Manon Eileen – a Writer's Blog

I am a procrastination professional. It’s a skill developed and nurtured over many years. That’s why wou should trust my expertise in this: I am a procrastination rock star.

So today I bring you the very first Procrastination Top 3! I hope you enjoy, and let me know if you successfully procrastinated, and what you should have been doing instead.

#3 Instagram

If you don’t have an instagram account yet, go get it. It’s addictive, fun, and great to see pics from all over the world, on any topic that you fancy. It’s also awesome to make pics and share them with strangers. Oh, and don’t forget to add tags to your pics! I can spend hours exploring instagram pics.

While you’re at it – don’t forget to add me!

#2 My Cocktail Bar (Free App)

If you’re into cocktails like I am, get this app. Currently it’s only available for Android (who cares about iPhones anyways!). It’s an awesome app: you fill in all products you have at the moment, and this app will show you which cocktails you can make. Have some limes in the fridge? Some old vodka in the back of a cabinet? Grenadine? This app will tell you what to make. It will also tell you what ingredients you’re still missing to make other cocktails with the stuff you have right now. I feel very inspired to get every type of liquor out there, now.

Must. Not. Go. To. Store… I have other things to do! Or maybe I should go…….

There’s also a paid version of this app, but the free one will do just fine.

#1 Duolingo.com

Great way to procrastinate but still learn something: Duolingo.com is a website on which you can learn languages, game-style. With every lesson you complete, you’ll score points, so you can compete with friends (or total strangers). Even though sometimes the grammar isn’t explained so well, if you score a hundred points every day, you will be able to tell your skill is improving! Mi Español es mejor cada día!

Currently, you can only study Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese and French at Duolingo. Of course, there are some down points, too: the “mother tongue” is always English, and the grammar, for as far as I can tell, isn’t always very clearly explained. But those are just some minor quibbles, and I’m sure at least the latter will be improved.

The Duolingo iPhone app is already available, and the Android app (highly anticipated here) will be made available May 29th (almost! \o/).

So I hope you’ll successfully procrastinate with these three options – right now, what I should have been doing instead was reading articles and books for my thesis, but instead I wrote this blog post. Procrastination: mission accomplished.

You may have noticed that I have been somewhat absent the past few weeks – lo siento! I have been insanely busy with writing the last few papers for my Master’s. I’m done, now, though! Finally.

As I shared a while back, I handed in my Master’s thesis proposal. My supervisor was excited and enthusiastic about my proposed research! While writing those last few papers I got more and more anxious to get started.

To refresh your memory (or to enlighten you, if you’ve been confused by my recent tweets :p), I am currently researching dystopian science fiction movies. Most people who I tell arch their brows at me, confused about how I could possibly mix that with criminology. Let me tell you.

Gattaca

I am looking into how dystopian science fiction movies discuss “formal social control”, that is every kind of control exerted by the authorities (either in classical government form or, as is sometimes depicted in sci-fi, the corporation who plays a governmental role), often in the shape of law enforcement. Not only am I looking at law enforcement, though. Control also includes punishment, so any kind of prison system or punishment modality, and crime risk management. Additionally, I’m looking at how certain scientific technological developments are portrayed in science fiction, but only tech development that is related to social control (such as the use of eye-scanners and DNA profiles for identification).

Society and Movies are Linked

The theory, among some cultural and popular criminologists is that film and society are linked inherently. Sociologists have often thought that movie only portrays “real life”, and so often for crime films, in analysis, people wondered how accurate the depiction of reality was. According to for instance Rafter (2006/2011) is that it’s not important how accurate it is: she says that film is influenced by reality, but that reality is also influenced by film – it’s going both ways (her example, for instance, is John Dillinger’s fascination for movies).

With my research I hope to shed light on what kind of developments have taken place in late modernity (approximately from the 1970′s to now), and how this has influenced formal social control. Science fiction movies are as much a depiction of a possible future as well as social criticism on society today.

The Movies

I will be watching about 40 science fiction movies in the next month, among which In Time (2011), Blade Runner (1982), Soylent Green (1973) – in the law enforcement category, A Clockwork Orange (1971), Children of Men (2006), The Running Man (1987) in the punishment modalities category, Banlieu 13 (2004), District 9 (2009) and Battle Royale (2000) in the crime risk management category, Gattaca (1997), Sleep Dealer (2008) and Strange Days (1995) in the scientific development category. I’ve already seen quite few, though, but I’m also seeing lots of new (to me) movies.

Sleep Dealer

I’m very excited that I can combine my love for science fiction and film with my academic field! I’m very daunted about having to write a coherent, cogent thesis on the matter though. Nevertheless, I don’t think anyone has ever had as much fun writing a thesis as I have, lol.

What are your favorite dystopian science fiction films? What do you think of the capability of sci-fi to deliver social criticism?

I took a year-long break from blogging – not proud of it, but I had to recharge. Before I took my break, I blogged about 4-5 times a week for about a year (yeah, no wonder I got a blogging-block). Back then I was always quite concerned with my website audience, and often checked my Google Analytics. Actually, I had a little plugin for my Google Chrome that would keep me up to date of my numbers all the time. I was a little obsessed.

Then, my break. I didn’t even look at the website for a while. When I returned a year later, I checked my Analytics, and was absolutely flabbergasted.

I still got 6000 unique page views per month. 

That’s quite the crowd. In the existence of this website, I have attracted one hundred and twenty thousand individuals to my website. Yeah, that’s a bit daunting. Whether or not these people return to my website in my opinion is not very important – they find my website, read my blogs and see my work!

How come I got these kinds of ratings? I know you too want more than just your mom, dad, significant other and grandma to read your blogs. So, let me tell you.

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Yes, you have probably heard about Search Engine Optimization about a million times. But trust me, don’t discard this one! It’s probably the most important reason I get so many visitors. Google is my friend. See the evidence here:

Traffic sources (of all time)

Almost 60% of my visitors find me through search engines. And most of them find me through Google. Look:

Search Engines Data (of all time)

How good a friend of mine is Google? About 94%. I’d call that a best friend.

SEO can be really complicated. I’ve mostly come across complicated explanations that make my brain hurt. Algorithms schmalgorithms, I say. My trick?

The WordPress SEO Plugin

All you need to do is install this baby on your WordPress (or, if you use a different content manager, I am sure they have SEO plugins for those as well), toy around a little with the settings (not too much or you blow stuff up), and make sure you fill in the WordPress SEO details for every post. It will even give you a page analysis on what you can do to improve your SEO. Once you’ve done that, you are set!

2. Don’t underestimate StumbleUpon.com

Almost 30% of my visitors finds my website through referral websites. In the following table I want to focus on StumbleUpon.com for now.

Referral Data (of all time)

SU.com is number one of all referral sources! It has sent me about 10,000 visitors which is pretty impressive.

StumbleUpon needs people to add a certain page to their database (I won’t go into detail too much, if you are interested in exactly how it works, go visit their site). So what I always do is, as soon as I’ve published another blog post, I upload my page to their database. You can install a StumbleUpon plugin into your web browser (Chrome, Firefox) and make it even easier (click the thumbs up button in the bar to go to the add page). Or, if you have social media buttons added to your blog post, add SU.com as well and use that one.

You’ll be directed to an “add page”, where you can add your blog. Fill in the details as carefully and fully as you can and select appropriate tags (I usually skip on the comment though). That’s all there is to it! From there, people will automatically stumble upon your site through SU.com’s randomizer.

I admit it’s a hassle to have to add each blog manually to SU.com, but as you can see, it pays off.

One last tip: make sure you don’t change the URLs of your blogs after you’ve added them to the SU.com database – once you do, it can’t find your posts anymore.

3. Don’t overestimate Facebook and Twitter

As you can see in the table above, Facebook and Twitter combined lead only about 7% of my audience to my website. Harrumph. That’s not very many. I spend a lot of time trying to write good tweets, deciding which hashtags to use, etcetera. Perhaps these numbers are more an indication of my sucking badly at social media, but … Somehow I do doubt it.

I know you reach more people on Twitter than on Facebook (even more so now that FB has their immensely stupid Promote rules, limiting your audience even further). But I think that (and this is from personal experience) people have a “READ MY BLOG PLZ” overload, from all the blog-shares going on on Twitter. I very rarely open a link to a blog anymore, and if I do, it must have really appealed to me. I’ve become a lot more efficient with my time, lately, and not spending hours reading random blogs I found through Twitter is part of that. I can imagine others feel the same.

But, are all my efforts to spread the word through social media futile? No, certainly not. And this is why.

Why this isn’t a reason you should give up on social media

Look, my data aren’t really useful for a generalization (the external validity is rather low). Your data would probably look quite different compared to mine. I took a year-long blogging break, and during that time, I did not really share anything on Twitter or Facebook, either. So, people technically and practically couldn’t find my stuff on there!

What I think really speaks for the use of the social media is the following (click on them to enlarge)

As you can see above, although Google and Stumbleupon send me a lot of visitors, these people tend not to visit the site for long. They visit one, occasionally two pages. The amount of new visits is high, but the bounce rate is, too (80% of the Google visitors closes the page after just a few seconds, deciding this was not what they were looking for).

However, the stats for Twitter and Facebook show something entirely different. They more often visit two or more pages, they tend to take their time to read on the site, the amount of people who return here more often is actually higher, plus people are much less likely to close the page after a few seconds.

Morale of the story? Although you attract tons of people through the search engines, they might find your blog post didn’t really match their search query and will close your site immediately. However, the ones that decide to click on your tweeted/shared link on FB or Twitter do so because it appeals to them. They take their time reading your site, and quite likely also return if they like what they see.

So there are pros and cons to both SEO/SU.com and Social Media: with the former, you reach a lot of different people, with the latter, you reach less people, but you reach the people that are already interested in you and/or in what you write.

4. Lastly, write a lot (but not too much)

My last tip is to write a lot. I have published many posts that attract people. Another tip: write about a few topics, don’t limit yourself to one. You’ll attract more kinds of people. But make sure it’s not too haphazard – my posts have always been related to what I do in my academic career, what I find interesting and stuff that I use for my books. If it’s too far removed from what you think would make your blog readers buy your book, they won’t buy it (and this applies to any kind of business, really). It’s as simple as that.

On the other hand, don’t write too much, or you’ll be burnt out like I was. Four to five posts a week is doable with more people, but trust me, two to a maximum of three is more than enough on your own. And you’ll appear as more stable and trustworthy to your returning reader, too.

And then, one very last piece of advice: don’t expect major changes in your stats overnight. For instance, Google’s algorithms work in such a way that once your site is visited more, it will put you on the top of the search results more often. That takes time – give it that. Don’t check your analytics every day, because you’ll be obsessed and disappointed, like I was.

Well, that is it for now! I hope this is useful to you. If you have any questions, please ask .

If you have any tips for me or other readers, please share them in the comments section. What do you do to attract people to your site?

I haven’t shared an update on myself for some time and I probably should.

I sent in my thesis proposal last week and I’m crazy excited about it. It’s cultural criminological and focuses on “society” as a whole, so it’s very macro. This is my research question:

How do dystopian science fiction films discuss developments in formal social control in late modernity?

I’m going to have to watch about 70 dystopian science fiction movies, relate them to real-life developments in … formal social control. That’s control exerted by the government (or a government-like institution), and I’m focusing on law enforcement, risk management, punishment technologies and technological development. I am so excited about it because I get to mix my three favorite topics in the world – movies, science fiction and criminology! Ah! I cannot wait to get started.

I’ve picked up the blog again after what I never realized really was a blogging-block. I’m really proud to admit though that my blogging break actually didn’t matter much for this website, even during my absence I got between four and seven THOUSAND unique visitors every month. But I’m happier I’m back.

You might have noticed, too, that I’ve been working on a new project, called Spirit, and I’ve already posted two teasers. I’m very excited about it!

Anywho, I have some instagram pics for you. If you don’t follow me on Instagram yet, feel free to! You can find me here.

The building my favorite coffeeshop is in!

Sunrise – from our bedroom window

Poh and I

A pretty house in my hometown (Utrecht)

Sneaky Poh!

Man, it was cold this month. O_o

Poh killed my orchid

He then made it up to me by being irresistably cute.

I got a haircut two months ago but hadn’t shared a pic yet, so here it is!

Then I found the Photo Grid app for Android (sorta like Pic Stitch for iOS)

Got myself a KeepCup! And who says you can’t let them wrap it as a gift, even though it’s just for yourself? This makes it so much more fun! ^^

We had our first spring weather here in The Netherlands and I immediately went up our roof to soak in the vitamin D. Omg. So relaxed!

Oh and lastly, I wanted to share this 3-minute TED clip, which is the absolute coolest thing I’ve seen in some time.

How has your start of March (god, time flies, new year’s was yesterday!) been? Did anything exciting happen?

10. Psychology is the study of mind and behavior

Psychology is the study of mental processes and behavior. The term comes from the Greek word psyche meaning “breath” , ” spirit”  and ” soul”. The -logy part is derived from logia,  meaning “study of.” It emerged from biology and philosophy and is closely linked to other disciplines such as sociology, medicine, linguistics and anthropology.

9. Psychology offers a range of career options

Just a few of the possible career options include clinical psychology, developmental psychology, neuropsychology, cognitive neuroscience, forensic or health psychology and industrial-organizational psychology.

8. Psychology and scientific methods

A common myth about psychology is that it is just “common sense.” To the contrary, psychology relies on scientific methods to investigate hypotheses to make conclusions. Psychologists (and psychological researchers) use a range of techniques to study the human mind and behavior, including observation, experiments, case studies and questionnaires.

7. Psychology has a many subfields

There are a multitude of branches of psychology. Some of the biggest subfields within psychology are clinical psychology, personality, and cognitive psychology, developmental, and social psychology.

6. Psychology is not just about therapy

Most people, when they think of psychology, think of the therapist and client – the latter laying on a couch. While therapy is certainly a major part of psychology, it’s not limited to it. In fact, many psychologists don’t work in the field of mental healthcare at all. You’d find psychologists in many other areas including teaching, research and consulting.

5. Psychology is all around you

Psychology does not just exist in classrooms, research labs or mental health offices. Psychology can be seen all around you in everyday situations. For example, marketeers rely on psychological theories to develop messages that will influence and even persuade you to buy the advertised products.

4. Psychology explores both real-world and theoretical issues

It might seem like some of the theories and research psychologists learn about do not really apply to real-life problems. However,  psychology is both an applied and theoretical subject. Some researchers focus on adding information to our overall body of knowledge about the human mind and behavior (known as basic research), while others concentrate directly on solving problems and applying psychological problems to real-world situations (known as applied research).

3. Perspectives in psychology

Psychological topics and questions can be looked at in a range of ways. For example, take violence. Some psychologists may look at how biological factors influence violence, while other psychologists might look at factors like culture, familial relationships, or other situational variables to explain the phenomenon. The major perspectives of psychology include the biological, cognitive, evolutionary, behavioral and humanistic perspectives.

2. Psychology seeks to describe, explain, predict, change and improve behaviors

There are four major goals of psychology: to describe human thought and behavior, to explain why these behaviors occur, to predict how, why and when these behaviors will occur again in the future, to change and improve behaviors to better the lives of people, their relatives and society.

1. Psychology studies both normal and abnormal behavior

People often think psychologists mostly focus on abnormal behavior – the diagnosis and treatment of it. However, to know what is abnormal behavior, psychologists have to know what normal behavior is, and so they focus on studying normal behavior just as much or even more than on abnormal behavior.

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Where do you find psychology in everyday life? Do you use it if/when you recognize it? 

Would you add anything to this list?