Our lives are performed in dramatic arcs that intersect and reflect and repulse and reflex: Are we divinely predestined or merely reflexive? The other day, I was thinking back on when I was a young child and, feeling alone and frustrated, I would climb a cherry tree in our backyard to get away from all the noise and hubbub of earthly living. From my vantage point 20 feet in the air, I could smell the wind and get a sense of a horizon that was far and above my current station.
If you live on social media networks, or if you write a blog, or manage a Facebook page, you’ve certainly seen a rise in efforts to game the networks for profit. Way back on September 11, 2006, I predicted right here on this blog that people would begin to use Avatars — their online identity — to make money by selling their craven image to the highest bidder:
What’s to stop active — or better yet, INactive — blog commenters from getting hired by companies to change their Avatar to promote a website or a phone number or some other advertising blitz? Can you imagine being a new beer company and going out and finding the top 1,000 blog commenters and having them all change their Avatars to the logo for your beer?
Why it’s sheer viral genius! You could buy hundreds of thousands of page views on the cheap that could reach for years back into the history of Avatar-enabled blog pages on thousands of blogs — and the beauty part is this: No one would be the wiser.
The Search Engines already indexed and tagged the old content as safe and sufficient and your Avatar Ads would be silently served up when a search return is clicked through to the blog. The Blogmaster would never know — especially if you were not posting recent comments.
What do we think of Sheryl Sandberg? She’s the big COO hoo-ha at Facebook, and she has a new book that is polarizing the public dialogue on “women in the workplace as women in power.” I admit I don’t know much about the woman, and my initial exposure was reading about her online. I haven’t read her book, and I’m not interested in picking a fight about her shallow arguments, but what struck me most about her recent PR tornado is how unappealing I find her as a live speaker arguing her points in person.
Here at Boles Blogs, we have always had a strict and unbending Comments Policy – that you had to use your real name, you could not insult other commenters or authors, and absolutely no curse words allowed — among many other rules.
As the man I am, I have over 5,000 friends on Facebook. As the blog I want us to be, we currently have seven “Like” friends on the new Facebook page for this new old Boles Blog that I created last night. Oh, the good old wild days when I could blink and I’d have too many friends to count and Facebook would warn me to be less popular:
Getting to 5,000 Facebook friends was a fascinating experience. It was easier to move from 2,500 friends to 5,000 than it was to go from zero to 2,500. I thought I’d hit that 5,000 friends limit in June, but it took to the end of August to get there.
Today, I am asking you to help build up Boles Blogs on Facebook by clicking the link below to “Like” us now and forevermore:
What is WolframAlpha doing on Facebook? Why, it’s parsing your data and making it it pretty while it fascinates. I love this word cloud mixup of “Davidescu Boles” and “David Gordon” all sitting there scrambled and brewing together in a “today” slurry of “reviews” “stories” “wonders” and “google jazz reports” — I love visual data!
Facebook, bleeding money and prestige, are forging forward with plans to build a huge, sprawling, Metropolis Campus that looks like a giant warehouse that was built on a Tilt-a-Wheel and then bumped for good measure just to be jazzy. There’s no sense of privacy or sacred space. It’s all one big blob of a structural maze and a spinning internal eyesore.
There’s nothing quite so disturbing as posting an update on Facebook and then having a guy with a fake name try to take you on by defending — or “understanding,” as he put it — why a parent would strike a child because of stress. I said then, and I say now, “I do not, and will never, understand why any parent would raise a hand to any child.” I’m not being dramatic or presumptive. I’m being factual.
It all started when I posted a link I posted to my article — How Home Foreclosures Trickle Down into Child Abuse — and the guy with the fake name put a comment on that update. At first, I thought he was agreeing with me, but it turned out he was really defending the abuser, as you can see in the message stream:
When I was a teenager, going online meant connecting to a friend’s local bulletin board system and checking the message boards, though you knew that you were never connected at the same time as anyone else since we were using dial-up modems to connect directly to computers that were just like yours — pathetically slow compared to the computers of today, or even the iPads! For the most part, however, we did our communication face to face and on the phone if that was not possible.
I am always confounded by Facebook. The social service is always changing things behind the scenes. Nothing I look for a second time is ever found in the same place. I wonder if that’s done by design or sheer arrogance?
My latest confoundidery happened last week when I discovered, for some reason, I had over 5,505 friends! You can see in today’s screenshot of my Facebook page that number has dipped to 5,501 — I lose and gain friends all day long in bunches of threes and fours for reasons I have not yet been able to divine — and I have no idea how I was able to leap over the infamous and mean Facebook 5,000 friend barrier because I haven’t actively made any friends requests in over a year.
There is a fantastic scene in the groundbreaking film Mean Girls (one of the last good films with Lindsay Lohan in it, as far as I am concerned) in which the characters are all looking in the mirror and criticizing themselves. Lindsay Lohan’s character, having lived in South Africa until that year, thinks to herself that she was only aware of girls being fat or thin and didn’t realize how many things could be wrong with someone as her schoolmates criticize their hairline, pore size, and bad breath. There is a whole new monster that has reared its ugly head in the world of self hate and its name is Facebook.
Who started the fire? Was it Plutarch so many years ago, or was it W.B. Yeats not too long ago? The quotation in question — “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire” — is extensively used in education, and in arguments about scholarship and proper attribution the world over. Here’s that quote, found right on the main page of Gallaudet University’s Department of Education, attributed to “William Yeats:”
On Monday, I learned a powerful lesson about the news and social media and how what we share with our friends can be ever so slightly shifted to show just what your friends want to show you — although this is only because this is the same side of an issue that they were shown. There was a tragedy in France in the form of a shooting at a school — a Jewish school, to be specific. A teacher, his two children and another student were killed in the attack.
A man slowly ascends the stairs of a tall building. He has an assault rifle strapped to his back and carries a megaphone in one hand. When he gets to the roof he looks down on the hundreds of people walking down the street and calls for their attention. He watches carefully as they gather around in the street below and when just enough people are listening he lifts the assault rifle in one hand and puts the megaphone to his mouth and says, “Ladies and gentlemen… I own an assault rifle illegally!” Within minutes he is arrested and nobody is surprised. Why then would someone do the online equivalent and provide photographic evidence to the world, including the police that eventually arrested said someone?
