2011 Year In Review

I’ve recently passed the one year mark of when I decided to focus all my efforts on my highest passion: psychological resilience. This post is meant as a succinct update for what’s happened in my first year in regard to resilience as well as my passions for dance, entrepreneurship and writing.

Research Experience: This time last year, I did not have a single hour of research experience. Since then, I have volunteered as a Research Assistant at the Brandeis Emotion Laboratory for one year. This opportunity has opened me up to the world of research. It’s exposed me to various parts of the research experience: collecting data, interacting with experiment participants,attending and learning from lab meetings, getting exposed to training in eye tracking and physiological measures. Recently, I have also had the opportunity to propose a research project if my own, and have so far been learning about the process of analyzing the current research literature to identify areas that require further investigation and also to identify issues that may arise with attempting certain studies.

In addition to this, my time at the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma has give me exposure to clinical and applied research, specifically in the area that interests me most: trauma and psychological resilience. As with the scientists at the Emotion Lab, the people at the ICTP and their work reminded me of why I want to pursue clinical psychology as my career. My experience volunteering as a Research Assistant there let me experience an environment that both produced empirical evidence on trauma and also applied empirical evidence to helping people, all in one organization. It also gave me an opportunity to serve as a Teacher’s Assistant in one of their courses, and in learning about not only how important but also how diverse and practical the field of trauma is. (Post-Traumatic Distress Disorder included).
Entrepreneurial Experience: About a year ago I shut down Literary Magic, the online literary magazine I founded and ran since 2005, in order to focus on my academics so I could do as well as possible in my academic and career goals. My passion for story never waned, however. Nor did my love for entrepreneurship. Why did I have to give up one passion to strengthen another? Why can’t I combine my passion for writing stories and for entrepreneurship with my passion for resilience?

That summer, I did just that. I founded Watch Me Bounce, a website that publishes stories about resilience. In our first few months, we have grown to a staff of seven. This passionate, dedicated staff includes a survivor of PTSD,  experienced editors and writers who have overcome and possibly learned from their own life challenges, and a  clinical psychologist,who has experience in both helping people be more resilient and who knows and has written about the use of story with trauma victims.

Writing Experience: Starting in January 2011, I took over leadership for n on-campus discussion group on ethics. Titled “Mussar Vaad,” the group serves as a safe place for discussing human strength and virtue, as well as traits we can use to live more meaningful, resilient lives. As part of this group, I write The Adventures of Mussar Man, a story about a superhero I created that fights adversity using not super strength or advanced technology, but the power of human strength and virtue. This experience has allowed me to combine my passion for writing stories to teaching and learning about human strengths, from self-control to humility to persistence.

Coursework: From learning about the different types of clinical psychological disorders in Abnormal Psychology to how to analyze data and design experiments in Research Methods and Statistics.

Background Literature: My work as a Research Assistant and Teacher’s Assistant at both the Emotion Lab and ICTP has exposed to research studies conducted in the areas of resilience, trauma, emotion regulation and coping. In addition, my lengthy transportation times this past summer afforded me with the opportunity to eat up a few dozen books on the topic of resilience. One bus ride I could be reading a book on empirically proven methods for building resilience, another I could be catching up on what we know and don’t know about the emotion ‘anger,’ and yet another I could be exploring the concept of coping with life’s challenges from the perspective of popular culture or religion.

Dance: In the Spring and Fall semesters of 2011 I performed in both the dance company and tap dance company at Brandeis, and also enrolled in a course that opened me up to using dance as not only something performed, but something used to help people manage stress. In the next year, I will be working with professor at my University to create an academic course that explores dance through the concept of resilience. Stay tuned for more.

In 2012 I hope to gain experience working at an organization that helps people who are clinically affected, as well as continue work on my thesis in the Emotion Lab and dance course. On the other hand, I also hope to continue to build both Watch Me Bounce and the discussion group I lead.

As a last but not least note, I would like to extend my gratitude to the many people who have helped me in the past year, whether they have supported me, inspired me, or even inadvertently opened me up to resilience as an empirical and practical study.

Wishing everyone a happy and meaningful 2012.

Take care,
Rocky

Lessons from the Resilience Experts

Lessons from the Resilience Experts

    By Rocky Reichman

My time with the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma (ICTP for short) taught me a lot about the nature of trauma and resilience: what we know, what we can do, and what we shouldn’t do. So in what follows, you will find a list of bite size lessons I learned about resilience. My hope is they will help you, too. Like everything on this website, this is not meant to be a diagnosis of any kind, but just some helpful tips I learned that may be of use to others.

• Resilience is not the same as Post-Traumatic Growth: Resilience is about maintaining normal life under stress, or bouncing back after falling down Post Traumatic Growth (PTG), on the other hand, goes a step further. PTG occurs when people don’t just bounce back, but learn something, and grow, from the experience. This growth can occur in a plethora of fashions, from being more immune to a particular type of stressor to gaining a deeper appreciation for life.

• PTG (Post-Traumatic Growth) is not always good: This may be a punch in the face from those who believe in not only surviving adversity, but thriving on it, but in fact it is not. It is good to thrive, but not to push for it. Our first focus should be on resilience. Here’s why:

Resilience is natural, and research estimates that around 85% of people are resilient, at least in the face of PTSD and trauma. PTG, on the other hand, is not common. Unfortunately, people who have overcome adversity may only perceive that they have grown, but in reality have not. In the course, Dr. Ruthy Pat-Horenczyk advised that therapists shouldn’t push for people to grow after adversity. They should instead focus on resilience, and getting them back to their normal level of functioning first. Then you can try to shoot for PTG. If you do it before building resilience, it may put extra unnecessary pressure on the victim.

On a side note, one may notice that at Watch Me Bounce, we maintains the mission to help people be more resilient in life. We do talk about “thriving” on adversity in our mission statement, but our one-liner clearly emphasizes resilience over PTG for the above reasons.

• Trauma is never good: This is probably another shock. This is despite what we see in superhero movies like Batman and Spiderman, both protagonists who suffered great traumas but used it to transform them This point from Dr. Pat-Horenczyk needs to be hammered home: trauma is never good. Sometimes challenges hit us, but we shouldn’t fall into the trap that we need adversity to thrive. We can grow and achieve our goals, without ever needing a tragedy to push us forward. Once trauma hit, however, we should make use of the adversity as an opportunity to build resilience and maybe even grow.

• Resilience is not rocket science: building resilience may sound complicated, but it’s really not. It all comes down to taking deep breaths, regulating ourselves, finding our strengths and meaning, and building social support. For more, see the Building Resilience Intervention model developed by Dr. Naomi Baum, director of the Resilience Unit at the ICTP (http://traumaweb.org/content.asp?PageId=477&lang=En).

• Resilience should lie in the hands of the community: also a nugget of wisdom from Dr. Baum. Resilience should exclusively be built in the clinician’s office. It can be built in the community too, by teachers, parents, peers and community leaders. You don’t have to be a therapist to teach people resilience. You can teach it by building it in our own children.

• All children need is one person to believe in them: this one, I believe, needs no further explanation.

• Don’t lie to children: If everything is not alright, do not deny the problem and say “everything is fine.” Rather, explain to them in simple, mediated terms that sometimes everything is not alright, but that there can be hope too. Otherwise, the children will find out, and may not trust you in the future.

• The caregiver matters: More than anything else, evidence shows that the greatest predictor in whether a child will be resilient vs. developing symptoms post-traumatic distress following trauma is the state of his caregivers, not the event. This bears repeating: The resilience of the child’s caregiver matters more than the objective event itself in determining whether a child will endure it resiliently. What this means is that caregivers and parents play a crucial role in maintaining and building resilience in children. If they have issues with regulating their emotions, or suffer from PTSD, then their children may develop PTSD as well, even if the child was never exposed to the traumatic event him or herself. On the other hand, however, if parents maintain resilience in the face of trauma, their children have much better chance at staying resilient too. To promote this point, the ICTP has launched Parents Place in Sderot, a clinic that helps both children and their caregivers by working on the dyadic relationship (dyad = two) between the caregiver and the child together, instead of only helping the child . Read more here: http://traumaweb.org/content.asp?PageId=415&lang=En.

• Social Support matters: caregivers aside, social support was found to be the strongest protective factor, or something that prevents or reduces the negative impact of trauma. This goes for any age group, from soldiers to cancer patients. Their greatest aspect is social support—from their friends, their families, and anyone willing to sit or stand by them and offer help. Social support is so powerful that it has even been shown that it can change the trajectory of post-traumatic adaptation.

• You are a “Survivor,” not a “Victim.” According to Rachel Yehuda, a well known researcher in the field of trauma and PTSD, resilient people avoid over-defining themselves as “victims,” and learn to see themselves as survivors instead. I think this message pertains to everyday life too: at some point, in almost every situation, you need to think of yourself as a survivor of trauma, not victim. This puts control of your fate back in your hands, and can even serve to change the story. Trauma has a lot to do with narrative, and how you process and integrate that narrative into the rest of your life experiences. So keep away from over-defining yourself by the traumatic event.

• Be flexible in your coping mechanism: George Bonnano, a psychologist at Columbia University Teacher’s College, has conducted research on what makes people resilient. His findings? That flexibility plays a key role. How flexible you are in how you cope matters a lot when you face adversity. So if the only way you de-stress is by doing one thing, like dancing or taking deep breaths, develop or find more coping mechanism. In case the adversity prevents you from usinga specific coping mechanism, you want to be ready with backup strategies for dealing with the stressor.

• People have different ways of coping: Everybody’s different. Some may cope through their belief systems, and use strengths such as optimism and willpower. Other may be more cognitive in their coping style, and change how they think about the adversity, other may use their imagination or affect (emotional) strengths, and still others may find strength in physical activities, such as dance or yoga.

Party ROCKY Anthem: Rocky Reichman Debut Battle Dance (Improv)

I recently released my debut dance video, Party “Rocky” Anthem. It’s based off of Party Rock Anthem (hence the nae), but the moves are entirely improvisation and done without any choreography.

Hope you enjoy!

Watch Me Bounce Launches

This past week I launched my new venture, Watch Me Bounce. Watch Me Bounce (www.WatchMeBounce.com) is a website that aims to inspire people to be more resilient in life through the use of story. It will publish real-life stories, fictional stories, poetry and review books that inspire and speak about resilience.

It’s been a busy but exciting week. Stay tuned for more news on Watch Me Bounce, as well as more articles on Resilience and news about my first dance/music video!

Take care,

Rocky

Watch Me Bounce, Editor-in-Chief

 

Click here to visit the website, and learn more about Watch Me Bounce.

The Bomb Shelter in the Playground: Resilience Applied

Trauma and Resilience.

This was the title of the course I participated in during my volunteer internship this summer. Taught by experts from the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma, where I worked, the course brings together people from around the world. What I’m going to do over the next few weeks is share a bit of what I’ve learned about the topic, starting with a trip to the Israeli city of Sderot.

In the past ten years, more than 11,000 rockets and missiles have fallen in the area of Sderot, an Israel city in the north. This type of situation affects the people of Sderot in not just physical ways, but psychologically as well.

This post will discuss part of this psychological aspect. It is not about politics, and should not considered as favoring one view over another. Rather, what this represents is an a look into the psychological aspects of the situation, and how we can help people deal with these issues better and more effectively.

Living in a city under fire can cause enough stress to cause trauma, and in its most severe form, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The special situation in Sderot presents a new kind of trauma, different from one-time terrorist attacks or child abuse. In fact, researchers have suggested added a new kind of trauma, peritrauma, in order to incorporate instances like these. Peritrauma differs from other kinds of trauma, such as Simple Trauma and Complex Trauma.

Which is exactly what brought my class there last week. The trauma center I work (full name above) has conducted research and offered treatment to the people in Sderot. But in order to truly understand the situation there, we had to travel there in person. So one hot July day, we boarded a bus and headed up north.

The focus of this blog is the topic of resilience. Resilience is defined as an individual’s or community’s ability to deal with stress and bounce back. Sometimes they can even grow from the challenge, and achieve post-traumatic growth, PTG for short. Unlike resilience, PTG occurs when someone is not only able to bounce back to normal functioning during or after adversity, but when the survivor also learns, and grows, from it. To keep this focused, we are just going to focus on one lesson the people of Sderot can teach us about resilience: maintaining control and routine.

Control and routine are critical for maintaining resilience in the face of stress. No matter what adversity hits us in life, it is usually important to stay in routine. Keep living. Function as normal. Once this breaks down, people are more likely to be affected by the adversity.

And they are more likely to lose control. Locus of Control, or whether or not we view ourselves as being in control of a situation and what happens to us in life, has been found as a major component in maintaining or draining resilience. The people of Sderot understand this. Which is why, a police officer told us, instead of running or letting the rockets control their lives, they will control their lives (this is paraphrased and was originally spoken in Hebrew, so it is not exact).

How do they maintain control? Two ways are through transportation and play. The bus stations, critical for keeping a city running and moving, have been built as bomb shelters. Which means that if a “Red Alert” sounds the signal of an oncoming rocket, the people can wait in safety for the bus. This not only helps them maintain their routine, but control as well: they decide whether they can travel, not the rockets.

Another, even more profound, way the people maintain a sense of resilience is in their children. They do this in many ways, but for the purposes of this post we will only cover the area of playgrounds.

Hmm. Playgrounds? What do they have to do with resilience?

Answer: Everything. Play is a crucial part of growing up, and important in the healthy development of children. But living in a city under fire means children may constantly be in “survivor mode.” They may be too stressed and focused on avoiding the next missile attack that play gets pushed out of the way. The unpredictability of the attacks also means that wandering too far from a secure place, like a bomb shelter, is just too dangerous. The result is not only a loss in childhood play, but in control and routine as well.

So now what? Playtime or safety?

Sderot decided to do both. By adding a bomb shelter in the middle of a playground, they ensured children can play as normal but still be close enough to safety in case of an attack. Even more creative, they built playground whose structure(s) were bomb shelters, just in a creative shapes. One such palyground consisted of a long winding snake with that the children could play inside of. But this snake was not only made for play, but reinforced with the same material as the other bomb shelters.

Both of these ideas represent more than creativity. They represent resilience. The city of Sderot can offer many lessons in this topic, thanks to their own inner resolve and the help of the Israel Center of Psychotrauma. But if one thing was made clear from this trip, it was this: in Sderot, the people control their lives and their routine, not some external threat. The result? A city-wide example of resilience in action.

The Writer as Fighter

By Rocky Reichman

Ever have one of the moments where you don’t know what to do? Where a mountain of work faces you? Where you are given an assignment and don’t have enough time to do it?

The answer? Probably a yes for most people. Sometimes you end up in a crunch. Where it’s simply not humanly possible to get something done by an assigned deadline. It’s a fact of life. Stuff happens. The question is, what do you do to combat it?

How you react will determine whether you succeed. I have experienced these moments dozens of times during my entrepreneurial ventures with Literary Magic (.com), writing or even this past week. An assignment was given. The task? Write a Features story on an issue you think is important. Find sources from both social media outlets, and get one interview in person.

The assignment itself was simple. But on my end, I misunderstood how laborious and lengthy the task of finding the right sources could be. In this blog post, I’ll share my experience adapting to work on short notice and what I’ve learned.

When given an assignment, the first task of every writer is know what they are writing about. Sometimes an editor will save you the trouble by telling you outright what issue you’re expected to cover. In my place, I had my professor to guide me through the issues to see which would make the best story. But in many cases, you may not know the exact topic to write about. How do you go about choosing?

If you know the field you want to write about, the obvious answer is to first learn as much about that field as possible. Bruce Byfield has a longer piece about at this at his blog, http://brucebyfield.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/how-to-generate-ideas-for-journalism/. For me, what ultimately made my decision was importance. Find the issue you feel is most important. The issue you think really needs to be covered. Then go after it. Once you know what you are writing about, you know where you are going. Next you need to figure out a plan to get there. Brainstorm. Then outline your main points. Note that none of your “plans” can be set in stone. Why? Because you never know when your story will evolve, And usually, it will be a better direction.

The most difficult task I ran into in writing a story on short notice was finding the right sources in time. For example, if you are assigned a story one week before deadline, that does not mean you have a several day to find sources. Work on finding sources immediately. It helps you already know the exact topic you will be writing about, but even if you only know the area but do not have a set outline yet, start contacting people as early as you can. Especially any “experts” you will need. Sources can be hard to reach, and even if they respond to your request (and hopefully say yes) within twenty four hours, you still need to work around their schedule to meet them. The interview process itself is a whole different story.

Be ready when interview time comes around. Prepare a variety of questions beforehand. Be open to whatever direction your sources takes a question in. This could lead you to good points to build your story off of. Or it could alter your story and send it in a completely different direction. Which is exactly why you never want to set your story in stone. I had to scrap my original game plan twice before finally settling on a solid theme. I let my interviewees lead the way. Their passion for the subject fueled me with the right material for the story, and set me on course. Be prepared to improvise with new questions in case you or your subject changer course. Often the best ideas are found by accident.

Look at http://matadornetwork.com/bnt/2007/03/26/13-simple-journalist-techniques-for-effective-interviews/ and http://www.mediacollege.com/journalism/interviews/tips.html for basic interview techniques.

Record each interview as a backup. Gather your notes after each interview, then revise your story plan. Write up you first draft, transcribing only the quotations you know you will need. You can always add more in later. Sometimes, it pays to just listen to your recordings, paraphrase your future quotations, and see where the story goes before initiating the laborious task of transcription. Double check any facts like dates, names etc. and get your draft out as soon as possible. The war may not be over then—but at least you have survived the first few battles.

The Nitty Gritty of Writing News Stories

The Nitty Gritty of Writing News Stories

By Rocky Reichman

This blog post will be dedicated to discovering my recent experiences learning and practicing how to cover a new event and subsequently transform it into a well-written, professional news story. To be honest, this process is not yet complete. But I do not think that really matters. Because like anything, writers can always learn new things. Adapt their style. Improve their techniques, and the speed at which they get event or other stories onto paper. This blog post will therefore focus on one specific challenge I have faced with my latest news story. That challenge is of a technical nature, and involves obtaining and editing digital photos for a News piece.

Let’s get started. Technology can be a bane to many writers. But fortunately, I was part of a generation that grew up around technology. So is the newest generation. “It’s simply a part of their DNA,” says Dave Verhaagen, a child and adolescent psychologist in Charlotte in USA Today, at http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-02-10-igeneration10_CV_N.htm. Why is this important? Having tools like the Internet, and knowledge sufficient to use them, saves the writer boundless amounts of time and hardship getting to learn them. So, one would think the technical aspects of writing a News Story would be clear-cut for someone like me, right?

Wrong. I am learning many new things in my Digital & Multimedia class, and believe it or not, not all of them revolve around the techniques of journalism. I think so far, the greatest challenge I have faced is realizing how little I don’t know about this medium. On the other hand, this has served as my greatest asset, too. Later in the course, and in future blog posts, I will have the opportunity to blog about my challenges with video and audio technologies. But for now I stick to one: digital editing. A plethora of tutorials exist for learning how to shoot, upload and edit digital photos. Adobe has tutorials, as well as video tutorials, all explaining in detail how to do this. Brandeis University has its own tutorial for Photoshop, at http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/photoshop/. So does the Knight Digital Media Center, on topics ranging from tone to cropping to exporting, available at http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/photoshop/.

But the process is really much more complicated than that. Editing digital photography requires the possession of quality photographs to begin with. When I started working on my news story, editing my photos, of which there were only a few, was not a big problem. Easy-to-use, free online tools such as PicNik or FotoFlexer are available for free on the Internet. But shooting a quality photo in a packed room with a hundred bustling people is no walk in the park. And I mean that literally. Usually, if you are walking in the park, the scenario is serene. Peaceful. Quiet.

It’s the ideal situation for capturing photos.

But that was not the case this past Thursday. The event I covered, Rabbi Avi Weiss’ speech to the Brandeis University community, was in a mid-sized room with people sitting—or even standing—everywhere. There were no clear vantage points from which to capture a powerful image, because they were either taken by spectators or crowded by other photographers. I managed to capture a couple of photos before the event that showed how packed and full of excitement the entire room was. But once the event started, it was difficult to move from my seat in order to get a clear picture of the speaker himself.

Why was this? Well, it was partly due to technological limits. I do not own, nor can I afford, a quality digital camera like those recommended at Bestinclassnet. I had one once, but it ceased to work. Given that, and the efficiency with which I wanted to have my photographs ready, I was left with using my back-up device: the camera on my mobile phone. The pictures were not as clear as I had hoped, but it was a start. One side challenge I faced was taking photos during the event. This was because I was sitting very close to Rabbi Weiss. The speaker was a kind man, but he seemed exhausted too. I doubt a flash in his eyes from my camera would have been appreciated very much. That, and my dual role as writer and photographer, got in the way of taking better photos. But some literature I found useful on the topic, and that readers can benefit from as well, can be found at http://www.kodak.com/global/en/corp/top10tips/index.jhtml.

Allow me to explain. I have been writing for one of the school newspapers here at Brandeis, The Justice, since last semester. What I have noticed is that it is usually more efficient if two people attend the even. One person to write about it, the other to take pictures. I assume this occurred at the Rabbi Avi Weiss event as well, since I saw a group of photographers crowding the corners.

But, you may ask, why is this a problem?

Answer: True, it is important to learn how to multitask. This is crucial for being a good journalist. Robert Hernandez writes about this in OJR: Online Journalism Review. And I appreciate having been afforded the opportunity of this challenge last week. But ideally, it was difficult to manage both tasks simultaneously. This is because while most photographers spend there time patiently scouring for good shots to take, the reporter is busy recording the speech. Taking notes on it. Listening carefully. Digesting every word. Weighing each point and deciding where the story should go. I realize the planning usually happens after the event, but I have found it easier in my short journalistic experience that the more fore planning you do early on, the more you will truly understand about your story.

Linguistics, Mathematics and the Memory of a Monkey’s Mind

In memory of my father’s upcoming birthday, I wanted to highlight an article he once wrote for my online literary magazine, Literary Magic. Drawing from his knowledge as a mathematician, Dr. Jack Reichman, Ph.D, figured out a way to write an article that combined linguistics, an animal’s power of memory and mathematics to try and answer the question of whether or not monkeys, if given enough time, could learn to write prose as elegant as Shakespeare. Here’s a teaser below with a link to the full article:

“There are some who would believe that given enough time and energy, a monkey could be taught to type, get lucky, and write some memorable prose. These are probably the same people who believe that luck plays the major role in all art. Let’s see if that is really true by doing a thought experiment…..”

http://tinyurl.com/23t7tpk

Hope you enjoy. I’ll try to respond to any comments left.

Why Society and Social Media Go Together

Social Media

This technology is transforming not just the way people act, but the way we interact. And not just on an individual level, but on a greater level. As an organization. As a community. As a civilized society.

But what is transforming?

Too often we hear buzzwords like “trends,” “transformation” and “change.” But the fact that a technology changes society is not what matters. How it changes society, is what people should care about. Which means it’s what writers should care about too. A plethora of media mediums have impregnated themselves into society long before the Internet was birthed. Newspaper publishing. Radio. Television. Not only that, but these mediums were very successful—and to some extent, still are.

But the Internet has done something far more important.

The web, social media most of all, has brought people together as a society. And in the rest of this blog, I will outline how.

According to Ravit Lichtenberg from Ustrategy.com, “Social Media Will Become a Single, Cohesive Experience Embedded In Our Activities and Technologies.” Dan Gillmor, in We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People, writes in the book’s Introduction (page XIII), that, “Tomorrow’s news reporting and production will be more of a conversation, or a seminar…The communication network itself will be a medium for everyone’s voice, not just the few….”

What this means is that, thanks to the Internet, more and more people are able to come together and participate, no matter what the topic or interest at hand. The fact that Gillmor uses the word “conversation” alone portrays the view that the Internet has brought people together.

There is ample evidence to show that specific types of social media technologies have brought society closer, such as SMS text messaging and P2P (peer-to-peer) file sharing on the Internet. According to Gillmore, P2P can also be used to bring societies together in response to—and in defense of—repressive governments. So says Gillmore in his book:

New P2P systems under development will provide the closest thing to anonymity that we’ve seen so far. Repressive governments want to keep Internet content under control, but anonymity will make censorship more difficult. (Chapter two, pages 37-38)

Lisa Hoover, in a ComputerWorld article entitled “How Social Networking Has Changed Society”, talks about how social media expands the opportunities for people to meet and collaborate. She writes, “Social networking services expand the pool of people we have the opportunity to meet to near limitless possibilities. We’re no longer restricted to or rely on people in our neighborhood, church, or workplace to provide the interaction we desire.” Brett Green, a blogger for the Huffington Post, wrote about theBoulder Fire on Labor Day 2010 and how helpful social media technologies like Twitter were during the disaster. “Tech-savvy” residents, he writes, took to Twitter to share information about the fire, from where to get food to evacuation advice.

Even older generations, people who did not grow up with social media usage as the norm, are beginning to pick up on the technology. According to a recent PCWorld blog, “A new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project says the number of social networking users ages 50 and older nearly doubled in the past year, continuing a trend of strong growth that was first spotted during the summer of 2009.” According to that blog, the primary reason older generations have turned to social media is because, “ social networks can be a way to stay in touch or get support.”

Now we can stop. Take a step back. Look at what we’ve found. This author has small doubt that readers will see that the Internet and social media has brought us closer together as a society. Everyone has a voice.

And everyone can share their voices. Together.

The Best Type of Research: The Real, the Practical Kind

This summer, as I pen (or rather type) the rough draft of my first Mystery novel, I have been given the opportunity to conduct a new kind of research. Call it practical learning. Everyday after my writing I head over to my summer class: Human Osteology.

Osteology is the study of bones.

Wait, Rocky, I thought you liked writing and business? Many people have asked me this question since I started, and it is not even the end of June. While Osteology has many benefits, among them teaching material to faciliate a complete understanding of human anatomy, it is a course most useful to pre-med, science or anthropology majors.

None of these match what I plan on studying at Brandeis, or doing in the future. Then why am I taking it? Because it offers me practical research.

When I spoke with best-selling crimewriter Patricia Cornwell, she advised aspiring writers to “go out and experience things.” Cornwell herself became a certified Scuba diver and helicopter pilot as her form of practrical research: she wanted to write about a character with these accomplishments, so she decided to practice it herself to fully understand what it was like.

The same applies to human osteology. The reason I am spending half my summer studying bones is because I think it will help me with my novel writing. Especially with mysteries. Half the Osteology class covers the anatomy of the human skeletal system. The other half teaches us how to use forensic techniques to determine the Age and Sex of individual bone fragments, as well as the specific bones they come from and correct sides. Today we started a project on how to do this but for bone fragments that have been immolated first (burned by fire). In addition, the human remains we study are not new, but most are estimated to be over a thousand years old. My novel happens to occur in a time and place where most forensic technologies do not exist, yet the skills that this course offers me nevertheless enrich my understanding of a portion of forensics. It’s sword and sorcery, however, so learning about medieval skeletons in particular may be even more beneficial. And most of the techniques we use do not involve modern science anyway. Which makes it a perfect training ground for me to experiment with something n a practical fashion that I want to write about.

Studying human remains in Human Osteology while writing has afforded me a tremendous opportunity to enrich my writing. I recommend this practical research to every writer. But with disclaimer: exceptions exist, so obviously do not do anything dangerous, immoral or against the law—that type of research may be best learned in non-practical ways. But in most instances, whether you want to write a mystery involving bones from the medieval period or a character who can dive to great depths underwater (or both!), gaining the experience yourself will help enliven your writing and give your readers a more powerful story.