Tweet this: KQED & Twitter come to B-High
Recently I joined the Advisory Board for the KQED Do Now. This is a group of educators who are looking at ways to integrate the KQED current event-based Q&A activities on their Do Now site. The goal is to see what it is like to integrate Twitter into a current events curriculum and see how it goes. I decided to use my sophomore classes for the project, as my seniors are so completely overwhelmed with being seniors that they are just sort of walking around in a state of confusion, occasionally proclaiming: “Ds get degrees!!” The premise is not that complicated: KQED provides a prompt, with a basic written overview for them to read and a variety of supplementary multimedia resources, the kids read it, then they Tweet their response to @KQEDedspace with the hashtag #KQEDdonow. Done. Their responses show up in the KQED Do Now Twitter feed and on the live stream on the Do Now web page. Immediately. Real time current events. Precisely the point of current events one might say.
Of course my seniors became incensed with this because it was SOOOOOO unfair that the sophomores got to use Twitter when they had been doing their current events all year on Tumblr. #grassisalwaysgreener Double hilarious as they were totally non-chalant about Twitter when @DanaDanger came to talk to them about it.
Anyhow, it has been very interesting to see how the Twitter project is shaking down in my classes. It definitely illuminates the technology gap for starters. Although a computer is not a prerequisite for utilizing Twitter (one of its key benefits is that it can be easily accessed through a smart phone, and even has utility with any phone that can text, as we saw in the Arab Spring and throughout the Occupy efforts) it is clear that kids who do not have a computer at their disposal are substantially more uncomfortable with trying the unfamiliar regarding online endeavors. Beyond that, as with all lesson plans, there are some kids who love it and others who really just cannot get on board. But they are the minority and that is a victory.
We started with prompt #31 on internet memes (likely why they have been showing up on here) and considering whether or not they are “art”. It was sort of a perfect prompt for my Arts and Humanities Academy kids. I asked them to answer the question and then to create an original meme. They were nothing short of amazing. You can see some of them here. I made one too.
Then I had them go back and do prompt #25 focused on individual internet presence. It was interesting to go back and forth about positive and negative digital footprints, and to share stories about interesting (and “interesting”) results of being out there on the interwebz. The conversation was lively and nearly every student had something to share:
- “Is it fair for colleges and employers to “stalk” you?”
- “Facebook owns your posts?!”
- “Can you actually have private settings?”
- “What is Google +?” (Okay, that was mine…)
- “Okay, you know you Google yourself…”
- “Wait, what if you Google yourself and it is not you but it says it is you?”
- “Maybe everyone should just use fake names.”
It went on and on. We talked about the weirdness of people you have not seen in ages talking to you about your most recent activities because they “saw it on Facebook”, or about people you did not know acting like they did know you because of your digital footprint. We talked about the effects of anonymity. At the initial board meeting we discussed the pros and cons of letting the kids use pseudonyms and it was a unanimous consensus that anonymity breeds false behavior at best, and downright awful at worst. My students tended to agree, though they liked the idea of anonymity in cases, they admitted it was generally to post things that they didn’t feel totally comfortable with otherwise. And like all things, that can be both good and bad.
The next prompt that we did was #32 about the gay marriage debate. This was a response to Obama’s declaration that he believed that gay couples should have the right to marry. This was the least inspired conversation of them all. All of my students had the same answer: “Uh, yeah.” And then that was it. I even tried to do the teacher thing and play devil’s advocate and offer some reasons why people might not agree with it, or that this was just some policy-shmolicy on Obama’s part.
I was met with totally blank stares.
Granted, I work in Berkeley, but none the less, I felt quite proud that my students couldn’t even get on board with why this was a discussion. I bet Rachel Maddow would be proud.
Thus far, the experience has been really positive. Case in point: one of my most interesting (read: very bright and disengaged) told me this project has been the absolute best, he really likes it (and his memes were awesome.) You can meet him here. Further, the Twitter learning curve seems totally encouraging, I think the 140 character limit must be comforting to them. In reality, the challenge of such a limit tricks them into creativity. Well, sometimes it does, but I remain ever the optimist.
#itswhatido
Of baseball and a couple other things I have loved, and not.
The world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self awareness.
I love sports. For real, I do. People who know me, know this already. [I am not one of these girls.] I love the thrill of competition, I am competitive – in things I should be, as well as those I should not – I use friendly competition in my classroom – sometimes between the kids and me, sometimes among them alone – even though I have been told that “the classroom is no place for competition”. And for so many of these reasons, I have always liked sports. I am a quick study and can learn the nuances of games quickly, and as such I am able to quickly deduce if I like a sport or not, as a spectator or a participant. Basketball, I love, clearly. Tennis I can get into. Golf can be thrilling – no lie. The end of a classic track meet with the 4×400 meter relay is incomparable. Rugby is fantastic. Cricket, more humorous to my American mind. Soccer? Yeah, I can appreciate it, especially as I learned all the parallels between the international futbol and basketball. Hockey? Can’t get into it. NFL? Oh man, I have tried to like it, but alas, only the college game will work for me. Volleyball? Surfing? Awesome. Cycling? I am getting it.
And baseball? I love it.
I don’t really like playing baseball, but as a spectator, I have aways loved the game. I am a NorCal kid and I grew up watching the A’s at the Coliseum through the amazing 70s and late 80s, and all the times in between. I also spent many a day watching the G-Men out at the Stick, sort of loveable losers, but always so much fun. The memories I have from and of my Bay Area teams are all amazing. I gravitated towards the A’s for many reasons: the DH, the friendly vibe, the sunnier-than-the-Stick Coliseum, the winning tradition, Billy Martin, Eck, Stew, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But many of my closest friends chose the Giants over the A’s. It was never much of a thing, we all had our own teams to cheer on and we had fun. So much fun!
But then something yucky happened. I can’t put my finger on it exactly. All of a sudden, I started hearing really disgusting classcist, and basically racist, criticism of the A’s from Giants fans: they were “ghetto”, they were “thugs”, they were “too poor to matter”, “If I wanted to hang around [add your own undesirable] I would go to an A’s game”, and all sorts of other ad hom attacks that had little to do with anything at all baseballesque. Some might say it happened when the Giants organization built the amazing and beautiful AT&T Park. Some, like Keith Olbermann, might argue it had more to do with the Giants finally winning a world series. As far as I am concerned the jury is out on the cause, but the effects are as clear as day, and as a result I will avoid AT&T park for the foreseeable future.
Here is why.
The other day I got a Tweet from a Twitter friend, who is a total Giants fan, a season ticket holder for years, and a true supporter of this team, who said he had tickets to the exhibition games between the Giants and As at AT&T that he was not going to use, and knowing that I bleed Oakland Green and Gold, he offered them to me. It was perfect, I was on break, it was a day game and as the last spring game we would get to see lots of different looks. I was psyched and replied that I would love to have the tickets.
We headed out to the park and took our seats in the sunny, full bleachers. I wore a black A’s hat, hardly all that obnoxious, and was glad to see a good number of A’s fans around, I have grown tired of the out-and-out mockery that lately leads to pretty cutting insults from Giants fans just for being an A’s fan. In no time it was 3-1 Oakland. The previous two games had both been won by a single run by the Giants, so as one would expect there were a good number of brooms in the hands of the Giants fans. It seemed like a great day for a friendly game between two teams who are rivals only due to proximity.
But by the fourth inning (and bear in mind we are talking about midday, like maybe 1:30 p.m.) I began to notice that the Giants fans were not cheering for their team. They were basically just hating on everyone and everything. There were a couple of lovely notable exceptions, but basically, instead of cheering for their team, they were talking shit about the A’s players (and their families, and their genitals, and how pathetic they are – I’d love to see some of these fuckers try to face even the shittiest pitcher in the majors…) The obscenities were flying. And there were kids and families all around us. Then there was a huge fight – between two female Giants fans that got the attention of the entire bleacher section. Then there were two Giants fans who caused such a scene with a young family with two young kids (all sporting the Orange and Black and having a great time) that the ushers had to get forceful to remove the fans, and the fans never shut their mouths, in front of the kids. Then a Giants fan came and sat in front of us – loud, belligerent and not in his rightful seat – who, when he stood right in front of me, I told to take a seat. But oh! He was not going to take that… “What are you missing sweetheart?” He shouted at me. I told him I don’t like to miss anything, and then he got really aggressive. Tried to get the people around him on his side and finally got a less than pleasant walk up the stairs with the Cowboy. The obnoxious fan never shut his mouth the entire time, and he degenerated to personal insults after our first exchange. I cringed to think that the Cowboy was having to deal with this idiot, but I knew the guy would be sidewalk lining if he pushed it too far.
Were it not for the two really nice ladies sitting next to us, we would have left for sure. And at this point it was only 6-1 A’s. No matter, the Giants fans kept on going about how the A’s, and all things affiliated with them, are the worst sort of garbage.
Now don’t get me wrong… I can, and have heckled, with the best of them. I see a place for it… but there is a way to heckle. Seriously. For example, I love to hate on all things Duke. They are a fabulous team to hate on, but make no mistake, I am hating on the team and what it stands for: years of success and domination. The Bluedevils are really good, and I would never say otherwise – that is what makes them fun to hate: they always win! (Well, not always… hehehhhehh…) And it is never about the kids themselves (and let’s face it, that is what all these athletes are: kids) it is a macro ‘us and them’ sort of thing. It is silly goofiness to rib my friends who love Duke and it is always in fun. I also enjoy a rivalry, but at the end of the game, it is about loving the game, not hating the opponents (at least for too terribly long, and certainly not because of their hairstyle or income level). Giants fans seem to have forgotten how to love the game, instead always going on about their stadium, how they have the best food, hating on everyone, even their own people. No one has ever been killed at an A’s game – but in 2010 a Giants fan was killed by another Giants fan at AT&T Park. I never see fights at A’s games… and funny enough, whenever I point this out, this new breed of Giants fan says, “That is because the A’s suck so bad, no one would bother to go to their game/ fight over them.” Seriously? I could give shit why people around me are not violent, crass, drunkards, as long as I am not around them, and I would far rather be around the happy fans out at the Coliseum than around these people I found myself surrounded by at AT&T Park.
As we walked out on Wednesday I heard people saying “Oh, who cares losing to Oakland? They are garbage, it doesn’t even matter” and “Whatever, we still win more games that they ever will over there.” I always have to bite my tongue about this when it comes to comparing World Series wins – really Giants fans? Do you know the history? Sigh. I left the game feeling sad for what people now have to immerse themselves in, just to have a nice day out at the yard.
And that was just the start of it. In telling my family about our day out at the ballpark, I heard a far worse story about a friend who took his family to the Monday night game. And again, it had nothing to do with the game, the players, or the A’s. This family is part of my family, and they are tried and true died in the wool Giants fans from forever. A drunken Giants fan caused a horrible commotion and my friends along with their young children, were caught in the crossfire – and they were not in the bleachers! To be fair the Giants organization is doing everything in their power to do right by my friends, but that they have to is simply an embarrassment.
I guess it doesn’t matter how nice your stadium is, eh?
Like I said, I have no idea when this all started to happen, but all I have to say about it is it’s a damn shame. I am not stupid enough to fall for logical fallacies like hasty generalizations, red herrings, ad hom attacks, straw man, or slippery slopes. I know too many amazing Giants fans who have been with their team through thick and thin, and they love this game – the highs and the lows. What I do know is this: I am really looking forward to seeing a lot of A’s games this year – at the Coliseum – and I know they will probably break my heart again, it is the reality of being a small market (read small budget) team with an incredible eye for talent (read farm system). But I still love watching them play.
And I live under no illusion: this is not my team, they don’t owe me something, they are not my friends. They are athletes who get paid (or not) to do a job. It just happens to be a job I love to watch them do. Plus, I feel like some sort of proud parent as I watch all of Oakland’s studs light up the rest of the majors… Talk about looking for the silver lining… but that is the job of a fan.
And as a fan, I love this game.
Oh, and –>
“He’s not online. Like, at all.”
I now know someone who does not use the internet. Seriously. Does. Not. Use. It. Lives without Google, without Z.E.E. (Zuckerberg’s Evil Empire), without the inclination to Tweet that which might be profound. Or profoundly banal.
Imagine this.
It is strange, isn’t it?
My first reaction was not a reaction. I did not care as this was not the way we met, communicated, or spent time. He does text and gets a substantial amount of joy from the photo text option on his moderate I.Q. cell phone. But, he does not emoticon. In fact, one of the first conversations we had involved his dread of the emoticon. I do not emote via icon to him. When I told one of my favorite people (ironically a friend from the halcyon days of MySpace…) about this, he said, “Cool.” Of course, we are not interneting so much ourselves these days, so that could explain it. Seems real life has become tantamount to us both. [Thank goodness for cell phones and G-chat. Hahaha.]
It made me think of another one of my favorite people, also an internet friend, though a local one, who said one time, “I don’t care what people say about Facebook. I don’t care what I say about Facebook. The fact of the matter is, if someone is not on Facebook these days, I don’t trust them. Why aren’t they on there? What is their deal?” [I think Zuckerberg just got a boner down in his undersized Silicon Valley digs.] Sometimes when I feel like the only place I get information is the Facebook, I agree. Other times, when I wish the only place I got information was not the Facebook, I beg… literally, beg, to differ.
I tell my students [frequently, repetition being the heart of education and all...] that I got my first collegiate degree without the internet. They cannot grok this. I try to explain how fascinating we thought it was that we could look up books, (you know, the kind with the pages that you turn, not scroll) on a computer at UCSD and we could see what books were on the shelves at all the other UCs. If we really wanted a book we could get it. Two days later off a van that drove around the interlibrary loans. That was the shit! They tilt their heads at me and look at me like a very interesting specimen when I tell them these stories. It is like reverse SciFi or something.
The internet is a strange place. But I like it –> “Boy, you sure are a funny kid, Johnny, but I like you! So tell me, what kind of a boy are you, John?” I have always been (and still am) fascinated by people who cultivate relationships on the internet, keep them on the internet, and call them IRL. I am equally fascinated, like in the way you cannot stop looking at something so freakishly awkward, by the demise of these internet relationships. The fallout seems exponentially larger than a real life break up because these people involve their entire internet universes. It is very, very bizarre.
The other part about the internet that I like is its memory. Of course I would. I have a pretty dangerous memory myself. Recently, I was giggling about a confession that someone had posted about how she was showing her tits on Twitter for attention, not actually for breast cancer awareness. You.Don’t.Say. This same sad lady also publicly sold out her self-professed best friend for an internet bestie. And then there are the romances. That shit stays forever. And you know that is making people cringe. And in the seemingly endless range of the online universe, isn’t it strange how these relationships can overlap? Wow – now that is super awkward.
Anyhow. I was telling my non-line friend about some of this stuff last week. I was trying to explain why a friend of mine was so upset about a certain situation. And in telling the story, of the internet affair and its demise, I realized he was looking at me with his head tilted to the side wearing the exact same expression I see on my students when I talk about life before the internet. I tried harder to explain the situation, sure I was not being clear. But the more I explained it, the more ludicrous the entire thing started to sound.
Suddenly, I couldn’t make sense of a story, that admittedly was pretty far-fetched, but had always, in my mind, been somewhat of a linear narrative.
“But, they didn’t know each other?”
“Well, I mean, not at first. I mean, no. No, yes. Yes, they knew each other. But then they had to meet each other.”
“I don’t understand. Did they know each other, or didn’t they?”
“They met each other eventually. A few times. Or, well, at least once for sure.”
“So, they were like acquaintances.”
“I think they were in love.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Well. I don’t know…”
It did seem pretty silly standing there face to face with someone trying to explain this.
Now it was me who tilted my head to the side with an expression of curiosity to look at my non-line conversationalist. He looked pretty good. And it is no wonder… while the rest of the world is inside, connecting online, this boy is out riding his bike, surfing, running, sitting in the sunshine, and living. IRL.
“Cool.”
Sometimes people really need to get their ass kicked.
The Need for Ass Kicking:
I don’t generally advocate for violence. Really, I do not. I think about it sometimes. In fact, sometimes thinking about it is a great catharsis. I picked up this strategy from a friend back in 1992.
Virtual Ass Kicking 1.0:
Pete and Brian and I were sitting in a dingy room at the Blue Moon “Hotel” on the Vegas strip between shows out at the Silver Bowl. Various interesting things had gone down, as they do in Vegas, and we were laughing outrageously about something I could never recall all these years later (and I imagine if I could I would hardly feel inclined to share it here.) The kind of camaraderie that the three of us shared was special in that we had known each other for ages (so it seemed at the time) as high school friends, but were now college friends allowing for the sort of personal renaissance that those first few years of university can offer kids from the ‘burbs (even relatively progressive suburbs like ours had been.) An entirely new language of private jokes and shared ridiculousness had emerged (I mean, really, we were in Vegas for Dead shows people, how serious were we going to be, and the annual motor caravan out to the desert from San Diego had gotten better every year.) Brian had a kind of goofiness that often engendered a shared look between Pete and I, and at one of these moments I remember Pete just shaking his head.
What?
Nothing.
What is it?
Dude, right now I am kicking your ass in my head so hard.
What?
Seriously, man. You deserve such an ass kicking right now. And I am giving it to you.
I looked at Brian. We both looked at Pete.
We all fell to the floor in an outrageous fit of giggles.
And so the strategy was born. For the rest of the trip, and I daresay the rest of the time I was able to hang with these guys who went to “The-School-East-of-The-5″, it was a staple of our vernacular.
“Don’t make me kick your ass in my head.”
Virtual Ass Kicking 2.0:
I am sure there are many who would not find this sort of strategy to be sufficient. Luckily for all those people the Internet emerged. What better way to kick someone’s ass than to smear them across the interwebs. To be fair, it took a while for people to really get the hang of this, but it is pretty much the lord-god-almighty arena of the passive-aggressive spewers of vitriol these days.
Is it better to do this than to actually kick someone’s ass? I am not always sure. I definitely understand Tyler Durden in a way that makes me feel like virtual ass kicking may actually only serve to perpetuate hate and violence and all those things a good solid ass kicking is meant to get out.
But sometimes it is what you gotta do.
This is one of those times.
Why Gene Marks (@genemarks) needs to get his ass kicked:
On December 12th a post on the Forbes site by “author” Gene Marks went viral on the interwebs. It was titled “If I was a poor black kid” (interestingly, even the rich white kid Marks apparently sucks at English – the giant grammar gaffe has since been edited and the title now correctly reads “If I were a poor black kid” - though to my joy the original title still remains in the url.)
My Twitter feed was blowing up about this article and from the clear tone of the comments I decided I would not read the article. Obviously this man is a total idiot, I thought. No one will take him seriously, I thought. But for days the fervor continued. On the morning of the 14th, I succumbed. I blame Bart for running so late giving me time to read the article while I waited on the platform for my invisible train.
Before I even get to the article itself, let’s just look at his headline and teaser:
Aha! The answer to all the problems of racial, social and economic disparities has been solved! Just work harder you lazy sods.
Dude, right now I am kicking your ass in my head so hard.
So, I read the article. He opens with some super basic statements of fact: “The spread between rich and poor has gotten wider over the decades. And the opportunities for the 99% have become harder to realize.” <DUH> “My kids are no smarter than similar kids their age from the inner city. My kids have it much easier than their counterparts from West Philadelphia.” <Based on your genetic offerings, it is good thing you gave your kids an easier road. DOUBLE DUH>
And then it really kicks off. He says that people not born into his white comfort zone are victims of misfortune: “they had the misfortune of being born two miles away into a more difficult part of the world and with a skin color that makes realizing… opportunities … that much harder.” Oh.My.God. Shall I start with the “they” and follow-up with the reality that repeating this scenario in print is its own validation of a fucked up reality… leading to its perpetuation? People different from you are UNfortunate?
Dude, right now I am kicking your ass in my head so hard.
And I am only in the lead paragraph.
Paragraph number two goes on: “life was easier for me. But that doesn’t mean that the prospects are impossible for those kids from the inner city.” Huh. I am pretty sure that Mr. Marks just capitulated. Oh, but do not worry, you will not have to intuit his subtleties for long. He is about to get blatant. “It doesn’t mean that there are no opportunities for them. Or that the 1% control the world and the rest of us have to fight over the scraps left behind. I don’t believe that. I believe that everyone in this country has a chance to succeed. Still. In 2011. Even a poor black kid in West Philadelphia.”
Even a poor black kid in West Philly.
You don’t say? Oh, wait, you have a caveat? What was that? “It takes brains. It takes hard work. It takes a little luck. And a little help from others. It takes the ability and the know-how to use the resources that are available.” I cannot even begin to tell you how offensive I find this. Even the most rudimentary math student could tell you, via the transitive property, Marks is saying that everyone can succeed if they have brains, etc. and that poor black kids are not succeeding, therefore… yes, you guessed it: those not succeeding do not have what it takes to succeed.
Dude, right now I am kicking your ass in my head so hard.
Marks then goes on to posit how he would be a super successful “poor black kid.” Because apparently a rich white middle-aged dude really knows about this sort of shit. He says, “If I was a poor black kid I would first and most importantly work to make sure I got the best grades possible. I would make it my #1 priority to be able to read sufficiently. I wouldn’t care if I was a student at the worst public middle school in the worst inner city.” I would like to point out that the true nature of Marks’ awesome white upper middle class grammar shows itself here (apparently his editors suffer the same grammar-exempted white privilege English practice.) But I am only being pedantic because to really talk about what this stupid fuck educated white man, who writes for Forbes Magazine, is saying makes me shake with rage.
AS IF poor kids do not know that these are the things that lead to Marks’ idea of success. Jesus Christ, man. Get out into the real world. Any kindergarten kid anywhere in the world will tell you that they know this. Even if they are suffering the “misfortune” of being from a family different from yours.
To save you from reading the article, I will highlight a few more choice bits:
Gene Marks on poor black kids lack of success: “But it’s not impossible. The tools are there. The technology is there. And the opportunities there.”
Gene Marks on taking advantage of the obvious opportunities offered by exclusive private schools catering to the 1%: “If I was a poor black kid I’d be using technology to research these schools on the internet, too, and making them know that I exist and that I get good grades and want to go to their school.”
Gene Marks as Horatio Fucking Alger: “Technology can help these kids. But only if the kids want to be helped. Yes, there is much inequality. But the opportunity is still there in this country for those that are smart enough to go for it.”
And then my train finally came. I got in and sat down. FURIOUS.
Dude, right now I am kicking your ass in my head so hard.
Why kicking Gene Marks’ ass, virtually or otherwise, probably wouldn’t do any good:
When I went through my teacher training program at San Francisco State way back in 1995, one of the tenets that informed our pedagogical foundation was an article by Peggy McIntosh from 1988 titled, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” I remember the first time I read this article, a white girl from a pretty white Northern Californian community, who attended a pretty white university in a really white community, but who would be teaching in a very urban, non-white area in San Francisco – by choice, for the record – and as I took in what McIntosh had to say, none of it shocked me, but the plainness of her tone and the list of unspoken privileges really hit home. It was this blatant obviousness that made the article so important. The article is famous and I was pretty sure that everyone with any interest in education anywhere had read it by now. [I have written about it here many times and found it fascinating to re-read while I was living in Asia, seeing how my white privilege translated there, even when my race was not the numerical majority.] In fact, when I was handed this article in a class I completed last month I laughed, “Wait, seriously? Everyone already knows this article, don’t they?”
Apparently not, *cough*cough* Mr. Marks.
Since the problem is that people who fail to recognize their inherent privilege spew stupidity a la Marks, I guess we still need to be reminded of this privilege. I wonder if Mr. Marks realizes that his entire existence has been a privilege – for him. Look at the list. I bet there are some things on there you forgot were a privilege.
How Gene Marks will continue to get his ass kicked, even though he does not care:
The thing about the internet is that, while its memory is short, its archives are permanent. And so, someway, somehow, this article will pop up forever, like Ms. McIntosh’s, reminding us of what we might otherwise choose to forget. And as things go on the internet, the responses and commentary will be as equally pervasive and permanent. One especially nice response is here.
There’s a lot wrong with “If I Was a Poor Black Kid,” not the least of which is the grammar in the title. But the biggest issue with the piece and everything like it is that it assumes being poor and black are the only two things on poor black kids’ plates. Content to generalize based on simplistic depictions of black poverty from TV and film, Marks believes that the only thing low-income minorities have to overcome is terrible teachers and a lack of technological knowledge; the rest of their problems stem from outright laziness. “If I was a poor black kid,” writes Marks, “I’d become expert at Google Scholar.” I’m not sure a more tone-deaf sentence has ever appeared in Forbes. To Marks, poor children exist in a vacuum where their only problem is poverty. In real life, poverty is a cloud that darkens every facet of a child’s life…
I see the kinds of kids Marks is talking about everyday. Kids who have shit going on in their lives that you could not believe – would not – even if I told you. That some of these kids continue to come to school demonstrates a strength and persistence that Marks will never even know in the smallest capacity, because, as he proudly proclaims, things have been so easy for him. My students may not have mastered Google scholar, but they sure as shit know what it will take to succeed in this modern world and they are doing all that they can manage to try to make the system work for them in the face of terrible prejudice and ignorance, like that of Forbes Magazine’s Gene Marks. Not to mention that they understand the conditional verb tense a whole lot better than Marks because they have been imagining all sorts of amazing things for much longer than Marks did for a minute in his cute little journalistic adventure outside of his lily-white, Lilliputian existence. Even if Marks is protected indefinitely by his own white privilege, at least we have the ways and means to combat him – if only in our own heads.
And dude, right now I am kicking your ass in my head so hard.
#Occupy #Education: Social media + Political action = Hands on learning
[photo of OakFoSho in action from Fly Trap Studio. Go look, it is worth it.]
People spend a lot of time questioning the value and influence and usefulness of social media these days. I know this because I am one of them. As a fairly avid user of social media technology of my own accord, and a teacher being constantly reminded of the need to bring technology into the classroom while simultaneously corralling all of my students mobile devices every minute of every day (in spite of the fact that I teach in a complete dead zone, they remain resolutely undeterred in their efforts to get some sort of signal – sigh) there is a lot of mental energy directed towards a consideration of our relationships with social media.
Having also had my fair share of mishaps with the interwebs – special shoutouts to Wavefunccollapse: resident Knoxville jackass, and the Coffee denier – I find myself increasingly skeptical at the very same time I see my internet presence expanding. When my parents ask why they should be on the FB, I have as many positive answers as negative. I recall looking across the desk at my former principal as he read through MY ENTIRE Twitter feed, which he had meticulously (though without any apparent logic) highlighted, and had to explain to him that he had identified a conversation between a friend (in Hong Kong) and myself, of which he was only reading one side [DUH]. No matter what, he just could not grok, no matter how plainly I explained it, that Amy wanted me to bring Twinkies to the 852 and we were joking about the effects of sugar. He remained steadfast in his opinion that I was talking shit about my job in the East Bay [don't ask, it really is impossible to explain] and as I remember this, I do rethink the benefits of internet absence.
But, I also think that internet absence is no longer a reality. And I think about what about what another [internet] friend said a while back that he simply did not trust a person who did not have a Facebook anymore. Not that he expected to be on a person’s FB just for knowing them but… you know, why would they not have a FB? Interestingly, this person is the ONLY person on my FB who I do not know personally. The Force is strong in that one.
So, for all of you out there who are considering this conundrum out of fun, futility or peer/professional pressure, here is a story for you:
words. no words. words…
What says the law? You will not kill.
How does it say it? By killing!
~ Victor Hugo
I wanted to write about my birthday tonight. About the beauty of fall and the wonder of balance in the equinox and the joy of having friends in all the hemispheres wishing me well as my day reaches them, well ahead of me.
But, now, I am simply overwhelmed with a dark, despairing sadness, and to speak of birthdays and lovely light, or new years and hope, all seems not only trivial but inappropriate – off color. Disconnected. Shallow.
All just a lot of semi-fancy ways to say sad.
Troy Davis was two years older than me. He had a birthday coming up too – on October 9th he would have been 43. A black man born and raised in South, I can’t say he and I had much more in common. Still, tonight, I am Troy Davis.
In August of 1989 while I was behaving rather badly and not taking care of business getting ready to head back to college for a truly unspectacular sophomore year and looking ahead to my nineteenth birthday, 20-year-old Troy Davis was arrested and charged with killing a police officer in a Burger King parking lot in Savannah, Georgia. He was sentenced to die.
Over the course of his two-decade stay on death row Troy Davis’ case offered up repeated and consistent doubts. No weapon was ever found. Another man, initially a witness for the prosecution, is reported to have admitted to the crime. Since the 1991 conviction, seven out of nine jurors have recanted their sworn statements, saying they were pressured by police officers into giving Davis a guilty verdict. Death penalty supporters have even come out to say, as the Twitter hashtag indicated, there was #toomuchdoubt. Specifically, former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, who served under President George W. Bush, urged the pardons board to grant Davis clemency because “it is clear now that the doubts plaguing his case can never be adequately addressed.” And former U.S. Rep. Bob Barr said in a letter that “even for death penalty supporters such as myself, the level of doubt inherent in this case is troubling.”
I have yet to see a death case among the dozen coming to the Supreme Court on eve-of-execution stay applications in which the defendant was well represented at trial… People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty.
~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Supreme Court Justice
The United States has set itself among distinguished company in the retention of the death penalty. Around the world there are only 58 countries still sentencing people to die. Among these are countries that we share so much with. Like, Afghanistan, Pakistan Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, North Korea, Yemen, the Sudan, China.
In 2010 the top five executioners (in order) were China, Iran, North Korea, Yemen and the US. In the world. Only four other countries executed more people than the United States of America, the beacon of democracy, freedom and justice.
As long as we maintain the death penalty in this country, we are all Troy Davis.
That Mark MacPhail lost his life in line of duty is most certainly tragic. That is undisputable. The facts surrounding this case were disputable, however. And in Troy Davis’ death, the tragedy of Officer MacPhail’s death is not remedied, diminished or even avenged. All we have done is add to the tragedy.
The death penalty categorically and statistically does not deter violent crime. The death penalty is more costly than any other form of punishment in the nation. The implementation of the death penalty only lowers us to the place we reserve for the most barbaric, the most uncivilized, the most reprehensible places on earth. Yet we carry on.
Consider if it is the job of a society to collectively kill in response to the actions of an individual. Perhaps it is time to ask “What would [your own personal] Jesus Do?”
Tonight I go to bed sad. Sad for two men who were victims of violent crime. Sad for a nation that cheers this kind of justice. Sad for a family who in seeking “closure” will find their dreams more like those of Lady MacBeth in the end.
Tomorrow I wake up and listen to my students discuss Hammurabi’s code of law.
- Damn, he killed everybody for everything!
- It this the eye-for-an-eye guy?
- How come his empire didn’t last so long?
That… is a very good question my young friend.
I thought of Bukowski again today.
We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes.
~ Bukowski, ‘Dinosauria, We’
I thought of Bukowski again today.
I am very disappointed about the forced resignation of Representative Anthony Weiner, (D-NY). In a world with far more significant problems than Weiner’s sexting habits and history, America chose to focus wholy on one man’s odd choice to send someone a picture of himself in his underpants. The key issue was the user error which caused the photo to post rather than be sent as a private message between consenting adults, though mental midgets like Andrew Breitbart, Reince Preibus insist that the issue was the photo itself.
If a majority of his constituents were okay with it, why do members of the opposite party care so much? If they really think Weiner’s behavior is so categorically reprehensible and the cause of untold moral outrage in our country, they should have put their thinking caps on and let him stick around so he could have been the Democratic Party’s Palin. I mean, damn, that woman is a godsend to every opposition party.
Of course, that they did not clearly underscores that they know it is not that big of a deal and so they had to make it a big one while they could.
Total focus on one man’s penis. That Weiner’s own party freaked is an eve bigger mysterty. Maybe they thought they were missing out on some quality collective outrage, or something. We apparently have the collective intellect of a 15-year-old boy. In a world rife with war, degenerating domestic industry, social isolation and sadness, violence, an absence of health care, regular miscarriages of justice, government sanctioned fraud in big business, and rampant political corruption of all sorts of real consequence…
We are
Born into this
Walking and living through this
Dying because of this
Muted because of this
Castrated
Debauched
Disinherited
Because of this
Fooled by this
Used by this
Pissed on by this
Made crazy and sick by this
Bukowski knew. We know. We can do something about it.
Will we?
Another interesting email.
I was sitting in the February sun as it delicately traipsed across the beer garden at Jupiter on Friday, sipping delicious Red Spot Ale and contemplating another week just gone, when a new email beckoned from my iPhone. I heard the beep, but let it go. There are more and more moments in which I find I do not need the electronic “enhancement” of constant communication. An hour or so later on Bart, hustling back to the City to meet my faboosh hair team, I checked my email.
I have written about the subject of this email before. I think it probably did not go down all that well, in spite of the fact that I was spot-fucking-on in my opinions and analysis. A good guy got caught up in a storm of false pretense on the internet. A less and less unusual event these days. I wrote about it before because these pretenders – who I do not even know in real life, and with the exception of the nice guy, have nothing to do with – had been harrassing me and I got pissed. And then the attacks got personal and I got seriously angry. I realize that their crap comes from a point of total insecurity and jealousy [and they were convinced I was trying to get their internet boyfriend], but I didn’t care. I also know the high road is always the better throughway, but I was so sick of these people I couldn’t help myself; sometimes the fact that I know they only act this way becuse of their own unhappiness is not enough.
Happy New Year!
It seems impossible to believe that 2010 has come to an end. I remember Gust Proutsos, back in my first year at Procter Hug High School in Reno, told me that I was going to be absolutely blown away at how fast the years would speed by. I was unsure if this was a comment on age, perception, or working in a profession that is so totally locked into a temporal relativity. Regardless, Mr. Proutsos knew what was up. I cannot believe that I started this year in Bali, still a Hong Kong resident, then meandered through Burma and India, then found myself Stateside again in the exact circumstances I had abstractly described as a goal in September of 2009.
It is nothing short of fascinating.
Everywhere I look I am hearing people talk about how they cannot wait for this year to end. They are so over 2010. 2010 was so bad/hard/unfair/miserable… I guess, again, I am an anomaly. Sitting at the Latin American Club last week enjoying a cold beer on a rainy night with a very cute and inappropriate compadre, I was considering things, my life and the like. He looked at me and said, “You are such a positive person. I mean, you love your job, your house, your family. You really love your life.” He kind of chuckled and I smiled.
Yes. Yes, I do.
True Stor- CENSORED!!
Anonymous, but suggestive of... what?
So, maybe there is some benefit to being anonymous in that you can really write whatever you want – consequences be damned. The downside of anonymity is that you don’t get the legit acknowledgment that you are probably after in the first place (and it seems to me that anonymous attention seekers really have no boundaries in terms of the desperate levels to which they go to for attention, so the theory that all of this is a plea for attention seems substantiated.)
The thing is I love to tell stories, about me about adventures, about whatever. I enjoy this simply for the opportunity to be a rocking raconteur. The other thing is, even if you harbor a rom-com inspired fantasy that you may write something and somehow the one person on the planet who is supposed to read it does, and then somehow you live happily ever after because s/he understood/had an epiphany/realized they had been right (or wrong)/saw the light/determined they could not live without you (or would finally live without you)/offered you a movie-book-tv deal… the reality is that the people who “read” you generally have a personal reason to do so; they found you through a friend or friend of a friend, they are your family or your actual friends, they have a common interest that brought them to you (sorry hot stuff, it was your kitty not your pussy that brought them around…) [Note: I am excluding stalkers here, because those people are not reading your shit anyhow, they are tracking you, which is really different; like I have this ugly group from Akron, OH and San Antonio, TX who are constantly tracking me, as well as a very strange individual from KNX, TN, but it is not because they want to read my blog it is because they are freakishly jealous of my life creeps.]
The way I have conducted my on-line life is as simple as my real life is, which of course is not simple. It is, however, authentic and not some fantastical version of what I might wish my life was. I have chosen to write about real shit that happens to me (sometimes pretty fucking embarrassing shit), real shit that happens to people I know (sometimes pretty unbelievable shit) and real people (sometimes seemingly unreal)… because I am real.
This has led to some interesting consequences and outcomes.
Now serving a conlfict of interest: Would you like a glass of #wine with that?
How romantic....
A boy meets a girl on the interwebs. This is not a dating site and so the conversation is not bent towards engendering any sort of intentional relationship, but the boy and the girl enjoy witty banter and savvy political commentary and so they continue to “talk.” Of course they have no idea what their individual voices sound like because they don’t really talk. They Tweet. Or Chat. Or Whatever. The contact becomes regular enough that they each believe they know the other. They are Friends. I wonder what each one imagines the other’s voice sounds like. Do they contemplate the way the other would use their hands to punctuate a particularly salient point, or what they smell like? Out there suspended on the interwebs all of that IRL detail is completely malleable, manifested entirely on the screen of the beholder.
One day the boy is no longer there. In truth the girl doesn’t notice right away because she has been drawn away from this particular interface of the [tangled] Web We Weave. In real life would you notice if one of your daily conversants was suddenly absent? Gone? Dissipated without a trace? I am not sure anymore, but I think, in spite of our increasingly complex cocoons of self-involvement, perhaps.
The girl sends out an electronic search party for her Friend. Email. Tweets. Wall posts. The search party is effective and within an hour the missing person has been found. Where were you? What happened? It was bad. I freaked out. I had to… to… delete my account. Oh. Wow. Why? It got too intense. Oh.
The boy had met another girl. In similar fashion he had begun to connect with his new Friend. Or was it a Follower? It is so hard to tell sometimes. Maybe he was the one who Followed.
Followed where?
Into the rabbit hole. [Lewis Carroll, you had no idea.] One interface makes you bigger. One makes you smaller. That is still true. They were bigger. So big in each other’s eyes. After one month they were in Love. Love is good. I understand how certain conditions lend themselves to the formation of incredibly intense relationships; I have always found that the bonds that are formed among travelers are like this. Intense. Quick. Flashpoints. The union of shared experience.
Shared experience?
As the boy tells his Friend of his Love she is curious but unafraid. This boy has a need she could never fill and she cares for him as a Friend. A Follower. She listens to his lament. It is a tawdry tale to be sure. Full of duplicitous, passive aggressive behavior so easily perpetrated from behind the one-way mirror of the computer screen. He looks for meaning in everything. Everything is a code to be broken. Nothing is as it seems. This is confusing. I am as I seem. Yes, but you are different. Aren’t you as you seem? Yes, but I am different. Why are we different? I don’t know.
It is as if the progress of the relationship has been on hyper-speed. How can you get to the icky parts without the honeymoon parts?
What do you like about her? What does she like about you? Do you know what each other smell like? How you sort your mail? Which way you like the toilet paper on the roll? You have not met.
But you are in love.
Yes.
Oh.
Well, she says to the boy, do we get to be friends again? I have missed you. Yes, yes of course.
Then the whole strange cycle starts again. They are friends. They communicate. There is some expectation of coded meaning, that nothing is as it seems. That people are not being honest. What can we deduce? What can we find out? What do you want to know? Will you feel better to know things you do not want to know? Yes. Yes. Yes. Of course, YES.
Now the boy’s Love is not okay. She cannot allow him to be friends with any other girls out there among the fiber-optic milieu. Why? She says it is because all the other girls are whores who are using him to suit their own agendas. That he is naïve and cannot see that they all want something from him. That they are taking advantage of him.
What she means to say is this:
You cannot be friends with any other girls because if you fell in love with me by communicating this way you can just as easily fall in love with them the same way. It was so easy. So immediate. And it is real. So real. And so all others are a threat because who’s to say that the same thing won’t happen again and be just as real. I must hold on. Or else I will lose. You.
That is what she means to say. But she cannot say that.
The boy, too, has issues. After all this is serious business; he updated his Facebook status to reflect that he was “In A Relationship.” Because he is so desperate for the words his Love Tweets and Chats and Posts to be real, he is compelled to place equal weight on all her typed sentiments – whether they are backed by gravitas or levity. It is a conundrum.
And so they “fight” through Tweets and Chats and Posts. As if relationship communication were not already complicated enough.
The boy is conflicted. The Love is mad. The girl is watching. The boy is now no longer allowed to be friends with the girl by mandate of the Love. The girl finds this frustrating, though not world ending. She wonders why they cannot be friends and continue their witty repartee. But the Love said no and the boy had to prove his love to his Love. The girl goes on, she has friends in town from overseas, friends to meet for dinner and an internet friend to meet in the flesh. She is sad about the boy. Or maybe for the boy. But in the end she just logs off.
I mean really, they never even met.
[image from here.]
John Cusack FTW. Don’t act like you are surprised.
Less than a week before its official US debut, the star (one of) and producer of Hot Tub Time Machine, John Cusack took his promotional mettle to Twitter. As both a regular Twitter user and a follower of Cusack I was party to the whole thing.
And it was a thing of beauty.
The thing about following Cusack on Twitter is this: he has very little (admitted) knowledge of how the thing works, and even less (admitted) interest in working it out. He also cannot type for shit. I assume he probably can spell, but only because of any public evidence I can glean as to his intelligence. And I think he is super-duper smart, politically, ideologically and, well… in the Mary Poppins way, if you want to know how I really feel about it. I think he likely Tweets drunk on occasion and I applaud his irreverence and his range of topics in his “stream” (look at me work the double entendre.) Basically, he cracks me up and makes me wonder how HST might handle such a concept as Tweeting.
So, either of his own volition or at the request of someone else, Mr. Cusack decided to take advantage of the Twitter tool of “trending” and see if, with the efforts of his more than 27k followers, get the movie to “trend.” He seemed unclear on how the trending thing worked at first, and I could certainly relate. Basically, any subject that starts getting repeat Tweets (to an exponential degree) shows up in the sidebar of a Twitter user’s page. This, in the tradition of the hive mind, of course draws more attention and before you know it, whatever the trending topic is, it has gone viral. You can set your trend topics regionally or world-wide, so you see what kind of audience we are talking about. Using a hashtag (#) seems to speed things up, but to my (limited) knowledge it does not seem like a requirement.
I guess you can sort of see the potential for massive exposure. The question is… to what do you want to be exposed.
A quick survey of the trending topics on any given day is almost certain to be 80% inane-to-the-point-of-insulting topics. For example, right this minute the worldwide trends are:
- now playing
- don’t you hate it when
- april wish
- i just wanna know why
- Justin Bieber….
And let’s just stop right here.
Justin Bieber. Two weeks ago, my only knowledge of this individual was through my blogging friend Clare‘s husband‘s tweets about Bieber because he has to write about him for celebrity news website. I had no idea who he was or why he was so popular, he is almost always a trending topic, but obviously I had never taken the time to investigate. I assumed he must have been an American Idol contestant or on Dancing With The Stars or something equally not-my-style. Turns out, No. He is a pre-pubescent (though he is 16 apparently so someone should be worried…) Canadian pop “star”.
Back to the Cusack connection. In the effort to become a trending topic, Hot Tub time Machine was going to have to disable the Bieber-machine. How to do this? Could it be done? Was it impossible that Cusack/Coddry could generate enough cyber-energy to topple the hormonal urges of millions of teenage girls around the world? [Turns out it is not teenagers that they had to worry about... it was three-year olds. Amazing.]
Game on people.
The Cusack troops were motivated. The Bieber-barbs were witty and snarky and all that is right with mockumentary. But clever does not always win you points in the world of Twitter. You need volume. Bieber held fast. But the,… suddenly… after a few days of solid #httm/#hottubtimemachine effort… it looked like the Bieber might be cracking. Add to that Roger Ebert’s review of the film and the ABSOLUTE AUDACITY of The Bieber to even try to emulate Lloyd Dobler, and the game was getting interesting. [By the way, just look at the picture. I mean, come-the-fuck-on people... what is this thing you have created? He thinks he is serious. Wait till his voice changes... All down hill from there, kid.] After just a few days, the movie was trending… it was a victory of Bieber proportions to be sure. When the movie opened it got an even bigger boost as people not actively involved in (or inciting) the Shockozulu-Bieber smackdown were inadvertently helping by tweeting about the movie.
Thus far, the movie that began this Twitter showdown, which apparently made it into the foreign press, has yet to make it to my far off shores, but you can be sure I am going to see it. I mean, 1986? I’ll take a second look. Plus, there is not much connected to Cusack that I don’t like. [Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was on purpose.] And while I am certain that the temporary Bieber displacement will be short-lived because I am aware that you cannot stop the insanity madness idiocracy that supports a concept like Bieberism, you can certainly enjoy it for one brief, shining, Twitter moment.
Wait… if it’s not on MyTwitFlickFaceSpaceBook… did it really happen?
il n’y a pas de hors-texte -OR- post-photo ergo sum
<<you be the judge>>
As has been amply, documented I ceased and desisted my online “profiles” a couple of months ago. This meant saying goodbye to Facebook and MySpace (though I held fast with Twitter and WordPress.) The process was far easier said than done. I wanted to use the Websuicide application, but there were too many requests for assisted suicide and so I would have had to wait for ages, and you all know that in the information age, only a loser will wait for anything. So, I went about deleting myself the old-fashioned way. Eliminating every bit of my profile and then canceling my account. Or at least, attempting to. Both Facebook and Mysapce made this excruciatingly difficult. It was ridiculous. And then, as if I had not suffered enough with innumerable emails confirming that YES, I did want to delete my accounts, and YES, I was quite sure about this decision, and YES, I was aware that I could simply “deactivate” my account, and in spite of all of that YES, I WOULD LIKE TO DELETE THE ACCOUNT… I started to see the side effects of deletion.
It was far more like suicide than I had imagined. Ok, I have no first hand knowledge of suicide, but, suddenly, inviting people to a party, a dinner, whatever, became difficult. Getting invited became awkward, when after not acknowledging (or worse unwittingly not attending) events, people would say, “Where were you?” And I would have to admit that I had no idea what they were talking about and they would say, “Didn’t you look on Facebook? The invite was right there.”
Shit.
As if I hadn’t clearly started to see the virtual writing on the LCD, when asking a friend about her recent trip to Brazil for Carnivale, she said, “The pictures are on Facebook… Oh, I guess you can come to my place and look – at my Facebook.”
Shitshit.
Another friend summed it all up when he said, “You went to Burma? Really? I didn’t see it on Facebook.” Maybe he was really on to what Descartes meant when he said: Dubito ergo cogito ergo sum = I DOUBT –> Therefore I THINK –> Therefore I AM. Had his doubt made his reality more real than my undocumented life?
Shitshitshitshit.
Well, I DID go to Burma and was awesome. And I took some amazing photos. But, due to the journey’s conspicuous absence on Facebook, it gives me pause… did it really happen… or… is it… all… just some figment of my… overactive imagination???
The revolution in “social media” has had a lot of side effects. (Collateral damage? You be the judge.) First of all, it may not be so revolutionary. Though to be fair, I am also not so sure that social media is all hat concerned with its own status. Still:
I remember the age at which photo-documentation of all social activity became mandatory for post weekend validation. I was 15. This led to the creation of countless photo albums, scrapbooks and in my case, an entire cork-board wall covered with the detritus of my adolescence. Truly, the stuff of teenage legend. But no matter your take on that issue the fact remains, our attitudes about the need for documenting everything we do (I mean, yeah, look at me – - Tweeting away and blogging on randomness of which there is no real proof of relevance.) Cameras are everywhere, all the time. Such a precedent has been set that, in fact, if there is no photo album, while we might not be able to say categorically that something did not happen, there is a definite sense of skepticism as to the significance of anything not public-photo-album-worthy. Must. Validate. All. Experiences. Publicly. To. Have. Meaning…
According to Stuart Jeffries’ article in the Guardian regarding this phenomenon, “Leeds-based sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote in his book Liquid Love that in a modern world in which those purportedly fixed and durable ties of family, class, religion, marriage have melted away, we look for something else to hold us together. Hence, no doubt, the rise of social networking sites.” [Brought this recent TFLN to mind.] Yeah, okay, that is all well and good, but my initial conundrum still remains (yes, I had a point…): Does an experience have to be shared to make it real/valid/actual? That sounds positively philosophical. I have a friend who says he does not like to do things on his own because it is more meaningful to share experiences. He was unable to go into much detail at all about precisely how meaning is changed in tandem, but when I mentioned that I always travel alone, I was sort of sonned when he said, “Yeah, and what is the first thing you do when you get back?” Errrmm.. Yeah. I blog. [Therefore I am?] I remember calling a “friend” in the States when I first arrived in Hong Kong and telling him how many times a day I thought of him when I saw random shit and how cool it would be if he could see it. But really, that had very little to do with sharing random shit experiences and all to do with wishing he was here with me rather than there with someone else. Not to mention that the shared experience in reality translates way differently in the virtual world. First of all you have corroborating evidence – not always a bonus. Second, for the same reason your creative license is naturally hindered. Third, reality is so… mundane.
I am not sure what any of this really means beyond the fact that I am consistently conflicted about the nature of on-lineness. There is actually a term, facebragging, to describe the habit of posting all sorts of status updates and photos to let everyone know how fabulous your life is and consequently how badly theirs may suck.
Oh, wait a minute, I think I do that.
Is that why I do it? Well, that is the question. Why do blog stats matter? Why do photo comments make them more worthy? Why do friend counts have any significance? Why do Twitter-idiots insist that if they follow you, you must follow them? Why do I have a fake Facebook profile just to have a “Fan Page” for my blog (even typing that made me throw up in my mouth a little.) Why isn’t creating for the sake of creating enough? Why does every business/band/service/charity/school/corporation/association/politician/quasi-politician have a Facebook and/or Twitter link prominently placed on their website?
It could be, according to statistics gathered from Econsultancy.com, because:
- Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours… A considerable increase from the previous 120m.
- Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis. It’s still a fair increase from the estimated 6-10m global users from a few months ago.
- Flickr now hosts more than 4bn images. A massive jump from the previous 3.6bn I wrote about.
- Photo uploads to Facebook have increased by more than 100%. Currently, there are around 2.5bn uploads to the site each month – this was around a billion last time I covered this.
- There are more than 70 translations available on Facebook. Last time around, this was only 50.
- There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
- Towards the end of last year, the average number of tweets per day was over27.3 million.
- The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.
- More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.
- Purpose-built Facebook pages have created more than 5.3bn fans.
- 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging, according to Technorati’s new State of the Blogosphere.
- At the current rate, Twitter will process almost 10bn tweets in a single year.
- More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since December 2008 and more than 60m Facebook users engage with it across these external sites each month.
Holy crap. I better get those photos posted before I fade away into the liquid abyss irrelevancy.
Am I more connected because of the internet? Maybe, but I have to agree with one of my favorite bloggers Tremendous News, that the connections are pseudo and for that reason, though they may fill a nice void in some ways… the limits are clear.
I am not sure I need the whole world to be able to see my vacation photos.
But then again, maybe I do….
Bob Herbert gets it. I wish the GOP did.
Today one of my students was telling me that he got stumped by one of his university interview questions over the weekend. Considering the student as well as the outcome, I am going to have to say “stumped” is a wee bit of an overstatement, but none the less, the question was interesting. As a future lawyer, he has applied for a Law and Politics program. On seeing that the interviewer said, “I see that you have aptly demonstrated your interest in law, but what about politics? What interests you about politics?”
“Uhhh….” He began. “Politics is interesting because it is the element of the system that works on enforcing law… like, they work together to effect change…”
Okay, so not bad. Always good to fall back on interdependence and relationships.
He asked me, what I would have said. What a perfect day to ask me such a question. I told him I was not sure I could answer the question in light of the current political sh*tstorm underway in the States. He persisted. I gave in with little more encouragement: “I think that politics is fascinating because it is like the crystallization of all the best and worst extremes of the human condition. It is the fun house mirror of our society.”
He laughed and then looked at the clock. Maybe I should have re-thought my answer.
In the wake of the passage of the Health Care Reform Bill the nature of the extreme right in our country has been disclosed to such a degree that even the “mostly extreme” right sees the red flags. Like I said yesterday: It is embarrassing. I am frightened to see the potential for hate that this has brought out in the people who we have chosen to represent us. Jesus – if this is who we have become we really are a Generation of Swine.
Bob Herbert’s op-ed piece in the New York Times pretty much summed up what I was trying to say yesterday (that is why he earns the big bucks, yo.) and I know lots of people are going to say that he is some liberal-leftist-socialist-racist-tyrant. So before you go there, consider what David Frum had to say about what the GOP has earned themselves as a result of the past few weeks years:
We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat… by mobilizing [the Republicans] with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. He went on in another piece to say that “Conservatives have whipped themselves into spasms of outrage and despair that block all strategic thinking.”
The behavior that Herbert describes in his piece defies any sort of rational explanation – oh, yeah BECAUSE IT IS IRRATIONAL. Beyond that it is inexcusable, but it was at the hands of a bunch of Teabagger Morons. So what then of yelling “Baby Killer” at Bart Stupak, (who frankly does not speak for my uterus in any way) on the floor of the United States House of Representatives? Randy Neugebauer [from Texas - HOW SURPRISING] came forward to admit it was him (though made up quite a justification for it) a day late. In the military don’t they have punishments for “conduct unbecoming”? Why do we have to put up with this kind of bullshit in the hallowed halls of “the greatest Democracy on the planet? [Be sure to read the comments following the Neugebauer article if you check the link.]
Yeah, the greatest “democracy” on earth. Maybe, as the Aussies point out, that is not necessarily the best thing.
“In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upwardly mobile—and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely. We owe that to ourselves and our crippled self-image as something better than a nation of panicked sheep.” ~ Hunter S. Thompson, 1979
**Thank you to Twitter friends: seanbedlam, shockozulu aka John Cusack, lizzwinstead, pourmecoffee, deringolade and cody_k for all the links and great posts over the past few days.**
How embarrassing.
For eight long years people in Washington had to mostly bite their tongues when it came to the vitriol that Bush and Cheney were spewing in and around the capitol world. You know, like when Bush was telling us that if we did not support legislation like the “Patriot” Act we were UN-American and Cheney was telling US Senators to “go fuck themselves.”
Today, after an arduous and ultimately not entirely satisfying run, the Health Care Reform Bill passed in the US House of Representatives. 216 votes were needed and they got 219. Certainly not a landslide, but hey. When Representative Stupak reversed and voted for the bill, a Republican Congressperson yelled “Baby killer!” Making it even more hideous, the Representatives know who it is and won’t say. Way to go Texas whoever you are. What is this Parliament for God’s sake? Who knew there was a three drink minimum for a House vote? [Maybe this is to demonstrate how health care reform won't help belligerent drunks idiots?]
How completely embarrassing.
Add that to the fact that Congresspeople ‘booed’ the President of the United States of America IN THE CHAMBER.
If there is more embarrassing than completely embarrassing, this is it.
The Twitterverse was alive and well with all the latest on the situation from start to finish. Here are some of the choice bits:
The federal government forced me to buy two wars in the last 10 years.
Smells and Boys. Sometimes Smelly Boys.
Where I live is quite fragrant. Hong Kong, after all, translates to “Fragrant Harbor.” This can be a good thing, though more often than not, it is a bad thing. This is mostly because I have a very sensitive sense of smell. So sensitive in fact, that I cannot turn it off and I aggravate the problem by intentionally smelling everything and then proclaiming that it smells this way or that way. And the fragrances of a harbor can be, you know… GROSS. There are some things that really, really make me wretch: the red tide in the Aberdeen Harbor, Dried Fish Street in Central, the fermented tofu stands in Wan Chai, and the garbage trucks. Tobacco cigarettes go without saying, but fighting that is an exercise in complete futility around here. Oh, and there is also the pollution. On the 29th of January we set a new pollution record over here with 2,000,000 parts per liter (this lady tracks it on her Twitter feed.) Sweet. In the past Hong Kong has realigned the pollution index in order to avoid the smelly truth about the air.
So, anyhow, there are a lot of fragrances around this (shrinking) harbor.
However, in the vein of relative objectivity, it must be said that I live outside of the serious pollution situation on the north side of Lamma Island, and it is cleaner there, if for no other reason than abundant (vermin producing) foliage. [Though I do work in Causeway Bay, the consistent winner in the most polluted area of HK...] Anyhow, where I live is not so smelly (except for Po Wah Yuen – which I not-so-affectionately refer to as Poo Wah Yuen because of the amount of dog poop that is all over.) In fact, where I actually lay my head smells pretty nice. We have more than a dozen Frangiapani [Plumeria] trees around, a huge veggie and herb garden and tons of flowers around our lychee, papaya and mango trees. [I am very grateful that my landlord is into gardening, because even though I thought I kind of was - it turns out - - not so much.] And when it rains in the subtropics, as it did the other day, two things happen: 1) the air gets cleaner and 2) the smells on Lamma – the good ones – really come out in that wet, floral, earthy way. It is really pleasant and kind of makes you close your eyes and take a big ole breath.
As I was walking home from the ferry two nights ago I was totally immersed in that jungle flower smell – even through Poo Wah Yuen. And, as smells often do… it took me right back to the first time I remembered really identifying that part of Life on Lamma. I was walking from Tai Peng to Wang Long (haha – and you thought my living in Pak Kok was funny… ) to meet Ex #5. It was a beautiful morning. I was, well, I guess I was unemployed. I was heading out on the road for points and durations unknown within a matter of days and I was in high spirits. I felt really free. Now when I smell that smell I feel that way again – enough so that for a moment I almost get nostalgic for #5.
Almost.
But as I recalled that moment, I started to think about the other smells I associate with boys. Not boys in general of course, but certain boys. Like for instance, I associate the salty smell of Pacific Beach combined with the smell of rental apartment paint and carpeting in my Emerald Street apartment with Ex #1. Oh and also Taco Salsa (now Taco Surf, but it was better back then when Pete L. and crew referred to it as T-Sals.) I associate several smells that will remain unnamed here with Ex #2, but the smell of Marin or a ski shop always brings him right back to me. And also the hoppy smell of a good micro-brewery. Ex #3 just smelled clean. Always. It was nice. Ex #4… well, he was obsessive about hygiene, something definitely for another blog, but he was very into products with too strong of a smell too. And too many of them. Super strong soap, shampoo, deodorant, cologne, Bounce dyer sheets. It was just a plethora of mid-range cosmetical fragrance that could sometimes make eyes burn. Ex #5 was earthy. Not smelly at all, in fact he mostly smelled good, but different (in a lot of ways.) He also liked very expensive cologne. He must have stolen it because I sure as shit did not buy it for him and he had zero dinero; but he smelled alright.
Some other smells that I catch olfactory glimpses of on occasion in totally out of context situations with equally powerful effects include:
- Fair food
- A certain kind of HK smog that reminds me of LA
- Jameson’s Irish Whiskey
- Public schools and the wax they use on high school gymnasium floors
- Sauteing garlic and onion
- Recycled airplane air
- Salt water
- Baking bread
- The stale smell of Vegas casinos at 4 a.m.
- Fine leather
- Clove cigarettes
- Barbecues
Everything on that list reminds me of a very specific person or place. You may even be able to identify whom or which. I like that it doesn’t even have to be a good smell necessarily to have the intended effect. Like here. Though I suppose that could lead right into an entire discussion on the gag-reflex. Case in point: I got an email the other day that reminded me of another smell:
I know I have mentioned the smell thing before. And I have had some very entertaining questions with regard to smell-obsession. But I think the instant recall that smell can engender makes it very dear to me, especially as I wander further afield. When I teach sense of place in Geography, and now in Literature courses, I always do sensory activities that require students to identify smells with places and scenes and characters and scenarios. And even when they we there is no smell to identify – there always is. And really, it can make all the difference.
Online Suicide. [Don't get emo - it is not what you might be thinking.]
I made a decision last week to delete both my MySpace and my Facebook accounts. I had been thinking about it for a while for myriad reasons, but every time I considered it, I came up with a reason not to do it: But, I have all those photos on there… But, how will I know about all those ‘events’… But, what if that ONE person I MUST meet is on there… But, what if I miss something really, really, really cool…
Yeah, right.
I spent a lot of time as an adolescent worrying about missing shit. Like, if you were not somewhere, something amazing might happen. This caused me tremendous stress the one time I was put on “restriction” by my mother for antics that had gone just a few steps too far. My mom decided that I would be on “restriction” and this meant that I had to be home by 9 pm on weekdays (you know, all those nights spent at the Petaluma Public Library – working so hard…) and I could only go out one night on the weekend with a midnight curfew. I thought my life was over. Only one night? What if I picked the wrong one? Oh.My.God. Total devastation. Looking back on this now I have to laugh for a couple of reasons: 1) I lived in freaking Petaluma after all, if it happened on a Friday it was gonna happen again on a Saturday and truth be told, shit rarely ever happened… and 2) The fact that what I just described was restriction is sort of hilarious – my unborn children better hope they never cross the line because I will lock them down – and for the record, after like five months of said “restriction” I asked my mom when – oh when! – would it be over and she went for the total killer blow saying, with complete coolness and appropriate aplomb, “Oh, yeah, I suppose it can be over now.” Talk about fished in. Mom, FTW.
Anyhow, to have this happening in my adult life was becoming too much of a recurring and horrifying déjà vu.
There were some other issues. I am really irritated at how both sites are operating and using our information/photos/etc – regardless of the fact that there are “Terms of Use” and the framework itself may necessitate said operations. The more I read about how they work, the more I don’t like it. Then I checked out the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine and it really made me think. [It is with no small bit of irony that the reason I heard about the Suicide Machine was through a blog I am linked to on Facebook.] But the developers of the concept have a point. Get back into the real world.
Then consider the fact that I have more than 300 “friends” on Facebook, and 150 or so on Myspace. [This after much culling, which has led to all sorts of drama. I have actually received emails asking why people had been deleted. From the people in question as well as other friends. Seriously. And then, someone I know was speaking to another person about me, and person #2 said, "Well, can Amanda be trusted? She deleted me from Facebook." I know you think I must be making this shit up - but I assure you, I am not. ] Who the FUCK has 500 friends? I mean, SERIOUSLY. I have already expounded on Dunbar’s number here, so I will not bore you with that, but SERIOUSLY. And the politics of social network friends. Holy Mother of God. I know there are tons of articles about it already, but it is like people lose their sense of reality when they enter the virtual world of social networking. Perhaps that is the point for some people, but where have the boundaries gone? In real life, you have to have a reason to be someone’s friend, don’t you? Just because you know Person A does not mean you are therefore friends with all of Person A’s friends… or does it? Though, to be sure I have fallen on both sides of this equation as well, as I mentioned here.
“Cats, who’d have ‘em?”
I’ve been thinking about cats a lot lately. Okay, it is not like I don’t think about my cats a lot in general, but lately I have been a little more global in my consideration of cats. I have long worried that I may turn into a “Cat Lady,” and the attendant stigma that goes with that. I am really the perfect candidate: single, approaching middle-age, cat-loving, History/Literature teacher. I mean, they don’t write Cat Ladies better than that. And my cats run me. For instance, right now, I really want to get up and get another cup of coffee but Matilda is on my lap and she is content, and gives me stink-eye when I move, so coffee is more of a contemplation at this point. Eventually, I will get the coffee, but not before considering what a great reason this situation is for having a live-in helper, roommate, even a boyfriend.
When I returned from Bali and I called my parents, I could hear in my mom’s voice right away that something was wrong and there were only a few things that might make her sound this way; as I was okay, it was either going to be gramma or kitteh. It is kitteh. Their 12(?) year old cat is not well, and as is the case with cats, the reasons are ambiguous, but the reality is clear. Taking her to the vet is traumatizing and causes kitteh to really make you feel bad, and so Ella was keeping to the safety of the subregions of the bedroom and not taking food. This cat is Ella Mae, who they adopted, along with another kitty named Callie, from the shelter in their North Idaho town. The adoption of these two cats has a lot of significance to me because I was there and helped my mom pick out the cats. She had been reluctant to get another cat after the death of her most recent furry friend, Celeste. But after enough time had passed she realized that she really missed having cats and had decided to adopt two, so they would have company, and also to select adult cats as everyone always adopts the kittens but the older cats often go overlooked. I happened to be staying with my parents after a very dramatic break up [look at me be understated] with Ex #3. I was not totally myself, but cats always cheer me up. I went to the shelter and we picked out the two (very different) calico kittehs. They were bewildered and everything esle that comes with a total rearrangement of every known detail in ones existence when we brought them back. Callie was the wilder, more adventurous of the two. Smaller and more traditionally calico, she ran around and checked things out. Ella, likely a little older, is a peachy calico – white and grey and peach colored. And she doesn’t like other cats. One night we couldn’t find Callie and every issue that I was dealing with regarding the recent turn of events in my own life totally manifested in a total freak out about her (temporary) disappearance. I totally lost it for a minute.
Then she came back.
Cats.
So, now Ella is getting ready to say her farewells. Callie left them long ago, likely the result of her wandering, she got really sick and gently passed. Ella really came out of her shell at that point and became the Queen of the Manor. And now as she is preparing to go, it is just totally sad all over again.
You wanna ban a book?
Ban books? What is this, the Dark Ages? Well, I guess if you want to determine what I should be allowed to read I won’t call you an idiot. At least, not quite yet… though you may infer my true sentiments before I do resort to name-calling. Actually, you probably can’t infer much if you are a book banning type, so at the risk of killing my punchline: You are an idiot.
We discuss censorship a lot in this part of the world. Primarily for how and why China applies censorship logic. And then of course there is that SAT essay prompt that asks if the government should restrict certain kinds of information from the public. [Most of my students here say yes. They view it as some sort of necessary protection without considering the issue of surrounding who we give the authority to determine what is okay for our innocent eyes and ears.] China has a strange censorship policy – like, it gives new meaning to the concept of arbitrary, but it does keep us guessing. I think they are aware they are fighting a losing battle especially concerning the internet and so they do that thing where they continue acting like they are in control of everything and then just sort of ignore the obvious evidence that they are not.
Recently a teacher was suspended for assigning a Chuck Palahniuk story called “Guts” in his class. This caught my eye for a few reasons (ok, yeah, it was brought to my attention by a Twitter tweet…) but more to the point, last year I had a student bring me the story and wanted to use it for a class assignment of his own. I read it and thought, “Wow. Okay, it is definitely an interesting piece of literature,” and frankly it was perfect for the project the kid had in mind, but was I comfortable telling him to go forward with in in light of the fact that he attends a “certain” school with “certain” religious overtones and a particular belief that they have some sort of high-end image to uphold? And what of his parents; would I be willing to defend the story if his fairly conservative Korean family came down on me about it? I paused. What were the issues here? This was a 15-year-old who was reading. Of his own volition. And, though clearly intrigued by the shock value of Palahniuk’s short story, he was interested and willing to talk about it. Isn’t that the point of having kids read? And, further, doesn’t that diffuse the potential for problems that generally lie in the misunderstanding in the first place?
I said go for it.
Unsolved Mysteries.
Neo: I suppose the most obvious question is, how can I trust you?
The Oracle: Bingo. It is a pickle. No doubt about it. The bad news is there’s no way if you can really know whether I’m here to help you or not, so it’s really up to you. You just have to make up your own damned mind to either accept what I’m going to tell you, or reject it.
I am not totally sure about my ideas about heaven or hell or reincarnation or the whole afterlife situation, but I have this recurring fantasy that somehow, perhaps in the transition from one unknown place to another, there will be some moment where all will be revealed.I find it somehow reassuring when I hold it up against the growing number of unknowns that float around in my mind. I have heard that the more you learn the more you realize you don’t know, perhaps that is true and perhaps that is why I feel like the Cold Case files in my brain are getting pretty full.
Of course it could just be that I want what Carl Spackler’s got coming to him:
I have not ever imagined the details of this fantastic mental voyage, like if it will be some giant Oz-like head in the sky dispensing long lost gems of personal curiosity; or perhaps it will be the world’s largest 8-ball just waiting for me to “concentrate harder” to get my requested reply. I hope it is not a Ouija Board; too much work involved there and I still think my friends always cheated when consulted that oracle. Or could it involve a trip to Delphi to consult with Pythia? That would be nice. Maybe it is a list; that would make me very happy – a nice big list with answers to all the questions I have saved up in life. Questions like:
- How did Oswald make it happen?
- What is the deal with the Bog People?
- What was Roxelana‘s secret?
- Where the hell IS Jimmy Hoffa?
- What happened to the Maya, anyhow?
- On that note, what happened to the Americans, anyhow?
- Who thought Elizabeth Berkley could act?
- What happened to Marilyn?
- Who thought this was a good look?
- Is the truth out there?
- Can we handle the truth?
And then there are some other mysteries a little closer to home that I have been wondering about… Most of them to do with the strange oddities of the interwebs. Or of cat behavior. And interpersonal crap, which I fear may always confound me. For instance:
- How can my cat sit and stare at a mouse for six hours and I cannot meditate for 15 minutes?
- How is it possible that someone I met in Hong Kong is FB friends with the girlfriend of someone I know from Penngrove, CA?
- Weirder still, one of my best blog friends is Twitter/actual friends with someone who it turns out is Twitter friends with the declared BFF of the individual who found me on my blog earlier in the year and then stood me up in SF after I flew long haul to be there specifically for said meet up. Is that weird or just how it goes in the world today?
- How is it that two of the three super expensive Pagani Zanda F’s that have crashed met their end in Hong Kong? – Oh, wait, I know the answer to that one.
- Why is it never amyloidosis, sarcoidosis or lupus?
- Will we get all the answers to the great mysteries of our personal dramas? Will we know why people lie? Will we care? Will we even know if the answers we are getting are real and true? And would it matter if they were or not?
There is a proverb that says: The more you know, the less you understand. Perhaps in this way our ignorance can be considered bliss. On the other hand the Aborigines say the more you know, the less you need. That is more like what I was thinking. Still,at this point it all remains a big conundrum for me, though unlikely one I will lose to much sleep over.
But if Norman is still staring at that mouse when I get home I am going to want some answers.
Saying thanks…
A person I know from a long time ago posted something on that notoriously annoying social networking site today that I really liked. It said:
Every day this month until Thanksgiving, think of one thing that you are thankful for…
Of course, there were some other requisite instructions I am going to ignore because that is how I am, but as an exercise, this is a good one. So, to start with, thank you Lance.
Today I am thankful for the return of my slightly distracted mojo courtesy of these two Tweets from the LA Times Books and the brilliant Lizz Winstead. [I mean if Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejan can write, come on...]
Life Lessons
The above image comes from the Twitter offices (for real) and was posted in a flickr photo stream from an actual Twitter employee, Caroline. It is a good list and there are several items that I have always embraced, there were a couple that I had not really considered before and I think are particularly salient advice:
8. Allow endings
This blew my mind. YES. Allow endings. I was surprised and glad to see this here. Surprised that I had never though of it in such clear and articulate terms and glad to know that other people may be as reluctant to face endings as I have been. I believe this may be my Lesson du Jour for quite some time. If you are a control freak you know you are needing to accept this too. No time like the present.
9. Fail openly
Yeah, okay. Gross. Who wants to do this? But I think there may be some great freedom in allowing your failures to be out there in the open. At least think of the energy saved on potential embarrassment when you put them out there of your own accord. I don’t like it, but I think I might just give it a go.
7. Respect people’s wishes
I know this seems obvious, and probably everyone thinks they do this. But they don’t. I don’t either and it probably stems from inherent self-interest. That sounds as crappy as it is, but sometimes reality is kind of crappy. Most of the time we are totally willing to respect others’ wishes. It is just those annoying moments where what we want is in direct opposition to what they want. Suddenly there is conundrum. Here come our friends Justification and Explanation. Probably the most common scenario I can think of where we ignore the wishes of others is when we do not understand said wishes. Sadly, our misunderstanding is not the point. [Gonna have to work on that one.]
3. Enjoy the moment
Duh. But really. Easier said than done. This is a conscious choice and one well worth the effort. Just do it.
10. Always have a good haircut
Like, totally fer sure.
ps: you may want to join Twitter.
Amanda
