Monthly Archives: July 2012

Facebook is failing me

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I don’t Facebook as much as I used to. My apologies to my Facebook friends. I still love you. I just don’t love the Facebook experience as much as I once did. I still check in many times throughout the day. I still post status updates, share pictures and video of my daughter and links to interesting articles. I check-in at places and share new blog posts, books I’m reading and, occassionally, the music I’m listening to. I still enjoy that part of everything.

But I am finding it very difficult to keep up with other people. The people I most want to see are getting buried beneath the Other Stuff. At the moment, I use Facebook much like a publishing platform. I’d like to use it as a way to keep in touch with friends.

I think there are two main reasons this is happening: 1) Facebook isn’t mobile friendly and 2) I forget to use the curated feeds.

Facebook isn’t mobile friendly. Both the iPhone and iPad apps are wretched. This is a problem since I do most of my Facebooking on my phone and tablet. To be fair, both are actually great in allowing me to post statuses, share pictures and video directly from my phone’s camera roll and check-in places. I get real-time notifications when people like, comment, message or post to my Wall. This is all terrific, which is why I do these things a lot. What I don’t do a lot is visit other people’s news feeds. They don’t render well on either the iPhone or iPad. The feeds are cumbersome to explore and can be difficult to comment on. I usually scroll a few screens, hit “like” a dozen times and move on to something else. Not good friend behavior.

I have tried using Facebook in Safari, which is somewhat better than the app interface but still isn’t fully functional. The Timeline UI renders rather poorly and it takes  a while for things down the page to load. Not good.

From time to time, I try to adjust to these problems by using a third party platform like HootSuite or Flipboard. Both help me see posts I would otherwise miss but neither feel like real Facebook experiences. I am open to suggestions here.

The problem with other people’s feeds became most pronounced about a year ago when Facebook changed the way they ranked news feeds. I started getting a lot more random posts than posts from the friends with whom I was most engaged. Not sure what they changed in the news feed algorithm, but it made my Facebook experience less coherent, not more. At the same time, they made Facebook less friendly by adding the javascript real-time crawler in the upper right-hand corner. This does not display at all on the mobile browser versions. Confusing.

Tonight, I rediscovered the smart lists on the left that allow me to customize feeds to lift friends into focused group categories that hopefully make them more manageable. Not sure how I missed that fact. I’m going to give list making another try. Hopefully, I will begin seeing more posts and engaging with friends more meaningfully. Until then, Facebook peeps, know that I love you and wish you the best, even if I haven’t liked your posts in a while.

How do you use Facebook? Do you curate lists? Visit specific friends’ Walls directly? Visit all friends’ Walls regularly? I’m looking for practical advice here. I’m not sure how Facebook became strange to me. I need help becoming a better friend.

 

 

The truth about profanity

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I got stung by a yellow-jacket about an hour ago. It hurt. I cursed. I used a few of those words you want people to believe you only keep for really awful special occasions. I used them loudly. I used them repeatedly.

This is not a new thing for my neighbors to hear. I curse when I build things. I curse when I get impatient. I curse when I lose things.

I don’t curse a lot but when I curse, I curse with gusto.

I was raised to believe in the forbidden power of Bad Words. I grew up carrying around the vague notion that Bad Words had magic powers and could send you directly to heck. I had a terrible time keeping up with which words were Bad. All the usual culprits were on the list (for the complete list see George Carlin). Words like crap, dang and hell occupied an undefined status. They could get me in trouble but definitely weren’t as bad as the baddest Bad Words. I once got in trouble with my Sunday School teacher for saying “holy cow”. She asked if I had ever actually seen a cow that was holy. At the time, I wasn’t versed enough in world religions to offer the Hindu perspective.

As a lover of words, the idea that some words are forbidden for no specific reason was frustrating. I was baffled by the general confusion surrounding which specific words I was being protected from.

Shit and crap is bad. Doo-doo, poop and feces are fine. I don’t know about you, but, to me, the later are more embarrassing than the former.

I’m thinking about this because I have a five year old daughter who listens to everything I say and likes to try out novel expressions in various situations. My wife and I are intentionally raising a child who loves language. We rarely use the same adjective twice. We play rhyming games. Emersey invents elaborate song lyrics with complex internal rhyme schemes. She starts kindergarten in August and already routinely uses words like “extraordinary”, “magnificent” and “inconvenient”. We talk about feelings a lot. She knows the difference between sad, irritated, agitated and gloomy.

All of this is to say I hate the idea of forbidden Bad Words. I can’t bring myself to chastise her for an occasional dammit or hell in the appropriate context. This is going to be a major problem for me because we are not just raising a kid to value the wonder of language. We are raising a kid who has to function well in polite society. I don’t want to raise a vulgar potty mouth. Not because I believe Those Words are bad but because I believe that the indiscrete overuse of Those Words reflects poor command of language and shows an inability to reach for richer, more effective words when the situation requires.

In short, I hope to raise a daughter who understands that there are no Bad Words but there are certainly Bad Uses. A word in itself cannot be bad, but it can be unwisely used and carry unintended side effects along with it. The purpose of words is to be understood. People judge us by the words we use. If they are well-impressed with our verbal toolkit, they are more willing to believe we are intelligent and treat us accordingly. If they find our toolkit lacking, they expect the opposite.

I’m not yet sure how I will handle this explanation when a kindergarten teacher wants to have a conversation about my daughter’s occasional use of the word “damn”. Did she use it appropriately? Did the word suite the context in which it was used? Would another word have more effectively conveyed her intended message? These are questions I suspect most kindergarten teachers will not enjoy. After a year of this, I may find myself resorting to the Bad Words list out of a sense of convenience more than anything else.

Until then, I feel completely justified polluting the neighborhood a bit with a few expletives when stung by a yellow-jacket, building a swing set or looking for my car keys. But I really must remember to be more creative and precise in my cursing. Good parenting is modeling desired behaviors. I want my daughter to invent new swear words that dig at the meat of the moment and get underneath the skin of the situation in a way that the typical everyday Bad Words just can’t.

What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (a mid-book review)

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I am halfway through Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Carr is the guy who wrote the excellent Atlantic essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” several years ago in which he documented his personal sense that reading online was somehow ruining his familiar mental habits — namely, concentration and focus. “Ruining”, I thought at the time, was an unfairly harsh term. He takes a more nuanced, thoughtful approach to his own experience of reading in the book-length study.

Page 125 of a 224 page book is not the ideal place from which to write a review. That said, I am ready to recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand what is probably happening to us in the age of ubiquitous internet access. Carr’s argument expands on the theme established in his Atlantic essay: the internet is destroying our ability to read deeply and engage with text-based narrative in a linear, hierarchical, rational fashion. Hypertext and multimedia “enhanced” text is changing the experience of reading and rewiring the way our minds are able to read.

The Atlantic essay struck me as alarmist, reactionary even. The Shallows places the new ways of thinking engendered by the internet into the context of other mind-altering technologies that actually changed the way our brains worked: the alphabet, numbers, the map, the clock, the codex. Carr examines how these new technologies of intellect have made entirely new thought processes possible and, thus, altered physical structures in the human mind. These changes play out over the course of millennia but they also play out in the course of a human lifetime. In the case of the internet, these changes may play out in a matter of days or weeks.

There’s a lot of strong scholarship in this book. I will come back for a better review 100 pages from now. For now, I just want to share how impressed I am with Carr’s ability to summarize the history of technological innovation, describe how it works and create a meaningful context that is value-neutral and does not necessarily crown contemporary humans as the apotheosis of what we will become. We are not necessarily destined to remain as we are. We are most likely destined to continue our process of becoming something else. This has happened before. It is going to happen again.

Carr says it better. Here’s a great passage from his chapter on the history of reading aloud vs. reading alone:

Like our forebears during the later years of the Middle Ages, we find ourselves today between two technological worlds. After 550 years, the printing press and its products are being pushed from the center of our intellectual life to its edges. The shift began during the middle years of the twentieth century, when we started devoting more and more of our time and attention to the cheap, copious, and endlessly entertaining products of the first wave of electric and electronic media: radio, cinema, phonograph, television. But those technologies were always limited by their inability to transmit the written word. They could displace but not replace the book. Culture’s mainstream still ran through the printing press.

Now the mainstream is being diverted, quickly and decisively, into a new channel. The electronic revolution is approaching its culmination as the computer — desktop, laptop, handheld — becomes our constant companion and the Internet becomes our medium of choice for storing, processing, and sharing information in all forms, including text. The new world will remain, of course, a literate world, packed with the familiar symbols of the alphabet. We cannot go back to the lost oral world, any more than we can turn the clock back to a time before the clock existed. “Writing and printing and the computer,” writes Walter Ong, “are all ways of technologizing the word”; and once technologized, the word cannot be de-technologized. But the world of the screen, as we’re already coming to understand, is a much different place from the world of the page. A new intellectual ethic is taking hold. The pathways in our brains are once again being rerouted. (77)

This is a very enjoyable, well-researched, well-built study. I just hope there are still people out there able to sit still long enough to enjoy it.