It’s been a while and I been getting that existential itch. Here’s the answer to one of the fundamental queries above — can you guess which? It ranked highest among responses to a Yahoo! Answers post and provides vital clarity:
For amusement and fun!
In that sense, there isn’t really a ‘point’ to it..
It’s mainly for young adults (some elderly people) who want a bit of a laugh…
I guess the shine has been teken off it a little due to the fact that somebody died from doing it…
Posted in Google Game
Tagged existential crises, facebook, Google Game, meaning of life, planking
It’s important for observant jews to adapt to the evolution of modern technology. But remember, you can’t block God. He’ll totally know.
Posted in Gadgeteering, Information Stupor Highway
The Unhappy Mediator is really disappointed by our collective priorities.
Related: Facebook Status Reveals Humanity’s Descent Down (Storm) Drain
Posted in Gadgeteering, Shoot the Messenger
Tagged chevy, cruze, facebook, onstar, superbowl commercials, tv commercials
I’m a storyteller. I love weaving a yarn, on the pages of a magazine, or over coffee with a friend. But today’s constant flow of information makes it hard to get the drop on a juicy tale, and that goes for good gossip as well as hard news. I find myself constantly scooped, even among friends and family.
Here, in brief, storytelling in the Facebook age:
Person 1: I was at Jason’s wedding this weekend.
Person 2: I know.
Person 1: Oh. Well, it was a beautiful wedding.
Person 2: Yeah, I saw the pictures
Person 1: I didn’t know you were friends.
Person 2: We’re not.
Person 1: But you saw pictures?
Person 2: You looked fat.
Person 1: Hey, my college friend Rachel had a baby!
Person 2: Is it a boy or a girl?
Person 1: Oh man, I don’t even know!
Person 2: It’s a boy. Get on Facebook.
Person 1: Big news! I called to tell you I–
Person 2: I know.
And they all lived virtually ever after. The end.
Posted in Information Stupor Highway, Unhappy Media
Tagged facebook, information, storytelling
Two weeks ago I painted a picture of Facebook as a friendship stock market. Last night on the newest South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone painted Cartman as social networking’s Jim Cramer. Gold.
jkl
Vodpod videos no longer available.
jk
Naturally, I identify with Stan, the episode’s central character, as his friends and family coerce him into joining Facebook, which promptly adulterates every real-world relationship he has and eventually sucks him in completely (and literally). I feel that his experience, albeit animated, is example enough to buttress my nonjoiner resolve. Oh, and PS, South Park thinks your farm is dumb, too. Just sayin.
Posted in Information Stupor Highway, Unhappy Media
Tagged facebook, farmville, friendship, investing, jim cramer, south park, stock market
Here’s the beginning of an interesting article called “The Social Media Bubble,” from earlier this week on the Harvard Business Review blog:
I’d like to advance a hypothesis: Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn’t connecting us as much as we think it is. It’s largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.
During the subprime bubble, banks and brokers sold one another bad debt — debt that couldn’t be made good on. Today, “social” media is trading in low-quality connections — linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships.
Call it relationship inflation. Nominally, you have a lot more relationships — but in reality, few, if any, are actually valuable. Just as currency inflation debases money, so social inflation debases relationships. The very word “relationship” is being cheapened. It used to mean someone you could count on. Today, it means someone you can swap bits with. [via all things d]
Such a strong start, but unfortunately author Umair Haque loses me pretty quickly. Indeed, this notion of “relationship inflation” is something I’ve been ruminating on for some time, and while Haque lays out some interesting points about the tenuous and ofttimes dangerous ties that bind online, he doesn’t ever fully make good on his principal metaphor. I’ll try. Continue reading
Every era has its fascinations, zeigeists that intrigue and often confuse. The most complex or enigmatic of these will persist in popular interest as the ages progress, placing time’s most enduring allurements in fraternity with today’s spurious obsessions.
And therefore we see our fellow man searching for an explanation for the defining strengths of our great nation (or is it?), da Vinci’s beguiling brunette and the whole of Christianity, while also probing the cloud for explanations of the buzziest of current concerns: Facebook, Twitter and Twilight, for instance.
Will Avatar be our generation’s Mona Lisa? When time o
bscures the context in which the movie represents a monumental step forward for technology and industry, will Googlers of Christmas Future wonder what so ensnared the collective imagination? Will James Cameron’s perplexing smirk make the coming generations wonder what he knows that they don’t? Or will they be too busy downloading pictures of Robert Pattinson to care?
I’m willing to wager, in any event, that Windows 7 will be long-replaced, BluRay gone the way of the laser disc, Twitter and Faceboook reduced to prominent points on an internet time line. And the iPhone will probably be made in America — a great place for cheap labor and manufacturing outsourcing — and shipped to China.
Posted in Google Game
Tagged america, christianity, facebook, iphone, mona lisa, twilight, twitter, windows 7
Logic leads to advancements, which in turn dictate logic. Why call someone when you can Facebook them? Why scan the street for an address when you can check the location on your iPhone? You could pick up a book on a subject of interest, but instead you’ll search for a few sufficient snippets online. Could you plan a trip without Orbitz or Kayak or Google Maps?
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “Self-Reliance” in 1841, praising the strength of the individual, the value of unadulterated opinion, and revealing the folly of blind following. In it Emerson provides a poignant vision of technology’s subtle and subversive shifting of priorities and perceptions. More than a century and a half later it is still a vital reminder that whatever our tools and acquired facilities, we must rely, ultimately, on ourselves.
This passage may as well have been written today, about the Internet and cell phones. The message hasn’t lost a bit of relevance — OK, maybe a bit; Kiwis are, today, largely clothed, I reckon:
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad-axe and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber whether we have not lost by refinements some energy, by a Christianity, entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue.
We kneel at the altar of information on atrophied legs. Occasionally it would behoove us to get up and walk around.
Posted in Gadgeteering, Unhappy Media
Tagged facebook, google, iphone, ralph waldo emerson, self-reliance
This weekend’s New York Times Magazine On Language column, written by Ben Zimmer (in for Sir Safire) looks at what Zimmer calls “the age of undoing,” the preponderance of backformed words created by tacking a convenient un- to the front of everything.
The article begins:
“What’s done cannot be undone,” moaned Lady Macbeth in her famous sleepwalking scene. If she woke up in the 21st century, she would be pleased to discover that whatever can be done can be undone, too.
Or perhaps it just seems that way in the new social spaces we are carving for ourselves online. On popular Web sites devoted to social networking, innovative verbs have been springing up to describe equally innovative forms of interaction: you can friend someone on Facebook; follow a fellow user on Twitter; or favorite a video on YouTube. Change your mind? You can just as easily unfriend, unfollow or unfavorite with a click of the mouse.
The recent un- trend has also seeped into the world of advertising. KFC is marketing its new Kentucky Grilled Chicken with the tagline “UNthink: Taste the UNfried Side of KFC.” The cellphone company MetroPCS challenges you to “Unlimit Yourself,” while its competitor Boost Mobile wants you to get “UNoverage’D” and “UNcontract’D” (ridding yourself of burdensome overage fees and contracts). Even victims of the financial downturn can seek solace in un-: ABC broadcast a special report in May telling viewers how to get “Un-Broke.”
It goes on to trace the un-ing of words back to some linguistic genesis, one rooted largely in the electronic world. Forsooth, there once was a time when the “Undo” command was novel. But what interests me more than their digital-etymological rise are the cultural connotations of these words, and what they signify beyond their definitions.
Take, first, Zimmer’s advertising and ABC examples: UNfried, UNlimit, UNoverage’D, UNcontract’D and Un-Broke. What I see here is more than clever marketing, but the display of a pervading sense of dissatisfaction. Typically, branding serves consumers (that’s us) with aspirational images. Beer will make you cool and popular, makeup will make you beautiful, etcetera, ad infinitum. Buy this, become better. But these un- slogans are not about becoming what you want; they’re about un-becoming what you are and wish you weren’t.
Posted in Shoot the Messenger, Write and Wrong
Tagged ben zimmer, boost mobile, facebook, kfc, new york times magazine, nytimes, on language, un-, william safire, youtube
No Happy Medium 
So This Is What I’m Missing on Facebook
Thanks to my little bro for sending me this golden nugget from the New York Knicks’ facebook page. He tells me that the admin posted the picture below with the caption “Browse through the Knicks City Dancers Auditions gallery from this past weekend. Over 500 dancers graced The Sports Center at Chelsea Piers to compete for a spot on the 2012-13 squad.”
Fair enough. But god help me, the comments. Really, guys, blodes prefer gentlemen.
Quoth the bro: “I don’t know exactly what to make of this, but let’s just hope the age of the internet comment is coming to an end.”
Personally, I choose Oblivion.
Like this:
2 Comments
Posted in Information Stupor Highway
Tagged comments, facebook, morons, new york knicks city dancers