Welcome to the Virtual Expats Podcast, where we discuss how moving to different countries affects what we do online. My name is Stephanie, a first generation Italian American who feels more comfortable not fitting in in Asia, where I have been living more on than off since 2003 than in my own passport country in the US. In this podcast episode, we chat with Kelly Merck, a Texan expat who has lived abroad since 2011, first in Japan and now in the Netherlands. Her Twitter buyer says, a Texan full of furwer. Furwer is a German word that means a far sickness or longing for unseen places. I had to look it up. Noob knitter and clay thrower. Fairy godmother of We Are Expats, a project of XPat Archive, we are expats.org. We are expats Rokor account on Twitter is actually how Kelly and I first met online and connected over discussing things such as place, placelessness, social media-ness, and expat life in general. For those of you not familiar with Rogor accounts, they are rotating accounts for usually one person in that category, in this case an expat, tweets for a week. And then the account literally rotates to another person after that. And that rotation keeps repeating. Kelly started this particular We Are Expats Rogue Core account while she was a volunteer at the Expat Archive Center in the Hogue, where she is now their public relations manager. Outside of the EAC, Kelly is also raising a tiny human with her husband and somehow finds time to write about her geographic ponderings in her blog, Bullet Trains and Bike Lanes. If you have any comments, questions, or feedback on this podcast episode, please feel free to reach out to me in any social media platform or in my Gmail address. It's all the same handle. Steph Fuccio, it's S T E P H F U C C I O. Let's have a listen to Kelly's virtual and geographic story. Thank you so much, Kelly, for joining us on Virtual Expat Podcast. Hi, I'm happy to be here. Well, let's dig into your virtual life. Okay, so here's the thing, Kelly. At this point, about 10, 12 episodes in, we've gone chronologically from the beginning of when people generally start creating an online present, whether they realize they're doing it or not, to the current day. We can either go that route or we can go backwards starting from now and back to the beginning of your online-ness.
SPEAKER_03Which way do you prefer? I think the latter sounds fun. Yeah, let's do it. Let's start today and go backwards.
SPEAKER_02Excellent. So where are you today online?
SPEAKER_03Right now I'm trying not to be everywhere. I don't want to say I'm an early adopter, but I have and have had for a while a Facebook account, of course, and Twitter account, an Instagram account. Begrudgingly, I have a LinkedIn account. I deleted it and have come back to it just out of pure necessity, but I don't like it.
SPEAKER_02It's had a resurgence in the past few months. I don't know what's happened, but it's there people are talking on there now for some reason.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I believe outside of the US, the Netherlands has the highest user rate. And so when I moved here, I thought, great, I don't need this anymore, but nope, it turns out that I do. If you want to be a working person, then you got you gotta have it.
SPEAKER_02Wow. Okay, so Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, where do you fall on the Facebook decision?
SPEAKER_03I would say it's a necessary evil, at least for my position. You you have to have a Facebook account if you want to keep growing as an organization. Or if you want to like just maintain a five-toe, you still need a presence there. Right. And it can be kind of a challenge to work with. And on a personal level, I don't use it every day. I maybe only post updates on it once a week, if that. But I've been a Facebook user since gosh, 2004, since when it was only available to college students. Right, right. Um so a lot of my online life is actually tied up in Facebook. For all of its faults, there's still a lot built in there.
SPEAKER_02I don't think I had it in university because all we had was hot mail when I was in university. It was really, really, really, really the beginning. I left university at 2001 and there was barely anything going on yet. But I was a pretty early person outside of university to do Facebook and then got creeped out really fast, not by advertisers or information, but by weird friendship structures and things. So I went on and off a few times and then I've just been off for a few years now. But I'm feeling the pull now that I'm doing a lot within social media for different projects. I'm feeling the pull. There's a lot of groups that are doing good things. Yes, but they're behind that Facebook wall.
SPEAKER_03Yes. From a marketing perspective, it is it is unfortunately a uh a really great tool.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Like it or not. It's a great.
SPEAKER_02Have you gone on and off of Facebook or have you been on the whole time since 2004?
SPEAKER_03Nope, I've been on the whole time, especially since moving abroad. It's a lazy thing to do, but it does make keeping in touch with you know people back home and other countries that you've lived much much easier.
SPEAKER_02It does. I was just saying today, I I just very accidentally spent way too much time of the past two days on this international podcasting conference that I didn't even know existed until 48 hours ago. And they had 30 hours of different live events and different things and things. And I was like, everybody had a different, like each country, each region had a different social media thing that most most people used. I'm like, oh my gosh, I need somebody to come up with the tool that drags in all social media so I just go to one place. Yes. I need that desperately now. Right now. What a boom. And and if somebody does do that, they're going to be totally and completely, utterly rich and set for life. I think.
SPEAKER_03I don't necessarily disagree with that. I'm thinking like how, yes, how easy and amazing it would be, but also just it would really, really flatten the social media atmosphere in general.
SPEAKER_02Huh, flatten how?
SPEAKER_03To put everything in one place. Unless maybe I'm not totally understanding what you're saying.
SPEAKER_02I'm not sure that I am either. I just want to log into one space and see the people that I'm following. I want to see all the places that they're at in one spot. Oh, you mean physically? Uh no, just I like I have some people who I follow on on Instagram, but they're not on Twitter. Some people are on Twitter and they're not on Instagram. Right, right, right. Okay, so I want to I just want to log into one place and see everything they're doing. I have no idea what that would look like because those are just platforms, right? So yeah, I don't think.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I do think that would really flatten everything. And that that again, not that that's a bad thing, but it would just make being online and maintaining your presences just so much simpler.
SPEAKER_02But then again, like the uniqueness of the different platforms might be might go away then.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that was a definite compromise. I don't know. It's not like I'm going to plan this, I don't do that, but and they all have such different rules, like like the latest hubbub with you know who on Twitter gets to be expelled and who gets to stay, for example. There's just different rules to play in one area than that on yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02That's true, that's true. Ay, ay, yeah. So it's not just the different looks of the platform, but the different rules of the platforms, and then yeah. So this is probably a long time in the future. If ever. So which one do you spend the most time on for your personal use?
SPEAKER_03Personally, I go between Facebook and Twitter. I did not log on to Twitter at all this weekend. Probably because I'm so sick of current events in my home country that I just wanted to like unplug for a bit. And there's more happy cat photos and stuff on Facebook, for example. I get to see my friends' little babies on Facebook. I don't get as much of that on Twitter. Right. So I really I go back and forth. I prefer Twitter. I think it's because I maybe can be more anonymous. I do keep my my face and my name, at least my first name, on there. But there's just something about being connected to everyone else that's just kind of like liberating. Whereas I don't always feel like retreating into my little crafted Facebook world where everything is more curated. That takes a lot more effort.
SPEAKER_02That's very true. Yeah, I do find that my Twitter is much more interest group based. And my I don't have a Facebook, but I do find that my Instagram is more of the it's still interest-based, but it's more of the friend photos.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah, definitely.
SPEAKER_02So and when I definitely want to just go cerebral, I go on Twitter. Yes, when I'm not blocked. I live in China by the way, so I get I get blocked from Twitter way too often.
SPEAKER_03Uh-huh. I can understand that. The great firewall.
SPEAKER_02Oh my gosh. Oh, it's yeah. Has its moments. So LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. And for work, where do you find yourself the most?
SPEAKER_03Definitely on Facebook. I use Buffer, and I also have a couple interns. Um with them, I use Buffer to organize um a schedule for all of our social media accounts. And we have pretty much the same ones that I've already mentioned: Facebook, Twitter, uh, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Facebook definitely gives the most traction. Uh, we try and gain their algorithm to by by by posting at least once a day. And by posting, it's usually just like an interesting link about archives or about life as an expat. Um, sometimes we'll share little snippets from our collection. So that's really nice. I also have the volunteers going through our collection and finding things that they think are interesting and sharing it that way. Twitter is obviously not as a long form, so it gets less of that kind of activity for more visual things. Like sometimes, let's say there is an interesting quote from the collection, we might put it into Canva and make an image quote on there. So you can make it like an image, and that can get pushed out to Instagram as well as on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn. I was on maternity leave from the beginning of this year. And during that time, there wasn't, was she an intern or a volunteer? Someone who's not here anymore created an Instagram account for the Expatriate Archive Center. And I'm not sure it is where we need to be. Right. It's not how we are getting engagement, and it's not how we are getting new curators for any of our projects and not donors. Yeah. So professionally speaking, I'm thinking about trimming back.
SPEAKER_02Right, right. I definitely have noticed Instagram has some really interesting stuff that they're doing with the live streams and the Instagram TV that I haven't even looked at yet. But I've noticed I hit more people with the same interest when I use their hashtags than I do follow just following people. Like I'll I'll I'll I'll go through phases where I'll hit a lot of people. Like when I found like StudyGram or Chinese gram or Podstagram, like when I found like the right hashtag and it took a while to find the right ones, that's when I got heap, like a bunch of followers, and then it'd be nothing for a while, and then a bunch, yeah. So it's it's a it's a very different creature where it's Twitter seems to be like one person, one person, one person.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. And I spend again personally less time on Instagram than I used to.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_03I think I think for like a couple of years, there was a time when I logged in maybe once a month. I do it more frequently now, but even still, my my personal engagement is low. Not because it's a bad platform. Um, I think it's nice and reductive and simple and in in a good way. But it's just not where I have been. And so I I actually didn't know about Instagram TV. That could be useful for some things that we do.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, it's it's really and there's even more than just those. Those are just the few things that I've noticed recently. Most of the things that I've learned on Instagram have been in the past couple months, and it's been from watching other people use the tools and go, oh, it can do that. I was on Instagram when it was just pictures seven, eight years ago, and went, eh, that's okay. I prefer words, I can see pictures anywhere, I take pictures, I'm cool. And so I went off for a long time, but I kept getting kicked out kicked off of Twitter for different quote unquote security reasons, had to log back in and do my own process. And so, like a few months ago, I found out I can post to Twitter from Instagram, so I just started doing that instead of logging into Twitter. So now I I've I've been looking at Instagram a lot, noticing the new things that they're doing. Wow, that's so interesting. It is, and the the live streams are pretty cool. I'll log in to just post like a picture of the day or remind people that a new podcast episode's out, and I'll notice somebody that I actually follow that I like what they're doing is doing a live stream. I logged in yesterday and see an artist I'm following was like painting via live stream, and I'm like, I can watch you paint? Huh. Didn't even know I wanted to do that. Okay.
SPEAKER_03Well, I guess now that Facebook owns Instagram. That makes sense that that would be available.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, my Facebook stubbornness doesn't make any sense anymore since I'm now on Instagram.
SPEAKER_03No, it still makes sense.
SPEAKER_02Oh well, we are inconsistent people. Um, not us, but just humans in general. People in general, yes. All right, so let's go back so we can put the other end cap on it. When do you think is the time when you started to have an online online activity, online presence? What year do you gosh?
SPEAKER_03Oh, that's really hard to pin down. So I'm 33. I'm an older millennial, and I can remember a time when there was no internet, of course. Um, I was you know, young, young, like a child. Um but I mean, starting from like middle school perhaps, I was using search engines and portals.
SPEAKER_02Right, right, right.
SPEAKER_03For for like, you know, writing my school papers.
SPEAKER_02So jealous. So jealous. Yeah, okay, let's put a year on that and then I have a story.
SPEAKER_03Okay, let me let me think. Okay. I will say 1997. Oh my god, yes. Okay, I'm good, I'm fine. I mean, of course it's creates social media itself, but I mean, we we had dial-up, we had America online from the time I was maybe 10 or 11.
SPEAKER_02Okay. Um I would I had America Online when I was 21 when I first moved to Los Angeles.
SPEAKER_05All right.
SPEAKER_02And I remembered I was sober because I just moved to Los Angeles. And I I would constantly get new free discs in the mail, and I'd keep switching. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, if I just sign up with a different name, I can get another 10 hours for free or however much it was. So yeah. So okay, so you were searching online then, and it sounds like doing emails with AOL, but were you when did you start like putting stuff on, like posting or going on to groups or doing that?
SPEAKER_03I believe I had a blogspot.com. Yes. URL definitely by the time I was in high school. Okay. I wanted to say I was maybe 14 or 15, so that would be let's say 1999.
SPEAKER_02Gonna party like it's 19. I had to do it, I had to do it 1999. Okay, okay. So what were you blogging?
SPEAKER_03You know, I was thinking about this the other day, and what would I blog about? Part of it was things I was working on in my personal life, like not gossip, but um kind of going through like current events and like filtering it, like, you know, how however I saw it at the time. Like I remember writing about when Ronald Reagan died.
unknownWow.
SPEAKER_03And it's not like he was like a particular idol of mine, my parents liked him, but I just remember being like, okay, this is a name I heard growing up, but I don't actually know much about him other than the sound rights that you would hear from the news and stuff. Sure, sure, sure. And so I would do a bit of research and say, okay, this is my semi-informed 15-year-old opinion on Ronald Reagan and you know its impact on American culture. Maybe half that and then half silly, like you know, questionnaires and stuff that were super fun to do at that age.
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah. Love that stuff. It's still kind of fun. It's really fun. I see people doing those on Twitter and Instagram, and I don't quite spend the time to get them set up, but I love participating when people do them.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Something satisfying about being able to click and finish something that quickly, I have to admit. Do you post any text or writing or any blogish type things online for your personal personal life now?
SPEAKER_03I do. Um, I have one that I use occasionally. It's more of a long form blog, um, which is why it's you know not so so frequent. Um it's called Bullet Trains and Bike Lanes, and I made it soon after moving to Holland.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_03And there were just some I kept on comparing things in my life from Texas and Japan and Netherlands, and how differently they would approach certain maybe problems isn't the right word, just topics or yeah, like problem solving. Like the first thing I wrote about was about flood infrastructure. And it was soon after one of my hometowns in Texas, where well maybe not a hometown, but where I went to college. I lived there for seven years. It's called San Marcos, Texas. And so it flooded in 2015. And Texas is like, if you live there, it is notorious for having really, really poor flooding infrastructure. They just like they refuse to spend the tax money to bolster their cities and their communities. So I was like, okay, this bad thing happened. Now I'm living in a place where they are famously like proactive against flooding. And also Tokyo is a massive city that is entirely made of concrete, and they have their own flooding concerns. And so I wrote a two-part piece about how these disparate communities just deal with it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Wow. Well, it's interesting that you're in the Netherlands now because wasn't that built on reclaimed land? A lot of it is, yes.
SPEAKER_03There's an entire province called Flavoland that is just like a giant boulder. I think it was drained in the 1950s, perhaps. Right. And so it used to be part of the North Sea, and then uh the Dutch government built one very long dike. And they created, they separated the North Sea from the Iselmere, which is basically it's now it's a lake, and they drained part of that lake and maze an entirely new province, and now it has cities with like a few hundred thousand people on it. They just they they literally just like abrupt, like it's crazy. It's amazing.
SPEAKER_02It it is truly amazing. Nothing. It does it rain a lot in the Netherlands.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_03It rained this morning on my commute to work. Of course it did. Yeah. Of course it did. Of course it did. Um, I do I do cycle to work. It's about a 15-minute bike from from home to the office, which is pretty great. In Japan, it was an hour door to door by bus and train.
SPEAKER_02That's it. I had 90 minutes when I lived in Tokyo each way. Oh, that's a long way. Oh, I got these so many podcasts and audiobooks. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that is the nice thing. So it does rain a lot. Yeah. Do they have possible flooding? No. Not typically, because their infrastructure is so amazing. There's floodgates, there's dikes. They've done a really good job to prevent flooding from outside forces, like the sea. Right. And they're continuing to work on flooding from inland, like from rivers, for example. So the city of Nijmegen had, which is in the east of the country, is closer to the German border. And they just rebuilt the riverbed basically and gave it more room to flood. That's fantastic. See, why is it? It's a park when it's dry and it's it's it's a floodplain when it's flooding.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. See, why don't more places to I've lived in so many places, and not just overseas in the US too. I've lived in so many places where the smallest amount, like an hour of rain, and uh if you're walking or bicycling, you're just you're going through puddles. And it's like, why is this why is this happening? And it wouldn't be the first time it'd be like this is the rainy season. It rains for a few months every year now, and I'm still biking through puddles. Why is this happening? Kelly, it sounds like both in high school and now you're you were doing kind of not current events so much, but things that were happening around you and just kind of diving a little bit deeper into them. Does that sound right at all?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I would call them contemporary events, things that are happening, yeah, at at the time.
SPEAKER_02Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, that's A good way to put them. Okay. So we've got BlogSpot 1999. When did you start using social media? You mentioned Facebook was 2004. Was that the first one?
SPEAKER_03Yes. I was also a reasonably early adopter of Twitter, but that didn't show up until I think 2008. Okay. And then the same with Instagram, maybe I think Instagram showed up in 2009. And I was one of a very few people on that. Amongst my friends, at least.
SPEAKER_02Sure, sure, sure.
SPEAKER_03Um, to to start it.
SPEAKER_02On when you first started on social media in those first few years, who did you see yourself talking to? When you signed up, who who was your intended audience? On Twitter? Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, all the just in those early years.
SPEAKER_03Okay, Facebook is easy to answer because it was so closed to it was still the prominence of college students. And at the time there was this almost like suspense, like every week or every two weeks, Facebook would roll out another like wave of colleges that could join Facebook. Wow. So I I had friends up the road at UT Austin, for example, who were on it well before I was. At that at that campus. And then I was only a sophomore in college. So I went to have some high school friends who I knew were at schools that already had quote unquote Facebook. So that's how that started. And on Twitter, gosh, it was so much fun back then. I wasn't really looking for anything. It was kind of like, oh, this is like the world. I can I can talk to anybody.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Were you looking for specific, were you looking for key, did you type in like keywords? Were you looking for specific people? Like where how were you branching out to that anybody space?
SPEAKER_03I kind of remember when hashtags became a thing. Because of course I did start with Twitter. I don't remember exactly if Twitter was created and the folks at Twitter said, Oh, hey, by the way, here's this thing called a hashtag and try using it. I think that kind of had to like be built up on itself. Yeah. So word spreads, and gosh, I think when I joined, it was very much like the joke of like, ha ha ha, I'm having scrambled eggs for breakfast. Here's a photo of my meal. Like people did not know what to tweet about. Kind of like haphazard community of like just kind of stumbling into people and oh, you seem kind of interesting. I guess I'll follow you.
SPEAKER_02You were in Japan in 2011, Netherlands to Netherlands 2014. Was was Japan in 2011 the first time you lived overseas? Yes. Okay. Did you, and here's the heart of the podcast right here. Did you notice any change in how you were using social media or anything you did online, blogging and whatnot? Any change when you moved overseas, from how you were using it before you left to how you used it after you left?
SPEAKER_03Absolutely. I began to use both as a tool to be more connected to my new community. Quite a bit of my definitely my Twitter feed is left over from Japan. Um, so I Japan tweeps, so to speak. Uh both both personal friends that I have made there and people who just you only know from like the Japan Twitter sphere. And same with Facebook. I kind of used it when you meet someone in Japan as a Japanese person. Most of the time they won't have Facebook, or at least this was the case in 2011.
SPEAKER_04Sure.
SPEAKER_03If it was someone that was more internationally minded, it was more likely that they would and that they would ask to connect with you. So I still have quite a few friends in Japan left over from that, but I also used it to just learn about my new home, like find restaurants, for example, find volunteer opportunities, really just social outlets, just anything. That was kind of the great thing about Facebook living abroad. Yeah. Which is one of the reasons I didn't get rid of it. Even when it was so stupid annoying at times. It's still incredibly useful.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well, Tokyo's a pretty intense giant city. Did you know Japanese before you went over there? Not really. Yeah, the langu the language is a bit daunting. And so, and it's it's not the international city one might think hearing about Tokyo in the West for a long, long, long, long time. So there's very little English, and uh people don't speak a lot of English there. So yeah, I used it a ton when I was there to try to find stuff that I wanted to go do in person. So I get that a lot. You've been in the Netherlands now for about three and a half years. Are do you speak Dutch by the way?
SPEAKER_03A little bit, yeah. My my Japanese in Japan was much better than my Dutch is here. Really? Oh, yeah. Most Dutch people speak uh fluent English. So it's like the barrier is oh much lower. And we kind of joke here in The Hague and definitely in other cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam, that if you try and speak Dutch, like at the grocery store or at a restaurant or something, and it's obvious to the Dutch listener that you are not totally fluent, they will just switch to English. Like, oh, you're okay, let's make this easier for everybody, and I'll just go ahead and speak.
SPEAKER_02A few of you then living in the Netherlands, do you still find you're using social media to to get acquainted with where you're living, or have you reverted back to some of the ways that you were using social media prior to moving there?
SPEAKER_03I still use it to keep in touch with my community. By my community, I just mean like specifically the city of The Hague. Like they have a pretty good English language social media program. But also local businesses, of course, friends and groups that I think are interesting. There's a couple really cute like local farms and and they'll have like they'll announce dates on their Facebook page of like come pick strawberries on this Saturday, like June 14th or whatever. And I probably wouldn't have known about it otherwise.
SPEAKER_02So you're using social media to keep in touch not just with people back home, but people in like in the place that you're in now overseas?
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Most of my Dutch friends do not use Facebook that often. Like they have profiles, but they rarely engage with the uh network itself. Yeah. Maybe occasionally they will like a photo, for example, but they don't like use messenger, they don't use a lot of it.
SPEAKER_02What do they use?
SPEAKER_03For keeping in contact, WhatsApp is most popular.
SPEAKER_02Oh, I just started on that today. Literally today. Today. Yeah. Well, somebody did a comp in the conference, the podcasting conference, somebody was did a presentation on WhatsApp in ours. Apparently, it's a big thing not just to do like Google Hangouts, but to do like WhatsApp things. And so they're also doing like different WhatsApp accounts for their different podcasts, and it pushes the publication of the podcast to people, and then you get that annoying little red number that tells you every notification. So you can't ignore it, right? So it's not just an email and all that kind of stuff. So it supposedly increases people clicking and going on to your podcast and stuff. And and doing the WhatsApp and ours live, I guess it's sort of like Instagram's live. I don't know. I just I just I was watching it going, man, I have missed so much social media wise. Like what? This stuff moves so fast.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, like WhatsApp is is weird. Like it's not social media, but it can really act like social media at time.
SPEAKER_02So I started my first group today, and I have no idea how to do anything because we're in China, we're incredibly uh WeChat oriented. 90% of what we do, 95%, 100%. Well, it's more every day, actually, because the more other stuff gets uh gets blocked. But there's so much within WeChat that you can do. Like everything we can't do that we would need a VPN for exists in some form on WeChat, including things that don't really exist. Like we have digital payments like no one else in the world. It's just crazy. That's cool. The yeah, the variety of things we can do. So they use WhatsApp there. Okay.
SPEAKER_03Yes. If I need to get a hold of uh one of my colleagues or a Dutch friend or whatever, or a group of friends, then definitely use WhatsApp.
SPEAKER_02Is WhatsApp more person-to-person? Is it groups? Is it a mixture of them? It's a mixture.
SPEAKER_03I have not organized a group personally, but I've been included in them. Like if someone is just like, hey, there's an event happening in my village, and I am roping you all into this group to send you a mass invite. And you're welcome. Like people do leave the group, like let's say they're busy that day or whatever, then they will leave. So it's not like once you're in a group, you have to stay. I've also heard of uh small businesses, usually restaurants, that will have like a menu that's only available on WhatsApp. And if you want to order food, you have to WhatsApp them, like you don't call. Yeah, you you would find you'd get this number and you'd say, like, hey, like, what's the menu today? And they'll say, All right, I'm making you like take a chicken masala. And if you know, if like how many would you like? Like I said, I've not used it, but I think it's a really interesting way to use WhatsApp.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Oh yeah, there's lots of services on WeChat that I still don't know yet. Because some of them are available in English and some of them are only available in Chinese, and I'm still at a pretty low language level. Um, but apparently there's like every service you could imagine from like haircutting to tailoring to maids to fitness trainers to people like who cook your meals and drop them off, like everything that can happen, apparently you can order through some service somewhere on WeChat.
SPEAKER_03That's amazing.
SPEAKER_02It's really crazy. We really truly don't need other apps, but since WeChat's primarily used in China, I still like seeing what the rest of the world is doing. Yeah, of course. Yeah, so I go offline, but it's not that I need my home country stuff, I need more than just the the place I'm living in.
SPEAKER_03Sure, sure.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03What an interesting dynamic though.
SPEAKER_02Oh, it's crazy. It's crazy. Because in the Western media, it's it's often portrayed as if you know, all this is cut off and there's nothing. But there's not nothing. There's a ton of innovation happening, but it's all right here, and the rest of the world can't see it because it's done. I mean, you can download WeChat and you can get on and and do all these things, but I'm not sure how much exposure you'd have to where to sign up for things. A lot of things you sign up for by scanning the QR code and without having that near you. How would you even know who to add and that kind of thing? So, but but there's there's a a parallel universe being created.
SPEAKER_03One of my best friends, she was my college roommate, she is a uh graphic designer uh and a marketer. And she just finished, I'm sorry, just visited China uh last month. So she went to Hong Kong and also went to Shenzhen. And she I talked to her yesterday about it, and she was like, oh my god, Kelly, it's like a whole different playing field of like marketing. It was like this is the future of branding. These people know what they're doing. It's amazing, it's dynamic. I'm so excited.
SPEAKER_02There oh yeah, no, their influencers are huge here. Local Chinese influencers and foreign influencers. There's there's there are podcasts about influencers, like what it what they do, what they can do, what they should do, like all kinds of tips and things and marketing things just for China. Like that's how gigantic this market is, and that's how booming the economy is. There's gigantic middle class, and they are more than happy to part with their money. It's something, it is definitely something. But let's get back to you. When you first got on social media, you said you were just kind of exploring and looking and seeing who's there. What do you want to get from social media when you go on it now?
SPEAKER_03My first thought was familiarity, which seems totally counter to what most people use it for, and really what I use it for most days. The Facebook world is one that you create, you curate what's out there, and I guess to a to a degree it's the same on Twitter, and definitely the case on LinkedIn, but I'm not gonna even touch LinkedIn. That's like I don't engage with it at all. Um I guess Twitter is still somewhat unexpected. You just open, you log into Twitter, you don't know what you're going to see. Just because something may be news in one place doesn't mean it's going to be news on my Twitter feed, for example. Let's talk about contemporary events this weekend, just to kind of date the podcast, so to speak. Dr. Christine Blossey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh. They both had their hearings in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee in the US, and that was all over my Facebook feed. And I knew it would be, but I also knew that it would be to a lesser degree on my Twitter feed. Like I knew it would be there because I follow some Americans and they would be talking about it. Large swaths of my Twitter feed, it just doesn't matter or it doesn't register. So I guess like I look for familiarity in a sense, but when it comes to Twitter, that familiarity is kind of like wrapped in like a veneer of like I still don't know what it is.
SPEAKER_02Does that make sense? So are you saying that Facebook is more of the a curated place with only what you want to see?
SPEAKER_03That and because I know the people on there, they are my friends, I know them personally, so I know their own, I know their social media habits. It's predictable that I will see X many people have this many opinions on a given topic. So that's what I want to see, then I will go to Facebook. But it's almost like when I say familiarity, I just that's not what I mean when it comes to Facebook. I think with with Twitter, it's like the unknown is the familiar there.
SPEAKER_02And this is interesting because you hear a lot of people, especially when when Trump was collected, and I hate to say his name, but it exists as a moment in time. Um people were talking about Yeah, it did happen, it's still happening. But people were talking about, you know, we get into our social media circles and we we hear each other. And I forget the phrase that people kept using for that.
SPEAKER_03It's like an echo chamber.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, people were talking about our echo chamber. So would you equate what you're talking about with the familiarity as kind of like your comfortable echo chamber that you come in and out of? Yeah, yeah. You're conscious about coming in and out of it because I think people were saying the problem was that people didn't realize that they were only spending time in the ones that were super curated.
SPEAKER_03Sure. And there are some like algorithmic issues that like we we do not have much control over, of course. Sure. Yeah, that goes for for Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and really any social media podcast.
SPEAKER_02Anything. Yeah, that happens to be a lot on YouTube too.
SPEAKER_03Ugh. The worst.
SPEAKER_02I'm gonna cross off my question about YouTube right now. Literally went, ugh.
SPEAKER_03Well I use it, I use it to like look up knitting videos, like how to knit something. Like that's what I use it for.
SPEAKER_02That's really good for help videos, yeah.
SPEAKER_03It is. It's really helpful. But that's that's the extent of it. Of my use anyway.
SPEAKER_02Well, Facebook is Kelly's familiar place online. Podcasts have turned into mine if you hadn't noticed. I'm still juggling three podcasts because I'm a crazy woman. Virtual expats that you're listening to right now, expat rewind, and changing scripts podcast. Two of those, as you may guess, by the titles are Xpat Life Focus. And for this shameless self-promotion, I want to tell you a little bit more about the Xpat Rewind podcast. We have been experimenting with different artifacts from XPAT's first year. We looked at expats, photos, a Twitter feed, a book, a poem, a song, lots and lots of different things. And what we finally decided is that books seem to be where we're going to pitch our tent. We've already figured a flip bit over in that direction, but coming in July, we're completely and 100% switching over to books about the place that the expat is living in. The first book focused Expat Rewind episode came out recently with Evo Terra, and we'll have another one on May 29th. We also have some more surprises for you for season four, which will start in July of 2019. But I don't want to spoil all of the changes for you. So if you are interested in different aspects of Expat Life, please do come over and check us out on Expat Rewind. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_03So, yes, I think that definitely when it comes to Facebook, like I don't know how people can't not think it's an echo chamber. And it doesn't mean that it's an echo chamber in that you only hear things that you agree with, but for again, all for algorithmic reasons, if you like certain groups, you're only going to see certain content. That has no bearing on you know other people's opinions, people who you personally know, of course.
SPEAKER_02Except you can block them or unfollow them or unfriend them or whatever the on is in the social media.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's that's true. Um, and there have been fortunately only a very small few cases when I've had to do that when someone's just like obviously a terrible person and I didn't know it before. But with Twitter, I recently, maybe like three months ago, I forget what the event was in the news cycle that made me just so disgusted. There's so many of them. I just like I went through my my my personal following feed and I unfollowed a bunch of politicos and journalists. Figuring, you know what, if if it's that important of an opinion, I will see it. Yeah. And I and I followed more scientists, more artists, more cartographers, and you know, just interesting people.
SPEAKER_02I did that right after Trump got elected in my Twitter. I was exclusively on Twitter at that point, and I did that immediately because I was like, look, I'm leaving the country, I'm starting a new life again overseas, and this just happened, and I was really sad. And I'm like, I can't see the news for a little while. I need to not know, which is terrible, but it's what it I just needed like a month or two. And I did the same exact thing. I was like, I'm looking for interest people that aren't political, super hard to do, but it they do exist. So, or at least they they only show that part of what they're interested in. So, yeah. When you put stuff on social media now, what what do you want it to tell the world about you?
SPEAKER_03I'm a mundane person.
SPEAKER_02That's your byline.
SPEAKER_03Okay. We're all mundane people. We may live abroad. But we all eat, we all sleep, we all like have jobs or whatever. I'm just kidding. Like we're we we're all we are all also extraordinary special people as well.
SPEAKER_02The older I get, the more I think, my god, I am so boring. I am so boring. Story of my life.
SPEAKER_03It's nice, it's so nice to just be like blah. I try to be exceptional all the time. Imagine how exhausting that would be.
SPEAKER_02Exhausting. I was listening to this great um Janine Garoflo. I I don't generally listen to comedy, but for some reason in my audiobook stream, there it was, and I was like, Yeah, sure, why not? She's funny. Oh my god. She was like, Look, I don't want to live my life like it's the last. It's exhausting. Every day living every day like it's the last is exhausting. I want to live it like it's the first. I want to go slow. I want to do things at you know, my own speed. And I was like, Yes. Someone who speaks my language. Yeah. I'm like, I feel like I spent my 20s going, carpe diem, carpe diem. And I'm like, I'm tired. I've done a lot and it's still never enough.
SPEAKER_03I fall asleep on the couch now.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_03The couch is my friend. I actually I really enjoy tweeting about uh food. I don't do it that often, but like it's kind of a joke with myself that like I am a I am a cookie monster. Oh there's like there's always cookies and like chocolate and stuff here at this office.
SPEAKER_04So like I'll just make a joke about like I'm the only one here at the office and you left me alone with the cookies.
SPEAKER_02Oh, okay. Not to bring work in, but if you were to rejuvenate the work email, those cookies would get you guys some traffic.
SPEAKER_03Oh, probably. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Just saying hashtag cookiegram, you're on. Oh right. Cookie Graham. Oh yeah. Oh, I do I do what you do with cookies with coffee, and I follow so many people who do stuff, lots, lots of coffee in my feed.
SPEAKER_03There is a I wouldn't call it obscure, but it's it is kind of obscure and it's not often used, but there's a Twitter account about cakes at archives. Oh like why people who bring cakes to to work at archives. Which is something that we do frequently. Like whenever someone has a birthday or whatever, like there will be the cake. And our street office manager will take a photo and she'll put it on the buffer to like push out to our very social media channels and she will tag Archive Cake and it just like just tickles me. But there's a Twitter account for such a niche thing.
SPEAKER_02I I gave up social media judging a long time ago when somebody told me I started following people who were doing like language vlogging videos on YouTube, got addicted, and then one of them told me during an interview, because now I have to do a podcast about learning languages, he told me about StudyGram on Instagram. And I'm like, what the heck is Studygram? And he said, Oh, people post pictures and videos of them studying. And I'm like, why would I want to see people studying? And then of course I go on there and I look at these, and it's like stationary heaven, it's like uh bullet journal heaven, and I'm sitting there mesmerized by other people's study methods, embarrassed to all heck, but there I am, like, this is amazing. I love this feed. I'm learning so much right now. Oh no, you have no idea. And I was like, okay, so judgment goes. I I can't even judge the people who have it their own, like their pets that have Instagram and Twitter accounts and Facebook accounts, judgment goes gone. They have their child is their Facebook picture gone. No judgment. Uh-uh. I can't do it. I am now at the lowest end. Study people study. It's just the most ridiculous thing, but it's so fascinating. It should not be interesting to watch. There should be more interesting things to watch. Websites. So pre-going overseas. Before you went overseas versus when you went overseas. First time to Japan. Oh my god, you went to Japan as your first place overseas. Talk to me about internet speed. Was there a big jump when you went, or was it about the same?
SPEAKER_03No, no. Like I was actually really disappointed. Really? Oh my god. Or you know, if there was a market difference in the internet speed itself, yeah, I don't remember it. However, my husband and I joked about how long it took just to get internet, period. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It took like three weeks. And before we went, I had visions of like, you know, benevolent robots like roaming the streets of Japan, just like spraying Wi-Fi everywhere. And I was like, what? Three weeks? We went through, I think, three seasons of Law and Order and like five Jigsaw puzzles.
SPEAKER_02So apparently you went from Texas to Japan. Yeah. So apparently the internet in Texas was better than the internet in San Francisco because I saw a huge jump in speed. Um I've never been someone to kind of test the speed and remember the numbers, but I remember it being a lot more.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, neither.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, I just noticed how long it takes to like download a podcast, download an audiobook, watch a YouTube video, that kind of thing. And it just was, it was like I didn't even notice the download time. Whereas in San Francisco, I'd be like, I'll come back in a few minutes, see what happens, kind of thing.
SPEAKER_03Wow, that's pretty cool. Well, to be fair, I it's been a while, so I just may not remember that part of it.
SPEAKER_02No, no, no. See, here's the thing, San Francisco was kind of at the forefront of all that. And so they've got when you're the person that's the innovator, you're always the person that has to maintain first, and nobody maintains anything. So they're probably slower than the rest of the country with all of that. So that's probably what happened between California and and Texas.
SPEAKER_03Well, that's possible. And maybe your your expectations are just different in general.
SPEAKER_02It could be, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Could be a lot of things. Again, I don't pay attention to numbers. I just kind of go, oh, that's fast, that's slow. I know what that means. Well, when did you live there? We did we worked for a company that did three-month contracts. Oh, well, you worked in it. Were you what were you were you teaching or doing something else?
SPEAKER_03I was teaching. You're teaching I didn't like I'm not I'm not a teacher, but if you're not fluent in Japanese, then teaching is like the way to go.
SPEAKER_02If you want to live there. Exactly. We we worked for Westgate Corporation. They at the time they only did three-month contracts, three months in spring or three months in fall, but that was it. They didn't do year-round stuff then. So we kept doing that between other contracts when we needed something between contracts. So we did it the first time intentionally to see if we wanted to live in Japan long term. And uh Tokyo was a bit much for me. It kind of taught me the maximum of the population I want to have in a city, and so we decided not to stay. And uh, which makes no sense is I sit in Shanghai, just just slightly below Tokyo Yoko population size, but bigger geographically. And then the other time, and we did that like four or five more times. We started 2010, was the first time, and then over the course of like five years, we were there like three or four times between other contracts.
SPEAKER_03And it was not all in Tokyo, or was it?
SPEAKER_02No, the first time was in Tokyo, and then after that, we we learned that they did job, they they also had schools in Nagoya, so we were in Nagoya three times, and then the last time was kind of an accident because of a contract somewhere else falling through. And so we ended up going to Tokyo, but we were in Kawasaki in this commuter town, so it didn't feel as bad. Um the morning crush wasn't as bad. So I guess technically it was two times in Tokyo and three times in Nagoya or something like that. All right, yeah, yeah. But like 2010 to 2015-ish. Um websites that you used before going overseas versus websites that you used after. What that I huh or types of websites or usage, just we're kind of trying to tease out any differences.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So one that I used a lot when I lived in Austin, but was using less of because it I didn't like it as much, but was still useful, was Yelp. Uh Yelp was just not a thing in Japan, at least at the time that it may exist now. I don't know. Netflix. Netflix had not been to Japan yet when I was there. Hulu. Wait, did we have Hulu? I think we had very limited. I think I think we had to have a VPN to watch Hulu because it's it is still like you need to be in the US. I think websites that are pretty US centric, of course, are the ones that fell away first.
SPEAKER_02Was we're in either Japan or in the Netherlands, other than WhatsApp, were there any other websites or apps or things you did online that are specific to those places that you started to use?
SPEAKER_03The messaging app in Japan that is really popular is Line. That's L I N they have the best stickers. That's why I enjoyed it. Stickers are really awesome. But really, outside of Japan, like not many people use it. I think maybe it's expanded to South Korea a bit and possibly China.
SPEAKER_02I don't know about China. Some people in Thailand used it too, but I've only been on our vacation, so I can't think too much about daily life. But I did notice it was like line pay was on some cash registers and stuff, and I saw some people using it.
SPEAKER_03Okay, okay.
SPEAKER_02But um, yeah, no, the stickers in WhatsApp so far look like yellow smiley faces. That's it. That's it, that's all they have? I think so.
SPEAKER_03I guess I just stick to emojis for the most part.
SPEAKER_02I don't really look at the stickers. Oh, there's fruit and sports stuff, and see the ones we have on WeChat are actually really cool. I was already kitschy before this, but oh my gosh. There's like sticker groups, like I'm in a sticker group where all we do is share on WeChat, and all we do is share stickers, and you can download new ones and share different ones. People say, Hey, I need like I need uh like a Valentine's Day sticker, and people will just start posting front of them for them. That's awesome. It's just crazy. Hold on, let me see if I can find the sticker group. It's just absolutely crazy. So I've I've taken to having entire conversations and stickers, it's really new.
SPEAKER_03Well, it just looks like they're they're gifts for the most part.
SPEAKER_02Pretty much. Yeah, well, some of them are moving and some of them are not, but you can also create your own. Like you can take a picture and make your own sticker. It's it's a bit addictive. It's hard to go back to straight text after this. I'm way too visual. It's so reductive. It is, but it's so fun. Like sometimes when you're just yeah, you're so like there's a million things going on, and somebody does something awesome, and you just get to do like a quick high five picture instead of actually thank you so much for all your hard work. It's just like, ah, there you go.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02Going back online. Do you find yourself talking to people online, either for work or play, however you want to answer it, differently than when you see them in person?
SPEAKER_03No, I don't think so. Perhaps one of my friends could tell you otherwise, but I I don't think so. I try and be genuine, if polished, on and offline. Maybe like because I am a public-facing person for this organization, I refrain from like, you know, heavy cursing, for example. Right. Or like really, you know, being very, very, very opinionated about a specific topic. That's something that maybe I would probably be more comfortable with, like in a group of friends, but I don't think I'm really alone in that kind of thing. I think that I'm a super confrontational person, but I also am like secure in my thoughts and opinions, and I know how to back myself up. I just uh for the time being, I'm choosing not to wade into those waters because I am a marketing and PR person. So but as far as like actual like just like friendly engagement, I think I'm pretty much the same. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02On and offline. At any time from when you started, let's say like started using social media 2004-ish to now. Uh, did you have any period of time where you met people online and then met them in person?
SPEAKER_03Yes. There's um one favorite tweet that I have in particular, Anthony Davis. He is part of my Japan tweet circle. I've met him twice. And actually, not in Japan. I we were we became friends when we were both in Japan, but um every summer he comes to Europe and does like just a round of language schools. So he spends two or three weeks in the Netherlands, I think for the last three summers. Before that, he's in Spain. He goes to a couple other places, I think. But I've met him twice. And both times we meet we've met for beers and just like talked until the cows came home.
SPEAKER_02I love those conversations. Do you pre-going abroad and post-going abroad, do you do you find that the time you spend online or on social media is more or less about the same? And I'm guessing this will probably be skewed by your work as well.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. I'm trying to separate the work from my life. I'm less likely to use social media at home. I actually took the Facebook app off of my phone for two years, and I only put it back on recently because of my job. So for so I I would take small measures like that to curtail how much time I spent. Not that it was an actual problem. Yeah. Like I I have a six-month-old son, and if he's crying, I'm not gonna let him cry because I'm like, you know, looking at Twitter on my phone or whatever. Um it's not a problem, but I just want to be more purposely mindful. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have you ever seen apps?
SPEAKER_02I just heard recently about those um apps that will track how much time you spend online and on which apps, those kinds of things, like on a daily basis. Have you seen or heard anybody any of those?
SPEAKER_03Heard about I've heard of them and I would actually really like to try one, but I'm also kind of scared. Ditto. Yeah. I'm not scared, but like intimidated.
SPEAKER_02I I don't think I need I want to know at this point. Because I yeah, I only work part-time right now, and so like a huge part of my stuff is doing promotions for my passion projects, which inevitably I have to do online because they're all online based. So it'd be really hard to tease out that quote unquote work versus just looking at fun stuff, but even seeing the numbers I think would be terrifying. Like how many times, like somebody was telling me they the average person checks their phone 120 times a day, right? I can't even fathom that. That sounds like a lot.
SPEAKER_03It does, and it is a lot. I'm actually very good about not checking my email. Social media is a different story, but uh email, I'm pretty good about like just if it's important, or like if it's important, they'll call me. If it's not important, it can wait till tomorrow. I just sometimes I go whole days without checking my email on the weekends at least. Has it always been like that, or did you kind of yeah, for the most part, I think that if I'm expecting something important, like if there's an if I've applied for a job, for example, or like submitted a news article, or just any kind of something that I've written, then I will make a habit of checking more often. But generally, those exceptions aside, I yeah, I I think I've always just been kind of easy on email.
SPEAKER_02I only got my first smartphone, I think, in 2012, and I've always had smartphones with really horrible battery life. So I've I've had the joy of just turning my phone off for long stretches because I'm just like, eh, I don't really feel like finding a plug, so I'm just gonna turn it off. And so it's just kind of been a blessing in disguise. So I'll just be like, I don't need it for the next three hours, I'm just gonna turn it off and I'll be fine. But then when it is on and I'm doing something that is media oriented, I do jump around from app to app to purpose to purchase. Yeah, yeah, and that's where it gets kind of crazy.
SPEAKER_03This I'm I'm thinking of a friend who who I knew in Japan. She was also American on the same teaching program that I was on. It's not really social media specific, but she did her dandest to live without a smartphone. Like she had an iPod, and it also meant that she had a Skype telephone number, so that would like be pushed to her iPod if she was at the time. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty, pretty smart. Yeah. However, it meant that and this is in Japan where like things run on time. If she was going to be late meeting us, then she had no way of telling us if her if her train was late. And there were points when we were like, all right, we gotta leave her because she can't, she has no means of telling us if she's show up or not, if she's going to be 15 minutes late, half an hour late. Yeah. So I was having this conversation with my husband about how like the smartphone and in some aspect social media has affected punctuality in the last maybe 10 or 15 years. If we're running late, you can just like text a friend and be like, I'm sorry, we need 15 minutes late. Whereas before you had smartphones, you had to either like make it your beeswax to be on time, or like leave the house for a beat. Or if you were on the receiving end, you would be like, Okay, well, how long am I gonna wait?
SPEAKER_02It's so true. And canceling within a few hours, I feel like has gotten more acceptable.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And general flakiness. And and sometimes I'm happy when people do it because I accidentally book too much for the week, and sometimes I'm like, oh, I really wanted to go do that. Yeah, but I I I don't know. I it's probably it's probably good and bad all at the same time. But yeah, it's definitely changed changed scheduling quite a bit. Do you tend to post more stuff on social media in real time as it's happening or after the fact?
SPEAKER_03After the fact.
SPEAKER_02How far after the fact?
SPEAKER_03Like a daily or a few weeks or maybe like a day or two. That's definitely not months. Part of my job, I need to be, you know, reasonably punctual. So if there's an event or something, then I gotta, I gotta push it. I gotta, it has to be out there. Sure. Of my personal life. I guess I I I delay, but not too long.
SPEAKER_02Do you feel that your work and marketing has affected your desire to be on social media? Has it made you want to be on it less?
SPEAKER_03Not particularly. I think I think if anything, it's made me be more choosy in how I use it. And I was already relatively choosy anyway. Like, for example, let's say there's a news story or a link that I find interesting. I rarely just post the link. I like having something to say, at least, about why I think it's interesting or why I think it's important. So rather than just reading something and pushing it straight to social media, I try and like chew on it and make sure I have the right words. And I think marketing at least has really helped. Those inform one another. I do it in my personal practice, and that informs how I market, and vice versa.
SPEAKER_02Well, it's no secret that I suck at social media. I post sometimes, I don't post sometimes. I post a lot of pictures and I post a lot of things not related to the podcast, and I just have fun with it. But it is not the best strategy, I'm told, on getting more listeners for the podcast that really do need your help, seriously. Here's what I'd like you to do. If you would, please take one minute and send the virtual expat podcast to one person. Just one person that you think would enjoy listening to these kinds of conversations about changing our places changes what we do online, our online persona, our online tasks, or what we do on social media in different countries, you get the idea. You can screenshot the podcast on your podcast app and send it to them. You can just post it on social media and mention one person and say, I think you'd like this podcast. Or you can just email someone at Steph Fuchio S D P H F U C C I O dot we bring W-E-E-B-L-Y.com and say check out the virtual expats podcast. We click on where most podcasts are. And if we're not, please let me know and I'll make sure we get listed there. So you could also just literally just call someone up or send a text message and say Virtual Expats Podcast, check it out now. However you do this, I really appreciate you mentioning to one person who you think might be interested in this podcast. This podcast. Thank you so much for your help. So, Kelly, you're a very conscious social media person, but I run across a lot of people, I'm not gonna badmouth anybody, but I run across a lot of articles online and things where people, how do I put this, kind of complain that social media is doing stuff to them. Why do you think they feel kind of victimized by this inanimate creature?
SPEAKER_03Is it inanimate though? It's a network that's made up of a whole bunch of other people.
SPEAKER_02But could it do anything without our participation, our conscious participation?
SPEAKER_03Oh, no, absolutely not. I mean, we are consciously participating in a network, like you say, and um we we cannot affect the things that happen to us, but we can choose how we react to them. So I I sympathize with people who feel like like I definitely have those days where I'm like, okay, I logged into Twitter and it's just too much. And it's not because of Twitter itself, but because of you know the things that people are sharing. Maybe some people I've seen really noxious like opinions or not even opinions, just things that happen in the real world that I'm not prepared to see that day.
SPEAKER_02So do you think it's the amount of information available or the intensity of it that can sometimes come across?
SPEAKER_03Our brains are amazing, but we are we are not built or not trained really to like absorb all of that stuff. That's trauma that's worth knowing about, but I think it's reasonable to really either need to take a break from it, you know, to take it in doses.
SPEAKER_02And I'll I'll include myself in this for sure. We do tend to include the extremes of our emotions and experiences, the really happy stuff and the really, really not happy stuff, and the really downright dangerous or scary stuff, and not a lot of the in-between banane stuff. Maybe that's why I like study gram so much. It's not happy and it's not suppressed. It's it's that in-between stuff. It's the mundanity. Exactly. I swear this is the theme for my 40s. I'm just going with it. It's it's mundane time. It sort of feeds off itself, right? Like we're sending out extreme versions of ourselves, and then we're reading too much of other people's extreme versions of ourselves. Should we try to stop doing that? Or is that just what the platform is for?
SPEAKER_03I don't know if that's what the platform is for, but it's definitely what it begets. I mean, it's it's it's almost like a self-perpetuating cycle, right? There's definitely the argument that Twitter has like zero incentive to clamp down on like its most uh challenging voices, shall we say, because of the interaction, because of all. And it's like it's stuff that I think any normal person would see and be like, this is disgusting. Why is this person sharing this information or this opinion? But then you know, people respond in equal measure. And I try also not to be one of those people. It's okay to be disgusted and not have to say something about it all the time.
SPEAKER_02Well, you have in your curated comfortable space on Facebook, I have on YouTube now. And when people aren't producing enough stuff for my brain to my brain wants more, I'll go on over into trending, and then I instantly. Regret it because I'll see more of the extreme, less mundane stuff, and I'll be like, why are people doing this? Why are so many people watching this? And I'll be kind of uh not what we're using our little computers for.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I try and not use the trending tab on on uh Twitter for that reason. Although I admit that when there's breaking news, for example, I don't go to Facebook. I go to Twitter for all the bad opinions and and misinformation. I mean, that's it's where to go.
SPEAKER_02No, it's so true. It's so so so so so true. So you haven't taken a break from Facebook. Have you taken a break from any social media like consciously a few months, a few weeks?
SPEAKER_03Yes. I actually took a break from Twitter.
SPEAKER_02How long is that for?
SPEAKER_03A few months. I don't remember exactly. So 2011 was an odd year. So in in the span of one month, my father died in a plane crash.
SPEAKER_04Oh my god. Sorry.
SPEAKER_03His oh, thank you. It's okay though. His spiral was the day before my wedding, and then two weeks after that, we moved to Japan. So that was the summer of 2011. It was just a lot to just like sit with and digest. And there was it took me months basically to just really sit with everything. But soon after uh my dad died, he or I I made the conscious decision for some reason on Twitter to just like not go there. I just wanted to be more present, I guess. And it's easier to not be present on Facebook than it is on Twitter for some reason. I guess it's because Twitter is so like live action, or it was at the time, like when it was still all chronological feeds. So I think I left Twitter consciously, and it was really not nothing that had to do with Twitter itself, but more of like a turn in words. Twitter was the space of people that I don't personally know.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_03And so that was the first to kind of go on the back burner. Whereas on Facebook, of course, I know those people. They are my family, they're my friends, they're still my support network. They were there were at the time, especially. There were people that were checking up on me and sending me messages and posts and stuff. So I wasn't going to abandon that.
SPEAKER_02No wonder you haven't left Facebook. That's an amazing resource to have during a series of events like that, like to have that cushion, especially when you're moving overseas for the first time on top of everything else. I wouldn't leave Facebook if I were you. I'm almost tempted to go back on now hearing.
SPEAKER_03Well, it's a testament more to the people in my life than to the classroom.
SPEAKER_02That's true. And that's I guess that's part of what semi-confuses me when people blame social media, is it it is what we create it or what we mold it into. So it can't be doing things to us. We're kind of doing it to ourselves. But I find myself going down rabbit holes in the different places I do spend online too. And sometimes we're getting out of that. So yeah, I just it's tricky. Well, do we do we need some sort of internet education?
SPEAKER_03I mean, we kind of just start absolutely like like some kind of literacy.
SPEAKER_02Right. When, where, what age do we start? Who decides what to put in it? I don't know.
SPEAKER_03Definitely a task for educators, which is not me. I would start. Gosh, children are screen time so young. Whether their parents want them to or not, they just get exposed to it just by being around the house. My son, last week, for the first time, like I don't have a digital camera, I use my iPhone. Uh so that for the for the first time, he registered that when I was holding up the phone, that I was that was for him. He didn't look at me when he was smiling, he looked at my phone.
SPEAKER_02Wait, you said he was six months old?
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Whoa. That's exactly. So I'm not like facing the screen to him. He's not like mesmerized, like, ooh, he's seeing the back of an iPhone, but like he somehow knows what it is when I do that, what it means. Wow. And so I I don't know what an appropriate age for teaching children like internet and social media literacy is because they just learn so fast and so early, you know, whether we want them to or not. Right, right. You have to be total Luddites to protect your children from computers.
SPEAKER_02Oh, absolutely. Computers, phones, tablets, I mean, all of it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Computer games, like there's so many different forms of it now. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe off early and often, I don't know.
SPEAKER_03I also feel like consent needs to be a part of that. You it's just you it's never too young to teach your children about consent. Not only like with their bodies, but with their words, when it's appropriate to say things, when it's not appropriate to say things, yes, that they don't they don't owe anybody information about themselves. For example. I'm just kind of like unpacking this on my own thing.
SPEAKER_02No, you've got to point. And I think that's part of why I like that the internet is leaning towards video right now, because I feel like if we can see each other, we're less likely to do the stupid things we've started to do online with our words. Because people yeah, but but it's not it's not everywhere and it's not for everything. But I think people kind of forget that there's somebody reading that. The words they're saying are affecting someone. That's a really good point. Yeah, I feel like there's there's something because I taught university for a bit in the US, first year writing freshmen, fresh out of high school, and they were lovely people. They grew up with the internet, they grew up with things in their pockets, but they didn't have off switches. Not that it was a problem in the class because I'm kind of a control freak and we were too busy, but the difference between how they treated people on social media and how they would talk to their classmates when they were working on an academic task would like it was just too almost too fluid. Like productivity was second to kind of clicks and having fun and showing trying to show videos or talking about the weekend, or like there wasn't really a switch for the I don't know. It was very strange.
SPEAKER_03So they don't really know how to separate one part of their life from the other, basically.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it kind of felt like it. It kind of felt like again, not bad kids at all. They were lovely, lovely people, but it was just like a really different environment.
SPEAKER_05No.
SPEAKER_02I don't know. It was very, very weird. And and yet the ability to critically search for like an article, even if it's like a newspaper or magazine article, is readily available and not behind any sort of academic wall. And like, you know, think who wrote this, why did they write it? That kind of critical thinking skill that wasn't super strong. But going and finding entertainment and games and finding their friends and those kinds of things, that was really strong. Like it's like they had skills, they just weren't the skills they needed to do these tasks.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I definitely think that media literacy needs to be a big part of a compulsory educational requirement. At least at least starting in high school. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02If if not before then, I don't know. Because they have access so early now. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And to so many, so many different things. And how do you how do you know what's real not to go on the fake news things? But how do you know what's real, what's credible, what's what's supported financially by some sort of special interest group and those kinds of things? I mean, we have to think like tease through that as adults all the time.
SPEAKER_03Sure. I'm I'm just always so surprised when people in my own, specifically on Facebook, my own social circle, will just share things without thinking about it. And I'm like, if you had taken 20 seconds to like bother and verify that, you would see that it's clearly wrong, or like part or part of it is unverified. It's like you are you have any college degrees, you do what for a living, and you're still like, oh, oh you just got me thinking about something.
SPEAKER_02Okay, here's a new here's a new app that needs to exist. You know how when you're about to delete like a Word document or or something online and it gives you that screen. Are you sure you want to delete this and you have to click yes or no? There should be, here you go. There should be something where when you're about to share something, it should say, are you sure you want to share this? Or do you really think this is good news? Or like something not so mean. That one last one was kind of wrong.
SPEAKER_03Please check your email and press the confirm button.
SPEAKER_02Is this what you want the world to read or to associate with you? Or do you want you want the world to do you want this information to be perpetuated? Get us to think, not just instantly share, share, share, but to think, does this need to be seen by more people? Do I need to share this with the people around me? Does this enrich people's lives in any way, shape, or form? Even if it's just to be silly or fun, but to not do damage. We need to create that button. So the internet is messy, social media is messy. Do you think we'll end up cleaning this up and organizing all of this stuff in a way that makes more sense in the future?
SPEAKER_03Really don't want to be a pessimist, but I just my first thought was no. Yeah. I don't want to say it's in no one's best interest because it's in almost everybody's best interest to do so, but we are so like eager to monetize everything. And I just like, where's where is the uh market-friendly, I guess, attitude for something like that?
SPEAKER_02What's the go-to search engine in the Netherlands?
SPEAKER_03Oh, Google.
SPEAKER_02Google, Google Netherlands, right? Yeah. Is it any more organized than the messiness of the US version?
SPEAKER_03If it is, it's because of European privacy laws. Oh, right. Which I actually really appreciate. So it's I don't know that it's organized better necessarily, but it does prevent a lot of uh duplicates uh or like multiple links showing the same thing. And they're like with if you're gonna search for someone's name, for example, um, at the bottom of the Google page it will say something like the search may reveal only entries that like fit these following privacy laws.
SPEAKER_02It's funny because as much as I'm behind the firewall in China, copyright is more like a question mark after it. It's not really it exists on paper, but it's not really followed. Yeah, so laws exist, but they're not really followed. So it's like everything's restricted, but it's really not. So I find um protections like that really, really interesting, and I'm semi-envious of them. Although sometimes I like the chaos here. I don't know.
SPEAKER_03So there can be comfort and chaos.
SPEAKER_02There there can be, yeah, yeah, yeah. As long as there's it's not 24-7. Final question. Keep in mind the focus is kind of geographically when we move overseas, do what we do online, does what we do online change? With that in mind, what questions are missing from this interview? What should I ask for the future?
SPEAKER_03I'm always really interested, and this is what I write about, so I guess that's why I'm interested, in how people's sense of place can change. The more places you visit and live, the more refined your sense gets, the more things you may learn to notice.
SPEAKER_02Is it about the number of geographical places?
SPEAKER_03Does the number of geographical places affect just how I guess that has really not much to do with online lives necessarily, but your sense of place and uh like how you can approach that perhaps like some in some intersection with social media or your online persona as you move around the world? Like, how does that change? What do you notice about the places that you live or that you occupy? And does that ever translate into you know, social media, your online self?
SPEAKER_02I think I bring up the travel writer Pico IR way too much in these interviews. Have you ever read any of his stuff?
SPEAKER_03It's been a while, but yeah.
SPEAKER_02I might have sent this to you. I don't remember his YouTube, no, it's not YouTube. He did a TED talk, but he's written about it a lot. Uh his uh, like what is home?
SPEAKER_03Yes, you just sent it to me.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so here's what I wrote so far. Tell me if this is kind of along the lines of what you said. Um, how does your sense of place change online as you move around the world?
SPEAKER_03I would move online and so okay, so how does your sense of place change as you move around the world? And how would that like intersect with your online self?
SPEAKER_02You know what I'm gonna ask you next, right?
SPEAKER_03Ha, that question.
SPEAKER_02Yep. With your online world. All right, let me ask you this then. How does your sense and it and and if need be I can also answer it? I'm not gonna put you through anything I wouldn't do myself. Okay, how does your sense of place change as you move around the world?
SPEAKER_03Okay, I would say, because I have a master's in geography, that I'm predisposed to notice certain things about you know where we live in the first place. And I have a grasp at least on like certain concepts, like placelessness, for example, and how super interested in that, by the way. Yeah. Yeah, it's such an interesting concept this is placelessness. So personally, I think that the the greater number, like quantity-wise, of places that you live will greater inform your perspective and your sense of place or placelessness. Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_02Not only does that make sense, I think you stole my answer.
SPEAKER_03Oh like I lit I literally started a blog because I just like for months after we moved here, I just kept on thinking about it. Like I would see something and then I would compare it to what I knew in Japan and what I knew in Texas. And really, like as far as expatriate or immigrant life goes, like living in three places is really not a lot. And it's not like what I have to say is super valuable or super insightful. Someone else has thought them before.
SPEAKER_02But it is valuable, and it probably is, judging from what I've heard so far, insightful. At least that's my my opinion. That's my opinion. Well, thank you. But here's the thing: it doesn't have to be so many places, as but I think it's important the places that you have lived have been very different from each other, and I think that can bring out something in and of itself.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02But placelessness. Do you feel less American with each place? Like more global, less American? I've heard people say that sometimes.
SPEAKER_03I don't know how to answer that. There are some ways in which my American identity is amplified. For example, writing social media posts for the archive, I might include an idiom that to me does not register as American, but it is. So there are times when like my Americanism will just like you know, unexpectedly show up in small ways. Um I still make it a point to vote in as many elections as I can. I have no desire to get rid of my citizenship. But on the other hand, I don't want to move back, at least not right now. We have a very comfortable life here. I don't really know that I would consider myself a citizen of the world type. I guess I am, just by dint of having lived in so many places and understanding what it means to live in places, but no, I'm I'm still pretty American. There are some parts that I have shed as well along the way. I still wish I could be very friendly, like my friends and family and other Texans are, but it's just not done here. It was really, really jarring to move to Tokyo and have to be like, I want to smile at everyone, hey guys, what's up?
SPEAKER_02And we didn't do the second part of that question. So the first part was how does your sense of place change as you move around the world? You did that. How does that intersect with your online world?
SPEAKER_03Well, like I said, I created an entire blog to basically like process my my own thoughts about this. Maybe not in real time. There's one I've been kind of sitting on for a month about placelessness. That's really the biggest thing. I do try and actively engage all geographic parts of myself online. So I have Texans I follow, and other Americans, but specifically Texans. It's funny how like there are some states like Texas is one, but like there are Texas first and an American second. Yes, yeah, California's like that too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I have my Japan social media life, and then my Dutch. And I try and interact with them in somewhat equal measure, but I can't I can't imagine that for anyone who follows me, it's terrible, all three are terribly interesting. Like a Japan tweak, for example, probably does not care about my life here or the life I had in Texas.
SPEAKER_02But that's just the way it is. The blogging that you're doing now, is it on is it still on the bullet trains and bike lanes site? Yes. And do you follow the Being Tokyo Road Core account on Twitter? Of course I do. Of course you do. That was a silly question. I will delete that later.
SPEAKER_03I do. Although I had I moved away before it was a thing, I believe.
SPEAKER_02Right, right, right. Yeah, I don't remember when it started, but it's just I have such a love-hate relationship with the thought of staying in Japan longer and and possibly retiring there. There's things I really like about it, and there are things that I think would drive me crazy, and I'd end up changing my mind after moving there. So watching that feed, I get super nostalgic and start wanting to plan the permanent move that won't happen.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's a pushy.
SPEAKER_02It's yeah, it's it's challenging. I'm super interested in this placelessness aspect. Is there anything you can recommend for our listeners in case they are equally interested in that? Are there any folks that you follow that talk about that a lot on social media, in addition to yourself?
SPEAKER_03The one thing I can think of is, and it's it's really more academic than like social media oriented, but the geographer Yi Fu Chuan, T-U-A-N, he was kind of like the pioneer of this concept of placelessness. And there's two kinds of placelessness. There's like the kind where, let's say you're at a McDonald's or a Starbucks, and like most McDonald's and Starbucks anywhere in the world feel like most McDonald's and Starbucks pretty much anywhere else in the world.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And that's not all of them, of course. I've been to some unique McDonald's and Starbucks. But you know, a Starbucks in Shanghai is going to be probably mostly the same as a Starbucks in New York City. So that's one kind of placelessness. And another is just kind of like the ambivalence of a place. Like they do not try to have any outstanding characteristics.
SPEAKER_02So placelessness is more literally for places than for people. Is that in my understanding?
SPEAKER_03I think it I think it's both because you cannot have a sense of a place without a person to feel that sense. And a sense of place is totally different, like for every person. Like I'm I'm talking smack about, I mean not smack, but like about how McDonald's and Starbucks are the same the world over. But there could be someone who is like, no, there are distinct differences. Look at the menu, look at the seating arrangements, like, and they would have a valid point. Right. Right, right, right. So placeless to me is not necessarily placeless to someone else.
SPEAKER_02Is placelessness as a term used mostly in a negative way, positive way, or just mutually descriptive?
SPEAKER_03I would not say positive, unless, of course, you are like the McDonald's designer. Fair enough. And you want it to be placeless the entire world over. Then it's a good thing. Because you want to cultivate what it feels like to be in McDonald's, no matter where you are in the world.
SPEAKER_02Or on some level, an airport designer.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, some airports you're like, oh, I am definitely in this airport. And some of them it's just an airport with an airport McDonald's and an airport Starbucks. Right. I would say that the term is widely used either as a negative or just a neutral observation. And I think academically it's probably more meant to be neutral.
SPEAKER_02Right, right, right. See, it's interesting because at first I was thinking I was putting my lens on it and thinking maybe, like you know the term third culture kit. I was thinking maybe it's kind of a third culture kind of label. But it sounds like it's a much bigger meaning than that.
SPEAKER_03There could be something to that.
SPEAKER_02It sounds weird to say, but I like thinking about this stuff, both the online stuff and the the expat stuff and what happens to us when we move around in both places. It's even though people have traveled and lived overseas for a fairly long time, it's increased. I well, it no, it not I think. It has increased a lot. There's a lot more of us doing it, and I think that's a lot more voices of people that can translate what that means to them and what's happening and what they think and what they're experiencing.
SPEAKER_03And I want to record all of them. I think you're right. My mom uh fully supports like my life abroad because she was a military brat, so to speak, and she just she enjoys travel, she lived abroad as well. And so she told me that when she was in high school and college, like the options for them were like, you know, the military or the Peace Corps. Like there just wasn't this world of like, you know, graduate from college and go teach in Thailand.
SPEAKER_02I graduated in 2001 and I wanted to work overseas, and so I would when I was interviewing. With companies, and I graduated at almost 30. I took a while, and I really knew what I wanted after graduation. And I was like, Look, I want to do this, this, and this, and this. Can I do this with your company? And they're like, Well, you can't work overseas for until you're like 10-15 years into working for us. And I'm like, Why would I want to wait that long? So I yeah, I I ended up uh bumping into some folks in a hostel of all things and hearing their stories because Europeans are so much more savvy about traveling the world than Americans are for a number of reasons. They have access to other countries right there, et cetera, et cetera. More more vacation.
SPEAKER_03The barriers are a lot lower for sure.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. Gap years are kind of normal in some places and those kinds of things. And and I was hearing how on how little they could travel on financially and how many opportunities and like casual work things. And I was, what am I waiting for? Without stumbling into that, I don't know. I don't know what would have happened. There's all of this out there, and I don't think a lot of people still don't know that there's more than just the business traveler that lives in their, you know, well-deserved but isolated kind of bubble in the society that they're living in, and then they go back home a couple of years later. There's a lot more to it than that.
SPEAKER_03And there's like this like the fuzzy world between definitely an expat and definitely an immigrant.
SPEAKER_02I hate the term expat. I tried to create a new term and I put it in my SEO and I tried to like I did a whole episode defining it and all the stuff. Yeah, nobody used why would anybody use it? I get like 20 downloads. Why why would this take off? Like there's like I'm trying to describe this population of people that nobody talks about. And so why would they start using this term for about it? You know, just so I had to end eventually use the word expat because that's someone people are comfortable with. So in order to relabel stuff and to redefine stuff and to educate stuff about what else we're doing out here, I have to use the term that I hate.
SPEAKER_04Yay!
SPEAKER_03I get it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, but there it is. So if that's the worst thing that happens with this whole project, then that's pretty good. Good luck to you. Yeah, thanks. Thanks, thanks, X, but seriously, thank you so much. That you're welcome. There's a lot to think about with what you said. Thank you very much for Kelly for being on Virtual Expats. I really appreciate it.
SPEAKER_03It was an honor and a pleasure, Steph. Thank you.
SPEAKER_02Three thank yous coming your way right now. Thank you very much for listening to this virtual expats episode. Thank you to Kelly Merks for joining us, and thank you to Damon Castillo for providing the music in the background of this podcast. If you like his music, which of course you do, you can find more at Damon Castillo.com. Don't worry, all that information will be in the show notes or on our virtual expats.podbean.com website. Damon Castillo is a talented musician based in San Luis Obispo, California. You can find more of his music on that website, and trust me, you want to listen to more. Thank you so much for joining us on VirtualExpats Podcast more soon.
SPEAKER_00At Pluralsite, they believe everyone should have the opportunity to create progress through technology. Pluralsite is a tech workforce development company that provides the solutions that high-performing engineering teams need to tackle today's biggest challenges. Whether you need to build the skills, individuals, and teams to tackle mission critical projects, drive cloud transformation, or help software teams ship reliable, scalable, and secure code, you can harness the collective power of hindsight, foresight, and insight with Pluralsight. Check them out today at Pluralsight.com slash vision.
SPEAKER_03Membership fees apply after free trial. Cancel anytime.
SPEAKER_01You know what's wrong with health and fitness? You weaponize it against yourself. Why didn't you go to the gym today? You're so lazy. Ah, why did you eat that? You have no self control. Stop it. At Beachbody, we think training and caring for your body in a way that works best for you should be about loving yourself. Let us help you without all the judgment. Here's how.com to claim your free membership and start feeling great.