Back in college, there was a popular class called “Arts 15: Introduction to the popular performing arts” — otherwise known as the history of rock and roll. The professor was, shall we say, opinionated. One test question that is still stuck in my craw follows:
The greatest rock and roll band of all time was:
What is social about social networking? That is a question I’ve been asking myself for a while. There is a lot of interaction with the computer and by extension other people who are using their computers but it is far from truly a “social” experience, right?
I don’t really know where I stand on these questions. I have used electronic communications as part of my everyday existence for so long that I really cannot imagine a life unplugged. Much of that communication has been for business but a substantial portion has been with friends and family. That sounds like the very definition of social to me. And yet there is something distinctly unsocial (perhaps even antisocial) about relationships that are purely based on electronic communications — the complete lack of physical face to face human interaction.
When TWTTR first emerged it was an SMS service with the simple idea of enabling friends to let each other know what they were up to. But that was geeky and boring and unprofitable and so now a significant number of tweets have nothing in them about what a person is doing. Most of them have a url and a lot of them are intended to sell something. That is Twitter in 2010. (And yes this blog uses twitter to get traffic too.)
Facebook was fun at first — catching up with people who I’d not talked to in nearly 20 years was cool. Finding some people who I was sure I would never hear from again was awesome. Even the games were fun at first. But then it settled down and the games and apps began to get old. There was a growing sense that the lil green patch couldn’t possibly be doing anything to help the environment. And gradually there was a realization that maybe the reason I’d lost touch with some of those “old friends” was because we really didn’t have all that much to say to each other anymore.
Suddenly I find that most of my facebook time is with people that I do have real relationships with. But that we are no longer calling each other or even emailing each other. Suddenly online social activity is replacing REAL social activities! And that doesn’t seem so social.
And one more thing…I was not a fan of my high school when I was 17 why on earth would I become a fan on Facebook?
If there’s one thing that annoys me, it’s when people fail to put a signature on their email. This is especially annoying when the said person is in a sales capacity. How much time have I wasted searching for an email from someone so that I can find their phone number, only to find that they didn’t include a signature? And yet, these same schmucks are the first ones in a meeting to walk around the room diligently handing out their business cards…
If you don’t have a signature on your email, you probably do a lot of other irritating and stupid things like play facebook games. Please read RFC1855. Among other things it recommends the following:
Make things easy for the recipient. Many mailers strip header information which includes your return address. In order to ensure that people know who you are, be sure to include a line or two at the end of your message with contact information. You can create this file ahead of time and add it to the end of your messages. (Some mailers do this automatically.) In Internet parlance, this is known as a “.sig” or “signature” file. Your .sig file takes the place of your business card. (And you can have more than one to apply in different circumstances.)
The list of things I should be doing today is probably too long to post, and I’m not feeling up to them anyway. So instead I’ll post the few things that I plan to do today instead.
Climate change … is a global tragedy of the commons, individual action cannot be enough. I cannot ensure the survival of my grandchildren, nor even yours, without compelling you to behave in ways that science tells me are necessary. Not to act, not to coerce, itself becomes immoral.
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Compulsion will be needed but compulsion alone won’t do it. People aren’t made like that. They need to believe in what they are forced to do. They need idealism, and that will also mean its dark side: the pressure of conformism, the force of self-righteousness, huge moral weight attached to practically useless gestures like unplugging phone chargers. They need, in fact, something that does look a lot like religion. But we can’t engineer it. It can only arise spontaneously. Should that happen, the denialists, who claim that it is all a religion, will for once be telling the truth, and when they do that, they’ll have lost. I just hope it doesn’t happen too late. (Andrew Brown)
As I write this, my neighbors are running their gas-powered leaf blowers. (I confess to having not one but two such devices in my shed.) I am wondering how I will handled the leaves this year. There are literally thousands of leaves in the lawn. In the past, I’ve used the heavy artillery of the leaf blower to deal with them. The leaf blower runs on a 2-cycle engine, which means that it literally burns oil mixed with gasoline. It’s not good for the environment on a number of levels: Carbon Emissions being the first and noise pollution being the second.
After reading Dr. Kaza’s book this week, I’m seriously considering handling the leaves differently, perhaps with a rake instead of the leaf blower. It would be another step down a greener path in life.
I stumbled upon this video below at No Impact Man’s blog. It struck me and I need to share it.
On 24 October, people in 181 countries came together for the most widespread day of environmental action in the planet’s history. At over 5200 events around the world, people gathered to call for action on the climate crisis. To make this global call to action count, it must be impossible to ignore. (http://www.350.org)
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