Matthew Dicks

Why do I use Twitter? Because I am a reader first.

Many authors have little use for the pretension of hermetic distance and never accepted a historically specific idea of what it means to be a writer.

This was a quote from a recent New York Times piece on why authors use Twitter.

I like it a lot.

The piece attempts to explain why authors use Twitter, quoting a handful of well known authors and positing several reasons for the desire to reach out via social media. 

For me, the easy answer is that Twitter allows me to easily connect and communicate with readers, critics, editors, book bloggers, writers, agents and other people in the publishing industry. 

A quick analysis at the people I communicated with through Twitter in the last seven days reveals six new readers, four book bloggers, the book critic for a national newspaper, two New York Times bestselling authors, one publicist, four authors who have yet to hit the bestselling list (but are no less impressive), three editors, two social media experts, three podcasters, three books reps and a number of friends and unidentifiable followers. 

These are people from around the world.  Norway, Belgium, Canada, Shanghai, the UK, and at least six US states.

They are people who have taught me a great deal, directed me to invaluable resources, made me laugh and supported my work. 

Without Twitter, there is little chance that I would have ever connected with any of these people.   

But that is the easy answer.

The real reason that I use Twitter is because I am also a reader, and as such, Twitter allows me to connect with other readers in order to learn about books that might appeal to me. 

Best of all, it allows me to communicate with the authors of some of my favorite books.

Just last week I tweeted as part of the FridayReads hash tag that THE POUT POUT FISH had recently become my daughter’s favorite book.

A few hours later, the author, Debbie Diesen (a New York Times bestselling author) tweeted back, thanking me for the mention of her book. We have exchanged a few tweets since that initial communication, and I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to hear from the author of a book that I have read to my daughter at least twenty times.

Imagine how exciting it would have been had my two-year old been a little older and could appreciate the fact that the author of her favorite book was so easily accessible. 

This is why I use Twitter.  Even though I am an author myself, the star power of the author has not eroded for me in any way.

And 2011 was a banner year in terms of star power.  Throughout the course of the year, I was fortunate enough to exchange tweets with dozens of authors including such household names as Chris Bohjalian, Jennifer Weiner, Jasper Fford, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood. 

Some of these were exceedingly brief exchanges, but others have resulted in ongoing conversations and near friendships (as much as you can become someone’s friend through Twitter).

Every exchange, regardless of length, thrilled me, and I try to remember this in my capacity as an author.  While I find it preposterous to think that a reader might find it thrilling to be able to reach out to me, I’ve learned as a teacher that it’s difficult to imagine the impact that you can have on someone’s life. 

I nearly leapt out of my chair when I saw Margaret Atwood’s tweet directed to me last year. 

While I don’t think anyone will be jumping out of any chair for me, I like to think that I might be able to bring a sliver of excitement to a reader who has taken the time to reach out to me. 

Weiner-Dicks agreement

When  it comes to Twitter, Jennifer Weiner and I are in agreement on many things, including this:

Finally, these are my pet peeves, but if your first tweet every morning is some variation of “I need coffee,” I unfollow. That’s not tweet-worthy, that’s more of a casual complaint for a spouse or roommate only. Same with tweets about the weather (unless you’re planning on changing it). Remember, you’re speaking to an audience — make it interesting.

The only difference:

I don’t unfollow. I see it was an opportunity to make a new enemy.

Martin Cooper kicked Alexander Graham Bell’s ass

One of my favorite people in all of human history is Martin Cooper.

Ever heard of him?

Cooper was a member of the Motorola team that invented the first cellular telephone back in 1973.

And while I am immensely appreciative of the convenience and joy that my iPhone provides on a daily basis, it is not Cooper’s inventiveness that I admire most.

It was the choice he made when deciding upon who to call first. 

For his first public cellular phone call in human history, Cooper took to the New York City streets and called his rivals at AT&T and inform them that they had lost the race to build the first functioning cell phone. 

The combination of New York’s busy street sounds and Cooper’s voice told the engineers at AT&T that they had been bested.

Now that is one hell of a phone call.

The perfect combination of comeuppance, spite, humor and bravado.

The inventor’s version of my four favorite words:

I told you so.

Can you even imagine a better phone call?

Contrast this to Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, whose first call was to his assistant in the other room:

"Mr. Watson—Come here—I want to see you.”

Alexander Graham Bell might have been a great inventor, but he sucked at understanding the importance of the moment. 

"Mr. Watson—Come here—I want to see you.” 

Is that the best he could do?

It makes me wish someone a little wittier, a little meaner or someone with a greater flair for the dramatic had invented the first telephone.  

Someone like the great Martin Cooper.

A waste of time well spent

I avoid most videogames.

I do not load games onto my phone.

I have never even seen a Facebook game.

As a kid, I spent hours playing the Atari 2600, the Atari 5200, various iterations of the Nintendo gaming system and PC games.

Not to mention the thousands of quarters dropped into arcade games over the years.

For a long time, videogames occupied an enormous part of my life. 

I’ve written about my gaming life.

I’ve complained about the videogames of today.

I even married a gamer of sorts.

I do not regret the time spent playing videogames.  It was an entertaining and challenging way to spend time with my friends and family.

But today, I have more important things that need to be done. I have goals to accomplish, dreams to fulfill and a family to support.

Other things have pushed the videogames aside.  

I still love playing videogames and will play with my buddies from time to time, but I have structured my life in such a way that the temptation to play cannot be readily satiated. 

No games on my phone.  No games on my laptop.  No gaming systems in my home. 

I have built my life in such a way that except for online poker (which is at least profitable), I cannot easily access a videogame.  

But occasionally, the Internet will intervene, breaking through my gaming firewall, introducing me to some online variant of the gaming I once knew and I will become briefly obsessed by a game. 

Sometimes it’s even worth my time.

It happened today. 

I suggest you give this game a try. 

This video made me laugh, but it strikes fear in my heart as a father and teacher, too.

My two-year old daughter can take my iPhone, turn it on, switch off the app that I was previously using, swipe three screens over to her selections of apps, and choose one.

She’s been able to do this for more than a year. 

And she doesn’t use the iPhone very often at all.  We use it to keep her still when we are changing her diaper or brushing her teeth, and we’ll also turn to it in our most desperate moments in restaurants and the car when everything else fails. 

I don’t mind that she is so proficient with the device.  The iPhone has actually helped her to learn all of her letters, expand her vocabulary, learn to count and distinguish between a hexagon and an octagon (something my fifth graders still can’t do). 

But it makes me nervous.  She loves books, and I don’t want that love to evaporate in a haze of touch screens and interactive media. 

We don’t own an iPad, partially because I have yet to find a real need for one, but also because Elysha’s mother owns an iPad, and I sometimes think Clara loves it more than she loves me.

The girl loves her some iPad. 

But I worry that the iPad and other interactive media distribution devices will replace her love for books in a time when it is critical for her love for books to grow.

I have seen what happens when a child spends more time playing videogames and watching television than he spends reading. 

I fight those battles every day with my students.

I know the challenges that lie ahead of the struggling reader. 

It is a trap into which I never want my daughter to fall.

I think this amusing yet frightening video demonstrates my fear perfectly: 

Picture equals words

Very cool.

And unthinkable just a few years ago.

More problems with Dicks

I recently wrote about my need to change my last name in the UK for the purposes of publishing. 

And while I am happy to be retaining my given name in the US and every other country where my books have been or are being translated (about a dozen at last count), it does create the occasional problem, as you might imagine. 

A good example is my name as it relates to Twitter.  Once a day, I use a search tool in order to determine if my name or the names of any of my books have been mentioned on Twitter within the past 24 hours.  Quite often a reader has tweeted that he or she has begun reading one of my books or enjoyed the book, and I am able to respond with appreciation. 

I’m also able to answer questions that the reader may have asked, offer to participate in book club talks remotely and begin the process of forming positive relationships with more and more readers. 

But in addition to tweets about my books, a Twitter search of my name often yields additional results:

• Women who are especially angry at men named Matthew and prone to pejorative remarks
• Men named Matthew or men speaking to men named Matthew who are proposing unhealthy, dangerous and complete insane activities with their genitals
• Men named Matthew making lewd advances at women and women making lewd advances at men named Matthew

To be honest, it’s a base, grammatically challenged and vulgar side of Twitter that I don’t normally see in my feed and one that I wish I didn’t have to see on a regular basis. 

But then again, I could have been named after my father, Leslie (Les) Dicks.

Or my Uncle Harry. 

Or my other Uncle Harry.

I can’t imagine what a Twitter search on those names might yield.

Please don’t tell me. 

Your sense of smell or your cell phone?

From a recent McCann survey of more than 7,000 people ages 16-30 across a variety of countries:

Given a list of things (including cosmetics, their car, their passport, their phone and their sense of smell) and told they could only save two, 53% of those aged 16-22 and 48% of those aged 23-30 would give up their own sense of smell if it meant they could keep an item of technology (most often their phone or laptop).

We all know how important technology is to young people, but a willingness to sacrifice one of their human senses to keep it shows just how intrinsic it has become.

I didn’t even have to think about it.  I would do the same. 

Without a moment’s hesitation.

Am I crazy?

Why videogames today suck

It happened about fifteen years ago.  I was playing a new PC game called Diablo with some buddies and liking it very much.  About an hour into the game, my character was killed by an arrow-shooting monster, and my head dropped to my chest.

Damn.  I’d have to start over.

“But, wait,” my friends said.   “No need to start over.” 

When a character dies in Diablo, he or she simply reappears back in town without any of the equipment or items previously accumulated.  And the lost equipment and items remain on the ground where your character died, so while it can be tricky to get back there without any weapons or armor, it is doable.  And you have all the time in the world to accomplish it.  

In short, the game has no risk.  There are no life-or-death battles taking place within the game.  It is simply a means of item-accumulation. 

And while I kept playing because my friends were playing with me, the joy in playing the game was gone. 

It’s why I eventually became a griefer, finding a way to circumvent the rules of the game in order to kill players (also not normally allowed) and strip them of the items that they had spent hundred of hours accumulating. 

The game needed genuine risk to be worthwhile.

So when I came upon this graphic illustrating the difference between the videogames of my youth and the games of today, it made sense to me. 

There was a time when dead meant dead in videogames.  When finishing a game was only possible for the most skilled players.  When you would literally be drenched in sweat upon defeating the game’s boss. 

Hell, there was a time when every game cost 25 cents to play, and that made the stakes extraordinarily high.  

But as videogames moved exclusively into the home and the videogame industry looked to expand beyond its base of hardcore gamers, it sought to create games that would appeal to a more casual gamer.  The new games allowed players to experience the fun of playing the game without having to make a serious commitment in order to become good.

The risk-reward was removed from most games, like Diablo. 

This is probably why I play significantly fewer videogames today.  It has nothing to to with age.

It’s all about the stakes, or the lack thereof.     

Henry Blake and Michael Scott: Thankfully not as intertwined as I (and many others) had feared

As The Office’s Michael Scott leaves the show forever, he boards a plane for Colorado and his new life.  The final image before the scene ends is of his plane rising into the air.

And in that instant, I thought about Henry Blake’s fate on M*A*S*H and was suddenly terrified that the writers of The Office might have decided upon a similar fate for Michael Scott. 

Henry Blake was the commanding officer of the M*A*S*H unit featured in the long-running sitcom, and in season 3, he finally received his discharge papers.  But the plane returning him to the States is shot down over the Sea of Japan with no survivors, thus killing off a beloved character at what should have been a moment of joy for the viewers.

The news of Blake’s demise shocked the viewing audience. 

In fact, the very next night on The Carol Burnett Show, the opening shot was of Henry Blake actor McLean Stevenson in a smoking raft, waving his arms, hollering, "I’m OK! I’m OK!"

Even though I had seen Blake’s demise in reruns, it still saddened me beyond description.  The thought that the same might be happening to Michael Scott sent a shiver down my spine. 

I mentioned this to my wife, but she had never seen M*A*S*H.  And then I wondered if anyone watching Michael Scott’s last episode of The Office had experienced a similar feeling of dread upon watching that plane take off. 

M*A*S*H ran from 1972-1983, making it too old for me to have appreciated during it’s original airing and too old in syndication for my wife.  But I watched the show in reruns on channel 38 out of Providence and loved every minute of it.

I’ve often said that it was the only good thing that my evil stepfather ever gave me. 

Sadly, I tried to watch some M*A*S*H reruns a few years ago and discovered that the show didn’t survive the test of time.  In comparison to today’s television, M*A*S*H is melodramatic, preachy and morally unambiguous.  It also contains a laugh track, which makes it sound overly earnest and dated.  

But I still love those characters and the memory of the show.

So I tweeted my thoughts of Henry Blake last night at the conclusion of The Office.  I wrote:

Terrified that we were going to have another Henry Blake moment as Michael Scott's plane took off. Anyone understand the reference? Anyone?

Within a minute I received responses from four or five people who had experienced the same feelings of dread, and by the morning, more than a dozen people had expressed similar feelings. 

This is the greatest of the Internet.  Twenty years ago I would have been alone in these thoughts, wondering if anyone else in America was thinking like me.

Not anymore. 

Before writing this post, I was responding to readers in Nebraska, California and Manchester, England.  All contacted me today through the unifying force of the Internet.  

And in the midst of writing this post, I received an email from someone in Minnesota who loved Henry Blake and also thought that Michael Scott might suffer a similar fate. 

Amazing times we live in.  Huh?