.

We live in a world that involves and maybe even relies upon increasingly more word-of-mouth. The consuming part of our lives has become inextricably bound up with the reportage and social sharing part of our lives.

We read the reviews on Amazon and Urbanspoon and TripAdvisor. We share each other’s links and reviews and we know each other through a melange of information, including the social data on promoted posts, so that I am being conditioned to think of certain people as advocates of pages for brands they have liked when they might not even be aware that the company is using them in this way.

So why do we opt in to participate? What motivates us to like, share, or comment on one thing and not another? Why, of all the ads that I have filtered out, did I respond to this one? And why am I telling you about it?

Novelty and appreciation, for sure. In the same way that I might tell you that we made this recipe last night and it is going in the recipe binder to file under great things to do with leftover chicken, along with a recipe for Bob Hope’s chicken hash and chicken vaca frita: I want to be known for knowing good and useful things. There’s also an element of getting there first, being a trendsetter, and just giving yourself context. But another recommendation I would make would be for Lacôme’s Colour Dose eyeshadow, which I come to find out has been discontinued for several years, which turned up in my thought feed because I have a tube of it and I was thinking the other day what an utterly brilliant product it is and wondered if maybe I should replace it because makeup expires, blah, blah, blah. It was a case of my not knowing what I had until it was gone, and I might turn to you to ask for advice for what might replace it. This, perhaps?

And having gotten there first, re the shoes, I want you to follow, so I’m not this lone, crazy outlier (with cozy feet). I want the Mahabis to normalize enough to can wear them without having a bunch of teenagers think I am just absent-minded. I work at a school, which involves lots of walking and teenagers, and it would be great if my choice of footwear didn’t provoke pity. No one wants to be pitied by teenagers.

But why would you trust me? Who am I? Already you know me through whatever voice and/or attitude I have imparted and through consumer choice and media consumption.

We trust other people’s opinions, but we are drowning in them. Take TripAdvisor. Would it matter if I told you that my two reviews on Trip Advisor have been read 916 times (according to the email they sent me yesterday)? Stats like those are designed to bring you back, to feed the owl.

Now let me shuffle over to my desk and connect these thoughts to my professional persona. As the director of communications (and marketing) at a school I spend a lot of time trying to create that same feeling of instantaneous need to know more/must have/take action for parents considering our school. I wish that we could evoke (maybe we do) that feeling of recognition that I experienced with that Twitter ad. There is definitely an aspect of recognition involved, and so then also identity. For marketing to work the people need to be speaking your language in some way: linguistically, visually, emotionally.

Was it the pairing of the words “slippers” and “revolution” that did it? The color yellow? One answer would be that Mahabis offer the solution to a problem: my slippers are so comfortable, I wish I could wear them all day. This idea of solving a problem is one I encountered at Claude Anderson’s Five Pillars workshop a few years ago, although I wonder if my problem is common enough for a campaign? If so, maybe you aren’t even reading anymore, you’re trying to figure out what slipper/sole combination you like best.

And there is a delicate balance with a novel idea. If people don’t grasp or become familiar with the urban, indoor/outdoor slipper/shoe context then my Mahabis will eventually be relegated to driving to the store, walking-the-dog shoes.

What was so elegant about the Twitter ad was that it did not evoke the usual resentment and feeling of intrusion of online ads; it was just part of the experience of being online. I spend a lot of time theorizing about marketing and social media and it was interesting and thought-provoking to be on the other side of it. Good marketing knows where to find you and does not wear you down. It presents something you didn’t even know was possible, like the fitting kit from Commodity. It’s personal but doesn’t get all up in your business.

Traditional boundaries are melting as fast as sea ice, where one person’s casual or heartfelt recommendation (read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels!!!) is another person’s marketing strategy to engage followers (tell us how you wear our jeans, hashtag a picture of you consuming our product.)

Wearing slipper/shoes, blogging about it, but not adding my picture to their Instagram feed, is me being pulled and resisting the tides of this ocean, but like Nancy Walker used to say on the Palmolive ads, “You’re soaking in it.”

Day One: Gray is the new pink

Your Disney Experience begins long before you arrive. You are supposed to pre-select the color of your wristband, which you will use as a room key, admissions ticket and credit card. It probably records biometric data.

If you don’t log into the app before you arrive to select a color, you get the gray band of shame. I am going to play it off like I chose gray because it goes with everything. It’s a sophisticated neutral.

At dinner, L. spotted an Amish family, the woman in a long dress and white cap, man and boy in bowl haircuts and green shirts. Visitors?? Talent??

Classical trio plays music from Frozen as little girls in netting skirts twirl on the pavement. One girl clutches a character doll in each hand. You can buy cocktails in go cups. There are enormous Lego sculptures. There are souvenir shops at every turn. One out of five people are wearing or carrying Disney merchandise.

The shoreline of Downtown Disney is illuminated. Fake water tower, fake hot air balloon. After only a few hours here the phrase Downtown Disney sounds normal. My husband laughs and asks if I wish I was staying in a loft.

He has stayed home with the younger daughter. I am here with the older daughter and her dance group. I have written previously about the frenetic pace and professionalization of children’s activities, all of which seem bound for state or national competition, and how this is a thing I deeply question, but a special needs dance group is both special and different; it is the exception. The promotion of a program that provides her with a network of friends and advocates was something we wanted to support. She was psyched. A dance team trip to perform at Disney has been the hyperbolic theoretical example of the crazy times in which we live and A Thing I Would Never Do. Reader, I’m doing it. I am on the boat in a fake river.

Day Two: Standing ovation

Where do you begin? There are so many parks and rides and experiences. There are singalongs and parades. There are fast passes and fast pass pluses. Some rides and experiences are booked a year in advance.

The kids’ performance, the reason for our being here, will take place at a waterside stage in Downtown Disney. They leave ahead of us and we, the parents, follow, with an hour to kill before the show.

When people talk about the Disneyfication of a place, New York City for instance, mainly, it is this: unnaturally clean and wholesome, concept places and chains, “immersive shopping,” safe, expensive, banal. And something darker, the eradication of the place where I grew up, where the old speakeasies, the used-clothing stores, you know the rant, become Pradas and Rainforest Cafes, so that it appears to exist, but has been taxidermized.The 19th century facades of my old neighborhood are just as fake and scrubbed up as the ones here. There are three food trucks parked by the water. The vibe is hyper-normal

contemporary. Everything has been designed to create the affect of a thing with a history, a provenance, but it can feel like an episode of The Twilight Zone or Star Trek where the characters think it’s Earth or their own past, but it’s formless Martians channeling human memories to appear like the soda jerks and elementary school teachers of the crew’s youth. It looks like an old, cool dive, but it’s chain, but it’s so familiar, so comfortable. Captain, we have to get out of here before we are drawn into this illusion.

Strangest person spotted: a mom in a knee-length Cinderella costume, black choker, heels. Blonde hair piled up. Little girl in regular clothes, maybe a set of ears. This is mom’s Disney experience.

By the time we parents arrive at the waterside stage an audience has assembled, an audience of unaffiliated people, actual members of the public. The founder of our program introduces the group and explains how their mission is to make the arts accessible to people with special needs, how the program has grown to serve over 500 children and adults. She urges people to take this idea back to their own communities.

The kids are having a great time on stage, not nervous, or at least not showing it, they are beaming, and for that, for them, the fact that we are sitting in the middle of America’s collective fantasy and these kids, each of whom has a particular set of challenges, but has found his or her way to this point, where they feel public acclaim in a place they have always known existed, is pretty, for lack of a better word, magical.

Disney is such a touchstone — it covers such a broad array of characters, it has infiltrated everyone’s childhood in one way or another. To perform here is to be anointed with some kind of pixie dust that will stay with them, I hope, in the days and years to come.

They receive standing ovations and on the bus home they are given special performer mouse ears. My daughter declines the mouse ears because she doesn’t wear hats.

Day Three: Yo, Mickey

At dawn, I walk down to the cafeteria to get breakfast. There is steam rising off the pool, happy vibraphone music plays from speakers hidden in the landscaping. We have to be at The Epcot Center at 8:15 a.m. for the kids to go to a dance workshop.

As we disembark from the bus at Epcot, a mom asks if we are here for the princess breakfast. This is a normal-sounding question. This is a place where you send a text to your friends saying that you are in starting your day in Fantasyland, which many of us may do in real life on a regular basis; here it is an actual place on a map.

The world does not open until 11 a.m. We wander through Norway, Mexico, England and France. The French bakery is open. A gay couple with gelled hair and tiny eyeglasses drink flutes of champagne. Each country is staffed by people of its nationality. All cultures are reduced to their most easily recognizable traits. In America, they advertise turkey legs, frozen beverages and beer.

At the turn of the century, Coney Island featured exhibits emphasizing the exotic aspects of foreigners. They recreated great sites of the world and moments in history, a trip to the moon, a tenement fire. The grandeur and grandiosity are part of showmanship. Disney is a more polished, sanctified, larger scale version of this concept. We, who believe in the magic, have become the barkers.

We ride through watery canals, along tracks, in the darkness. Voices narrate our experience for us. There is no need to read anything. There is nothing to read. We sit on a ferris wheel chair in front of a screen that fills our entire field of vision so that it appears we are soaring over mountains, through orange groves, across the Golden Gate bridge.

We travel through a storybook version of Mexico. We travel back in time to the beginning of human civilization and see cavemen, Romans, monks, Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, and the invention of binary code. Everything they put in a diorama they lay claim to. It becomes part of the Disney experience. Human history? We’ve got that.

Disney is for people who don’t like travel but are willing to put up with all the unpleasant aspects of it — endless queuing, crowds, being in a constant state of expectation, consulting your map and being out all day — in exchange for safety, convenience and familiarity. There is no language barrier, no currency to decode, no complicated transport system, no risk. If you were in an actual place, you could escape the crowds, leave the center, have an adventure or even a catastrophe, but here you are inexorably pulled from one attraction to the next, flowing in a river of people, wishing periodically to sit down, sitting, flying, flowing, pumped through a system of entertainment.

There are people with lanyards or vests jangling with metal souvenir badges. There is an endless variety of mouse ears. Whole families don mouse ears, a style for each. A woman in an expensive looking Mickey sweater and a luxurious red velvet headband with a large Minnie bow. A 10-year-old white boy with his carefully curated hip hop look sprawls on the bus next to his little sister. He has on a crisp Mickey cap with graffiti letters.

Among the most enthusiastic of the visitors are the Japanese youth. Four girls in bright tutus and sneakers photograph each other outside of Epcot. Two girls in blue and purple zipper sweatshirts with grey horns on the hoods stroll through “France.” Young couples hand-in-hand, in coordinated outfits.

There are websites devoted to eating at Disney, Disney for grown-ups sites that recommend coffee and cocktails. Surely in the layers of the empire there must be a sub-Disney with after-hours activities, cabaret and character role playing. There are sites with tips for figuring out the system, shortening the wait, booking your meals, getting upgrades, getting closer and closer into the core of Disney. The idea is that this not be a one-off. It’s not a question of if you will return, but when.

The best thing about this trip for my daughter is being with her friends. It is like college. You can see your friends all the time. You eat meals together, you run into each other, it’s all just a huge buffet of experiences.

An environment like this makes you ask fundamental questions like, What is fun? What is relaxation? What is the point of a vacation? Are they providing the backdrop or the main event?

Day Four: Take me to the egress

There is a national high school cheerleading competition going on. Total number of injured cheerleaders spotted today: nine (seven in wheelchairs, two in air casts).

Another thing about Disney is the scale of the operation. They keep the places looking smaller, the lines appearing shorter, so you don’t you realize how huge it is. Everything is built on a slightly miniature scale. Hotels with modest “riverside” frontage go back and back and back. Tiny cottage fronts expand in caverns when you enter. We eat lunch in a place that serves hundreds, a buffet with characters.

My daughter is reprimanded by Donald Duck for touching his bill as she blows him a kiss. Hey, kid, hands off the costume. But Donald is a splenetic character so maybe he’s not really pissed, but I get a pissed vibe from him. And when the heads are through, they’re through, off duty. Tigger and Winnie leave the photo call in Fantasyland later like celebrities, flanked front and back by minor cast members. Don’t even think about it.

Road signs have mouse ears. Streets have names like World Drive and Backstage Lane. Everyone is a cast member.

The parks are designed for young, old, with wheelchair ramps, and some rides that can adapt to wheelchairs. Map legends code the rides for accessibility and speed. The bathrooms are numerous and easy to find. And yet despite this more humane view of guests, the parks are still designed with carny knowledge of human nature which involves controlling and managing crowds and the flow of people, whoever those people are, however they may travel.

Day Five: Let it Go

Someone told me that if you bring your cup to the cafeteria, refills are free so I have been taking the coffee cup from my room to the cafeteria every morning and either availing myself of this “amenity” or “stealing coffee.” But this morning, I forget my cup. The coffee at the resort is so bad that I will not pay for it again, so I will forgo coffee until we get to the airport where there is Starbucks.

The bus from the hotel to the airport is the resort’s last chance to hook you. It is a fascinating lesson in marketing. Just as there is Disney clothing to suit every taste, so too are there deep layers of segmentation and customer engagement strategies.

The Disney bus video blasts us with classic animation, stories about the friendly grounds staff and the dancing Main Street USA cast member, the glass-blower, the chocolate covered apple people, ads for the new rides.

I learn from an interview with a cartoonist the definitive answer to the difference between Pluto and Goofy. They are both dogs, but while Pluto identifies canine, Goofy identifies human.

If you yearn for travel beyond the confines of the parks, there are Disney Adventure package holidays, where you can have a “hassle-free” experience in other countries.

Meanwhile, the driver launches into this monologue about his own Disney journey. I can’t figure out if it was his idea to do it or part of a script. It is the first time on the trip where I am stumped by the question, Is this real?

He is from New Jersey. His first trip to Disney was in the early ‘70s, when it was just the Magic Kingdom, and he thought it was wonderful. He spends ten years driving buses and then gets the gig here in Orlando. It’s not exactly a story of a life’s ambition to work at Disney per se, but it has narrative unity. It feels like a success.

Now he lives so close that he can see the castle from his house, hear the fireworks at night and the whistle of the steam train in the morning. I wonder if all the workers live on the grounds. He tells us about the Disney health plan. He tells us about D23, the fan club for serious fans, a kind of inner circle, where they preview movies and have the Hollywood voice talent perform. The woman who sings “Let it Go” came in 2013. Angelina Jolie turned up for a screening of Maleficent. This is good marketing. The tribe creates the buzz, a ripple effect.

Does he tell this story to every busload of passengers or only when the spirit moves him? Or do they tell all the drivers to talk to the passengers and our driver from the airport just didn’t open up? Do they have a list of talking points? Make it sound personal. I am glad, even this late in the trip, to have encountered him. Most of the cast members I have been professionally friendly but not particularly engaged. Whether he is making the best of a crappy condo with constant amusement park noise or living the dream, he has woven a narrative and, sitting at the helm of the bus, he is a cast member starring in his role, which is the stuff of the videos we have been watching on this very bus. Everyone has a role. You can make of it what you will.

They release us gently into the Orlando airport.

It’s 10:30 and the headache is creeping in. Maybe not wise to have left having coffee so long. We had cleared security and were riding the monorail to the gate when I realized that we had left our our carry-on at the security scrum. TSA had pulled it because there was toothpaste inside. The real world is hard.

“Should I delete the My Disney app?” my daughter asks when we are on the plane.

“You might as well,” I say.

“Because we’re not going back?”

And yet it will be this: a time she will remember as fun and special, a vacation that just the two of us took together, no bickering with her sister. Because there is so much build-up to a Disney trip, she was psyched from the beginning. When you tell people you are going, they say how much fun you will have. People have positive reactions that reenforce the value of the experience. They will tell you their favorite rides. If you said you were going to an American city, they might tell you mixed things, or say how that’s alright for you but they’re not a fan of that city, or cities in general. Europe is far. People may say they have never been or they may say how lucky you are. With Disney you just get a full-on happy reaction. Even if people think Disney is stupid they won’t say it because they wouldn’t want to ruin it for you. People can relate, they’re excited, you’re lucky, but lucky like we’re all lucky together. Disney belongs to all of us. When you get back, they will still be excited for you. Maybe, anyway, reality is overrated.

The urge to crack the Disney code is such that both my husband and I start to calculate whether or not I would have saved money on the meal plan, but this implies that next time you will get it right. And next time and next time. As I would tell my daughter, it was good trip, we had fun, I’m glad we went, but, as I said at the restaurant, Step away from the duck.

The younger daughter comes home on the third day of her week-long art camp with an invitation to an art show at which her work will be for sale. The art school/gallery will take a 10% cut. We, her parents, find it funny to pay, or bid against others, for the projects that she would otherwise just bring home in a bag on the last day.

We suggest that she should hand over any proceeds to cover the tuition and possibly the cost of the gas to drive her there. And then she gets mad at us.

My husband proposes a 15% cut and she can keep the rest. But she is still mad.

Fine, she says, you don’t have to come. You don’t have to sign me up for things.

This forces us to back up and try to explain. We can’t expect her to share the joke without understanding the context. The more we start to articulate what it is about this leap from kids messing around with materials to being invited to enter a professional arena the more we start to feel a need to take a stand against it.

First of all, it’s not about the money and it’s not about not wanting to go. It’s something bigger and more culturally pervasive. And when you put it that way, your kids totally get it.

Actually, they don’t.

Last week she came home from another camp all psyched because the instructor told her that she could get a college scholarship if she carried on with the sport. The takeaway point for her was that (after three days of trying out an activity for the first time) this was her golden ticket. What a relief it must have been to know that this whole college thing, the reason why we say her grades (will) matter, was pretty much a lock. All she has to do now is figure out how to get her 12-year-old non-driving self to practice for the next six years.

I know, I know, I tell her, we’re meanies, but just try to understand what’s going on here.

I will spare you the entire scene, although the younger daughter, who read this before publication, wishes me to convey that she is a sane and stable person, but our reasoning goes something like this: You, the child, are just doing this activity because it’s fun, like you do lots of other things, because this is the age of trying things out. It’s good to commit to a team because the act of showing up and being part of something and working to improve has value more than the activity itself.

The early introduction of the future benefits (scholarship, sales, travel team, finding your passion) that one could get from an activity puts pressure on the kids to hit those marks. Why should you think that after three days of an art class you have anything worth selling? Or be good enough to do the sport in college? Which is not to denigrate the fine work you have done — you have to keep coming back to this concept, that you can be criticizing part of something but not all of it. Something or someone can be well-intentioned but have a flawed idea. And we forget that this is sometimes a hard concept for kids to grasp.

Come to the next class, come three times a week, join the travel team, sign up for the state tournament. Pay the fees. Back in London, we were suspicious of any class that offered “a chance” to perform at Euro Disney. Were there not enough performance venues in London itself to meet the experiential needs of the 8-year-old dancer? And if your 8-year-old is making her international stage debut are you seriously going to miss it?*

So now you’re telling me that I can’t be an artist, she says.

Nobody is telling you that you can’t be an artist.

Help me out here.

And then this unexpected backlog of thwarted ambition comes pouring out, fires we had neither lit nor stoked. Suddenly it was all so bleak and complicated.

First, she says, you make me miss my flute lesson for the swim meet when I was practicing a piece to audition for all-state and I only swam exhibition and now I won’t make all-state and I won’t get into a good college for band and then you said I couldn’t do this additional sport to get a scholarship and now I probably won’t get into college and I don’t even know if I like doing any of these things.

But that’s just the point. The stakes are being set too high. You don’t have to want to major in something to take the class.

And who knew she was feeling this kind of pressure about college? I feel terrible. We hear things about how older kids are becoming too careerist and driven but it’s happening in our house, in spite of us.

Summer presents us with these huge swathes of our children’s time, which we are trying to fill on their behalf with meaningful pursuits because otherwise they are at risk of wasting time. Is it that we do not trust her to put her own time to good use? Partly.

Left to her own devices she bakes, organizes her room, has read 13 books and visits our neighbor. She had a job looking after our friends’ dogs, twice a day for two weeks, and we didn’t have to remind her or drive her there. But there is also a lot of noodling and flopping around. She has read up on all the uses for baking soda that were printed on the 13.5 lb bag my husband bought at Costco in a moment of madness. She sprawls on the floor and talks to the dog.

You make me sound crazy, she says. You have to make it clear that I do normal things.

Between the 10,000 hours of Gladwellian practice one ought to invest in the name of excellence and the unstructured time children need to develop inner resources and just be (even if that being involves learning about baking soda), I thought that art classes, summer league swim team, a few flute lessons, the chance to try a brand new sport mixed in with a little responsibility and some sleepovers seemed like a good balance.

You can’t win summer. I was being ironic.

We go to the art show, which is part of a city-wide arts week, so there are lots of people at the reception, not connected to the class, and lots of other art on display. The children have had the option to price, auction or just display their pieces. We are at peace with letting her rabbit sculpture go for $20, but I really love the painting she has painted of a door. It’s in the Ashcan style, unintentionally. What if someone buys it?

If you try to win summer, you will lose it, and you will never get it back.

This post was written in the Summer of 2012, but as we plan for Summer 2015 our family revisits this topic and reminisces about art camp. Oh, and irony: three years later, yep, I go to Disney World with the older daughter’s dance team. The painting has been framed, but the rabbit is still for sale. We continue to work our way through the baking soda.

Please stop not understanding hashtags

When you say you don’t get hashtags I hear you using the angry voice of John McLaughlin in his festive holiday blazer sounding off against the selfie in his last show of 2014. He doesn’t like them and he wants them to stop. Enough already! What a stupid century we live in. You people are all idiots.

If you don’t get hashtags and you’re willing to admit it, it’s either because you are waiting for people to knock it off and get back to work or you are playing at what my college boyfriend/husband and I used to call “furious ignorance.” You cannot be mad at a 16th century poet (or the Norton anthology) for writing Ss like Fs. That’s just how they did things then. #getoverit

At the end of February, and again in mid-March, I am giving a presentation at a schools conference about a project I did last year where our students created our school’s admissions viewbook. The students in AP English wrote personal narratives and the advanced graphic design kids were given an RFP and then had to art direct the beginning graphic design class. One of the ways that we involved the whole school was by using a hashtag to crowdsource photos.

We are calling the talk “Hashtag Viewbook.” Usually when schools do their viewbooks they select a handful of stars who meet with the designers in a focus group. We wanted to open things up. The terms around which we were building the book were open to interpretation. The hashtag was an opt-in, open call way to participate. Anyone could take part at any point in the project about a topic of their choosing. It also meant the participants were offering us the photos to use so we didn’t need to immerse ourselves into their online lives, which even if open to public view, one doesn’t like to impinge. In marketingese, we had created an ongoing narrative about the School’s value proposition.

The use of the word hashtag in the presentation title is slightly off-point. The main point of the presentation is about taking a different approach to school publications and collaborating with students. But “hashtag” is shorthand, intended to appeal to people who are interested in using social media for their admissions work or are interested in how other schools are exploring, entering or setting up shop in the borderless terrain of social media. We’re assuming that people will get the gist of the hashtag reference. And yet…

Over the past year, I spoke with people about the project, both at my school and outside of it, and every so often an adult would profess some level of bafflement with hashtags. And actually there are a lot of teenagers who don’t “get” Twitter. The question could even arise after we had been talking about Instagram, where hashtag use is a little different than on Twitter, but still.

I had this horrible thought the other day that at the end of our presentation the first question would be, “Now, that was very interesting, but what exactly is a hashtag?” And then I wondered if we needed to preface the talk by making sure that everyone knew, and that they weren’t attending the talk in the hopes that someone would explain it to them and when it came time to rate the presentation they would write, This talk was disappointing because at no point did the presenters explain what a hashtag is.

But in order to understand hashtags, you have to be familiar with Twitter and/or Instagram, and while they function in the same way they’re used differently. And while you can use them on Facebook, one doesn’t. For people who are are attending a professional conference in 2015 this feels remedial. Surely, they will all know.

I spend more time on social media than probably is healthy, but I need to because my job involves marketing and you can’t do marketing without social media. Because of this, I assume that everyone is familiar with how these things work. #déformationprofessionnelle.

Part of preparing for the presentation is gathering resources in an online location. I have been building a Pinterest board called Hashtag Viewbook, and, yes, you can use hashtags on Pinterest, but no one really does, do they??, so my thought was that if I could include an explanation of hashtags with the resources that if anyone did ask that dreaded question, I could refer them to this post. Only it’s a bit ranty. So if you’re feeling ranted at, don’t, I don’t know, don’t take it personally.

Here’s the thing about that question, it’s not the first time you have asked. Hashtags are pretty maintstream. One cannot watch the news without hearing references to Twitter. Take #jesuischarlie for one or #cremeegggate for another. And how would one properly enjoy the opening ceremony of the Olympics or the Oscars or political debates without them?

You have asked the question before, but have yet to receive a satisfactory answer. Am I up to the task? Probably not. But others are. Here’s is but one of many articles, but really, the best way to see their purpose is to get on Twitter and click on them. You CAN figure this out. You are clever enough and no, it won’t make you look superficial. Or like you are trying to appear hip or young or whatever would be most embarrassing. I mean, come on, in answering this question I have to endure how silly it sounds to say, “I use hashtags for my work.” Can you imagine saying that at the dinner table with your parents and their friends? I can make a long list of people whose wit, wisdom and experiences are not on Twitter and live outside the realm of the hashtag.

Which only goes to remind us that we can crowdsource all we like, but the crowd doesn’t include everyone. One person’s idea of the universal is another perfon’f confufion. The short answer would be to say that hashtags create a shared conversation. So, don’t let me put you off. Keep asking questions!

Songs you never asked for

Back in the day, in the Wild West of the internet era, my father discovered Napster, with its slightly sinister logo, and the surreal and risky idea that you were hooking up your computer to thousands of other people’s record collections, their scratchy, copy of Malvina Reynolds singing “Little Boxes,” my father’s Benny Goodman Live at Carnegie Hall. Who were these people? Why would you want to correspond with someone you didn’t know? Was it safe?

My father and I embarked on a greedy period of musical nostalgia. I tried to remember the songs we had sung together when I was little and my weekend treat was a trip in the car down to the town across the river to buy the New York Times at the supermarket. We sang “Home on the Range” and “Where Have all the Flowers Gone?” He searches for the beach music of his youth. All of these songs were out there, little points of light, constellations flashing on a thousand modems, to work out and reconfigure.

He burns CDs for me, writing the names on them in Sharpie, “Protest & Western,” or “Songs You Never Asked For,” making cases out of paper. Some CDs will have several versions of the same song or a song that has only partially downloaded — the downloads take a long time — but they are like postcards from my childhood.

Time moves on.

My older daughter’s school is 20 minutes away, which, when you add up the road time is too many hours to spend listening to pop music. We have been subscribing to podcasts.

The other day I discovered “No One’s Listening.” Host Irene McGee’s voice has a slightly Janice-from-Friends edge at times but it’s an interesting conversation that she and her guest, the author of a book about an anonymous photo/talkboard site, are having. They consider the moral implications of anonymity, the appeal of the site, the agenda of its users, how they united against MasterCard to defend WikiLeaks.

What are the rules in a community that defines itself in terms of not having or not needing rules? Following the flow of their conversation is a better way to spend the time than singing along to “Wonderwall.” The podcast is 50 minutes long. I listen to it throughout the day as I drive between meetings, these thoughts about how we behave online, what is right, what is privacy, where the line is, threading between the bright, green stalks of the day.

At the beginning of the show McGee says that she had asked her guest not to Google-search her until he’d been on the show. He has agreed but says that basically he knows her backstory. The whole thing is a bit high school flirty, no, I just wanted to see if you could do it. I thought it would be cool. I mean, I don’t care…

I wiki her when I get home. She was on the Real World Seattle and there was some kind of furore when she left, about which Jello Biafra, (what’s he doing here?), also a guest on one of her podcasts, is quoted as saying:

“I recently met a woman named Irene McGee who quit this show and said not even the house was real. The fridges were all filled to the brim with Vlasic pickles delivered daily by the crate load along with gallons of Nantucket Nectar. If she drank anything else, the crew took it from her hand and made sure the Nantucket Nectar label was facing the camera instead.”

She gets hit by one of the other contestants and MTV sues her. McGee’s experience is almost weirder than the Dead Kennedys’ vision of California/America.

On another podcast, on Four Thought, Russell M. Davies recalls another online community, GeoCities. Like the original Napster, these are important ghost towns for the civilization that now reigns, in the same way that MTV and the Real World were important to understand the evolution of reality television.

The other day as I was leaving the house I grabbed one of my dad’s Napster CDs that he had titled “Protest and Western.” I almost skipped over “Alice’s Restaurant,” who hasn’t heard that song enough? It takes stamina to listen to it, but actually it doesn’t. It has been years since I have heard it.

I associate the song with a boy I met in California my senior spring in high school when I spent a month on an exchange, attending school in Haight-Ashbury. The Haight was already running with the times, with boutiques and fancy restaurants, shedding its deep hippie cred. But this one boy was like the good soul of the class. He had a beard (having a beard is quite a statement for a high school boy.) I am sure I am conjuring this out of the haze of memory but it is not impossible that he drove a Microbus. He presented himself as this countercultural throwback dude, though he had genius SATs, was brilliant and hard-working and was going somewhere impressive for college. He was good friends with my host, who was hard-edged, athletic, competitive and generally a bit pissed off at everyone, including me. He had a guitar on which he would play and sing, with very little or no encouragement, “Alice’s Restaurant,” with all the lyrical embellishments and the paragraphs and the arrows on the back of each one.

Just cue the strumming and I hear the SF classmates laughing and groaning, “Oh no, not that song again!” The song was like a symbol of the kind of person he would have been born 15 years earlier.

Pete Seeger unwinds his tale of the arrest for littering and we have just gotten to the part where the narrator and the army psychiatrist are jumping up and down together saying “Kill, kill, kill,” when we get home.

The word “draft,” which used to conjure up so many specific images, is not an idea with which my children are familiar. What is it, do they still have it, could they make you go? Could you pay not to go? For 10 years our country has been at war and there are a lot of people who object to it. Where is the protest music? Instead we have WikiLeaks. We post links to videos and news as our status updates.

The next morning my daughter says she wants to hear the rest of the story. As it’s a CD, I have to start from the beginning.

From the first chord to the final verse is how long it takes to get to school. I am not sure what she makes of it, if she gets the jokes or the irony, which are flagged up by the appreciative, knowing laughter of the 60s audience on this live recording. It is a song that she easily could have gone another 10 years without hearing. It is out of fashion, not referenced or sampled in the music we listen to, but now she knows it.

The circular, cyclical path of folk songs is an aspect of handed-down music of my parents’ generation, the flowers picked by the girls that cover the graves of the soldiers; the children who will “go to summer camp and then to the university,” but who will “all get put in boxes, little boxes all the same.” As a child, the connection at the end is a thrilling epiphany, a glimpse through the door of childhood into the joined-up meaning of the world, even if those joins take you, innocent and devoid of understanding, back to the starting point.

If you listen to NPR, have you noticed that the tagline for one of their sponsors is a line from “Little Boxes,” only “business executives” have been changed to “business professionals,” to make it more democratic, one assumes? Is there intended irony there? Surely their aging demographic recognizes this line. Or have the words been picked like fresh flowers by innocent young interns?

I had forgotten about the call to action at the end of “Alice’s Restaurant,” a flashmob style protest whereby young men would appear for the draft all singing this song so that one person would be deemed mad, two gay (sophisticated laughter), three a political movement, and 50 an uprising. It’s not actually that different from 4chan bringing down MasterCard.

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Post reblogged from here.