By Any Other Name

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…” –Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

One-hundred and fifty years ago, without even knowing it, Charles Dickens encapsulated what social networking has become. It does provide the best of times; finding old friends, keeping touch with family, seeing weekly picture updates as a grandchild grows up somewhere across the country.

And, it is the worst of times. People being fired for Facebook status updates, on-line social stalkers, identity theft.

But in what should be an age of wisdom with unfettered access to more information in .29 seconds than Voltaire, Socrates, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and Einstein had access to ever in their combined lives, we continue to prove this the age of foolishness, at least, social foolishness.

Luckily (insert sarcasm HERE), technology providers are finding new and inventive ways to help us shoot our own eyes out. Microsoft has released the Outlook Social Connector for Microsoft Office Outlook. Basically, this connects all your Outlook contacts to their information on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and more. You’ll see status updates, comments, messages and alerts from the social networking sites all in one place for your contacts. Cool for you, but also remember the flipside. Now your boss, co-worker, neighbor, stalker, vendor, customer, and crazy Aunt Sally can all follow your social doings in one place without even having to try.

For some (this guy included) this raises the question of privacy and Big Brother and how much is too much? How “connected” and transparent do you really want your life to be? For many like myself we try to keep two separate identities in the social space; one business appropriate, the other inner-circle friend appropriate and “never the twain shall meet.” (Rudyard Kipling, The Ballad of East and West) However, this is becoming more and more problematic as advances such as the Outlook Social Connector spider out and aggregate material on the fly.

Your best defense? Don’t be stupid. Sounds easy enough, yet a week doesn’t pass where you can’t find mention of someone getting fired or not getting a job because of what information lies in the social aether (yes, this is the correct traditional spelling used in this sense). Use the rule of thumb I was taught as a child. Don’t do anything you’d be embarrassed about if your grandma read it on the front page of tomorrow’s paper. So, don’t post without thinking. Mistakes can follow you forever, just ask Monica Lewinsky, Roger Clemens or Tiger Woods.

Also, use your knowledge to set up as good a firewall between your two personas as possible. Know what Facebook is publishing publicly and control it. If you don’t care, trust me, they sure as heck don’t.

Remember, this information never dies. Digital copy is around forever. Just because you delete it doesn’t mean it’s gone. It could be days, months or years before it shows back up, but it can and does.

I began with a famous beginning, let me end with a famous ending. Just know information, like plague bacillus, never disappears for good.

“He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.” - Albert Camus, The Plague

Facebook causes death?

Which causes more deaths per year, saccharin or Facebook? (Answer below.)

Imagine this. You just broke up with a significant other and upon the next Facebook login you realize you are no longer considered “in a relationship” or “married.” Thus, you change your status to “single.” Nothing out of the ordinary here, right? I’m sure many of you have done this exact thing. Seems pretty innocuous.

Well, not in this day and age. Mr. Wayne Forrester of Croydon, England was on the other end of such a Facebook experience and decided to take things into his own hands. I mean, how dare his soon to be ex-wife tell her friends via Facebook that she and her husband have split.

Hell, we share everything else on there. The idea of personal privacy has certainly changed in the last decade or two. Imagine in 1984 if you were told your friends knew your every move (granted at the time my friends and I thought girls had cooties and Danny White was the best quarterback ever, but just pretend.) Most people would have had two reactions: first that of disbelief, and then of outrage.

“Surely no one has such an ability, and if they did what an affront to personal liberty!”

The cry of the fruition of an Orwellian future would sure bring people to act in outrage. They would rise up against Big Brother and shed their shackles of doublespeak.

Nowadays many of us couldn’t imagine not knowing everything as soon as it happened. With tools like Twitter we’re actually broadcasting, sometimes to complete strangers, our every activity. And, we do it in our own type of doublespeak.

WTF? @TEOTD IMHO we r nutz & F2F comm will die AFDN. But, wca?

You understand it? You know at least half of it I’m sure. Translation: “What the fuck? At the end of the day we are nuts and face-to-face communication will die any fucking day now. But, who cares anyways?”

Yes, these are all accepted, if not commonly used “words” in the new doublespeak. So, have we entered into the beginning phase of Orwell’s futuristic society? If we have, are we the ones to blame? There’s plenty more to talk about regarding privacy and liberty in our present day, but I’ll leave you with this.

Mr. Forrester of Croydon arrived at his old house in the early hours of the morning and, upon entering, attacked his ex Emma with a kitchen knife and a meat cleaver. He stabbed and hacked her to death. His defense? The Facebook posting “ totally devastated and humiliated” him. Unfortunately, this violent act based on on-line communication isn’t an isolated incident.

So, to answer the question, Facebook causes more deaths. Saccharin has never been proven to be a carcinogen and as of 2000 the USDA has proclaimed saccharin as safe.

Next time you reach the keyboard to update your status, pause and think. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/7676285.stm

Defensive Driving

So a few weeks ago I got caught going 72mph on highway 75. Seriously, the posted limit is 60, but it’s Texas. More so, it’s Dallas! No one goes the speed limit. The speed limit signs are more of suggestions I thought, general rules of thumb like “watch your step” signs and the such.
To get out of the ticket I chose to take defensive driving. Not only will I have the ticket cleared from my record, but I’ll save $80 a year on my insurance. Whippie, but I guess it’s the best way I can get back at the man this week. So I’ll take my $80 sir!

Now, where to take said defensive driving class? Well, I’m not one for sitting in a classroom for 6 hours straight on a weekend. I don’t own a working VCR so no defensive driving via tape. I think they have DVDs, but I am simply too lazy to go to Blockbuster to find out. So I settle on an on-line course. I figure that way I can drop in and out over my lunch period and at nights and over a week or two get the required hours in. Turns out it was even better. I dropped in between drug induced comas. (yes, prescription because of my surgery.)

I look for two things: something to keep me from offing myself during it; and something cheap. I thought I found this in www. comedydriving.com. Come on, it says comedy right in the name and it’s only $25. Holy cow was I wrong! This has got to be the worst attempt at humor ever. I would have rather watched paint dry or flies procreate. Poorly done voice impersonations plus shitty animation combined with horrible jokes (if you can even call them that; calling police “pigs” seemed to be the most reoccurring) and sprinkle liberally on an already painful topic equals disaster. Seriously, I’m recovering from surgery and am on some great pain killers and I still want to take the cord from the mouse and hang myself. At least they had a continual countdown showing me how many painful minutes remained ahead of me until completion.

I guess the old adage is true: if something seems too good to believe, it probably is. Funny, on-line convenience and cheap was just too good to be real. So my advice for all you looking to erase a ticket or lower your insurance in the state of Texas, AVOID comedydriving.com or risk suicide. Or, just don’t speed. I guess that’s a good option too.

And you thought you were screwed up

In the March issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, Dr. Jerald J. Block, M.D. proposes that “Internet Addiction” be added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official field guide for mental disorders. http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/165/3/306

For all the statistics and details read the short article, but what I want to focus on is the whole idea from the 50,000 foot level. I mean, really, is there anything in this f’ed up world we CAN’T turn into an addiction? Why can’t we just call a spade a spade and say: “Hey, that is f’ed up and you need to take some personal responsibility and control your damn self!” Instead we hand out mental illness badges like the cub scouts hand out the art merit badge: if you can’t get one, seriously, time to reevaluate if being the fry cook might be aiming a little too high for you.

Have we really “advanced” so far in the last 30 years that “Internet Addiction” is really something we need to actively diagnose? For as “addicted” as I am to my blackberry, laptop, the internet, etc. as I am, give me a chance to turn it all off and I’m in heaven. A few years ago I spent 3 weeks backpacking through Peru. Besides the amazing views the greatest part was knowing I wouldn’t hear a cell phone ring in the middle of the Amazon, or that no of keyboards would be heard 14,000 feet above sea level in the middle of the Andes. Is it truly a mental illness if someone doesn’t have enough personal control to put the mouse down and take 5 from playing Halo3? If that’s the case, I must have suffered terribly from “Homework Avoidance Addiction” and never should have been put in the horrible situation where I was asked to actually do homework.

When I was growing up this type of “addiction” was immediately remedied by a parental unit. If you were an adult and suffered from a similar “addiction” it was remedied by a spouse, the bill collector or you were simply dubbed, the lazy a$$hole who couldn’t hold a job. Pretty cut and dry to me.

So despite my ramblings, I come to offer two points. The first point is that by calling such things “mental disorders” simply demeans and trivializes those who truly do suffer from mental illness. As a society, we have already stigmatized mental illness. Until you see someone you care for deal with not only the pressure of the illness, but also the societal stigma surrounding it, I don’t believe you can truly understand how helpless you are to aide them. There are real and powerful illnesses out there that merit the research and treatment dedicated to mental illness and we must avoid trivializing them by adding in slackers and losers. It’s time to draw a line.

Secondly, we once again have given an out to the lazy, lethargic and slothful among us. Our political correctness will be one of the sledge hammers that undo the pillars of society we current reside on.

Stand up, grow up and take accountability for yourself and hold other accountable for themselves.