in a world where everybody's famous, does that make everyone a legitimate target?

I'm thinking a lot about suicide at the moment. Professionally, not personally, although, as for any emotive issue (and my work is, mostly, emotive issues) there is personal spillover. Very few (if any) people have lives entirely untouched by suicidal thoughts, feelings, impact, loss or report, and I'm certainly not on that list. So we're starting with:

Trigger alert - activate your coping mechanisms 

Like most people touched by suicide, I've created a practical accommodation which embraces the unthinkable and reframes it as something we can work with, help, treat. This idea is very important to me, even though it is entirely challengable, may not reflect other peoples' experiences and may not be entirely backed up by evidence. Technically, the term for this is a "cherished idea", and it's important to understand that cherished ideas attached to emotive issues are a point of vulnerability for the individual. Loss of cherished idea is a dislocating bereavement; challenges to them feel like intense personal attack. Even writing them down is risky. But nevertheless, here is my thought about suicide:

Suicide is a health crisis akin to a stroke or heart attack, where an interruption of normal function (in this case, of emotional self-regulation) creates a brutal deficit that is over corrected and/or corrected in the wrong direction which leads to a further abrupt adjustment, which also fails, and so on, and so forth, until the person's usual capacity for emotional self-regulation is radically incapacitated and becomes completely incapable of sustaining life. If the crisis can be managed, stopped, interrupted, paused or stabilised, this can create a pathway back to good-enough emotional function, and then the underlying factors can be addressed.  

This helps me personally think about suicide analytically, and in a way that won't cause me constant pain. It is a coping mechanism. You may have a different accommodation, or think about suicide differently. Whatever your accommodation is, I am going to be talking about suicide, so use it. you need to make sure that reading about suicide doesn't raise your own suicidality. Use mine, if yours isn't working too well.

Everybody's unhappy nowadays

Let's start by stating the problem. Children are anxious. Children are unhappy. This unhappiness includes suicidality. Some people say social media is to blame, and while the picture is certainly, as the saying goes a bit more complicated than that, mitigating the negative effects of social media seems a sensible enough use of time. I'm on it, lots of people are, and yes, there are other issues, and they are important. But lets concentrate on this one for a moment.

Everyone's a celebrity nowadays

This Guardian article, by well-known anti-social-media polemicist Richard Seymore, caught my eye, but you don't need to read it all, let me skip you to the good bit:

Less well known is that the rate of suicide for celebrities is anything between seven and several thousand times higher than that for the wider population. And now their breakdowns have become riveting social media spectacles, with celebrities often driven over the edge by supposedly outraged followers.

Yet if all of us are now celebrities – or at least all of us on social media – then that cruelty is also masochism. The thrill of the chase is accompanied by the thrill of realising that we are all at risk, all potential targets. Today’s bloodhound is tomorrow’s fox. So the more we extol the virtues we find wanting in others as we take them down on spurious grounds, from Natalie Wynn to Jameela Jamil, the more we are gleefully setting ourselves up for the same fall.

This idea, of everyone being a celebrity nowadays, is a fresh spin on Warhol's famous proclamation; "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." I remember, steeped in the DIY culture of the mid-90s, with its widespread (and quickly shed, should any actual fame come along) rejection of fame-culture and mainstream success, thinking: what rubbish, no: in the future everyone will be famous for fifty people.

The expanded social group

Being famous for fifty people is kind of cosy and nice. You can throw out the difficult ones. You can remember everyone's names. They are close enough to friend that they make you smile, and you can smooth difficulties. But fast forward five years and I was already wrangling 200+ contacts on one of the proto-social-networks, the ones that turn up in the histories of the early web. They weren't the easy list of fifty fans, either; there were friends who didn't like my work; fans who weren't my friends; interesting strangers, people I admired, people who admired me; friends of friends who might become friends; people I'd shared projects, crises, workplaces, interests with... and of course now even that many people seems like not really enough. With the advent of social media, now it's more like everyone is famous for 500 people, and our cosy house party has suddenly become a party large enough to require professional planning and staff.

We all need an entourage 

Which brings me to the obvious next point. If everyone really is marginally famous nowadays - Z-1 list, if you like - then what actual celebrities do in order to avoid falling into the various traps of of the over-scrutinised life (substance misuse, nervous breakdown, crippling anxiety, eating disorders, suicide, etc. and oh what a familiar list that is) could perhaps be applied on an individual level. For example:

• Bouncers, bodyguards, muscle, security  - These individuals (or attitudes) step between you and the slings and arrows of your over-enthused public. They deflect the eggs, mop up the milkshakes, report the stalkers and have firm discussions about what isn't OK, which is pretty much everything that makes you uncomfortable. Move along now.
• PAs, private secretaries, relations managers, schedulers - These are the ones who guard your time. They make sure that your you time is in place and the things that help you gets their due. Those things that won't help you develop or make you happy? They schedule them away and set up auto-replies and shortcuts that mean they won't keep eating time.
• Personal trainers, masseurs, therapists, nutritionists, private doctors -  This lot keep you on the good drugs and off the bad ones. They help you optimise your fitness, health and looks. They advocate for the needs of your body and mind. They insist on good food, adequate rest and absolutely forbid you to do anything that might unreasonably hurt, harm or disturb.
• Drivers make sure you get to where you need to go, they help you make it to the things you want to do and escape from the situations you don't want to be in. They listen to you decompress and play you soothing music in a safe space. They lose the paparazzi in Chinatown, pick up some friends for a jolly and find you a Waterloo sunset to watch.
• Butlers, minders, buddies and Persons Friday - These ones save you from you; they scrape you up off the floor. They suggest that some of your ideas may not be the best choice, for you, right now. They check that when you're on your way to bed, you get there. When you're up or down or stressed they keep an eye or give you space or intervene as needed.

These five types mesh to create a protective cocoon around the public person nowadays. They help you dodge some problems and sort out others. Chances are, if you have a good friend or a partner, or a kid, or whatever, you've probably played some of these roles for them, and felt the virtuous thrill of enabling someone else's social and emotional safety. But a moment of reflection; have other people played these roles for you? Have you played them for yourself?

Entourage issues and how to solve them

Celebrities attract problems entourage members, too, of course. Predatory therapists, black hole charity cases, quack doctors, knife-smile tabloid journalists, I'm-your-friend-honest dealers, high maintenance partners, poison arm candy, and spiky, fragile fame moths who detonate like social grenades. Aspects of celebrity life compress people who may have been reasonable in other contexts into these difficult, risky roles. Your own behaviour probably has a lot of impact on who becomes an invaluable Person Friday and who ends up selling you black thoughts, dodgy investments and heroin. Sometimes these problem entourage members can prove fatal.

So, another moment of reflection. Have you been part of the dark entourage for someone else? Can you recognise those thoughts in yourself?

The limits of learning from celebrities

There are lots of other things that famous people do to cope, of course; they give problematic interviews, become Scientologists, develop dramatic substance misuse issues, get plastic surgery, book themselves into weird clinics, write books etc., but a lot of these solutions are dysfunctional and/or actively risky unless you have a big fat money cushion to fall back onto. The celebrity industry also is a risky space to learn from, littered as it is by dramatic failures and cautionary stories.

But I would argue that in the world where everyone is experiencing some level of fame, then we need to look to the people who have managed that, badly or well, for lessons. Because whether you're famous for seventy year-group "friends" on Instagram, two hundred twitchy tweeters on twitter or five hundred geographically and temporally scattered social contacts on Facebook, you are famous.

So activate your entourage, wrap yourself round in support, fire the bad voices and work that fame.

Ten things that are killing the social web

In common with lots of people recently I've been seeing a slow fall-off in numbers of people commenting, participating, chatting and responding on my various social networking channels. Part of the clue's in what I've just said; channels. More channels spreads attention more thinly, and stops people reliably getting your news.

You drift apart.

This annoys me; when I first joined the busy rush onto social networking sites (2001, my archives tell me) I had a bold vision of a world where I could broadcast important information easily to friends; where they could pick it up at their leisure without feeling pressure to respond or react; where I could see day-to-day details of their existence and by this resist the slow erosions of time and distance that lead us, in five years time, to be strangers again. This was my vision; a social group where no one is left behind.

It didn't happen that way. Partly, that's down to human nature. Lots of people don't enjoy the fragmentary communication style of online contact; others see computers as work and socialise away from them. I've made new friends and reconnected with old friends and walked along the social connections to friends of friends pretty much as you're supposed to, but right now I'm organising a party and the situation is far from ideal. In fact, I'm probably going to need to send out an email, and then send out another email, just like I did in the old days, but with even less chance of success thanks to hair-trigger spam catchers.

The messages are up, but the number of relevant people listening is dropping off. Plenty of interaction, but increasingly with partial strangers, as if this were a communication mode no longer sufficiently privileged for actual friends. And there's no point in trying to write IMPORTANT in capital letters or bold or even blink some text or use any other attention! indicator, either: years of deleting spam has taught us that the more urgent something appears, the less likely it is to need reading.

So much for human nature; there are also a bunch of things happening in the evolution of the social web at the moment which are stifling communication (even though some are enabling it). Confused? Let me explain through the medium of a conveniently numbered list:

1. Richer environment
   It's a bit like trying to meet a friend at an Arcade combined with a Science Museum, gallery, Shopping Centre and Funfair. With so many shiny distractions around it's easy to miss something, especially when the first symptoms of offline crisis is online absence. Yes, your games, puzzles, ads, badges and prizes are lovely, but I need to go see my mate now, sorry.
2. Feature creep, usability decay
   Currently Myspace's music player is flaky and Facebook is only intermittently alerting you when you receive an event invitation. At the same time, both are expanding their capabilities like excited slime moulds, colonising thrilling new features, while crucial central systems decay and reorganise, forcing users into multiple work-arounds and unbudgeted and unexpected learning curves to a soundtrack of struggling, swearing and giving up.
3. Social Networking Marketing Experts
   Top of the social pile of the people trying to game the online social system are the people trying to build personal brand, leverage their online identity and create a buzz around [content]. They not only clutter my social space with idiot theories, annoying how-to videos and tedious single-insights posts, they also (and more insidiously) create nervousness among online freshers who are in a state about making a mistake; irritate and annoy regular users; and provoke veterans to throw up their hands and leave it to the Nathans.
4. Earn money from home!
   Somewhere in the middle are gangs of teenagers, marketing students and stay-at-home mums earning small amounts of money for brand blogging, SEO optimisation, buzzes made entirely by a stable of fake IDs, and all the other myriad methods of white-to-greymarket online advertising. It's impossible to resent anything that produces such low wages and some of it is useful information, but the constant murk of UGG boots, random restaurants and price comparison websites gets wearing.
5. Spammers, scammers, hackers, script kiddies and their ilk
   Bottom of the heap are the parasites who've trained us to ignore urgent messages, avoid clicking on links, and fear making friends with strangers. Who have distorted the development of websites so that vast resources are now poured into security and updating, rather than into improving the site for its users. Thanks to them, all websites are now less reliable, more prone to changes of service and more annoying. They are largely responsible for that slug of anxiety, paranoia and fear many people feel when they sign up to a new service or suffer interruptions or changes to a current service. It's driving people off the web, not least because there's no obvious way to punish the perpetrators.
6. Firehose of Me anxiety
   Some people select one channel and stick with it; others skip around doing a bit here, a bit there (often precisely because their friends are scattered across different channels). Almost everyone has an additional channel for rich media, even if it's only a Photobucket or a Youtube. While combining these channels into one, single complete channel is certainly possible nowadays, all but celebrities and massive egotists flinch from full channel combination, the unmediated stream of an individual's online existence. That much of one person at once is overwhelming, and feels intrusive; even if it is, often, things you do want to see.
7. Overwhelementation
   There is too much to follow. Too many cool things, nice people, fun events, neat new music and gorgeous art. Once the watched feeds get over a certain level, once the channels proliferate sufficiently, once you have above a certain number of elements on your page, following everything, reading everything, you either can't do it, or it stops being sociable fun, LOLs and gossip and turns into a joyless job-list, a round of sniffing posts to deal with and shout back at, grinding out your social existence like a grumpy prayer-wheel.
8. Intimacy drift
   On the social net, the professional is personal, strangers are friends and family are filtered; privacy settings came in alongside the crowd of old schoolfriends, colleagues and acquaintances building their instant social groups, and all of us too status-aware and/or open to turn down even a dubious social connection. But as friend-groups swell, trust diminishes; and no matter how heavily we filter, the awareness is always there that as soon as anyone gets annoyed or feels someone should know something, or is simply sufficiently motivated to press ctrl+c, ctrl+v, our privacy is toast. It inhibits, and forces a backwards march into an inner circle, particularly during times of stress when we need new connections and fresh perspective.
9. "Share this" --with your mum
   Sharing is a lovely idea, but enabling tools encourage oversharing, which leads to inhibition. The first step into any new application, social network or utility is nowadays increasingly likely to include a frantic dash through the settings, turning absolutely everything off, for fear that your skimming of small print has produced a cross-identity torrent of "x watched this", "X thinks kittens are cute!" and forced that most disagreeable of thoughts; Le spammeur, c'est moi.
10. Hesitancy of choice
    Most of the central services (Facebook, Myspace) want to take on the functions (photoposting, status updates) of the specialist services (Flickr, Twitter). By the time you've figured out what to use, the urge has often faded. This is why I often find myself using Tumblr, the blogging equivalent of bashing big buttons with little thought. But Tumblr's simplicity means I don't tend to pass on its pretty updates, locking them away from the bulk of my friends. As a result, my friends are --word of the moment-- siloed into channels and unable to mingle.

I'm aware that I'm listing problems without knowing solutions, and that it's only my opinion, and that I'm no trendsetter or important voice; but I know I'm not the only one posting things like "...tumbleweeds here..." right now. And, as it happens, I do have some advice, although it's not new, not rocket science, and not an easy answer to all your online marketing needs.

• Don't neglect your core functionality
• Build new features when you need them, not for their own sake or keeping up with [SNx]
• Engage with your marketing population and encourage them to enforce good behaviour
• Make it easy to share and not to share on a post by post basis
• Play nice; you'll win in the end