Archive for the ‘Community’ Category

Trapped

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

Facebook is a trap. I walked right into it and now I can feel the vise-like grip of it like a digital bear-trap snapped tight around my ankle.

I never intended to join Facebook. Social networking didn’t interest me at first. I don’t think of myself as a very social person and the notion of connecting to long-lost friends and relations wasn’t that appealing. After all, if I wanted to be in touch with those folks, why did I stop talking to them in the first place?

A few years ago I was working on a contract job. The company was involved in producing an interesting preferences engine, a system to help you discover media you might liked based on things that people like you also like. Facebook was a target platform for the companies products and they were working in integrating with it. And the work the I was doing at the time dovetailed into the Facebook integration work. And to be a Facebook developer, you have to be a Facebook member. And so I signed up, never intending to use it for anything more than getting my job done. But the trap was now set and armed.

I left that contract a few weeks later and moved on to other things. I pretty much forgot about my Facebook account.no logging in, no connecting, nothing. But the trap was still laying in my path, taut springs ready to snap the jaws shut on a misplaced limb.

I don’t really remember why I picked up Facebook again. I have a vague recollection of some one asking me if they could connect to me that way and responding in the affirmative. The details from there are hazier than a Haight-Ashbury head shop. But somewhere in there, I stepped on the trap and SNAP! I was caught.

Over the next year or so, I began to use Facebook a bit more. I tied it to my Flickr account, set up Twitter to feed my status and even connected this blog to it. All in the name of sharing more with my growing “social graph”. And I’ll admit, I started to see some value in the connections. Even with my antisocial tendencies it has been nice to hear from friends and colleagues from the mists of time and places long forgotten.

I never had any illusions about the privacy implications of exposing parts of my life on the Web. I’m fully aware that what I choose to share is immediately added to the ever-growing information doppelgänger being constructed in the dark corners of corporate databases across the Internet. And I’m aware that the creators of this other me—this homunculus made not of my flesh but of my digital life—are busy gathering even more information, things that I’m not even consciously aware of having shared and binding that to into their creation.

So I’m not naive about the implications of participating in the Facebook’s of the world; I am aware of the price and many times I have been willing to pay it. Gladly.

But the cost of being a member of the Facebook community is now too high. It has become painfully obvious that the primary goal of Facebook crew to do whatever they see fit with the information in their system, regardless of the desires of the owners of that information. I won’t hash out all the problems with Facebook’s stance on privacy; Jason Calacanis does great job of that is his latest email. However, any illusion or lingering naivety I may have had has been stripped away and all that left is a clear view of the trap.

But I think I can escape from the trap. I don’t have to play Mark Zuckerberg’s game and I don’t have to keep feeding Facebook. It a sad truth that I’ll never be able to kill my Facebook doppelgänger entirely. They’ve already got information about me that it’s clear I won’t eve be able to erase. But I don’t have to keep letting them have my information.

So I’m disconnecting myself from Facebook. I’ve already pulled a few of the connections to other source. And As soon I finish taking the thing I want and getting rid of as much as I can, i’m going to deactivate my account and throw away the password.

I’m going to get out of this trap, even if it means cutting off a part of myself to get free.

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Posted in Community, Family, Friends, Holidays, Madness, Random Stuff, Writing | No Comments »

This is history.

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

My great-grandfather was born a slave. His son, my grandfather, went on to become a respected surgeon. His son, my father, has reached great heights of success as a journalist of international reknown. One constant in all of their lives has been a slow and painful progression, from a world where people of color were considered property in this country to a world where a black man is within hair’s-breadth of becoming the next President of the United States.

All of these men, my paternal forebears, experienced racism and prejudice on a scale I can barely conceive. Although I was born less than nine years after Dr. King made his iconic speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, but the time I came into the world things had already changed so much. And now we can stand and applaud Barack Obama as he accepts the nomination of the Democratic Party.

Simply awesome.

I can say that I would have been just as happy to see Hillary Clinton upon that stage. Her nomination would have been equally historic and possibly more meaningful, given the long-standing state of inequality experienced by women. I doubt that Hillary would have been as eloquent, as impassioned, as moving in her speech, but the significance of her success would have been just as great.

This is a stunning time to live in. It’s hard for me to express the joy I felt in watching Mr. Obama on that stage. The Amercia, and indeed the world, has entered dire straits indeed. The world we live in now is fraught with dangers of a scale unknown in human history. We face economic, military, environmental and social challenges that are literally unimaginable to those who came before us. And yet, watching this man, I can believe that we will prevail. And even prosper again.

Some of the hope surrounding Barack Obama is his aura, his charisma. He speaks as few orators have ever done. He stirs the emotions and brings us to our feet. But more that just his tone and tenor shines through. His message is equally powerful.

Barack Obama will be remembered, I hope, as the President who returned America to an age of responsibility. His message is one of maturity and adulthood. Of taking responsibility for ourselves and each other, because that is the right thing to do. Of finding a better path where strength and safety come from within and from without. Of working together to make this the best of all possible worlds.

That is the kind of world that I believe my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather wanted for me. I am honored to bear witness to this time.

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Posted in Big events, Community | 1 Comment »

Spring has sprung at last

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

Yesterday I pulled out my old Raleigh, hitched up the Burley trailer for Miss Z, plopped her in and biked down to the recycling center to drop off our compost. All because the weather has finally gotten warm enough to cut down a layer (bye-bye, wool sweater!).

This was a big deal for a couple of reasons. One, I actually got on my bike. This is not something that I’ve been doing a lot of the past couple of years, but I plan to change that because I really like riding. And for the amount of stuff that we do around town, it’s crazy to break out the car.

Two, this was Z’s first time in the Burley. I think she liked it well enough. She sure didn’t mind napping in it.

Three, this was a trip to drop off the compost. Cambridge has a new community composting program and I’m really into it. I’ve wanted to compost for a while, but our postage stamp yard isn’t the best place to do that. At least not yet. So I love that we can participate at the civic level. Sooo cool!

Posted in Community, Zoe | No Comments »