Cosby karma is a bitch

Karma is a bitch, they say. As early as the mid '80's I'd heard through the Temple production network that the studiously folksy Dr. Pudding Pop, though the most famous supporter of my alma mater, was a bitch to work with, that he treated crewpeople like dirt. Later, I recall one or two whispered allegations of sexual misconduct, but at the time, it was common to dismiss them as conservative dirt—the bigoted stereotyping of African American men as sex-crazed. The video crews’ reports I didn’t dismiss. I know these folks and if they said, with a sad shake of the head, that America's favorite TV dad is a raging asshole off-camera, then I believed them.

Flash forward 20 years and he becomes the darling of the conservative set for his "calling out" of black social values. I must admit that I listened with interest to one of his screeds until I came to the part of him slamming people with Africanized names. I said, whoa, hold the fort, Heathcliff, I know lots of good people with names like the ones he was insulting. Who is he to judge my friends or their children for something as personal as their names? Does his race or his success give him carte blanche to rail against people whose lives he doesn’t know?

Though I happen to agree with him about hip hop below groin level pants, guns, the social cost of having multiple children of multiple parentage and absent fathers, the name thing stopped me cold. I couldn’t listen anymore. And my opinion of the opinionator changed.The name thing revealed a lot of loathing, not even below the surface anymore.

So maybe the names are “made up” and so what? Five generations ago there weren’t any Cosbys or Bills in the village where Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable’s ancestors were kidnapped, chained and sold into slavery halfway around the world. The irony of Cosby’s Anglicized names and character’s names is too much, so “white,” but that’s even beside the point. A name, inherited or new to a family, even a made up name, misspelled or creatively spelled, is a point of pride. This is sacrosanct. Names are people. Names are identity and you don’t disparage identity unless you yourself are a bigot of the worst sort.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a black journalist must have felt the sting of Cosby’s blanket disapproval. Coates is a talented Atlantic staffer whose conversational but layered writing style is always a good, sometimes a great read. So it must be terribly hard to look back on your work and question your own failure to address the painful disillusion that comes from seeing your heroes fall. Coates writes with true humility while Cosby's Huxtable humility is mugged and method act superficial. Reading this article, my estimation of Coates rises inversely as my estimation of Cosby falls.

So many heroes fall today. Practically, to a man, they all seem to fall/fail. Is it in the meanness of our social nature to tear down what we once put on a pedestal or does fault lie in the meanness and triviality of the elevation of celebrity? Cosby presented a (superficially) easy icon to raise up and a painful and difficult one to tear down. But tear down we must. While 12 allegations are not the same as a conviction, they are damningly consistent and sordid almost beyond belief.

Talk shows are dropping like flies, NBC and Netflix have cancelled comeback projects, but his disgrace is worse than that. Mr. Cosby now lives under a terrible, poisoned shadow that will follow him for the rest of his days. His loss of face is both cruel and just. There is no comeback from this. For the women he apparently victimized, this will have to serve. It is an incomplete justice that condemns our culture of celebrity as much as it condemns the predators who feel their elite status grants special dispensation for misanthropy and misogyny. Cosby is perhaps both types of devil. Though the social judgement brought down upon him is horrible, he deserves no pity. He is a self-made man.

My Father's Clothes

Several times in the year or so after my father passed, my mother would call me over to one or two closets in which she'd neatly hung my father's clothes with a veneration reserved for a priest's vestments. "He hardly wore these," she'd say with a sad, delicate wave of her hand. I’d look in her eyes and what I'd see there was not so much her grief in the lengthening absence of her mate of over 53 years. What I'd see most, was her hope in my acceptance of the utility of the offer. These were reverential, intimate moments between the two of us. The third presence, the obvious one, Dad’s, was hanging on the clothes rack. So, each time, I selected two or three items that I liked more than the others and thanked her. 

It's an odd, sad and complex thing to walk around in your dead father's clothes. There are times I asked myself that if his clothes retain some essence of him, would I absorb it?  I already had 90% of his genetic makeup. Would the clothes make it complete? All his successes, setbacks, beliefs and experiences–would I inherit these by osmosis?

Dad was 5'9" and barrel-chested. I am 6'1" and barrel-chested. At the top, we are alike. Dad's legs were short, thick, muscle-knotted and bandy. I have my mother's longer, more graceful legs. Dad's scent is sweet and masculine. It is cinnamon, musk, Irish Spring soap, Old Spice aftershave, graham crackers and face stubble. I’ve known this scent/signature all my life. My own scent is much harder for me to describe, though I know it is similar to his.

I passed over his sportcoats, which I really did not like and assumed would not fit me properly. The first item I chose smelled the strongest of him, even though freshly washed. It's a navy blue zippered pullover. As I held it to my face, a flash of grief surged through me with the knowledge that once I took it, wore it and washed it, eventually my molecules would displace all his molecules and its scent would change, become entirely mine, not his. Everything fades. Molecular traces are replaced. Though I honor his memory by wearing Dad’s pullovers, I actively erase his imprint by doing so. This is not something one can do casually.

New Toy

Did I ask you for your love?

Did I ask you for your dedication?

I don't want, I don't want your love.

I don't want, I don't want your affection!


Dateline, June 31, 2004

8 years ago,
to the month, I plunked down good money ($1600) for the old desktop. Call it Big Blue Dell. Despite its long service, I don't really harbor any emotional attachment. People love and make love to their computers, mod them, endlessly customizing inside and out, imbue them with personalities—only to chuck them out too soon when the newest shiny box becomes available. But to a writer, a computer ideally, should just be a typewriter. Sure, a typewriter with endless time-squandering fingertip access to a world of knowledge and social engagement, but a typewriter nonetheless. Means to an end.

But when you're on your own, business-wise, your box is not just a toy—it's your work, your productivity, your revenue generator. And when you're on your own, you have to be your own IT and IT training department. So no, I'm not a tech, I don't program or solder, but I've learned a bit about everything. Even when I knew far less, every upgrade I opened my wallet for has to run this gauntlet:

1.    Is it going to make what I do easier, faster or better?
2.    Do I need it now?
3.    How soon can I afford it?

Most of my techno-fancies are felled by the first blow. Few survive all three. These are good rules. Abiding over all is the genetic predisposition to buy smart, agnostic and not very often. Modern technology and its advertising make this very difficult. Device manufacturers want you to buy early and often and that is how their advertising is geared. To build brand loyalty. When the bloom is off the rose and you want to find out how to keep older tech serviceable, well that requires some serious research skills.

I want a New Toy (oh ay oh), to keep my head expanding.
I want a New Toy (oh ay oh), nothing too demanding.
Then when everything is in roses, everything is static
Yeh my New Toy (oh ay oh), you'll find us in the attic.

It ain't necessarily so ... Political commentary

All I know is what I have words for.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1953

Time Magazine called the Protestor "Person of the Year." The first New Yorker of 2012, on my desk today shows Old Man 2011 eying Newt prancing about as the 1994 baby. Already, given the peripatetic nature of the Republican race, the New Yorker cover is obsolete before its cover date. I'm afraid the Time cover is too.

It ain't necessarily so

The t'ings dat yo' li'ble

To read in de Bible,

It ain't necessarily so.

Perhaps it's fitting to revisit this George Gershwin composition that has been recorded by so many of the greats. Like most things Gershwin, it was really quite before it's time. This song's time is now. Even the statement "these are cynical times" sounds breathlessly naïve. These are way beyond cynical times. These are times I have no better words for. What's more cynical than cynicism? Fatalism. Both assume the worst of inputs. The latter affixes inevitability to outcomes. As much as I abhor predetermination, there's only so long you can drive along saying, it's a wall, up ahead, coming closer, it's a wall, it's a wall, before you smack into something.

Let's play history rematch. I re-pair Ronnie Reagan, the Teflon optimist and Jimmy Carter, the one term president who preached austerity, mano e mano 2011 and wonder whether Carter would have been so convincingly trounced. We've got your New American Century right here, Ron. How do you like it?

While our president gets to play hail the conquering heroes to soldier boys and girls on airbases and transport ships coming home from Iraq, worldclass skeptic Trudy Rubin writes how profoundly and non-partisanly we've failed that country and the region.  It doesn't take a skeptic to see that wherever in the world we (mis)adventure, we unerringly make the wrong moves.  It makes some of what libertarian skeptic Ron Paul says make sense. Not the John Bircher stuff, but the "we should keep to ourselves stuff."

Once we invaded Iraq was there ever any positive exit to be had? Whatever happens there next, civil war, Armageddon, Iranian puppet statehood, Muslim sects running after each other with power tools, etc. ... America's first and biggest folly was to ever go there and we should never forget this. For a writer, that's like starting a sentence with a period. I see a lot of revisionist media about Iraq and it sickens me. Not so much because of the disinformation fed our own people, but the false hope stirred up in the Iraqis. We have abandoned the few secular, progressive Iraqis we've encouraged in our short stint there. Once branded American sympathizers, their fates are double-sealed. They should notice that the American dream did not flower in Iraq and flee their country while they can. This sort of abandonment happens with some regularity. Ask the Kurds under Saddam.

In Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, et.al, we hail "the will of the people," the triumph of the protest movement over multi-decade dictatorships but worry about what has replaced them. In America, we automatically assume that our way is the best and brightest beacon the world has to offer.  I'm less convinced than ever that the world wants what we offer. I'm not even so sure we ourselves still want it.

We watched our Congress bring the economy to the brink over the deficit limit, watched in horror as Standard and Poors downgraded U.S. Bonds from AAA to AA+ and decided, as individual investors and en masse that it really didn't matter. Congress doesn't matter. The Tea Party doesn't matter. The OWS doesn't seem to matter.  None of the Republican candidates matter. They all surface briefly like blips on the radar, then fade into the murk. Why? Because they appeal to our craving for novelty more than our desire for hard work and lasting solutions.

What matters? I say this to the Republican presidential wannabees as I say it to the Democratic president I voted for. Failed. All failed. What makes you worthy of another chance? Unbelievably enough, I'm going to give you one if only because I'm not yet a fatalist, but a failed fatalist, I'm reluctantly willing to listen. But I know that you're lying to me. Your lips are moving I know you're telling me what you think I want to hear.

Never has cynicism seemed like such a requisite and important virtue.

Wadoo, zim bam boddle-oo,

Hoodle ah da wa da,

Scatty wah !

Oh yeah !...

It ain't necessarily so. Happy New Year.

In defense of the (revised) liberal education

"This is a tough time to graduate from college. While unemployment is high across the board, recent grads face a brutal 9.3% unemployment rate -- the highest that statistic has been for them since the Great Recession began. Worse yet, studies have shown that fewer than half of recent college students are finding jobs that relate to their majors, and just more than half felt their jobs made use of what they learned as undergrads."

I came across this article by DailyFinance.com's Bruce Watson, thanks to an FBF and it made me think about how much things have changed since I was a starry-eyed student.

The old saw when we didn't have gray hair was that college was less valuable for what you learned and more valuable that you "learned how to learn." As a grad of communications, back further than I care to say, the attrition rate was appallingly high. Maybe 1 in 10 still working in the field. The one thing I got right back in my youth was that "you really have to want it" and I did. And I do. So here I am, still working in a field that is every bit as tough as it was when I got out of school, if not tougher.

A Speechwriter's Contribution

Dear President Obama:

I am a working media and speech writer and though struggling in this economy, I am not in the habit of working for free. 

Nonetheless, please consider the following an act of civic contribution to your re-election campaign. I can't offer money I don't have, but I do have ideas and words aplenty. Some of them, I think, belong to you. They are yours for the taking. An attribution would be nice, but I'm not even insisting on that. If you use it, I'll know.

The title of this speech is: 

"Things I should have said and done"

Three years ago, I was elected to the most important chief executive position in the world. I, like others, thought of it as the most powerful position in the world, but experience has taught me otherwise. With a thousand thousand media spotlights turned on me and powerful forces bent against me, I have seen the failure of my best intentions and at times have felt powerless to stop this failure.

I don't feel that way now.

ARE WE NOT MEN -- Mainly on Masculinity, Learning and "Anti-Social" Media

Last month I spent a marvelous weekend in the company of two of my best friends and their sons. It was a multigenerational, manly weekend, full of beef, beer, boasting, boating and blasting the open road in my friend's Porsche 914.

Manly stuff, including long reminiscent and forward-looking conversations wherein we expressed fears, concerns, hopes for our boys. On the whole, they are like the children of Lake Woebegone, above average lads, and nearly all labor with some degree of academic challenge.


Two speakers at Ted Talks intelligently and eloquently spoke to "boy issues" in academia.



Psychologist Philip Zimbardo asks, "Why are boys struggling?" He shares some stats (lower graduation rates, greater worries about intimacy and relationships) and suggests a few reasons. He stops short of solutions. He tells the audience that it's their job. And no doubt it is – their job and ours.


So what the heck do we do?

Reflections of a Walker #3

Volt for me and I'll set you free!

(warning: high geekspeak index)


Goodbye, good old friend.
Hello, good new (more gently used) friend.

 Back, last winter, I was stepping into a cab in my trenchcoat, closed the door and heard a sickening crunch. Result, house left. I was heartbroken, for this old friend had accompanied me on all walks, rain and shine for six years. Perhaps it was the striding gods punishing me for abandoning my pedestrian ways.

I know there are tons of fancypants MP3 players out there, most with Apple logos, big flash drives, video, all manners of "Swiss Army" hoohah, but this old school iRiver H320 player still holds more than a candle to them all. Maybe I'm an old school throwback, but the idea of watching a movie on a 3" screen is absurd. Hell, my 27" screen is too small for optimal viewing. Let music players be music players.

This South Korean manufactured playa sports a comfortable 20G drive, room enough for 2800 songs, most ripped at minimum 256k bitrate, decent radio, great recorder ... plug it in USB to your computer and it functions as another agnostic USB drive, no fuss over DRM or bizarre Apple music file structure. (Music, music, which directory is my $$$'ing music in?)

So unlike wetware friends who are irreplaceable, this new old friend (house right) was $60 on Ebay. If you like this oldschool player, just understand that it has a fiercely devoted fanbase (http://www.misticriver.com/) and can be hard to find. I was damned lucky. The one I'd bid on previously topped out at over $200. Once new friend arrived, I dragged and dropped my 18G portable music directory to the new friend, stripped off the old friend's silicon skin and plugged my musician quality Shure SCL4 sound isolating earbuds in and good to go.

Some folks take me to task, asking "is it safe to walk with earbuds in?" I'd ask them, especially if they're city dwellers, if you really need to hear city noise at normal db levels? The headphones' sound is so clean 109db (S/N) on the SCL4 (EC4 replacement), that you don't need to and shouldn't overdrive them for risk of damaging your hearing. Clean, normal volume sound, exterior sound reduced 60-80% and one's own head is a concert hall. One only need pretend you're hearing impaired and pay extra attention when crossing streets.

This iRiver player/recorder sports a 1.8" 20G Toshiba minidrive found in netbooks and mini-laptops, but Toshiba discontinued the more capacious upgrade drives with the old CF interface in favor of the newer ZIF interface. There are converters out there, but there's some question in my mind if it can all be crammed into the tiny space in my H320. So for now, I guess I'm stuck with only 2800 tunes at a time. A quality problem.

What's this have to do with walking? All I can say is it's my life and it's sometimes life needs a soundtrack of one's own choosing. Urban ambience can be interesting but I prefer to roll my playlist when I hit the streets. The aural joy and peace of mind/soul it brings me was well worth the investment.

For earlier Reflections of a Walker posts, just scroll down or visit my FB posts at:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=32729666&l=a7efec5c26&id=1338279946
and
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=32676077&l=b4c64e24e4&id=1338279946

Happy trails.

Signed the Walking Man.

Wise words from the director of "Biutiful"

"We can't understand what is happening to something if we aren't looking. But nothing is going to happen to that something if we don't look deeply. That's why so many things with incredible potential go unnoticed, because nobody bothers to look.

Like Schrödinger says, what you see in the world is what you get and that determines your destiny. Vitality or mortality is determined by what we choose to see in the other."



"The truth is that many events that shape our lives and our judgment come to us in the form of books or movies and television, and not from reality. Younger generations prefer to have reality reinterpreted for them, edited instead of facing an unpredictable and sometimes boring reality. When I am filming and setting up a camera maybe I am separating myself, and intellectualizing the moment but I keep it and that is the trade off. We are conscious that now we are observing ourselves observe. We document but we don’t participate in the reality."

Alejandro González Iñárritu from the DVD Special Features section of "Biutiful."

This film and its director do look deeply. If one of the duties of great filmmakers is to place us in a world outside of our range of experiences and make us live in it for awhile, then this director and his star have succeeded admirably. This world is incredibly hard to look at, at times, yet it is lyrical and heartfelt. Unlike previous Iñárritu films, all of which are good, it stays true to itself from start to finish. There are no false notes or easy outs. There's never a moment when you feel you are watching "Bardem the actor" instead of Uxbal the man. The rest of the cast are unknowns or amateurs who actually have lived the lives they are portraying. This is Iñárritu's and Bardem's masterwork and the only truly sad thing about it is how quickly it passed from notice.

Rent "Biutiful" and definitely check out the featurettes that accompany the DVD. I defy you not to be deeply moved.

Appropriation

Every day before we go out into the world, we stand naked in our bedrooms and make choices. Most times we put no more mindfulness into these choices than “gotta get dressed.” but because our clothing choices are the most visible aspect of our appearance, they define us perhaps more than we’d wish .

The shoes are New Balance. The half-socks are Hanes, as are the briefs. My shorts are Spaulding. The shirt is UnderArmour. The water bottle is SubZero. The phone is an ancient Treo and the MP3 is an ancient but serviceable iRiver.

I am good to go. I am a walking billboard for other people’s brands.

Except for the hat. Sorry Toyota, but it’s my brand now. It is no longer stands for a large, richly-appointed gas-guzzler. It means something more pedestrian.

It is me. It is mine. I have appropriated the logo and words to stand for my own decisions and behaviors. I am the Land Rover.

I began roving about seven years ago when I was 80 pounds heavier, hypertensive and had HBA1c values in the high 7’s. A diabetic son of diabetic parents. My last six HBA1c levels have been in the low, mid 5’s. This is accomplished by my near daily ritual and smart(er) food choices. I am no paragon of virtue. But I am a bit better than I was before.

It's good to have a vision. I told my physician and diet therapist that mine is of a spry 90 year old stepping into a canoe with my grandkids. These health advisors helped lay out a lifestyle that would bring me to that goal.

I had and have to make the “micro-decisions” necessary to reach it.
“Just do it.”

I used to say that I didn’t have time to make these commitments. That they were unfair. That evolutionary biology was stacked against me. Boo frickin hoo. The time of feeling sorry is past. I have too much roving left to do.

I'm not a huge fan of ballcaps, but you can't exactly go strolling in 90 degree heat in a Stetson. Maybe that's why those Texas politicians are all so … nevermind!

I am my cap. I am branded. There are many like it, but this brand is mine. It's sweet when that happens.

Take a hike!

7 reasons why being middle class ain't what it used to be

My dad worked a middle class job for almost 30 years. He never cracked more than a 5-figure income. Yet we had a house, plenty of food and oh, yeah, he put six of us through top state and private schools using a combination of (then) plentiful state grants, scholarships, work study and low interest loans. I only have two kids to put through college. My income is more or less on par with Dad's, but do I get the sam deal as him? "Every picture tells a story, don't it." Pertinent images from documentary, "Inside Job":
(rights retained by author)

Going to college is about 10x more expensive than when I was going.
Is my income 10x what Dad made? No.
American universities have abrogated
their compact with the middle class of this country.

Glad somebody made out. My family didn't.

I don't carry anywhere near this kind of debt,
but my savings certainly don't show
the same robust upward swing.
Talk to me after the boys graduate.
I may well be at the top of this cuve.

When I saw this, I knew things would be no different.
Change = "same as it ever was"
I am so disappointed in him.

Tim Geitner -- go directly from Wall St. to PA Avenue,
no need to stop at Main St.

Father and Son Talk 1

The first of an occasional series where I post recent Dad/lad talks for fun, posterity or just so I don't forget them when I go senile.

Here's a little story about #2 Son in honor of his day. A few months ago, he had to recite this cute Shel Silverstein poem for class. It's called "Smart."

SMART

My dad gave me one dollar bill
'Cause I'm his smartest son,
And I swapped it for two shiny quarters
'Cause two is more than one!

And then i took the quarters
And traded them to Lou
For three dimes-i guess he don't know
that three is more than two!

Just them, along came old blind Bates
And just 'cause he can't see
He gave me four nickels for my three dimes,
And four is more than three!

And i took the nickels to Hiram Coombs
Down at the seed-feed store,
and the fool gave me five pennies for them,
And five is more than four!

And then i went and showed my dad,
and he go red in the cheeks
And closed his eyes and shook his head-
Too proud of me to speak!

The night before, he had it down cold, but the recitation had the sort of emotionless, flat quality of rote memorization. So I put on my speech coach hat and showed him which words and phrases to punch to derive the humor and meter from the poem.

The next day we were walking home from school and he said he'd done his presentation. I asked him how he did and an odd hangdog expression came over his face. (All my doggy owner friends know that expression.) I held my breath, thinking oh no, he messed it up. He mumbled a response to my question and I asked him to repeat himself.
 

He said, "Everybody clapped."

I said, "But son, that's great."

He said, "I guess, but they clapped really loud!" 

Me: "What's wrong with that?"

Him: "Nobody got as much applause as I did."

Me (heart swelling, but sensing the teachable moment): "Son, its great that you have empathy for your classmates. You're all part of a community and it's nice that you want to share things like praise with them. There will be times when they do things better than you and there will be just as many times (or more) when you do better than them. But you have to promise me something."

Little man: "What's that Dad?"

Me: "That you will never, ever again be embarrassed about excelling. Even if you're the only one who does. Instead of feeling embarrassed, ask yourself why they clapped so loud. Ask yourself what you did right to earn those claps and what you might have done better. Instead of feeling embarrassed turn it into a learning experience. Do you see what I'm saying?

Silent head nod.

Me: "Good! Now give me a hug."

Sometimes a kid who senses he is different and excels wants nothing more than to fit in. Nothing wrong with that, but when there's a strong, unique light under that bushel, a parent's job is to help lift that bushel and let it shine. It's moments like this that bring a sort of transcendental joy to being a parent. I've been graced with many such moments.

Face to Face

A recent freewheeling FB chat I had with my brother who is a teacher in the Chicago Public School System on the subjects of privacy, "friending," "defriending," kids and personal technology and the up/downsides of all:

10:16pmMe
are you still home?

10:17pmGreg
yes if you mean Pgh.

10:17pmMe
just got K's msg about defriending ###### for Mom. I can't do that. Would need access to her account and pw to do that. So perhaps you can while there.

This is one area where Mom and I disagree, but she has the right to her own opinions and "friends"

10:18pmGreg
I can handle it...think I'll just hide ###  for her...that way #### won't hound her and won't know that she isn't seeing ####'s posts unless ### posts to her directly

10:19pmMe
I thought of that and while I'd advocate hiding too, I think if she looks at her friends list, then she'll know ### is still there.

10:19pmGreg
it's a more "polite" way to ignore
we already talked about that

chances are real good ### won't
talk to her any more on FB than #### does already

10:20pmMe
abso, as long as she agrees
I've spam foldered ##### already. The crap I get from her isn't even personal email.
Just lame and stupid jokes.
The last series of Obama "cartoons" are positively racist, some of them, so off to spam she goes.

10:21pmGreg
I haven't received a single post from ### --to me, since friending.

#### is no more a part of my life now than before FB
no surprise

10:23pmMe
I am one for maintaining congeniality. which fb is a great way to do
friendship/contact but without the sticky stuff.

10:24pmGreg
I am no more/less congenial...like I said, the connection is the same as before.
I think ###, like most "collects" friends...
something I am not interested in doing

I only have about 150 people
on my list
not several hundred

10:25pmMe
I've had marvelous time reconnecting with bricks and mortar friends, some from as many as 30 years ago.

10:25pmGreg
did that with 1-2 people
most are people I already am in steady contact with on a regular basis

10:26pmMe
had a great discussion with 10 people over a photo from the early 90's ITVA. Might even inspire a reunion. Social media at its best.

Annuals and Decimals--Notes on the Passing Decade

Sweet dreams are made of these

At age 10, I had a dream about my fifth grade class going on a field trip to the moon. I actually entered the gleaming rocket ship and settled into my launch chair, but I never made it. The nuns discovered I'd forgotten my lunch money, so I was kicked off the space ship and left behind. I'd never forgotten that dream, but the last place I expected to be reminded of it was at the premiere of "Tron" this week.

My 16 year old and I settled in for the trailers and I found myself watching this theatrical Kia Optima commercial: "Sweet Dreams"  with a mixture of joy, wonderment and the feeling expressed best by Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly." It felt like some evil mf copywriter genius at Park Pictures reached inside my head, extracted the glowing filament that best distilled all my most cherished fantasies and unfulfilled dreams and splashed them on the screen with a tagline "No one ever dreamt of driving a midsized sedan… until now.” The boy driving his bed through his fantasies turned into a driving man who watches in awe as the rocket ship of his dreams lifts off into the cosmos. He's happy in his sleek midsized sedan, but to me, it seems like a poor consolation prize.

Chatter astride the Social Network Divide, Halloween Edition

c.010101 is in your "face" for Halloween

Today, folks my (middle) age are split right down the middle. Half are FB junkies, half are still poleaxed by the social networks, their triviality, their meteoric rise in popularity (in direct proportion to that triviality). To both halves, the haves, the have nots, the "likes" and the "like nots" this is my final apologia.

I like having a tab on my 16 year old son and knowing who his friends are through FB. I like catching up with my nephews in college and my own friends from 20-30 years ago. I like knowing that my brave friend MN is a master woodworker and though she has breast cancer I can "like" her post in which she tells all, that I can offer her support and encouragement along with dozens of others of her friends. I'm sure she'll carry a little positive buzz into her next chemo session. I love the rolicking political debates I have with farflung friends in FL, PA, CA and all over on issues as diverse as "the meaning of tolerance" "abortion" the "Tea Party." I like bating my old TU classmate who is both a Republican media consultant and though he might howl at the label, a closet liberal. One guy from FL has a real knack for throwing out a debate topic and watching people pounce all over it like wolves. This makes for lots of freewheeling intellectual interplay and just plain fun on a purely social level. If you post about what you had for lunch and that you're at work and bored, chances are I'm not going to care or answer you. It takes less than a second to engage or dismiss a trivial post, but for the rest of us, there is discourse, real intelligence out there. You don't have to look very hard for it. I have a wife, two tech-savvy boys, a business and a pretty active "non-virtual" social life.

I am done justifying the value of being an online social networker. I'm not turning into a socially maladjusted hermit for using it but you may be turning into a socially maladjusted hermit if you don't use it. Many people are saying that the social platform is rapidly becoming not just the next communications platform, but the next communications, computational do everything platform. So whatever you say about the intrusion of the media into our private lives, social media are/is here to stay and some of us have stopped puzzling over what it says about us (as a society) and started wondering what it says next.

Facebook needs some work as a "cloud ap." Doing some things on it still takes too much guesswork and clicking about. That's all about to make a radical leap.   


Form Factor Follies

From geek ...

Computers. We have always been slaves to their form factors. When I was a teen wolf, they were as big as libraries, and now you can slip one in your pocket and carry it everywhere. One of my standard jokes is that as a tween geek I always dreamed about owning a pocket computer and now that I have one (a 5 year old Palm Treo) I'm old enough to need glasses to read it it. The joke loses something without my scintillating delivery, but the Treo, mature tech, fits handily in my pocket. So the problem with mobile computing is no longer size, but two other issues. Better imaging and input. We've all seen people walking down the street staring and clicking away at tiny screens until they walk into walls or other people. They're mobile, but the tiny screen and finger input sucks. It requires that you absent yourself from your surroundings. In the case of texting and driving to disastrous results. Wearable, discrete, heads up displays built into glasses or contact lenses and corneal sensors and the next phase dataglove-finger/hand-whatever thingy sensors will solve this issue. That's just current/breaking tech. Who knows what kind of cool, weird body-integrated computing interface is being dreamed up by the bright boys and girls in Silicon Valley and MIT.  



To chic!



The form factor change of computers drives the very definition of "computer" and "computer user." It's changed and will continue to. Computers used to be computational devices. They solved mathematical problems. Like the payload to get men to the moon and back. Then they shrunk down onto people's desks and became personal problem solvers. Business machines. Users changed from scientist to teenagers. Now our personal communications machines are social machines. And they are rapidly becoming ubiquitously portable.

Here's what the next big leap will look like.

It's more of the same.

It's everwhere.

It's in your face, introducing ...

facespace-3D



FaceSpace 3D Live--What, you think it won't happen?

 Imagine, Facebook 3D and other non-virtual platforms where social networks run amock and becoming completely equally untethered and mobile. Whether I want to or not, I'll be wading through endless streams of social data. Ron in Florida is stirring up his conservative friends. My sister in Virginia is posting the Steelers jerseys she knitted for the lab puppies. Here in Philly, I take a moment and friend the Art Museum as I run up its steps and do my Rocky victory dance.

The Rocky Statue, already my friend, says, go ahead, friend both the museums too. When I get to the top, I'll let you all know. Heck. You'll all be watching. We'll share likes and posts from the restaurants, galleries, service stations and CVS's I pass on foot or you drive by in your car. You think we live in a media-cluttered world now. Man, just wait.

I don't know how I feel about that. Ten years from now, I'll no doubt be nostalgic for the relative simplicity of these our current times. That's just the way it works. We will all walk around endlessly distracted by our personal technology and our personal enviroment and its global extensions. Soon our environment and our technology will merge. And we will merge. I just hope I can keep up with all of it.

Off to get some Halloween candy with "Tween Wolf." Live from the trenches.

Stiegless in Seattle, Stockholm, Philadelphia and Everywhere

At the end of last week, I finished reading "The Girl that Kicked the Hornet's Nest," the third book in Stieg Larsson's startling trilogy. I'd first heard about Larsson in 2008 on NPR in one of Martha Corrigan's erudite but effortlessly seductive book reviews. Corrigan, a writer, lecturer at Georgetown, is one of NPR's jewels, the type you sit in the car with the engine off, just to hear the end of her latest installment. Don't know if it’s the timbre of the voice or the whip smart things it says, but I remember exactly where I was, when I first learned about Stieg, Blomkvist and Salander, (heading north on 11th, turning on Arch Street. I remember exactly what I thought, (that though I'm not much of one for mystery novels, this sounds just off-kilter enough for my tastes).

Perhaps, I was more receptive because I'd just finished reading Eliot Patttison's brilliant Skull Mantra, itself an offbeat murder mystery set in post-occupation Tibet. So okay, okay, I've found my "MM niche." Give me a tale of culture totally alien to mine own, kill off some characters in a grizzly fashion and let me follow the trail of a whip-smart investigator and I will read and read …

Lists, Advice and the joys of reading aloud.

A writer on one of the writers' groups I follow posted this link to the 100 Greatest Opening Lines for a novel. In some respect such lists are meaningless, but I am reading Huckleberry Finn to my 10 year old for his bedtime reading and this line appears as #12 of the "Greatest Opening Lines":

"You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter." —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

This is the second child I've read aloud to from this, perhaps the most important American work of fiction by arguably the greatest American author. I tell him its for his erudition, but it's really for me. I maintain a "selfish selflessness" when it comes to reading to the boys. I only read works I love, so as best to communicate my enthusiasm for the work and for reading in general. Huckleberry Finn is perhaps my favorite novel of all time. Such a ripping adventure yarn, so simply written, in such a compelling voice on so many complex subjects. Racism, slavery, morality, identity, personal loyalty, the relationships of fathers and sons ... layers and layers, on and on.

That said, imho, the line is only memorable because the book is so damned good. But does that make it great? I always thought the line was a bit of a "throw-away," an understated device Twain used to quickly move readers from A to B. He gives permission to read Huck (his masterpiece) without having first read TS (his great work). Huck Finn is chockfull of amazing lines, all far more memorable than its first line.

How about this passage from Chapter 16, where we stopped last night:
Setup--Huck is bedeviled by his conscience, having had an opportunity to do the "right thing" and give Jim up. But for reasons he doesn't fully understand yet, he doesn't.

"I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn't no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don't get started right when he's little ain't got no show -- when the pinch comes there ain't nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat. Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on; s'pose you'd a done right and give Jim up, would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I'd feel bad -- I'd feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what's the use you learning to do right when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn't answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn't bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time. "

What makes a great opening line? Is it the great poetic resonance that presages the story like a bolt of lightning? Is it how in a single brushstroke, it intros a memorable protagonist or sets the stage for the work's central conflict?

What virtue is inherent in a novel's first line that we as writers should study, know and emulate?

I always thought that the first lines of short stories were more "important" because of the economy of short stories v novels. Novels are about slow-cooking, delicate, complex nuanced flavors, while short stories offer sharper, faster brighter flavors but by necessity, less complexity. The short story format only allows you to hint at complexity, i.e., negative space, rather than develop it. In cooking, a good reduction, water is all that boils off. In a good short work or a good long work, there is no excess water. So, I'd argue that it's not possible to retain ALL the flavors of a long work in a short work, no matter how skilled or brutal an editor you are.

To wit, this link from Writer's Digest for those of us considering, editing or pulling our hairs out over a novel in progress. Some solid advice within, which I'm taking to heart:

Writer’s Digest - Take Your Novel to the Finish Line

 

Here's again is the link to an essay I did on Twain while reading Tom Sawyer with Son 1. 

My how I roam and ramble. Twain would have me set on a raft without a paddle. 

Eye to Brain -- This post is too long!!!

My oldest friend, J, fellow writer and most observant critic emails:

My first take on (your blog) is hampered by my dis-inclination to read (with attention) off a computer screen. This is a real obstacle as evidenced by the efforts to produce a "reader" like Kindle. However, this may not be an obstacle for our kids but I worry about the loss of the habit of attentive, non distracted reading on our consciousness of the real, tactile world. Such may have been the medieval transition in human thought from oral tradition, bardic incantation of epic tales, wandering theatrical troupes to the emergence of print and the explosion of human knowledge.

My response:

J, I'm probably in the minority of early adopter types, but I still think Kindles suck and won’t get one until they get much better. Christ, they don’t even backlight, which means I can’t tote it to bed and read in the darkness while my wife sleeps. That's a deal-killer for me. I might as well sit in my comfy chair with a book or my desktop screen which has better resolution. But what's zero sum gain for one reader is a direct hit for another. I maintain each student in this country should be issued a loaded Kindle and juvenile backstrain would disappear overnight. Poor #2 Son has had to carry as many as 18 lbs. of treekill. I know, I always carry them for him on our walks from school and several times have weighed the bloody things.

From feeding to locomotion, there are some human needs so old and basic that the forms of the devices that service them are elegantly fixed by function, if not physics. Simple machines like the spoon and the wheel represent design perfection in their spooniness and wheelishness. With reading, the issue (as J points out) is also form factor, but as acquiring knowledge is a relatively new human endeavor, it is vulnerable to being pushed, bent, perhaps out of shape by the delivery mechanism. Books tire the eye less than e-screens. Portability, visibility, tactility are all easy virtues of books. Length becomes a design issue when it tires the eye and undermines rather than engages concentration.

So my essays are long and I'm faced with two choices:

Write shorter ones
/
or
\
acknowledge they are long because they have to be
to convey concepts that aren't easily condensed
and help the reader suffer through them as much as I can.

From a book aesthetic it seems artificial to mediate a solid argument with jumps, links, graphics, pictures, headlines and other publishers eye-candy to titillate tired or bored eyes. Yet, the British tabloids know exactly what they're doing with their (PG-13 rated) page three girls.

This is how we train people to write for the web. Content design born of the limitations and the audience's declining attention span. Fifteen years ago, I wrote an essay on a concept I coined as "deep interactivity" which I defined as using content driven branching and non-linear information architecture used to create the kinds of deep, meaningful resonances and complexities a reading a long passage in a story or essay provides. To quote U2, I still haven't found what I'm looking for. Perhaps the quest is quixotic.

The printed page is a linear storage device. However experimental a writer's style, it will always be linear and thereby limited. Why is linear limited? Because linear compels each user to use the author's argument architecture largely to the exclusion of his own. The disk-based nonlinear storage of content frees us from linearity, offers us search, linking, bookmarking, compact storage, but it sacrifices the best of what even the paperback has to offer, the intact human voice telling its own story from start to finish. Reading itself seems to be evolving into something we won’t understand a hundred years from now.

The bardic tales were passed by oral tradition, so Homer, Gilgamesh, the Upanishads and a handful of the great oral works fortunately survived long enough to be fixed in the amber of written language. But what we certainly lost are lesser known tales and even the finest extemporaneous interpretations of the tale, because a scribe wasn't around at a particular campfire to write it down. It would be like a 21st Century saxophonist reinterpreting John Coltrane, without any original recordings to reference from. Each oralist brought both enhancement and degradation in his ownership of the stories he committed to memory.

Modern disciples of the oral tradition, like my professional storytelling brother argue that the paradigmic shift from oral to written tradition lost something precious, i.e., storytelling as a socially binding, community-reinforced experience. In workshops, conferences and festivals all over the country, a new generation of bards are subversively deconstructing the modern media to reconstruct and reclaim the ancient oral arts.

Tactility has also suffered. I keep coming back to it as it might be at the root of what J is saying. You can touch a storyteller, hear him, smell her, hold hands with an audience member during a scary part. Emotions and social engagement are subcarrier waves for long, involved stories. Tactility is another content subcarrier.

Books have a more reserved but still profound tactility. Papers, bindings, edges, covers, fonts, illustrations, the shapes of paragraphs so fixed and legible that you can see patterns in the way the letters line up. The smell of a new book. The smell of an old one. The soft flick of a turning page, the satisfying thunk of the cover closing to assure that everything you've read and yet to read will be in exactly the same neat rectilinear package tomorrow.

The web; keyboards, speakers mice and screen. We're still clicking away. Each generation abstracts the kinesthetics of knowledge acquistion a bit further.

Yet those who only look back without looking ahead (and J is certainly not one of them) demonize the web as an anti-socializing, anti-intellectualizing force, neglect to grasp something fundamental. The web has taken giant strides toward synthesizing the instantaneous emotional resonances of the communally shared story and the archival compactness of text, adding search, networking and infinite storage, a synthesis paper can never accomplish on the same scale. Synthesis is meaning and context. Community is meaning and context. Community adds complexity. The tactility issue is addressable by bandwidth and innovation.

Today, the Kindle, tomorrow i-glasses, which will let you read the entirety of the world’s web of knowledge, while walking, but only line at a time. Or you'd rather have a v-hat that plunges you full and deep into 4-d holospace. You could experience the classics of world literature in full Sensurround without ever needing to learn how to read. Will you want to? What will change next? Will the language itself become more pictographic to balance the inverse proportionality of textual and visual literacy. Will density and complexity of information continue to degrade or can a newer, meatier sensory-augmented alphabet convey more with less.

As our generation ages and dies off, many believe the trend of information decay will accelerate until like pond scum it blankets the surface and blots the sun from the deep spaces, satisfied to be skipping along the bright and superficial, the odd and confrontational while avoiding the deep elaborate organic tide pools where complexity flourishes and well-reasoned resolutions to multivariate arguments are forged.

Are we really the last champions of "complexity" that we so smugly assume ourselves to be?

Or are we witnessing the watershed of language evolution, the indrawn breath before the explosion of the new language, new concepts and new achievement in thought and word propel us to new heights.

Or did Gutenberg, like the Beatles, get it absolutely right the first time, only to have successors dilute and degrade the medium and the message beyond all future recognition or hope.

In Semi-Reluctant Defense of Facebook

On Friday, a wicked storm blew through our area, but Saturday night, the skies were clear and the humidity was down and as I sat with an assorted collection of friends and family on a dock by a lake after a wonderful cookout, a subject came up that is probably on the hot plate of families all over America.

Frankly, I wasn't looking for any debate, especially this debate, preferring a peaceful kickback with good company, cigars and port. What I was silently pondering was the counterpoint between the port I was sipping and excellent Cubano I'd lit and the clever response I'd make to this guy on FB, obviously an inhabitant of another continent, who cracked wise about Americans obsessing about the weather. Said dude said, just you wait, winter with all its rain and cold are just around the corner. He obviously didn't grasp that here in NNE America it is record-breaking rainy/cold and it's bloody summer.

But my reverie was interrupted by somebody saying, people, especially teenagers should just turn off their computers and get out and interact with each other. In "real life." Ah, the camouflage was off the digital divide and the Luddites were marching, with fixed bayonets. Their rallying cry:

Facebook, "Great corruptor of youth and destroyer of health, civility and "real social discourse."

Or not.

As the last standing digital partisan in this upscale crowd of lawyers, financial analysts, tech workers, investors, teachers and healthcare workers, I was pulled into a trench war in reluctant defense of my own usage and that of teens. My assignment was to hopefully raise the awareness of a group of parents, good, intelligent people all, about the true pros and cons of social media.

The curve on all new tech trends comes up fast, each faster than the previous one, so there is really no shame in professing tech-vertigo. But those on the dock with the staunchest opinions weren't informed by awareness, i.e. actually being on the site and using it and their arguments were so categorical and absolute that they demanded a reasoned response. Where there is a little shame, IMH, is judging without knowing.

FB IS a time waster. Sure, but so are a lot of things.

At first glance, it is easy to dismiss FB as a trivial time-waster. People write about the yummy beef burrito with chipotle sauce that they had for lunch. They write that they're stuck in airports. They take quizzes to determine if they're dateable or which Mafia boss they are most like. I mean, really! A lot it is crap. It's like being on an old-fashioned telephone party line with most of the jabber being nonsense. Hmm, a potential through line? Let's put it on hold for a moment and return to the non-virtual lakeside debate.

The argument that I responded to first, was the new technology = decline of civility argument.

This one is hardest to counter, because there is always an element of truth to it. Social pundits at the turn of the previous century slammed the "yellow journalists" for their lack of decorum. Newspapers decried the telephone and radio as infernal instruments. Radio took on movies. Movies took on television. Television fought the net and they all won. They're all still around. Granted, the fishwraps are on life support, but the good ones will pull through once they figure out how to save trees and international journalists.

Samuel Johnson said that "Politeness is one of those advantages which we never estimate rightly but by the inconvenience of its loss." Yet social commentators from the days of the Athenian republic have been decrying the loss of civil discourse in the proceeding generation. By mathematical progression alone, this would have reduced Johnson's generation to Yahoos and our generation to snarling brutes. Yet the argument remains evergreen and is levied by elders against every new generation or medium embraced by that generation.

Civility is both a fluid and a static concept. There was a time in this country (which still exists in some cultures) when women would be considered rude, just appearing in public without a male escort. Aristotle believed that virtuous behavior had to be voluntary and that civility is a form of virtuous behavior.

· Treating people well

· Speaking politely

· Telling the truth

Any generation that decries the breakdown of civility in its youth, must first examine itself, what of these virtues it has passed down or failed to pass down to the next.

I'd argue that it is never the role of the new medium to lead the charge of civility. That role is reserved for the oldest of media, the discourse that takes place at the "kitchen hearth." The lessons of the hearth are no more the role of technology than sex ed is the role of Playboy. Remember Playboy? People bring what they've learned to the communications tools they use, so you can hardly blame the tool for the poor choices of its users.

But I'd also posit that communication, as a human activity, is a virtue, more valued than making money or war. In a democratic society, even poorly done communication is better than none at all. A million twittering Iranians can't be wrong. Our own founding fathers valued free speech above all other freedoms or virtues and there's no doubt that if they'd had cellphones they'd have tweeted from the docks of Boston to the shores of Yorktown.

"How much time do you spend on FB?"

One individual asked this in a somewhat hostile tone, expecting, I think, that the answer would be 'hours and hours daily', an a priori assumption that would have undermined my credibility, with the insinuation that I'm just one of those pathetic time-wasters who are so addicted to their computers that they've lost all sense of perspective frittering away in other people's trivia. My answer is about 10 minutes per log-on. Well, this individual countered, I work, and I don't have time ... which I'm sorry, is the refrain that unengaged parents have used for generations to not be bothered to find out what their kids are thinking about or doing.

I hear this argument far too much from my "on the digital cusp" generation.

It basically translates thus:

• "It's all crap and I don't care" or
• "I haven't figured out how to do it yet and rather than take the modest time and admit I need a little help, I'd rather assume the high moral ground and paint those with skills as "people I am better than and don't want to be like anyway."
• "I'm too important. "

I have a clue for such folks. It isn’t all crap. Something important is happening here and though I can't state with certainty what it will morph into, I can tell you that you are missing the boat. You aren’t better or smarter for your standoffishness. You and your work aren't any more or less important than this. Put your prejudices in the back drawer and check it out. It isn't as hard as you think and you may even enjoy yourself.

You don’t need FB to be rude

Another individual began his argument (as he always does) with the aggressive suppositions that "You don't get it." "You don't understand" and "You're not listening." This is a familiar three-toothed saw, as this person consistently assumes that if I don't agree with him, that I've not listened to him. (His) logic dictates that either he believes his opinions are facts, or that the force of his arguments are so incredibly compelling, that merely listening to them will bring instant agreement or that I'm so incredibly stupid or stubborn that I wouldn't know a compelling argument if it hit me on the head. None of these assertions are accurate or terribly polite, for that matter. Perhaps my response should have been to point this needlessly demeaning rhetoric out, but I shut up, sipped my port and listened to him describe how a personal connection was maligned by another on a website, that people who use email to communicate don't understand the proper means of discourse in a "real" office" or are too lazy and stupid to have a face to face conversation and that he simply won't allow his children to ever fall into this trap. Let's line these assertions up one by one.

I disagree with this individual on some of his strongly held beliefs and in such cases, no amount of listening will change my mind any more than listening to me will change his. That doesn’t mean I lack the capacity to comprehend his opinions, even when he states them as “facts.” It merely means I take his opinions as opinions, which leaves me free to agree or disagree.

Sure, it sucks that his colleague was maligned on a website, but that perpetrator could have mailed a flier, gotten on the phone or on a soapbox in the town square to spew her dirt. Yes, the web makes dysfunctional spews easier to launch, but now the argument is one of relativisms, not absolutes.

If a technology’s direct and primary role is to do harm, (like guns) then you ban or heavily restrict its use. But if its primary role is good and useful and harm comes tangentially, then you manage the tangential harm and throw the bathwater out, not the baby. I found it most shocking that he was so "anti-email" given that he recently installed a FIOS account to work from home and be closer to his children. I'm assuming that most of those business transactions take place via email. In "You don't get it's" or any other office, email is a far better way than face-to-face speech to maintain records of who said what to whom and the progress of a project. In my world, email is the life's blood of my and much larger corporations' business. Last year, I used it to deliver online courseware for several major corporations, for clients all over the country that I never met face to face.

Finally "You don't get it's" children who are going to be protected from this e-onslaught-- are very young and I plan to revisit this conversation when they become teenagers. We'll see who is listening and understanding and who is not and how effective this Khomeinish ban of his has been.

There's not space enough to describe all the useful ways I use the various web outlets to foster my hopefully polite and efficient connections with business and personal contacts.

Let's stick to the "worst offender," the dreaded Facebook. My initial motivation was to track my teenage child's usage, because I was, as I always am, concerned for his privacy, online and off. I let him have an account only after he promised to "friend me." He used some colorful language on one of his posts and I used it as a teachable moment. I learned that he had a girlfriend through his Facebook page. I learned that they'd broken up. These are the sorts of painfully intimate things I'd never discussed with my own parents, face-to-face or otherwise, so I understood my son's reticence.

I have a useful window into my teen and his friends' daily lives that I would not have otherwise.

Anybody who parents a teen knows how important any channel of communication with teens is. Kids like mine collect hundreds of "friends" and while only a fraction of them are "real," let's recognize that in the hyper-frenzied social world of teenagers quantity is more important (to them) than quality and having friends of any sort is super-critical. I don't judge. If the kid is smart and well-informed (by their parents and peers), they'll figure out soon enough what and who counts. I don't see this specter of isolated children sitting in the dark, being stalked and pretending to be friends with fake friends. I see young people learning to use tools that will inform and enrich their lives.

Suddenly I thought, wow, this is cool, maybe there is something untrivial about this social networking thing after all.

Shortly after I opened my account, several interesting things happened.

• Many of my former ITVA colleagues from all over the country started signing up and it has been over ten years since I've communicated with them. Now I see some of their names, faces and areas of interest on a daily basis.
• One of them needed production support so I passed on a job lead to a colleague.
• Then I learned my niece's daughter had persistent ear infections. I encouraged her to seek an audiology consult, because we encountered the same situation and ear infections in the very young affect speech development.
• I started promoting my fundraising for the American Diabetes Association and got a friend from halfway across the country to pitch in.
• Part of my business marketing strategy is to post headlines for this, my business blog and get responses via FB.
• One of my friends blogs professionally about food and wellness and her snappy well-crafted headlines draw my attention.
• My brother, a professional story-teller and playwright, is using FB as inspiration for a new theatrical production.
• A friend’s sister did a daily countdown before the two sisters would be reunited. Not terribly important (to me), yet it was sweet and revealing and got me thinking hard about the nature of sibling love and the distances modern society imposes on loving family.

All my FB friends are real friends and family.

Maybe you be-”friend” anybody who comes along. That’s your option and you won’t find me judging you for it. And yes, while our kids and many of our friends and family write the most trivial things, on occasions, there are nuggets buried in the hay, little sparks of human connections that don't necessarily rise to the level of a call or letter (email or otherwise). FB, with its user-centric interface allows you to scan quickly and comment where and when you deem it worth your while. Then there are Plaxo and LinkedIn for keeping up with business contacts, keeping my email contact list fresh and there's no denying that they can be very useful for business purposes. Smart users balance their time on these online tools, maintain appropriate contact through appropriate channels and expand, not contract their worlds. These contacts are as "real" as the people who send and receive them. Common sense dictates balance, not exclusion.

If your kid is getting fat, spending four hours a day on his computer, instead of making "real" friends or doing his homework, is it the computer's fault?

No, it's yours. Paul Simon said "Every generation throws its hero up the pop charts." So if the next generation's use of social networking is so dysfunctional in the long run, chances are good that their own children will rebel against them and start a "back to real" communications trend of their own. I'm cool with that. If it happens, which I doubt, it will be a choice born of experience and informed choice, not ignorance and blind rejection.

Now finally to the REAL downside.

So, with all these positives and whatever novel innovations social networking holds in the near future, what IMH, is the real downside? It can be neatly summed up in the following quote on a page I clicked inadvertently on a couple of days ago.

"Allowing My Birthday Calendar access will let it pull your profile information, photos, your friends' info, and other content that it requires to work."

CANCEL CANCEL CANCEL!!!

What this seemingly innocuous FB permission opens, is a floodgate that takes what you share and who you share it with out of your hands. Read the fine print before you jump on one of these aps. Please!!! But as onerous as this may seem, at least this is the devil you know, for they give you the option. So I decline all those cute, fuzzy FB aps. Sorry, but I won't put your birthday on my FB calendar, give you a hug, friend blessing or teddy bear. I've made my choice and drawn my line. We already live in a world where your every transaction is recorded, archived and sold to corporations who use it to "monetize" their interactions with you. You don't know when and how much it happens, but unless you stuff your cash under a mattress and don't have a SS number, ATM card or credit, you leave a trail a mile wide, each time you "transact."

Your Information/Somebody Else’s Commodity

The most important issue that none of the folks on that dock got, is how what you say, think, buy or sell is mined by people who are looking to sell your information as a commodity. FB poses some privacy issues, but at least they are known and can be managed. What about the hundreds of other times a week your information is aggregated and sent to huge databases to be sold to the highest corporate bidder and you know nothing about it. If you want to get angry at something, if you want to be afraid of something, this is the real bug lurking in the bed. A giant wave of change is washing over us. You can ride it or you can turn your back on it, but you stand a much better chance of not being swamped if you get on the board. The essence of democracy is participation and choice and any technology that expands these options even a little is fine in my book.