"What Might We Be Accomplishing If We Weren't Tethered to the Net?"

Writing a book, maybe? Watching television? Cleaning? Exercising? Not being a total loser?

Everyone loves the Internet, but I'm convinced some people love it more than others (I firmly belong in the latter category). And there are many of us in said category that wonder what we would do with all that extra time if we didn't spend it conversing with others, looking up random shit, or watching YouTube videos. The Internet is one of the greatest timesucks ever invented, and all those other things fall into it: chat services, Twitter, Facebook, email, RSS feeds....

To quote technologist Nicholas Carr:

[T]he Web is also an enormous global timesink, sucking up massive amounts of time that might have gone into more productive, thoughtful, and fulfilling activities. It's difficult to measure the cost of this wasted time, because it's impossible to know what people might have done if they weren't surfing and tweeting and youtubing and huluing and foursquaring and emailing and IMing and googling and etc. The Web often gives us the illusion of having an incredibly diverse set of pursuits when it's really narrowing the scope of our thoughts and activities. There is still a whole lot more that people can do offline than online - something that's easy to forget as we peer into our screens all day. (my emphasis)

That's seen in the discussion of the polarization of our country and our media, how everyone is worried that we siphon ourselves off into our own bubbles. StumbleUpon can tell us our interests, further refined on sites like Amazon and Pandora, all with the universal "like" button. The Internet is, like so many things, a blessing and a curse, a way to connect and a way to disconnect. It's up to the user to define the experience.

Facebook, Stop Sucking Ass

As pretty much anyone who uses Facebook semi-regularly knows, the site keeps changing its privacy rules. Not only is this confusing and downright maddening, but it's pissing off a helluva lot of people. I track Facebook's moves somewhat closely, and I've been fed up with them for a while. And I'm a very heavy user. I know the ins and outs better than most, and I've been having trouble wading through this recent mess.

I want better ways to complain, I want to be able to have choices, to control what I want, and I want some of the old features back (I won't list them all). Mark Zuckerburg went from being this wunderkind to this reviled, amoral overlord. Facebook is too wound up in my daily existence, my way of life, for me to just zap it out completely--like destroying the Internet!--but Zuckerburg's vision of the future is not compatible with how users want it to be, and he no longer cares about the vast network he's built. He's transforming the Internet with his conceptions of privacy and openness, not understanding that everyone needs and has the right to privacy. Hell, even when Gawker exposed him, he quickly took control and put his stuff behind privacy walls!

So I am very glad that, among many other website, the Times is on this and has compiled a list of questions they will present to Zuckerburg and Facebook to answer. A response should be up in a few days; I eagerly await it. In the meantime, check out this timeline of privacy changes to the site, and please, check and update your privacy controls! Too many people stay ignorant and they ruin it for the rest of us.

Update: Here's an interactive pie chart, using the same data as the EFF.

Tracking Yourself

Of course I have to mention the Times Magazine's cover story on self-trackers. I am very much into the idea of tracking everything, as I love the idea of quantifiable data and how I can use it to improve my life. The biggest downside is the vast amount of time it takes to do this, and it quickly becomes, like anything else, another chore. And there are so many already!

I was surprised they didn't mention Feltron, a guy who's tracked his music, the restaurants he visits, the cities he flies to, and a number of other things over the past several years. I blogged about this before, and I am again in awe of this idea. Self-absorbed? Maybe. I've taken a different approach to self-absorption and narcissism in this age--it's about how you relate to people. If all you talk about is yourself, then yes, you are self-absorbed and boring. But this idea, of tracking yourself in order to change your life, to conduct experiments? Awesome.

But Jonah Lehrer (who looks like an older Michael Cera here) takes issue with this:

One of the main problems facing self-experimenters is the powerful role of expectations in shaping performance. If we think something is going to work, then it probably will work, at least for a little while.

Studies like this demonstrate the necessity of blind controls. The brain is a gullible machine, which is why the very act of believing that tryptophan might work makes it much more likely to have an effect, at least at first. ... That's why I'm a teeny bit suspicious of clear-cut results that come from tested hypotheses, especially when the results contradict the scientific literature. The very act of speculating about a causal relationship - say, for instance, the link between a pill and the ability to concentrate - warps the data, biasing our mind in a million little ways.

His discussion on wine and beer is quite interesting--and I do buy the idea that mood and other factors do shape our opinions and reactions. A bad day may make us eat more or work harder--or just be lazier, if we stopped giving a shit.

I love the tools, the apps, that make it easier to track things. I think it could help me with productivity and other time/organization issues. I somehow imagined the afterlife as being a repository of facts; you could look up anything related to you and your life, and it would be there. How much time, over the course of your life, you spent in the bathroom. Or on the internet. Or talking with a specific person. Or anything. How scary and awesome that would be.

On Laura Bush

I am a fan of Curtis Sittenfeld. I have read all her books, and I think she does an excellent job of describing women as they are, what they go through, often in ways that aren't usually expressed. I think of her second novel, The Man of My Dreams, occasionally, because it's a book that doesn't do any sort of typical romance or romantic trajectory, and is completely heartbreaking is so many ways that feel so true to life. I agree with Katie's review in that I immediately liked it just because the protagonist wasn't experienced, and not in the totally fake way that Charlotte Simmons is. But her standout is most definitely American Wife, her novelization of Laura Bush. When I reviewed it in 2008, I said it didn't compare to her previous works, but I don't agree with that assertion any more; I think it is quite distinct on its own.

I bring this up because Laura Bush has released her own memoir, and I agree with Jessica Grose in that reading American Wife completely changed how I viewed Mrs. Bush. She still seems so reserved and matronly, but with American Wife in my head, even a year and a half later, I am intrigued by Mrs. Bush's story. It just proves how damn good Curtis Sittenfeld is.

This Should Be My Bible

Katie from Boston at Struggling Single Twentysomething linked to me. Yay! And she led me to an excellent site: Smart, Pretty and Awkward.

Change is one day at a time, right?

Really? Glamour?

Glamour was recently named magazine of the year.

I'm not quite sure why.

I've subscribed to Glamour for the last year. I only did so because of their 75th anniversary promotion, where I could get a year's worth for 75 cents. Yep, 12 issues for less than a dollar. What the hell? As far as women's magazines go, I actually like Glamour, detesting their nearest rival, Cosmopolitan. Glamour was more real, and I liked that they incorporated recipes and real advice, at least in the back. They had the obligatory "serious story", addiction or do-gooders, now with Katie Couric interviewing some notable female. All well and good.

But after a few months, it was wearying. The topics were the same, of course: men, relationships, food, eating, exercise, fashion, beauty. I wondered how those working at the magazine didn't get bored of the repetition. The advice was usually sound, but repetitive, and occasionally contradictory. I waded through the "girl with the belly bulge" and the Crystal Renn spreads; meh. Crystal Renn is beautiful and not plus sized in the least, as I've noted before. I no longer felt that the magazine was the exception to others in its category; maybe I just got used to it, maybe the novelty wore off. But I also wasn't looking at other young-women magazines, either, so it became just another Glamour. I knew I wasn't going to renew my subscription when I subscribed, but now I didn't care.

But besides the sameness, I was saddened to see that women's magazines "cleaned up" certain celebrities:



































Lady Gaga and Rihanna are known for dressing explicitly, in wild getups, but they are stripped of their individuality; whitewashed, you could say. There's no crazy makeup, no funky fashion choices, nothing that should be exposed covered up and nothing covered up that should be exposed. They're not even in fun colors: Lady Gaga is uncharacteristically in all white, or off-white, as if to appear pure, but she looks out of place and strangely bland, since she blends in with the background. It's the text that speaks, not her. Rihanna at least looks happy, if girlish, a woman full of spunk and personality. This might be to offset the serious interview inside, promoting her album Rated R, both which explore her dark and volatile year. But her hair is gelled back; we are not to notice her funky, unconventional style choices, just like we aren't meant to view Lady Gaga as she wants to be seen. Maybe that explains her detached look.

I see this as suppressing both women's natural personalities and style to favor a more acceptable form of female expression, both in beauty and personality. I can understand why a cover picture of Lady Gaga wouldn't have her face covered, but I don't see why she has to appear in such an awful getup, one she would never wear anywhere else. I don't see how prettifying Rihanna makes her ordeal any better, except take away her right to express herself as she chooses.

So Glamour, magazine of the year? You might talk the talk of inclusion of expression, proudly showing off your Crystal Renn glamour shots, but until you really show how real women are, capturing their life as they live it (not as you wish them to see it), you don't deserve this title.

Cross-posted on Notes on Popular Culture.

RIP: The AIM Away Message

A blogger I follow, Katie from Boston, recently wrote an ode to AIM away messages. Both of us spent overlapping years at college, in that space where social media was growing, but hadn’t hit the wider world yet. Status messages were only in the province of AIM, and the unique college environment meant that everyone was on all the time, through one medium. We all had angsty things to say, and we did so by the most elegant and articulate way we could—song lyrics:

One thing that’s been lost in the translation from away messages to Facebook statuses and Twitter, though, is the art of the song lyric message. Most song lyrics are too long to sum up our deepest feelings in 140 characters, but that wasn’t a problem with the AIM away message! No, we didn’t have to come right out and say what we were feeling because an artist we liked had done it for us, leaving us with cryptic lyrics to provide our friends, hoping that they’d decipher our mood. And there were truly lyrics for every emotion.

I too have lamented this loss. Song lyrics just don’t work on Facebook, just another post on a feed. With AIM, we got the added bonus of fonts and colors, all designs to prove how precious or earnest we were through what we listened to.

Katie nails down many of the categories the songs fell in, although her personal references do not mesh with mine (or my friends), since that is based partly upon taste. But no one who went to college in 2004 will forget the ubiquity of Garden State (I’m pretty sure everyone on my buddy list used “There’s beauty in the breakdown” from “Let Go”). She misses the overused “We’re so in love” lyrics from “Such Great Heights”—to this day I groan when seeing “I am thinking it's a sign that the freckles/In our eyes are mirror images and when/We kiss they're perfectly aligned”. It’s not original or cute anymore, it’s hackneyed and trite.

Away messages were a code. Not always, and obviously, sometimes they were perfectly explicit, even when in song lyrics. I knew what certain lyrics “meant”: trouble, or heartbreak, even if I didn’t know specifics or if the specifics didn’t line up exactly with the song. I just knew it was bad news.

Of course, away messages were also misinterpreted, sometimes causing lots of offense and drama. That was all part of college, as was the timing of certain remarks (whether intentional or not), or the inability to update the away messages either out of sheer laziness or because people were plumb not there to do so.

I suspect AIM is not held in the same regard now among this demographic, not with Twitter and Facebook and cell phones and text messaging all overtaking the importance of the away message. Plus everything can be integrated, so there really is no excuse for not updating. But I do miss crafting my away messages, thinking of the audience to read them. Now, out of college, most of my buddies have gravitated away, and like most social services, the fun is in who you know and how many people in your network are in, so the reason for going on has diminished, and with that the motivation to put up an away message. Now, the same people are on, usually at the same time—the evening.

Instant Messages have gravitated toward the workplace, as a way of connecting to far-flung colleagues, or to those in a big organization where picking up the phone is pure avoidance or laziness. Katie does nail some of the problems inherent with talking via this means: the inability to detect tone (sarcasm often falls flat), causing confusion; and how to squeeze in this activity while doing other things (also a mainstay in college). It always seemed dishonest to ghost in order to talk to only one or two people, or to put up an away message in order to avoid those you don’t want to talk to while engaging others. AIM also foreshadowed the “digital autism” of today, the inability to have a conversation or pay attention to those you’re physically with, preferring to spend energy through technological means.

I still go on AIM, but it’s a different experience; it’s to talk to specific people. I rarely have away messages up now—what’s the point? Who’s going to see? And with all the new features, it’s no longer the service of yore, but an entirely new beast, one that’s trying to still be as old-school but playing catch-up with the new kids on the block. AIM’s heyday was rooted very much in its time, a benefit of a confluence of factors that was victim to technology and time: growing up.