Why Feedback Matters

The snow is swirling, everything is shut down and Associated Content selected one of my videos as feature content! I'm exhilarated, I'm full of ideas and for the first time things that I'm uploading to cyberspace are coming back to me!

I know people who are able to churn out work and are complete when they click submit or send the email. I am not one of those people. I need feedback! I thrive on comments and knowing that my writing has reached a person.

Feedback doesn't have to be positive for me to feel the reinforcing effect of someone else taking the time to notice what I have done. Writing is communication and feels empty when I have no response. It is the lack of interaction that made me drag my feet and take my time investing myself in online publishing.

Writing online there is no tangible product. No book I can hold, no newspaper that I cut a clipping from. Somehow pasting a link into an email feels like a little kid jumping up and tugging on peoples pant legs "Look at me!" pasted links seem to scream!

I am a product of the digital age and have had a computer in my house as long as I can remember. My father's excitement when he brought home our first TRS-80 and the thrill of getting our first hand held scanner which never really worked for anything larger than a business card were part of my growing up. I spend hours typing lines of coded basic programming into the Color Computer 2 from Radio Shack that was nicknamed CoCo long before html was imagined.

After forever copying program lines like "2650 If yes then GOTO line 12 if no then GOTO line 2660" a single wrong keystroke would cause the program to fail and every time I instructed CoCo to run I half expected an error message to take over the monitor screen. Somehow I didn't mind because I was creating something and it was giving me feedback.

The computer was talking to me. Telling me that something was wrong and I had made a mistake but it was feedback. The computer communicated with me prompting me to make corrections and praising me by actually running the silly program when I entered every character correctly.

Seeing charts and graphs of page views was cool but when I see that 1,000 people clicked on my article I have no idea who they were or what they thought. It's all ambiguous past tense and not very fulfilling. Comments on the other hand tell me that a real person connected to what I wrote!I am working hard to communicate and comment to my cyberspace neighbors and I hope that you will do the same. The truth is, comments make the world keep turning!