On steem in fragments

It’s struck me that steem is a fragmentary experience in at least four ways:

• In its limited capacity to present a structure for my writing
• In the way steem encourages you to read, respond and ‘play’ in snippets
• In the tendency to spread yourself (delegations) thinner across more applications as steem expands.
• In the pull to write about events on steem rather than staying focused on your own agenda.

On the limited capacity of steem to structure my writings

There’s a cyclical weekly macro-structure to my writing on steem, or at least I like to think there is. It’s a structure imposed by me and it looks something like this:

It’s an arbitrary and amateur structure, like all of our structures, no matter how fond of them we may be. I’m actually quite pleased with it… it goes from heavy through to light from Sunday through Friday – the general plan being that I write all the heavy stuff the previous Saturday/ Sunday and save the light stuff for Thursday/ Friday night and Saturday after the park run. I don’t always stick to it.

It’s entirely imposed by me, for my own sanity. At least maybe it is my sanity, maybe it’s my identity, maybe it’s ‘me’, who fucking knows, but what I do know is that I like structure when it comes to thinking and writing. I’m the kind of person that likes to know how everything fits together.

NB – that’s just the when to write/ publish structure, every chunk of that has further sub-structures: e.g. Tuesday and Weds breaks down into something like this:

That's a simplified version I had to hand, this in turn has a further layer of analytical structure behind it, and each one of the above has a sub-structure.

Pretty much everything I write falls into one block of this structure, I have folders for each of the main areas above and subfolders within and I write everything in word docs before I publish.

The problem with steem is that there’s no easy way of showing this structure – basically there are no pages, so if I want to show how all of my writing fits together, I’d have to create an external web site with a home page and a series of sub-pages (or just one massive index page) and then link back to each individual post on steem.

I could of course do a repeat ‘updated structure’ post every month or so, I think @creatr used to do something like this, but it seems a little pointless when I can just do this once on a WordPress blog and update the same page/s every so often, as and when I have the time.

I could also post everything through WordPress via SteemPress, but now that I’ve started to get some reasonable pay-outs on my posts, I’m no longer prepared to lose 15% of my post pay-out to SteemPress, it’s got to the stage where the value of their large upvote doesn’t compensate me adequately for my loss, especially since I’ve discovered @ocdb.

Anyway, financial concerns aside, however I choose to ‘display the structure’ my writings, I can’t do this on any of the steem platforms (someone correct me if I’m wrong here!), I have to use an external platform to link back, which means that the blogging experience of steem is inherently fragmentary – or at least the only way posts are structured is temporarily, as in through a linear time-structure – the various themes of my writings (rantings about the suboptimality of normality, running posts, posts about eco-communities, finance updates etc.) these are all fragmented, broken up by all of the other topics.

It’s not a big deal, I have the structure in my files, and I could easily link everything up with a week of effort on one of my WP blogs, which is something I might do at some point.

The tendency of the experience of steem to distract and fragment my consciousness.

On steeming in snippets

On my WP blog, I basically write three posts a week and post them (within a clear structure following the A-level sociology syllabus), and this is a very top-down experience – I produce content 99% of the time and I respond to responses about 1% of the time (I don’t get much engagement even with >600K hits a month!

Here, it’s very different…. I get a lot fewer readers but a lot more engagement, and so I spend much less time producing content in relation to responding to comments.

Moreover, I spend A LOT more time checking my feed and reading and commenting on other people’s posts, and even (more recently) reading and commenting on comments – so rather than spending 2 hours head down writing 1 or 2 blog posts, I’m much more likely to write 200 words, check my feed, respond to a comment, read a couple of posts, respond to one of them, and so on.

With d’apps this is ‘worse’ – intersperse into the above mix ‘play a few games of steemmonsters’, ‘upgrade a building on drugwars’ and ‘do a quick @actifit post on my alt-account’, then you’ve got something closer to reality.

So, rather than a clearly focussed and concentrated linear content production experience, I end up with 2 minutes here, 4 minutes there and so on, a fragmented experience.

Of course this isn’t entirely bad (hence ‘worse’)….. fragmentation is the upside and downside of social media in one – I like the diverse fragmentary experience, it’s connective, it’s fun, it’s just that it can make concentrating on outputting content difficult!

Then there’s discord of course – I’m going to recommend to the Oxford English Dictionary that they just put ‘GO VISIT DISCORD’ next to the word ‘Fragmentary’.

Fragmented expansion

Thirdly, there’s the increasing ‘macro-fragmentation’ we get as steem grows – as new people and new communities onboard, as new d’apps join the blockchain (or as I just discover old ones for the first time), I’ve had to adjust to the different ethics of these communities, figure out how d’adpps work, and my permissions and delegations reach into more and more diverse blocks.

Of course I don’t have to try out anything new, but it just seems rude not too – take @gofindrx for example – I just had to exchange 50 steem for XR tokens, rude not to!

On the pull of the blockchain

Very finally, many of us experience the pull to write about steem – in fact the first rule of steem is to mainly write about steem – which is a consequence both of the last type of fragmentation – the fact that steem is continually adapting, but also because you cannot quite pin steem down because it’s complex, dynamic and there is the possibility that we can change it: even now I’m struggle to understand the SBD peg, and as far as I’m concerned linear rewards is unfinished business.

Final Thoughts

Steem is a truly fragmentary postmodern experience…. Despite it being a blockchain (and hence its having an ‘immutable structure’), this structure is dynamic, and it’s unpindownable, which makes for a truly fragmentary experience – we may be able to see where we’ve been (but not necessarily whose been there, and then only some of the processes which got us there because much of the steem story is off-chain), but there’s very little capacity to use this knowledge to inform us about where we’re doing, which is both fantastically enticing and utterly disturbing at the same time!

So if you end up feeling a little bit blurry round the edges after a day of steeming, that’s just because steem does have this tendency to make you lead your life in fragments, which can be hard on the head!