Category Archives: mark my word: twitter will doom us all

Betrayed by The Huffington Post? I want my Virtual Lives separated!

It is clear that I intend to keep my blog anonymous. Not that it matters to anybody anyway since in the grander scheme of things, I AM anonymous: one of the masses, does not matter whether my name is known or not. However, in the unlikely case when someone at work or a family member stumbles upon my blog, I really don’t want them to know what I really think about things. I mean, some of the things are better left unsaid, un-discussed. If I could have discussed an issue or a subject with anybody at work or in my social circle, I would probably have discussed it with them and got it over with. No need to use this blog as my “therapy sessions”. It is the same as when I leave comments on the Huffington Post. There are acquaintances and co-workers who I don’t want to become privy to how I see things.

I made the first mistake when I signed up for the Huffington Post through my Facebook login. Lo and behold, my Profile name is now my real name, and when you click on my profile, you are prompted to a screen to connect with me through Facebook. Again, 99.999999% of the world population will not care or bother, since my name or “Jane Doe” does not make any difference to you. Again, however, in the unlikely chance that someone I know comes across the same posts and the same comments, I don’t really want to be “found out.”

Ok, lesson learned. Luckily the comments I left were pretty neutral and fair. No moral, emotional, outbursts of any kind. No bawdy remarks. No curse words (since they are not allowed in the first place). I left my first profile as is, nothing to be done about it. There does not seem to be an easy way to disenroll myself from THP. I am lazy. Whatever.

I created a second profile. This time I made absolutely sure not to log in through Facebook and used an inconspicuous handle. Things were going along well. No personal information divulged through my profile. Until just now…

Somehow, the system working behind the scenes detected my Facebook login when I was logged into THP at the same time, and automatically connected the dots on its own. Now my profile picture shows a tiny “F” at the corner and when you click on it, the screen shows my name, that I am on Facebook, and would you like to connect with me on Facebook.

Now the tiny F is a BIG GIANT HUGE F to me!!!

This brings back the memory when a tiny window creeped up from the bottom of my computer screen after I finished with my Blockbuster queue, announcing (not even asking!) that my friends on Facebook would be able to see what movies I would be watching. The window then quickly disappeared before I could click on the button “No F*ing way!”

In the age of social media, Web 2.0, etc. etc. it is probably boggles the mind of those who design these nifty, intelligent, systems that someone, like me, may not want to have all of their virtual lives tied up in a nifty bundle, that someone may still prefer to lead an anonymous life while pouring her heart out.

It is ironic. But we live in an ironic era, no?

To Tweet or Not to Tweet…

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Upon learning my having joined the latest phenom which is Twitter, my male co-workers asked me point blank, But, WHY?

Why not just use emails if you want to talk to people you know? Why not use TXT? You can email to an entire group of people if that’s your reasoning for using Twitter (“one to many” instant communication)

Or, is your intention of letting strangers know what you are doing at any given minute? Waiting in line in the grocery store? Watching TRM at airport lounge?

Why? What is the rational excuse for this? Or even, the psychological needs behind this?

Excuses I use for being on Facebook, despite not having lots of “friends” (or Peeps) nor being a teenager, nor leading an active interesting life, cannot even be applied to Twitter: I can share pictures with people that I know on Facebook, only when they want to know; I am not shoving my cute kids’ pictures down anybody’s throat. And my friends may not want to know that I have been up to on a daily basis (for some, perhaps once-a-year Christmas cards have been adequate?) , but if they check my Facbook status, again, only when they want to, they can see that I have been traveling a lot more for business and that my husband is traveling around the world for his own consulting gig.

No. The same rational does not apply to Twitter. So why indeed?

I happened to read an article in Spectrum, the less-techy (and more Wired-like version of IEEE’s publication), in the current issue: “To Twitter or Not to Twitter” by Robert Lucky (I wonder whether he gets teased for his last name a lot…)

(Right off the bat, the author showed his Newbie status by not using the correct verb “Tweet”… But it’s the type of endearing mistakes that anybody over 30 in this day and age could relate to…)

He mentioned his puzzlement over a young speaker’s Tweeting about “waking up in the morning now”. Any sensible (perhaps older person) would ask, “Why would anybody want to know?” And if they want to know, can’t you call them? TXT them?

This new need experienced by the Internet-generation to be connected to the World all the time is intriguing to me, and I doubt that our children ever even stop and ponder at the wonder of this. To them this is part of existence, “I TXT, therefore I am.” The real grown-ups say this now often as a gentle tease, but there is truth in this saying. “I am Connected on the Web, therefore I am.” A life that is not documented is not worth living.

Excerpt from Mr. Lucky’s article:

“Twitter, the social-networking Web site that allows users to broadcast short text messages to a group of friends, has burst into popularity with millions of subscribers. I’m a confirmed e-mail user, but that’s so 20th century. I feel a certain pressure to get with it. So, to Twitter or not to Twitter? I view it as a question for the ages—the ages of the users, that is.

It was my generation of engineers that created the Internet, but it is largely today’s youth who are molding the social connectedness that is coming to characterize cyberspace. These are the so-called digital natives, who grew up with the Internet already a part of everyday life. They’re always online, inhabiting multiple identities, living a culture of sharing and peer collaboration. For them, multitasking is just the way it is. We older engineers built cyberspace, but our kids live in it, and for many of them the technology is transparent and almost irrelevant.

So as a digital immigrant, already an adult as the new culture was forming, I am amazed at what I see. At a recent meeting a young speaker casually mentioned that every morning he Twitters that he has just woken up. Alarm bells went off in my head. I thought about the fact that several scores of people are going to read a message that this guy has awakened. Isn’t this is an incredible waste of time for everyone involved? But a more unpleasant thought also formed in the back of my head—the worry that no one would care that I myself had just arisen. There must be some social consequence that I’m missing. An older acquaintance told me that he had been using Twitter and that after a week he had begun to feel a sense of connectedness.”

Mr. Lucky referenced two cartoons published by The New Yorker 12 years apart to illustrate how things have changed through the years, and how things have not really: these priceless (and thought-provoking) cartoons can be found here:

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” (A dog, sitting at a computer terminal, talking to another dog.) Published in The New Yorker 5 July 1993 by Peter Steiner.

“I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.” (One dog talking to another.) by Alex Gergory, The New Yorker, 12 September 2005.

Where do people find the time to blog? And the Huffington Post’s guide to blogging…

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I am seriously puzzled. I have checked out the “competitions” out there: do a google search (or a google blog search, even better), and there are a lot of suburban moms out there, clicking away. Many of them are writers, professional even, were or still are. Thank god!

They all have kids, well, duh, that’s the definition for “mothers”. So, where do they find the time to produce such abundant material for their blog?

I have to decide whether I want to go to bed or blabber away in the cyber space. And even in the cyber space, there are so many “social media” choices for my insomniac mind: Facebook, My Space, Slickdeals, Baby Bargain chat rooms, in addition to all the wonderful professionally written blogs: the Huffington Post, ReadWriteWeb, Micro Persuasion, and, let me not forget the most fun of them all, randomly searching the interweb for funny stuff to read or watch. (Oh, YouTube, you are the ultimate time sinker!) Even Twitter, the haiku model of the social media, proves to be a great aide to procrastinators, despite its claim to brevity: read the “Everybody” section like a great “found object poetry”, and click on all the TinyUrl links that people shared. FUN!

Hack, even reading reviews (and dueling comments) on Amazon.com is entertaining sometimes.

And actually, spending more time on my computer, now that the kids are in bed, requires me to put on the blinder and ignore the 3-day-piled-up laundry, the unwashed dishes, the toys strewn about the floor, oh, and yes, BILLS TO PAY, and Quicken to enter (I am proud to say that I have been diligently keeping records on Quicken since 1993… that’s an astonishing record for someone who has never managed to keep a journal past page 10…)

Really, I could be watching one of the Netflix DVDs that I haven’t touched and need to return soon to get our money’s worth. Or, I could read the newspaper. Or, heck, I should take a shower! I could also use some exercise on the machine that is now, as predicted, the clothes hanger.

It amazes me every time I think about this question.

In her latest (and probably the “lightest” and least political) book, The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging, Arianna Huffington proposes that everybody should have a blog, and that one should write something down instantly, no thinking required, no minimum for length for each post. And that’s where the fun is, and probably what the point is about blogging.

I have taken a liking (more an affinity, actually) to Arianna Huffington ever since her appearance on the Jon Steward Show this past December (promoting the book, of course). Jon true to himself wasn’t persuaded by Arianna’s ensued plea, “hey, you should have a blog!” What got me was what she said, as a side comment, about why she personally likes blogging,

“This way my accent won’t be an issue: people cannot hear my accent…”

It was mind-blowing to me that with her wealth and power and position, she still minds her own accent. Perhaps I read too much into this. But I now think of her often and wish her well.