ATTENTION, PLEASE: “@Melinblau” — Medium’s former ID for me — Melinda Blau — whose work you read and hopefully enjoyed is gone. From now on…
Please look for me on Medium as
@MelindaBlau (Melinda Blau)
Sorry! When I signed up for Medium, I didn’t pay enough attention to “user name.”
I actually didn’t pay any attention.
It was enough that I was signing up.
Full Disclosure: I am not a digital native — not by a long shot. I have just so much tolerance for new tech.
As it was, I didn’t even know what to call Medium —a website? writing software? a platform? — nor what to expect. Accordingly, I never even considered — or noticed — that “they” gave me a different writer/user name.”
How Could That Happen?
Especially in retrospect, it’s shocking. This is my name we’re talking about, my identity as a writer.
I use “melinblau” as an ID. It was my first email address back in the mid-nineties — because someone else had taken “melindablau” on AOL. I was fine with it, as many call me “Melin” anyway.
But everywhere I write, I use my full name — my website, Facebook page, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram. I even play Words with Friends as melindablau.
Granted, my tech knowledge is advanced compared to most of my peers. Still, I’m tentative with any new challenge that requires set-up and inputting.
That makes me “tech-adequate,” not a “tech-competent” — two coinages that probably won’t go beyond this writing!
Thus, I allowed Medium’s software to do everything for me.
I don’t think I’m alone in this.
Otherwise, why would Holly Kellums have written this: Writers — Your Usernames Matter: Anyone who publishes content online should understand the importance of their URL? Unfortunately, I only read it after discovering my lapse!
Computer Literacy Isn’t in the Air I Breathe
The younger generation is always ahead of the curve. In a 1993 book I wrote for family therapist Ron Taffel, he suggested that to “connect,” ask your child for help with something you genuinely can’t do. The example then was “programming the VCR.”
Also in the early 90s, I interviewed Frederick Starr, president of Oberlin College, about how parents can prepare kids to travel the “Information Highway,” as we once called it. His answer was prescient:
Computer literacy is only a problem for parents. For children, it comes with the air they breathe.
It’s not in the air I breathe! What about you? Do you ever hear yourself saying something like…
I can’t believe I have to learn this new… [phone/refrigerator/printer/car…you fill in the blank!]
Or have you ever put off buying and then unboxing a new gadget — say, a new laptop — because you dread that damn learning curve….
Then you know what I mean.
A “Platform” Was Once Something You Danced On
I’m not an early adapter, but as a twenty-first century writer, I’ve had to upgrade my tech skills.
I have been writing for more than forty years. By the time I came to Medium, I had worked with major publishing “houses,” as we once called book companies. I lived in print.
I wrote books that were “type-set” and transferred to paper. I wrote articles that appeared in actual magazines. My words remained “in print” and, sometimes, as a “reprint.” I did book tours. (Seriously, Melinda, you sound oooooold!)
A “platform” was something you danced on, not wrote for!
It also used to be that publishers made writers “famous,” or at least tried. Somewhere in the nineties —even before we began counting “followers” — acquisition editors began asking about a different kind of “platform,” as in… “How many people already know your work?”
An author was said to have a “good” platform if she was quoted as an expert, a featured speaker, doing radio and TV shows.
Fast Forward 20 Years: Even More is Asked of Writers
It is 2009. I am sitting in a conference room with the editor who helped me shape the book, her assistant, my agent, and assorted members of the publisher’s publicity, marketing, and sales team.
It is at that pre-launch meeting, for my 13th book, that I am asked questions I’ve never heard:
- “Do you have a website yet?”
- “Are you on Facebook?”
- “What about Twitter?”
In Consequential Strangers, the book we were then discussing, I had covered some of the early social media websites: how they were changing our interactions with strangers, our relationships, our potential for making connections far beyond geography or, as I wrote then, “the confines of our familiar.”
Social media is understood as the different forms of online communication used by people to create networks, communities, and collectives to share information, ideas, messages, and other content, such as videos. — The Complete History of Social Media
I walked out of that 2009 meeting realizing that online communication was changing everything, including the “business” of writing. What I didn’t foresee was that “platform” would again come mean something else, fifteen years later.
On Being “Tech-adequate”
I still feel I’m at least a step behind, here and on my own website. I can manage Word Press, tweet, post, hashtag, etc.…but I’m sure others are better at it.
I’m not being modest. I once made a whopper mistake—lost four different websites in a day, because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. But that’s another story.
By the time I found my way to Medium, I had more than dipped my toe into the pool of online writing: my own blogs, a regular column for Huffington Post, and contributions to various websites, some of which even paid me to write.
So while I didn’t need a teenager to show me how to sign up and contribute to Medium, let’s be honest: There are wide gaps in my knowledge. I’ve been learning each new tech still as-needed — and basically on my own. Who could blame me for not thinking about my user name?
Medium made signing up easy. And they have lots of good advice for new writers and technophobes alike. For now, though, I’m content to keep writing and uploading pieces.
I haven’t attempted to design my own page. (I might at some point; I’m open to suggestions!) But I do love to fiddle with headings, spacing, even the limited typeface options. Maybe it reminds me of the good old days.
@MelindaBlau signing off!
Special thanks to Clive Wilson who (weeks ago, I’m embarrassed to admit) suggested that I (a) change my user name soon — and (b) write about it.
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