Precious memories, preserved by facebook

This past week I walked into my composition classroom and my students were talking about one thing: facebook buying instagram.  The 18somethings were all buzzing with questions, insights, and non-words (“it’s so interconnectudual!”)

I didn’t contribute a lot to the conversation. I deactivated my facebook in September and I’ve never used instagram, though I’ve admired & envied my friends fancy-filter-fotographs. All I could say to my students was something about facebook spreading everywhere. I compared it to a gas leak.

My close friends know I have an unnecessarily conflicted relationship with facebook. Since first joining in 2006 I’ve deactivated my account roughly 8 times and have deleted it twice. Each time I shake my fist in the air and shout “This time it’s for good!”

I bet a few of you dear readers also feel conflicted about facebook. Hi.

My reasons for feeling unsettled aren’t all that original.

Pros
- Staying in contact with people
- Sharing photos and being able to tell a friend 3 states away “the guy on the left is the one I was telling you about”
- Getting to “poke” people. As Aaron Sorkin said when he cameo’d on 30 Rock: What is poking anyway? Why won’t anyone do it to me? I’m cool. Read more »

I'm unlucky in facebook love

I had a really dramatic idea of what I wanted Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera to be about, something between a Fabio paperback and literary fiction. What I got instead was the reality of love. Dirty, dirty love.

 I was in a relationship with the same person twice at two different times in our lives. After the first breakup I went back and deleted any and all photos of us together. This was way back in the stone ages before Facebook changed its privacy settings ensuring that any photo ever uploaded became the site’s property. But the photos I uploaded the 2^nd time popped up like dead bodies Read more »

Two days ago Troy Davis was executed by lethal injection. Two days ago Typhoon Roke made landfall on Tokyo. My Facebook newsfeed was covered with the former and silent on the latter. Why?

Do you remember when women started posting random colors in their statuses? And it turned out the be the color of the bras they were wearing at the time and the end result was supposed to heighten Breast Cancer Awareness? Is that what happened?

What has more relevance: the execution of  a man who might have been innocent or the threat of a natural disaster to a country that’s barely recovered from a previous disaster?

How do we decide what issues to stand up for or against? Is it Groupthink? Are we trying to prove we’re informed, even if we’re informed through social networks?

Does the interspersion of world news (or tragedies), politics and every-day whining on social networks make anyone else slightly nauseous but also intrigued?

Should social network be separated by purpose (i.e. whining, politics, world news)?

If Troy Davis was given a reprieve  – would that have been a victory for social justice or just an example of how a social network can act as a catalyst for change?

How much legitamacy do we give to the information on places like Facebook? Is it paranoid to think everyone has a hidden agenda?

Disclaimer: I implicate myself in each of these questions. I do no expect long-winded responses and would rather see counter questions.

I know I’m not the only person who has a “special reader”, that person you give your work to after you’ve cooked it real good and you think you can knock his/her socks off with one bite and yet, you never do. But this is the reason you keep bringing him/her work because maybe one day you will write something that will make your special reader pass out with adoration. Or so we dream.

artwork done by Kori in high school containing lines of my poetry and famous quotes

My special reader is also a poet. Her name is Kori and she is a graduate student at the University of Washington. If someone had told the two of us that we would be attending graduate school for the same discipline at the same time in Washington state, we would have, very literally, laughed ourselves into crying. Surely, we would have said, wiping the irony from our eyes, the Universe is not so twisted. Read more »

this man would probably not approve of twitter.

the other week former soul coughing frontman turned terrific singer songwriter mike doughty did a thoughtful and honest interview with new hampshire public radio (full 30+ minute version here; 10 minute edit here).  at about 14 minutes in, he talks about that moment of discovery you can still have, even after hearing a song million times.  coincidently, a couple days later i was listening to jeff buckley’s cover of “hallelujah” (for the millionth time).  i was walking my dog and using my ipod with a set of earbuds that have these foam cone things which do a remarkable job of blocking external noise.  and, for the first time ever, i heard jeff buckley gasp, for literally just a second, before that first haunting note hits.  it stopped me stone cold in my tracks.

i’ve always loved that song, and found it soulful in the way white boys with guitars can be.  but hearing that brief little exhalation just knocked me out.  like there was this whole other, even deeper level of exhaustion beneath the song that i didn’t even pick up on before.  and that made me think of the last time i watched “high fidelity,” one of my all-time favorite movies.  there’s a scene in which liz asks the broken-hearted rob gordon, “why do you want laura back so badly?”  and the camera flashes to rob’s face, for just a moment, before cutting to the next scene.  what i never really noticed, before my most recent viewing, was the look in rob’s face—as if he had never even considered that question before.  it was brilliant bit of acting & editing.

and all of this made me think of an article i read (but sadly can’t remember where, in order to link to it) which advocated the position of reading a lot, but fewer writers—as opposed to reading just one or two books from many different authors.  the idea being that we as readers can learn more by studying an entire body of one author’s work rather than trying to assimilate the ideas of hundreds.  the familiar depth vs. breadth argument.  which brings me to facebook.

Read more »

I’ve been thinking lately about Shira’s discussion of blogging and introducing high school students to a world of Internet communication wider than Facebook, wondering if they (or I) even really have Facebook nailed yet. Two weeks back I posted a link to an infographic on my Facebook that, due to the content that had been analyzed and designed, riled a few feathers (to put it lightly). The comment left on my post was sent to my email and came through while I was at work, which meant that I had all day to think about what to respond but couldn’t actually go on and craft a response until I got home. And I admit, I stressed more than a little bit about it.

On the one hand, it seemed so silly to me to be worrying about it. I mean, it’s Facebook, for heaven’s sake! People write articles about how to handle Facebook breakups and whether or not you should friend your ex. And here I was wondering how to respond in a way that people visiting my profile would (1) see me standing up for myself and my views and (2) doing that in a respectful and logical manner. Judging by the articles across the web, not the concern of your average Facebook user.

Read more »

Listening to NPR’s On Point on Tuesday morning, I heard something that gave me pause.  The show, which was about new technologies and their effects on the brain, included the writer/journalist, Nick Bilton, who said that the brain isn’t programmed to read. He said that we’re programmed to communicate, but reading is actually quite unnatural. It’s something we teach ourselves to do despite our natures. I don’t know if I believe this, but it does kind of make sense. Most people, barring those with developmental disorders, who are exposed to other communicative people learn to speak, but reading is something that takes years of practice to get really good at, and even then, some people never get to the point where they can interact with texts in complex ways (locating implications and assumptions, arguing with the text, finding logical fallacies and holes in reasoning, making connections, etc.), so maybe, as Bilton later states, reading is much like other technologies that have an effect on the brain; it teaches our brains to behave in certain ways in order to collect information, just as using the Internet, iPhones/Pods/Pads, cell phones…do. The worry, though, and the difference for me, is that reading doesn’t seem to contribute to attention problems while these other communication technologies promote short attention spans, according to anecdotal evidence and other studies that were brought up on the show. The other guest, Nicholas Carr, who wrote the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and the book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, argues that these new technologies are changing the way we pay attention. Read more »