Facebook Follies

Apropos my recent Twitter and Facebook "embargo," I've found it increasingly difficult to avoid Facebook entirely, especially now that I've been contracted as a media consultant to Diamond Dog Food and Bakery, a boutique dog food, drink and product store in Bayside Melbourne. (Please "like it" so I can access a custom URL!)

The experience thus far has given cause to put a personal "value" on the friends I keep on there. One Facebook contact I saw tried to passive-aggressively knock me down a peg - I had no care for his online "friendship" so I deleted him on the spot. I have no time to waste on people like that.

The Twitter hiatus has gone well, despite breaking it once to share a link to an interview I did with Jonas Renkse of Katatonia.

In a recent essay, I charged that Facebook and Twitter aren't just part of our media culture but a culture in and of themselves. I feel now that Facebook is borderline "unavoidable" if you wish to participate in commerce in any meaningful fashion.

Over time, I am becoming less and less enamored with both Twitter and Facebook and more likely to fight the urge to tweet or post. I caught myself thinking in 140 character "bites" to share with other people about 20-30 times over the last few days and had to actively stop myself from reaching into my pocket or firing up TweetDeck. If anything, it's shown me that I still have an attachment to being liked, being seen as witty or intelligent and as a good writer. If I can overcome those attachments, it lifts a massive burden from myself and eases a lot of self-imposed stress.

I don't feel disconnected from my friends - the connections on Facebook are devoid of intimacy and reality. The challenge is to find social relationships with substance in real life with real people, every day.

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http://twitter.com/crushtor

Renovation of the Soul

If there's nothing to be learned in life then in my opinion, you aren't living life. This past week has been full of anger, tumult, hate, love and renewal. Just today I was caught between bliss and indignation, the latter caused by a failure to stop and take repose. In moments of intense pressure, the head takes flight and the heart gears for war.

Rationality has no meaning and in some cases, the sounds coming out of one's mouth would sound almost foreign to you and others in calmer moments. A industry colleague of mine, after unjustly calling him "unprofessional" (I later apologized and thanked him for his good work and kind words) advised me to "kick back."

Kick back! If only I could kick back, I thought. I have work - paid, unpaid and academic to finish. I have all these attachments that signify anything other than kicking back. But why? Was this true? Had I forgotten my GS training? Were my meditations and self-reflections all for naught?

These items of paper with instructions printed on them are not the cause of my stress and worry. Ultimately, I am the culprit. If I am dissatisfied with an aspect of my life, then I can only really blame myself. So I took his advice. I poured myself a double whiskey and sipped a while. My feelings told me that I was putting myself under the "pump" rather than anyone else. My thoughts were not in alignment with reality - 3,000w of 4,000w done with 2 full days to complete the remainder? Hardly a challenge for me. It has been done before and can be done again. My internal map was very much out of alignment with the blank, "objective" territory.

Reading my colleague Sandi's blog, she has learned a lot in 26 years. She makes some good points, others I disagree with. But there is one point that remains pertinent:

Disappointment and hurt is everywhere in life. Happiness and wonder is also everywhere in life. Choose what you decide to focus on.

Just like a modern day Marcus Aurelius, we sometimes have to sometimes stop and remind ourselves: "The universe is change, life is what our thoughts make it."

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http://twitter.com/crushtor

Embargo of Presence

Some excerpts with commentary from my recent essay (footnotes removed) on media ecology entitled "An iPhone in every hand."

Neil Postman in his magnum opus “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” wrote the easiest way to see through a culture is to “attend to its tools for conversation.”  Currently, all of our conversation, save for face to face contact is mediated, at some level, by computers and the internet – the tools – and the conversation – the exchange of messages – is happening globally in which any user of a computer is theoretically part of this “globalized conversation.”  But what is the nature of the language of this conversation – the “driver” of conversation that makes it possible?

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis presents the formation of language is “not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas, but rather itself is a shaper of ideas.” The computer and the internet and all its various convergent and multimedia forms not only have produced new platforms for communication, they have, in fact, shaped a new way of organizing and regulating ideas; the way humans interact with one another, conduct their business, their politics and their education of future generations.

One such device that achieved this was the mechanical clock. A computer is built on a time-telling function – time regulates the processing of information by creating a sense of “dramatic, fictional or symbolic time as well as a sense of past, present and future.” Computers, like clocks are self-operating machines; they manufacture no physical products. They are able to regulate starting and ending times for social/economic/political engagements; enforce deadlines and are used to track units of remuneration (workers paid by the hour, etc.)  For example, all people across the known world began to
"[W]ork, sleep and eat by the clock” and began to “regulate their actions by this arbitrary measure of time, the clock was transformed from an expression of civic pride into a necessity of urban life…the computer too has changed from a luxury to a necessity for modern business and government.”

In 1993, Postman said that it would be possible for us to "privatize" our public space by outsourcing it to computers - we would be able to shop, converse and vote from the comfort of home. We have moved beyond that space - we can now do this anywhere with mobile smartphones. Like the mechanical clock, the computer regulates our movement and how we communicate.

It as if we cannot communicate if we do not have a phone or access to the internet like social media. It's commonplace to hear about events after the fact if you did "not check your Facebook."

Chunks of time can now be graphically represented; we can see the past and the future in our own present by the dynamic exchange of text, video, audio and images. The television was bound by time to show its programs sequentially - now the programs can be viewed in our own "time" at our will from wherever. As Watzlawick says, "one can not not communicate" - but what happens when one does not have an iPhone in his hand to begin with?

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http://twitter.com/crushtor