Wednesday, December 19, 2007

What we've all been waiting for...

A poem I came across the other day:

The Quality of Love


In the throws of the affair
I was surprised to learn
I could love two women
With intensity
At the same time
One with whom I’d spent many years
And one recently met

Now
The quality of these loves
Is best described by the difference
In my bathroom behavior—toilet procedure
At home
Though the room was occupied
(my wife in the tub)
when ya gotta go
Ya gotta go—and I always went
But in an apartment near chicago
I would carefully close the door
Run the water
And turn the fan on

During this time
If a doctor had informed me
I had but six months to live
Looking back
I think
I would have chosen
The apartment
For the first three months
But I know now
I would have wished to go home
To die
With someone who knows just
How full of crap
I really am

And an excerpt from the book, Still Life With Woodpecker, by Tom Robbins:

"Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not.
Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious questions is whether time has a beginning and an end.
Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of the bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm.
There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay?
Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself."

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Who am I? Let me tell you...

In my first ever visit to the social networking site "myspace.com," I learned some interesting things:
  • Tash is a 35-year-old single woman. Her faith in God is only paralleled by her love of the Denver Broncos. At this very moment (as I can tell from her recent last login), she is feeling thankful (probably because the Broncos haven't lost yet this week).
  • "Mizz Tina Marie" is just divorced, even though she's only 21. She lives in Connecticut and is interested in using myspace to find a potential date. She does warn, however, that "I'm flattered that my page is so entertaining, that you come by everyday to see it, and you aren't even on my friends list, can you say STALKER!!!"
  • Finally, there's Elvis, 21 and from Bridgeport. One click on his page and Vodka bottles start falling from the top of the page. One of his buddies said that, in a conclusion I have yet to understand, all of the alcohol on his site makes Elvis' profile "gay." Maybe such a comment fazed the young man and pushed him to the bottle. Right now, he's listed as "drunk."


Tash, Miz Tina Maria, and Elvis' profile in no way standout; the three do not provide more information than other people (in fact, they were the first three profiles that I looked at before I got bored). In what the Economist calls a "dictator's dream," people are putting more and more information about themselves on the Internet for all to see. Relationship status, sexual preference, likes, dislikes, groups of friends, telephone numbers, location, status -- listing personal information online is not the exception but the rule. Never before, the Economist continues, has so much personal information been in one place. And people are doing this voluntarily.
Social networking sites like facebook are not the only venues in which information we provide personal information. Each search we enter into Google is saved, possibly forever, so that the company can, at best, market to us better and at worst, sell information to curious governments spying on its own people. (In China, Google has been accused of "collaborating" with the government over search results.)
Each purchase we make with a credit card is stored on company servers. Not only do we allow these people to know what we're buying (which for some is scary enough), but also where we frequent.
Some of these conveniences make our lives better. We just need to make sure that we know precisely the consequences of using these services.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Facebook Fiasco

Well, I've always been wary of facebook, but now I'm wary of our whole generation. So much has changed in the way we communicate with each other, and based on responses I got to an email the other day, I'm convinced that we aren't quite aware of what exactly these changes mean.

The original email is the one pasted below. I sent it to Facebook, and I blind carbon copied many of my closest friends. Instead of outrage, the common response was, "who cares?" Over the next few weeks (not tonight, I'm going to bed), we'll explore first why the changing ways we communicate are so important and second why I'm now shifting from online back to the hand written letter.


To Whom It May Concern,

Facebook disabled my account last night because I would not submit additional personal information about myself, namely, my birthday. I write today so that the operators of Facebook might reconsider both its recent actions and also the overall direction of the site.

Here's the story: for months, Facebook has sought my birthday for “security reasons.” The site placed a yellow box at the top of the "newsfeed." Such a request was fine: I simply ignored it. Last night, however, Facebook's approach became more intrusive: a popup box appeared on each page I clicked. Incredibly obnoxious, I grumblingly submitted to Facebook’s incessant requests by setting my birthday as “January 1, 1910,” making me a young and healthy 97 and eagerly awaiting my 98th birthday. For whatever reason, the site rejected my submission. I then tried a date a little bit closer to my real birthday (how much closer I still will not say) -- “January 1, 1976” -- but Facebook still somehow knew that this was not quite right. I tried again, and again, until I could try no more; Facebook disabled my account. Whether this action will be temporary or in perpetuity, I now inquire.

To what ends Facebook wanted personal information about me, I do not know. Maybe the site will claim that it simply wanted to confirm that I was over 13, the minimum age which Facebook allows membership. But maybe – and much more plausibly – Facebook sought my birthday because such information is useful for, at best, making money and, at worse, because it understands that users’ favorite books, movies, and education, which profiles people look at, their sexual preference, and their religion is information valuable in its own right. What a far cry from the original aim of Facebook, and how very, very scary.

In writing this letter, my goal was to ask for my account to me reactivated. But I am now more seriously considering, especially as new networking sites are born, whether I want to be part of the Facebook community even if reinstated (I think that I do). Kicking me off sets a bad precedent, and worse, makes me -- and I'm sure when others hear about this and other similar actions (and they are already hearing) -- concerned that Facebook is no longer an online social networking community but instead a marketing, money-making, information-collecting machine. We will see whether, if it ever reaches that point, Facebook will even be trusted with a valid email address.

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best,



Eli Berman
eli.berman@yahoo.com