Community Thinking

I really haven't gotten the hang of Google+ Mostly the way I've been using it so far is to send links to individual people, an attempt to share links in a fairly innocuousness way. So there's hardly anything in my public stream. However the other day I reblogged a link from Howard Rheingold to spacebank. It was Howard Rheingold's tag that caught my attention:

Don't hate banks, become the bank.

A friend responded saying that he'd been talking with friends about his neighborhood community and the link was barking up the same tree.

He gave me just enough encouragement for me to try to put together a few thoughts and a few links. Of course I'm so spacey that's easier said than done!

I was having dinner with another group of friends the other day and the subject of Occupy Wall Street came up. I was very surprised how negative my three friends were. One of them was down on it because she thought it was turning off--scaring--somewhat liberal professionals like her brother. As chance would have it, I had an opportunity to spend some time with her brother planting spring bulbs in his mother's garden yesterday. I was curious about what he thought and got him talking about it. One of the reasons I was so interested to hear his views is there's about ten years difference between us. I'm firmly in the Baby Boomer generation, and he's in Gen X. While Occupy! is a multi-generation movement, Gen Y seems to be getting most of the credit or blame for it. The names for generations are a bit fishy, indeed the whole construct of generations seems suspect, but painting with a broad brush there's something to it.

My fellow Baby-Boomer discomfort over Occupy Wall Street seems more her own than what her brother thinks, although there's discomfort all around. In any case the issues of Social Security and Medicare are beginning to have great salience for us Boomers. Most of the plans to "reform" Social Security and Medicare are premised on a generational divide and conquer pretext: Boomers will get theirs and screw the rest. But most Boomers aren't so far removed from Gen X to think we don't care about them. And having lived through so many years, it's hard to escape that Gen X has been dealt a bad hand. Generation X Doesn’t Want to Hear It is an eloquent lament and has a epic comment thread. So if Boomers and Gen X can find common cause, the best hope for divide and conquer is to gang up on Gen Y. Alas, this seems all too prevalent and gets my knickers in a twist. Perhaps the more obvious coalition is between Gen X and Gen Y against us Boomers, and that's frightening.

I scared myself in my conversation with friends because I swore like a drunken sailor. One of the messages of Occupy! is that the economic system which only benefits the 1% isn't working out so well for the rest of the 99%. That seems glaringly obvious to me, and the tenor of the conversation seemed to be along the lines that protesting isn't going to do a damn thing. So I found myself saying the F-word or variations about every other word in polite company. I know that's no way to win hearts and minds! I managed not to say much at all to my friend's brother and listened. Strange that he found me convincing in our conversation about Occupy Wall Street!

Early in September I had been ranting to one of the other friends at dinner about the Keystone xl Pipeline protests. What had me wigged out that evening was the largest civil disobedience action in front of the White House since the Vietnam War protests had garnered practically no press. My friend hadn't heard about it and quipped that she was terribly out of touch with the news. But I've know my friend since college and knew that she buys both the New York Times and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and reads them every day. That seemed a winning point to make about the discouraging the absence of coverage. My friend also had not heard about the Alberta Tar Sands. I told her that if she did nothing else to do a Google Image search for Alberta Tar Sands.

Anyhow at the more recent dinner, between my profanity strewn ranting, my friend pointed out that she had done some research about oil sands. Another friend interjected that nothing is gonna make a big difference in our lifetimes. But in the context of other stuff we had been talking about at dinner, especially concerning some children he's close to, I think this line of argument seemed weak even to him.

Vinay Gupta got some pushback for his post Templars of Earth but there was something of the message of the Templars of Earth oath which came up in our dinner conversation when my friend mentioned the tar sands. Here's the oath:

I understand and accept fully that the human race is harming the natural world by driving species to extinction, releasing long-lived pollutants, changing the climate and poisoning nature.

I understand and accept fully that the human race makes many suffer horribly and die in war, famine, injustice, poverty and oppression, and that we are not choosing to provide a good life for all of humanity.

I understand and fully accept that my own efforts appear unequal to the task of changing these facts.

I swear by the bones of the earth, the roots of the mountains to always treat those who understand and accept fully these Three Truths with dignity and respect, myself included.

Out of habit, I'm tempted to add the coda: We're fucked. The problem with that is profanity is disrespectful. I've got to mind my words better.

John Micheal Greer makes a very useful distinction between Problems and Predicaments. It seems what happened in our dinner conversation with all the contentiousness about Occupy! was thinking in terms of problems, but once the subject of oil sands was broached we made a turn towards predicaments. Now most of my friends are proudly not slackers like me. They don't like to think about predicaments. They go to work to solve problems and do the best they can. It seems to feel as if that should be enough. A common taunt directed at the Occupiers is: Get a Job! Still, sometimes most of us grok there's a gap; Here's Greer:

The difference is that a problem calls for a solution; the only question is whether one can be found and made to work, and once this is done, the problem is solved. A predicament, by contrast, has no solution. Faced with a predicament, people come up with responses. Those responses may succeed, they may fail, or they may fall somewhere in between, but none of them “solves” the predicament, in the sense that none of them makes it go away.

My friend talking with his friends about their community are probably talking in some sort of hybrid mode between problems and predicaments. They all know it's a problem that so many young people not only can't find work, but have little chance to. It's a problem that so many dwellings in the neighborhood are abandoned and decrepit. There's even a sense there's a solution along the lines of putting the unemployed to work on the dilapidated structures. Alas, the devil is in the details. And it's when we begin tumbling around in those damned details that solutions begin to seem remote and alternative responses more promising. Indeed as community members the heart of the discussion isn't so much how to solve problems, but how to respond constructively in these dire circumstances we're facing.

Among the damned details--ha and I said I'd watch my mouth--is money. Besides the point, the Flying Lizard's rendition of Money is compelling. Yeah, money is such a strange topic. Bazungu Bucks was a lame attempt to create a special purpose alternative currency. While the experiment didn't work in any way, shape or form, it did pique my interests about alternative currencies. I do think that alternative currencies can be appropriate in many situations. As strange as alternative currencies may seem, good old money is seeming strange these days too.

Julian Assange says Wikileaks is starved for cash. Here's a link to a New York Times article about that. The article of course is subject to the Times's wimpy paywall. You can't give money to Wikileaks without having the banks do it for you and the banks refuse. Back with the legislative arguments about banking reform, Dick Durbin in a fit of candor said: Frankly, the banks own the place. Meaning the government is hamstrung to regulate them, but it rather holds for the Wikileaks financial woes too. People want to give Wikileaks money, but the banks tell them they may not. It's a bit obscure, and perhaps far afield, but Louisiana has made it essentially illegal to sell secondhand items in the state using cash. The law requires sellers accept payment only through banks. Old assumptions about legal tender are falling by the way. Increasingly in order to pay for some good or service or to give money away, we're being told that first we must ask a bank: "Mother may I?" Like they own the place!

Well, the sorts of responses my friends are imagining for their community are the sorts of things one can be reasonably sure that banks will say "No!" to. That negative answer stops thinking in terms of solving problems dead, but has the advantage of opening up a range of responses if instead we're trying to respond to a predicament.

I have more to say but I've blathered on too long as it is, so I'll put it to rest now and will write some more tomorrow or next.

Internet Identity

Sometimes it seems to me that "identity" is over-rated. At least when it comes to filling out those online forms which say, "Tell us about yourself" I'm at a loss to know what to put down. I rather admire young digital natives encountered online who seem to know what sort of performance online will say a little something true about them. It used to be that women and girls were the ones who knew what to do in front of a camera lens, that is, had a sense in advance what the picture would look like and what they could do to look good in it. Nowadays this sort of knowledge seems much more widespread. And it seems much more noticeable that I don't get it.

When commenting at blogs I often leave the address for this blog. The thought behind it is so a person could get a glimpse of my identity. I'm afraid the messages this blog leaves about me is an identity crisis, especially so because I update so infrequently these days.

I have meant to get around to posting here. One reason was to try out Blogger's new interface. Holy smokes! The first thing I notice is the blog stats, which I've managed to ignore over the course of blogging here. I was surprised to discover people land on the pages. I wonder why? I guess I'll have a look at that feature later.

Another reason I've wanted to post is because of Google+ and the new additions to Facebook. Both of these places are calling themselves "identity services." Apparently there's an algorithm to say what I have such a hard time saying: Who am I?

Algorithms are powerful, witness Google. Ha, Google has turned 13 which seems an impossibly short amount of time for something which seems so necessary I would have thought it's always been around. When I go to Youtube for a song, I always look for the suggestions because almost always find something remarkable. Still, I'm lacking enough imagination to think an algorithm will really do a good job telling others who I am.

Nowadays when first going to a new Website we're often encouraged to "Sign in with Facebook" or to sign up with an email. Whether or not Google or Facebook are good at serving up our identities, it's certainly true they hold the keys to lots of places online we'd like to hang out and participate. And if my imagination isn't so good about how well these services will do in re my identity online, it's not at all hard for me to worry about what would happen if Facebook and Google decide to "disappear" me. The consequence seems not limited to Google and Facebook, but rather extends to the many sites which they hold the keys for me.

For years I've been reading Dave Winer and other tech luminaries who warn about corporate silos online. I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to technology. I could see the point being made, but was pretty much unwilling to do anything about it, even too lazy to worry. I rather like walled gardens. Over the years I've put stuff up that's nowhere to be found anymore. It is true in a way that the Internet doesn't forget, that nothing which is put up is ever completely lost. The warning back in the old days in school, "That will go on your permanent record!" has got more weight these days with so much stored in digital files online. Still there's lots of writing of mine posted online which I wouldn't mind a copy of, but its retrieval beyond me now. So stuff does get lost, lots and lots of stuff. Mark Brown points out about Geocities:

Within months of announcing the site's closure Yahoo had evicted its tenants and bulldozed more than 38 million user-built homes.

Digital archaeology is a burgeoning field.

Barely computer literate, it still seems to me I ought to pay more attention to the ways to keep the Internet a distributed system. I like open source software, even though my contribution to it hasn't gone beyond using it. Likewise I haven't set up a node with Diaspora but I did sign up for it tonight. It will probably take me a long time to find some utility for it. Terry Handcock's article in Free Software Magazine, Why You Should Join Diaspora Now, Like Your Freedom Depends On It convinced me it was a good idea to sign up.

Meanwhile I've been busy putting my stuff up into silos. I've got a link-blog on Tumblr called Three Good Links. It really consists of me copying quotes and links I put on readon.ly a neat service I was worried about disappearing one day. I figured that Tumblr probably had a greater likelihood of being around for a while. Tumblr's search function isn't anywhere as good as search on my bookmarking service Pinboard. I copied my bookmarks from Delicious when it leaked that Yahoo was trying to sell it. To my surprise Yahoo did manage to sell Delicious. Not only did they manage to sell it but Chad Hurley and Steve Chen the founders of Youtube bought it! I'm really happy that they saw the potential of Delicious. I'm so lazy that I haven't begun to save bookmarks on Delicious again. But I do check in to see where things are headed over there.

My bookmarks at Pinboard are a mess. I really am never quite sure what I will want to find again one of these days, so I liberally save bookmarks to the place thinking possibly one day I might want to find the page again. Wow, it's a big help to me. Pinboard's funny tagline is "social bookmarking for introverts." It really is a strong and fast service. But the extroverted bit about Delicious is a strength, at least a part of it that interests me. What my Tumblr blog experiment has shown me is that there really is something to the idea of online curation. Ideally I'd like to more or less dump bookmarks on Pinboard and then curate them at Delicious.

A friend recently started a Website where he talks about music called Musicasaurus. Every two weeks he puts up a playlist with great commentary. As an unauthorized activity I've been taking his playlists and matching them as best I can to videos at Youtube. You can see my playlists there if you're interested. I don't think my friend approves, but I've asked him point blank and he hasn't told me not to do it. Something I would do if he approved was to add the tag "Musicasaurus" but that seems his so I don't. Anyhow there's no worry because most of the playlists have exactly zero views. I started out doing this just as a way to hear my friend's playlists. But the addition of video to the music adds something and makes the list different. Even though nobody else is enjoying it, it still seems like a worthwhile activity, an activity that adds some little bit to the common good.

The photo is a screenshot of a wall at Koowall. That particular wall is the Monster Music Blog wall. I don't have any music blogs in my RSS feeds, but I do run across links to pieces at music blogs. And lately when I do I've put a link to the blog over on the Monster Music Blog wall. So far there are almost 150 links to a wide variety of music blogs. The idea of Koowall is people can add text, photos, and videos to walls. Each entry is tagged and there are buttons to send a link to the particular entry to Facebook or a notice via email. The idea is that people who've signed up for Koowall can add content to the various walls and support (like) various entries on the walls. It seems a pretty cool way of sharing and encouraging social production. So far I don't see much sharing, and it doesn't appear to me that unregistered users can see the walls. For all of that the sort of curation I do at Koowall seems worthwhile. I look forward to more people sharing. If anyone wants an invitation send me an message by email and I send you one.

The point of this long ramble is it appears those in the know think that online identity is the big thing. But it seems to me that people sharing, peer to peer production is what seems more important to me. Many of the online silos do facilitate P2P interactions and I use them enthusiastically. But the recent focus on identity over what people produce online is a pretty clear signal that my interests and the interest of large corporations aren't perfectly aligned. It's not that I don't think their algorithms capture a glimpse of my identity. Rather it's that I don't want, and can't really imagine, my identity limited to their algorithms. I guess that means I'll have to start paying a little to support more open and distributed platforms.

What Did You Listen to Today?

I was posting at an online forum on a thread "What did you listen to today?". I afraid it was something I did, like posting pictures like this, anyhow the account got suspended. So my online sand castles got washed away. I didn't save all the posts, but did save a few. I thought to post some of them here.

Aside from reformatting them into HTML from BB formatting, I'm a bit curious about what stuff I said about myself there I'm leery about saying here. Ha, these posts seem innocuous enough.

Let Me See Your ID (YouTube)


Gil Scott Heron passed away May 27th and so lots of people have been posting remembrances of him, but today saw this song posted from the Artist United Against Apartheid Sun City album. I've never been cool, my copy of this is on a cassette tape. The whole project never really caught fire with the national imagination. Steven Van Zandt founded Artists Against Apartheid and I think some people who listened to the record were looking for an E Street Band kind of vibe and then wondered what was up with all the Rap. I never really listened to this album with others much, but this track is one I listened to over and over.

I liked to make mix tapes for my own amusement and kept trying to fit this track in mixes and I don't think I really was ever successful, not the least of the reasons was I probably only ever had like 50 albums or something. This talk about cassettes makes me think about the time of music scarcity. It's very nice that music is so available today and it makes it hard to imagine what it was like when it was so much more scarce; like when there were only 3 TV channels. One of the cassette tapes I had though was Sun City and I think because of that, and maybe also because of hearing The Specials Free Nelson Mandela I very distinctly remember where I was the minute I heard the news that F.W. de Klerk had announced that Nelson Mandela was to be released from prison. It was one of those "pinch yourself" moments where the news was too hard to believe.

I had only heard of Gil Scott Heron from many years earlier with his piece The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. I can't place where I first heard that, my brain searches way back to 1970 when I was in high school, but I really wonder if that's right. I can't figure out how I would have heard it--you can be sure it wasn't on the radio in Charlotte, North Carolina at the time. Then my mind forwards to about 1974 when I was in college, which makes more sense cause that's when the version with a band behind it was released. Then zooming in to a bar in East Liberty, Pennsylvania in about 1976. It's possible it was on the Juke Box, but I'm suspicious of my memory. I know I'd heard The Revolution Will Not Be Televised but honestly don't remember when and figuring out where and how doesn't really add up to me.

What I take from my memory that I heard Gil Scott Heron is that obscurity doesn't mean no influence. Gil Scott Heron wasn't obscure, just not played in the mass media. Yet I heard The Revolution Won't Be Televised and noticed. Even if what we do is as small as a bee sting, a bee sting isn't nothing, a bee sting is noticed.

Trouble Everyday (YouTube)

My previous post made me think of mushy memories and subversive record albums. I don't remember when I first heard Freak Out! my mind places me in a particular location probably in 1969, but I'm not too sure. However I do have a distinct memory of when I first saw the Album. It was 1967 in the Woolworths in Greenville, South Carolina. I noticed it because it was hung high up along with other "blue" records. Here's a blog post I wrote about that album and my high school days back in 2006.

Social Media

Yikes! It's been a long time since I posted anything here. And you guessed it, what I have in mind is talking about that. Gad, blog posts about blogging have to be the worst, so fair warning.

The picture is of a local bridge over the Ohio River. I got it off Wikipedia (cc by 2.0). I also want to link to the photographer Rob Strover's photostream at Flickr because I love the area where I live and Strover has many great photos from around Pittsburgh up and they're really worth checking out.

I first started the blog thinking that Africans and Americans could benefit from Internet-enabled dialog. I still think so, but if anything the last years have proven to me is I have little authority in this regard.

Last time I was here I eliminated my blogroll, not because I stopped reading the blogs, but rather feeling embarrassed. I thought it would be better just to present myself as some guy who rambles on the Internet. It's all I've ever been anyhow.

I thought I'd feel more free about posting, but in fact haven't posted since then.

I post three links a day on a Tumblr blog, post links at Facebook and tweet at Twitter very occasionally. And to some extent this post comes about from trying to get my head around Google+ which doesn't seem to be happening very quickly for me.

None of these venues seem very well suited for rambling on as I'm wont to do, as if there is such a place. But if any place is this would seem to be it. Well, something like this place.

Dave Winer thinks that more of us should produce content on our own sites and then send it out to walled-garden services, like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Tumblr and the like, instead of making our stuff behind closed walls. He makes a good point, and his EC2 for Poets makes clear that's not out of reach. So far that's beyond me, however he keeps talking about his blorking tools and I think I want one.

Andrew Feldmar, a well-known Vancouver psychotherapist, rolled up to the Blaine border crossing last summer as he had hundreds of times in his career. At 66, his gray hair, neat beard, and rimless glasses give him the look of a seasoned intellectual. He handed his passport to the U.S. border guard and relaxed, thinking he would soon be with an old friend in Seattle. The border guard turned to his computer and googled "Andrew Feldmar,”

And on April 23. the same article went up on The Tyee’s website with this headline:

LSD as Therapy? Write about It, Get Barred from US

BC psychotherapist denied entry after border guard googled his work.Link

I haven't written any scholarly articles. But I am quite aware how the Internet is often used in a game of "Gotta." If blogging has taught me anything, it's that I need an editor, and without one I'm sure to loose that game.

Really I'm happy not many people see what's here, but it's more open than some places. Google+ is a nice tool for choosing who you want to share communications with. And it's a tool that will surely become quite useful, I just haven't figured out how it might be for me. As a method of pointing to my rambling prose, not so much.

I rather do like posting in somewhat out of the way places online. Sometimes even comments on other people's blog can seem "out of the way." Recently I've been enjoying posting on a board TheKeenOne. One of the threads on the board is based on the simple question: "What did you listen to today?"

This question is cool because almost everyone listens to something. I found myself bloviating on there, not because I'm particularly knowledgeable about music, I'm not, but because I thought somebody might be amused by my messy prose and some links.

There's a problem: very often what I find amusing few others do.

At root it's a Hip Hop board and one of the posts I did there had I done it here I would have entitled "Horowitz Weeps." Yes, that's right a post full of links to classical music on a Hip Hop board.

Of the many wonderful things I might say about TheKeenOne, what stands out to me is how supportive she is of the creativity of others. I think her idea for the thread was for people just to post one thing, but so far she's been quite tolerant of my posts.

The simple solution rather than spamming a discussion board would be to post here and then put links up at the board. Somethings give me pause. First is photographs. I've used publicity shots for musicians, album covers, and screen shots from YouTube videos with my posts. I think that all such uses are legitimate Fair Use, especially on a discussion board. The waters are slightly less clear on a blog. Still I hate to get involved with copyright craziness. Second, I feel free to cuss a little bit over there and not so comfortable doing so here. Third,is mention of various state of inebriation and other foolishness that mostly I've avoided here.

It seems silly to worry, but at least in part what Google+ is for is negotiating worries like this. Although, I suspect, all the sorting we do of people into circles and the like on a site that stores our email, that it isn't lost on us that Google's business is search. That is, Google is in a unique position to make all that we wouldn't like widely known about us readily available.

The insanity of recent American politics, where those very eager to use democratic means towards undemocratic ends seem ascendant, makes the search capacity of Google feel threatening.

I thought of the picture of the McKees Rocks Bridge because years ago some foolish young people would race their autos along Ohio River Boulevard. After turning onto the Mckees Rocks Bridge drivers would sometimes approach 100mph to finish first. The Mckees Rocks Bridge is actually two bridges in one. The first part is across the Ohio River and then an equally long part that crosses over McKees Rocks Bottoms. The road ends in a Tee, so drivers had to slow done before it. So the end of the river crossing bridge was the finish line.

If you're not from the area it maybe hard to fathom how dangerous all this was. If you're from around here the question that comes to mind is: What were they thinking? Both Ohio River Boulevard and the McKees Rocks Bridge--then four lanes now two--are impossibly narrow for high speeds.

I've heard many an old codger tell stories of their racing days. Such mischief is a heck of a lot worse in terms of potential harm to life and property than the sorts of things people worry about young people putting up online. The difference is that what gets put up online can be searched for and presumably has a permanence that can't be shook.

I figure we're all busted now. I'm plenty worried in general. So the worries that have made me not want to post here seem ridiculously small. Perhaps I'll start rambling on over here more often. I hope to anyhow.

Paul Theroux Loathes Blogs

Travel writer Paul Theroux in an interview at The Atlantic--pushing his new book--remarks:

I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look to me illiterate, they look hasty, like someone babbling. To me writing is a considered act. It's something which is a great labor of thought and consideration. A blog doesn't seem to have any literary merit at all. It's a chatty account of things that have happened to that particular person.

Ha! That's my blog, although surely there are blogs which do have "literary merit." Still, I'm a bit puzzled as to why blogs as he defines them should provoke such loathing. I rather like babbling and chatty accounts and of course that's what I have in mind for this post.

Daisy's post about the Facebook era still has me thinking round in circles and want to attempt to write more about that.

The picture comes from a National Park Service page, Mississippi River Facts. In case you've missed it big news in the USA is flooding along the Mississippi River. If you look at the right hand side of the map you'll notice the Ohio River. I live about three miles from the Ohio River and about twenty miles from where the Ohio begins at Pittsburgh. The Ohio River is no small river. With the record flooding it's a reminder that the Ohio is just a portion of the great Mississippi River Watershed.

It's wet here. I've got my rubber boots on. The paper today tells us to expect another two months of unusually wet weather. Yikes! In May the grass grows so fast, grass along with everything else. What I can mow now determines what areas I'm able to keep mown the rest of the summer. And there's always a crush because May is also the time for planting. The grass can't be mown when it's too wet, and the rain only makes the grass grow faster. And the ground can't be turned when it's too wet and seeds planted. When I go out to work it starts to rain and by the time it's not raining I'm inside doing something else. I'm not getting much done. Wet weather is part of my personal story right now, but I sure have it better than so many of my fellow Americans, some of them with homes under the water.

Theroux is right that such chatty excursions are outside the boundaries of literature. I'm not sure that blogs are an existential threat to literature, but there's no question media is changing and we are changing along with it.

When I started writing this blog I used a pseudonym. I was also visiting and writing at a social network called Tribe. Tribe was a pretty free-wheeling place at the time, lots of nudity, profanity and the like. Because it was popular with younger folks I was a bit concerned that some of my younger relatives might happen upon my goings on there. But ultimately with all the linking I did at Tribe it became clear to me that because I hadn't organized myself from the beginning for online anonymity the pseudonyms I was using online did little to make anonymous. Web searches clearly associated with my real name brought up links to stuff I put up under screen names, especially at Tribe for some reason.

After using Tribe for a while I discovered the Omidyar Network (ONet), which was sort of an online social network for dogooders. The charitable foundation called the Omidyar Network is alive and well, the social network has been defunct since 2007. The culture at ONet was for people to use their true names. While it's not 100% that's also the norm at Facebook. Anyhow I figured the easiest thing was just to accept that I wasn't anonymous online. There are, however, many good reasons why people publish anonymously online, not the least of which is some people are creepy.

Nowadays I participate at a forum where the convention is for people to participate using screen names. I hesitate to link to that forum because it isn't clear to me what the ripple effects not just to me, but to the users of the forum, might be to linking my pseudonym with my real name. Over at that forum for the last few weeks there's been a long thread on misogyny. The title of the thread seemed pretty generic, but I wondered if using the title links to the forum thread would come up high in search results. Of course they do, and in that search I discovered blog posts, anonymous of course, which were a sort of back channel to the thread.

Certain topics can be quite incendiary and misogyny is one of them. The thread has meandered between talking about misogyny and examples of misogyny, even if providing examples of was not explicitly the intent. Some of the talk was pretty bad but my default reaction was don't feed the trolls because some of the talk seemed pretty good. The problem with that approach was getting called out on the thread for not calling out the BS. I knew that there was some private discussion going on between members, even posting a few private messages myself. What I hadn't known before today was the commenting about the thread and nasty stuff about some of the posters on blogs. Jeez, people can be such dicks!

The xkcd comic pane Duty Calls with the line "Someone is wrong on the Internet" is so often passed around because we human beings seem easily obsessed with being right to the detriment of online comity. Sometimes people anonymously post online because it is unsafe for them to be exposed.

Drima at The Sudanese Thinker probably had danger in the back of his head when he started the blog five years ago. Probably more prosaic reasons along the lines of my not wanting young relatives to stumble upon my Tribe postings seemed more important. Recently Drima exposed his real name at Twitter and at his blog. He didn't offer a long explanation for why he did so, writing:

I have numerous personal reasons for and that I cannot explain adequately in a simple short blog post. Let’s just say the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, and the changes sweeping the region now have inspired me and forced me to come to a simple conclusion.

Screw anonymity.

With the events in Tunisia late last fall I began following events at Twitter. Andy Carvin (@acarvin) of PBS was curating tweets, he sort of vetted Tweets. I hadn't been following @SudaneseThinker at Twitter, but had read his blog over time. His tweets came up in Carvin's retweets and I promptly followed him at Twitter. Even though Drima is a pseudonym, I knew enough to have some confidence in him and his tweets. When he retweeted people's tweets, especially in re Egypt, it added to the authority of those tweets.

Dave Kenner at Foreign Policy Magazine recently posted an article Here's your reading list, Mr. President which consists mostly of a list of blogs about the Middle East. The premise of the post is that it's possible to get a realistic picture of political conversations going on in the region. Of course it would be great if the President of the United States sought to hear these views and so as not just to hear the inside Washington policy debate, but the larger point is any of us can be privy to it too.

The impetus for this blog was quite a simple idea of explaining to some of my friends why I was taking an interest in the life of a young Ugandan man. Quickly it became obvious that most of my friends had little interest in blogs, but plenty of Americans were turning attention to Africa often from quite stereotypical frames of reference. As a white middle-aged American the topic of "privilege" come up in many different contexts. It rankles me when it does, but on the other hand turning my attention towards Africa has demonstrated time and time again that there's potency in the construct of privilege.

Offline and online I was being asked about Darfur. In Pittsburgh there are some refugees from the North-South civil war in the Sudan. As I was also trying to find out more about Uganda it was hard for me to discuss Darfur without first making the North-South conflict part of the context. Very often I was sharply criticized for doing so. I'm a fairly incompetent activist in any case so pointing that out comes as no surprise to me. While Darfur was awful by anybody's standards opinions outside Sudan as to what to do sharply differed. Among people I like an admire, my views about US policy towards Sudan were often anathema. Being basically needy, I want very much for people to like me so Darfur was posed something of a dilemma for me.

I read and still read Alex De Waal's blog Making Sense of Sudan. It's really excellent. As far as online discussions about Darfur activism went, De Waal's analysis of the situation was an unpopular. I'm hardly an expert so I didn't spend much time trying to argue from a perspective which was already disparaged. Just in ordinary face to face conversations the sorts of perspectives that The Sudanese Thinker provided were more helpful than the academic perspectives at Making Sense of Sudan.

People wanted to talk about basic information like: Who are the Sudanese in our area? How close is the Sudan to Uganda and what are the relationships? Are Sudan and Somalia the same place? Who are the Somali-Bantu's in our community? The Italians, in Africa, you're kidding me! The tenor of such conversation might seems a little daft. Nobody really likes to be thought of as ignorant, but let's face it I like most Americans are ignorant about Africa. Much of the activism here around Darfur seemed to demand political commitment and such a demand rather pointed up a common ignorance of a large and populous continent.

Here's a post by Drima from early February 2007 entitled Sudan Arab or African? It's the sort of post probably of marginal interest to political scientists and political activists, I guess from an assumption"everybody knows that," but just the sort of post helpful to most of us who didn't know what we were supposed to. I can't remember once Drima writing anything to make it seem that not knowing something was tantamount to being stupid.

I do remember Drima talking about being a college student, hanging out with friends, getting a new CD, eating good food, being exhausted from studying from exams, all of the boring stuff Paul Theroux thinks has no place in literature. Perhaps blogs aren't literature because the boring stuff is important for lots of blogs.

As the events in Egypt unfolded on Twitter, I noted who the Sudanese Thinker was following and often followed those people. People were arrested, people died, sadly Egyptians still are being arrested and are dying. It's hard to have a very detached view of events when following people who know the people arrested and killed, post pictures of them and link to blogs by them.

It's so far fetched to think of Drima, whose real name is Ahmad, as a friend. Ha an Internet-friend, but there's real value in Internet friendships. I was moved when I read the post at his blog giving his name, Amir Ahmad, especially because he connected it to the experience of the the political events in Northern Africa, events which in a way I followed on Twitter along with him and others. I know saying revealing his name comes with some danger attached. I respect that saying his name publicly is to trump fear with love.

Amir Ahmad is writing a book, Islam: A Love Story – How Fundamentalism Stole My Mind, Broke My Heart, and Blogging Freed My Mystic Soul. It's sure to be carefully considered writing,as Theroux maintains literature ought to be. The irony is the book is at least in part about blogs. Ahmad writes:

Set in Sudan, Qatar, Malaysia, the United States and the new frontiers of the Arab and American political blogospheres, Islam: A Love Story is ultimately about my journey of spiritual awakening and why and how the internet will not only help reform the political landscape of the Arab and Muslim worlds, but also significantly shape the future of Islam as well.

It's sure to be carefully considered writing,as Theroux maintains literature ought to be. The irony is the book is at least in part about blogs. Ahmad writes:

Set in Sudan, Qatar, Malaysia, the United States and the new frontiers of the Arab and American political blogospheres, Islam: A Love Story is ultimately about my journey of spiritual awakening and why and how the internet will not only help reform the political landscape of the Arab and Muslim worlds, but also significantly shape the future of Islam as well.

I've babbled on about the author Paul Theroux, about the wet spring where I live, about flooding in the American Midwest, about brutishness on Internet forums, and about a blogger named Ahmad, also known as Drima. Is there a thread that connects? I think there is, and imagining a thread is probably why unlike Theroux I rather love blogs instead of loathing them as he does. Love them or hate them, blogs and Internet communications in general are changing how we view and experience the world. Those changes are neither all good, nor all bad.

Riffing About Facebook

The image was lifted from here. If it's hard to read, it says:

Dear Senior,

Please be safe at the prom. I would like you to wear a condom when you are getting freaky.

Sincerely,

Emma C.

P.S. Here is a picture for you!

One of my favorite bloggers, Daisy at Daisy's Dead Air has a post ruminating about our Facebook era.

It's definitely worth reading the post and while you're at it reading her wonderful remembrance of Ben Masel* posted earlier. Masel was an old friend of Daisy's and they'd reconnected recently on Facebook, so news of Masel's death seemed to feel different. Feeling a difference led her to write a bit about how Facebook changes us. Among the observations she makes is that she's glad that "the various addled twists and turns of my life are not available for public consumption." That's a luxury today's digital natives probably won't have. Daisy writes:

And then again, there is Gatsby, the quintessential American character. We re-create ourselves throughout our lives, in numerous ways, large and small. Is Facebook making Gatsby more or less possible and is that a good thing?

It's a pretty straightforward question, but the Internet is a big honking question and my mind started circling in various directions when thinking about it.

The way that Facebook makes us aware of friends of friends is something that makes a big difference. I saw the picture of second grader Emma C. that I posted here over at Tumblr. I didn't actually see it originally at the link I posted for it. At Tumblr it's easy to reblog posts that come up in your own feed of people you follow. By the time I saw it it had been reblogged over 8,500 times. I didn't scroll down the list of 8,500 plus names of people who'd reblogged it, but simply that such data is viewable provides an ordinary example of how social networking data makes friends of friends visible to us. The visibility of extended networks seems strange to an old guy like me, but a matter of course for young people today. What stood out to me about Emma's school work wasn't so much a seven or eight year old writing about "getting freaky" so much as teachers nowadays thinking that what a second-grader has to say would influence a senior in high school to behave at the prom. I doubt that back in my high school days teachers would have thought a second grader could have much if any impact on what an older teenager does, now we assume she does.

It's been wet here. I looked at the 10-day weather forecast and rain is forecast for every day. Spring has sprung in these parts and growth is exuberant. The problem with that is both keeping all the growth beat back, in particular trying to keep lawn areas mown without contemplating taking in hay, while at the same time trying to work the soil to plant seeds. Behind the eight ball in the best of years, I'm quite in a muddle with all the rain this year. Yesterday I went down to a Pittsburgh suburb to help a friend with a gardening project of his. Miraculously the rain held off and we managed a complete makeover of his front yard.

My friend was in the music business for more than forty years. He's got a curious mind and is a good writer. Recently he's been talking about a Web site he's beginning to make. I'm very eager for him to launch it. Talking about the site with him it's clear I'm coming to it from a different perspective. My friend isn't being critical so much as incredulous when he says "People must spend hours on the Internet." I do spend hours on the Internet daily and it seems the comments and questions I pose about his Web site are incomprehensible because he does not.

For many people my age that younger people have their Facebook open in a tab and and some sort of chat client open during work seems immoral. I say that, but also since I'm on the Internet a lot I also read what people basically my age write sometimes while at work, so I know this sort of "immorality" isn't solely among younger folk. Closely coupled with this disdain for the sort of news streams online denizens depend on is the lament: "Why can't they just pick up the phone?" A running joke about a good friend is that the best way to get in touch is to write her a letter. In business and life in general what's the right way to get in touch with people is in flux.

Ethan Zuckerman recently wrote a post about the dilemma of not know what's the best way to contact people nowadays. He points to an experimental site called Protocol.by which is a Web site and an email signature which lets people know the best ways to get in touch with you. It seems a good idea, although so far as I can tell nobody has trouble contacting me. Some people do complain that I don't have a cell phone or message machine. It probably would horrify some of my friends to say that Facebook is probably a pretty good option if they want to contact me during the day.

The friend for whom a paper letter isthe best way to reach her, likes to write everything in neat cursive handwriting. Everyone has preferences about writing and probably for most of us nothing seems quite perfect. QuiteWrite is an online text editor whose promise is to reduce the number of distractions. I can see it, but so far haven't actually used it. Right now I'm writing in the Blogger composer. I like to use it for blog posts because it's easy to handle links and certain formatting options. I asked my friend working to create a Web site how he writes. The question I posed really had to do with coping with HTML. His answer was that he writes using Word. It's been years since I've used Word, but I feel sure Word makes it easy to create an HTML document just like the LibreOffice Writer which I use. But he isn't thinking of HTML.

I looked at his Mac with the Safari Browser and wasn't smart enough to go to the View menu to show him the HTML of a Web page. He does get that there's something that has to happen to see a page on the Web, but so far that "what happens" is handled by sending copy to the guy making his Web site in the form of a Word Document. I don't think it's occurred to my friend yet that he's going to want to add links to his online text. As he gets online not only what makes for a comfortable writing will change but his ideas of what it means to write will change too.

All this is pretty far afield from Daisy's question about how Facebook may be altering our capacity for re-inventing ourselves. I'm not tech savvy, talking about things like HTML makes it sound as if I ought to know something technical. But when I talk with my friend about his Web site any technical matters seem so much less important than a shift in perspective which comes along with reading and writing on the Internet. Having Facebook open at work may seem immoral, but if it's a good way to contact people you need to at work, then how different is it from the phone on the desk? The point telling stories about pre-Internet folks like me is to show that the Internet makes a difference. The differences are both hard to see if you're not "swimming in it" and hard to see when you always are.

There's a sweet little YouTube video getting spread around It's Okay to Not Like Things. The punch line of the song is "But don't be a dick about it." It is embarrassing that not only are there pages online revealing me being a dick about things I don't like, but also that I know where to look for them. An example, perhaps not so much of being a dick but of being a total asshat, is that I used a picture of me wearing an Afro wig as my Blogger profile picture for a time. I have a thumbnail copy of the picture up now at Flickr with a link to The Jim Crow Museum. Once I had finally grokked how offensive the image is, it had been on the Internet for a while, and I felt it important to own up to my mistake by keeping it online in some form. I suppose that enough time has elapsed that it's probably alright now to delete the damn thing.

The fact that once something is on the Internet it's not easy to scrub it off has consequences. Everyone knows we ought to be careful and everyone whose been putting stuff on the Internet for any length of time knows some foolishness is inevitable. Often we can remember exactly where an example of our own foolishness lives online. It's not just about foolishness. The life of a thirteen year old seems eons away to the same person at sixteen. But that's only three years, and millions of sixteen year olds now can visit their thirteen year old selves online. Growing up really isn't quite the same as "reinventing" ourselves, it's just growing up. In a sense the Internet keeps a record of it all and that makes a difference.

I don't really know of a good way to go back an see my 2007 Facebook pages. It's quite possible that 13 year olds using Facebook now will still be using Facebook when they're 16. Facebook chronicles our lives, but it isn't so easy to go back and read from the beginning. Perhaps part of the current popularity of Tumblr has to do with blogs being much easier to travel backwards in than Facebook. But while it's hard for users to go back in time on Facebook, the Facebook corporation has been collecting data all along our use, for example keeping track of our "likes" over time.

I've already rambled on for too long, so in winding to a close will point to a much linked to quotation:

if you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold

Most of us are content to Google, use Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, etc. without giving much thought to who owns the data. People haven't stopped growing up or stopped re-inventing themselves. As we live more and more connected online, I suspect that more people will see the value in asserting ownership over their own data. Dave Winer has advocated that for a long time. If you're interested in a short snapshot of what Winer is up to in that regard this post by Scott Gilbertson is quite helpful. Tantek Çelik is all over that too.

The difference the Internet makes is a big subject. I like that Daisy is asking questions about how the Internet, and Facebook in particular, is changing our interior landscapes. I've rambled here and there about it only to get nowhere. After reading Daisy's post I left a comment. Marshall McLuhan came to mind. There are many super cogent thinkers about the Internet nowadays, and they're worth paying attention to. But I think McLuhan is important especially for older folks like me. Lots of American Baby Boomers read Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and many more with the gist of McLuhan's ideas about media.

The short version of the 1964 book is that media extends our senses and as a sense is extended the ratios among the different senses are altered. For example with the invention of printed books sight became more important and hearing so important attenuated. So as sight is extended a portion of our hearing amputated. Clearly people didn't loose their ability to hear as books rolled off the presses. What's important is the ways in which the interrelationships between our sense are changed with the development of new media. While these changes are happening to the many, those of us who lived long before the Internet notice the change. Well, and a surprising number of old folks like me feel that resiting such changes is virtuous. McLuhan provides something of an accessible theory for what we fear to loose; for every extension is an amputation. But on the other hand fear without understanding creates moral and ethical confusion which perhaps on a trivial level gets expressed in outbursts of "These kids today!" Old folks would do well to put more effort into understanding rather than leap to ethical judgement. The changes that networked computers and widespread access of people to those networks create require ethical and moral judgments; it's good not to be a dick about them.

* I checked and there doesn't seem to be a Wikipedia article for Ben Masel. A Google search yields dozens and dozens of remembrances. Reading some of those is fun if you're in the mood. It may be helpful for understanding who Ben Masel was to read the Wikipedia article Youth International Party (YIPPIE).

Another Post About Blogging

Over the last week the leaves on the trees have begun to open and many blossoms burst forth. That has nothing to do with not posting here for months, except that my posts generally begin with an off topic remark and proceed to rambling from there.

This blog has been the place I've most consistently posted about what's happening in my day to day life.

I was surprised the other day looking for something I once posted that I've been posting here since 2005. Originally the idea for this blog was to encourage some of my friends to pay more attention to people in Africa along with a half-baked idea I had for alternative currency scheme to encourage that attention. Quickly it became apparent that very few of my friends pay any attention at all to blogs which exposed the premise of the blog as fairly useless. I posted anyway.

Generally when I comment other places I leave behind the URL for this blog, so it represents something of my online identity. Many who write online enjoy having a large following. I've been content being hardly visible knowing that my opinions tend to rub the wrong way and being fairly thin-skinned happy to have limited exposure. If the purpose of this blog is to somehow represent who I am online, it makes sense to make some changes here, but the revealing aspect about me is my voluminous capacity to shirk anything resembling work. So I just made a few easy changes now and will see what comes up as I go along.

Curious about Tumblr and knowing that the way learn best is to jump right in, I made a blog other there called Three Good Links. The idea was a simple link blog posting three short snippets from daily reading. The blog doesn't add much to the Internet ecology, but it's been enough to discover that Tumblr is fun. While a link blog reveals my interests to some extent, surely what I write offers more clue as to what I'm like than snippets of what others say.

Curious about Tumblr and knowing that the way learn best is to jump right in, I made a blog other there called Three Good Links. The idea was a simple link blog posting three short snippets from daily reading. The blog doesn't add much to the Internet ecology, but it's been enough to discover that Tumblr is fun. While a link blog reveals my interests to some extent my interests, surely why I write offers more clue as to what I'm like than snippets of what others say.

I do want to keep blogging here. Anyone whose read any of my posts knows they're rambling ones, mostly my stabs at trying to make sense of things. I hope that the changes made make the blog more transparent about what it's about.