Tumblr for the Lipitor generation

---

Here’s how I feel about the different social media sites and their uses:

·        Facebook, for the young, is for connecting and gossiping and embarrassing one another.

·        Facebook, for those of us who are no longer young, is for keeping in touch and swapping recipes and Simplicity patterns and posting pictures from thirty years ago and embarrassing one another.

·        Twitter is about branding and advertisement and being stupid in fifteen words or less. If you are not consistently very witty, you shouldn't really bother posting, unless you're Katy Perry or Justin Bieber, in which case it doesn't matter.

·        Pinterest is for those who like to post and share pictures of fashion and decorating and jewelry and cute boys. Much though I like all these things, I decided after a few months that Pinterest was not for me.

·        WordPress is a nice stable blog website, full of people with all kinds of interests. I have made some very nice Internet friendships on WordPress.

·        Blogger / Blogspot ditto.

·        Tumblr is a friggin' zoo.

 Let me expand upon this last statement.

Tumblr is something for everyone and no mistake: lots of beautiful photography and art, lots of underdone cheesy humor, lots of selfies. Also lots of bizarre political thought and amateur porn. It's a more freewheeling version of Facebook in which you don't need to friend anyone, and in which most people use handles and aliases. Nothing comes to you automatically on Tumblr: you have to shop around for it. Once you find something with which you feel comfortable, those people will be reblogging from other similarly-oriented Tumblr blogs, and you can follow those in turn, and - within a month or two of careful tending - you will have a beautiful Tumblr garden / dashboard full of lovely and amusing images and texts to enjoy!

Let me give you a head start. Let's say you're a mature person, a little literary, a little artsy, with a taste for kitch and a goofy sense of humor. You might like to look at the following Tumblr blogs, just for entertainment's sake. (And if you’re reading this on Tumblr, look these folks up; you won’t be sorry.)

  

·        Diane Duane. Diane (who blogs under her real name) is a successful author, mostly sci-fi and young adult. She lives in Ireland and posts wonderful pictures and texts, and she is very responsive to her fans and readers. She is very likeable, and I recommend her highly.

·        Devilduck. This is the ultra-kitschy Tumblr blog of one of the guys associated with the well-known Archie McPhee joke shop in Seattle. If you like pictures of people wearing horse masks and Christmas trees decorated with Cthulhu tentacles, this is the site for you.

·        Bad Postcards. What it says. Mostly 1950s and 1960s; mostly cute, some poignantly nostalgic, and almost all in brilliant Kodacolor.

·        1950s Unlimited. Like Devilduck, but a little more on the sentimental side. If you get misty-eyed over black and white photos of people using cigarette machines, you'll feel very at home here.

·        Well, That’s Just Great. The drily amusing / often hilarious daily chronicle of a man named Anthony Giffen who lives in central Florida with a dog named Ducky and a partner named Gizmo. Highly recommended.

There: I have sanitized Tumblr for you. I guarantee no porn, no dangerous radicals, no homicidal lunatics.

Now get in there and explore Tumblr and stomp around a bit.

You might just have fun.

---

Famous on the Internet

---

There is a website called Klout, which tells you how influential you are on the Internet, on a scale from zero to 100. Only a few people have ever achieved a perfect score, and then they fall away again. I believe they give you a 15 or a 20 just for signing up, but then they monitor your Internet presence – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, other social media, blogs, et cetera – and make your score more precise.

Some examples:

Justin Bieber’s a 93, or he was the other day. The Boston Bruins have the same score: 93. The New York Yankees have a 95.

Among my friends: one of my acquaintances (a former Brown student) has a score in the mid-60s. Partner has a pitiful 12. Two of my other friends are in the 20s.

I am currently a 37.

What does this mean?

Well, I consider that my score is pretty good for someone who has less than a hundred Facebook friends (it’s in the sixties, actually). Partner has less than twenty Facebook friends.

I love asking my student assistants how many Facebook friends they have. Invariably they have hundreds. One, a serious young man who’s going to be a junior next fall, has over 500; one of his classmates, a girl, has over 900; two recent graduates (I mentioned one of them above) have more than a thousand.

What does any of this mean?

It means: you can be famous on the Internet, if you know what you’re doing.

Just be careful.

---

Death on the Internet

---

A co-worker and dear friend – let’s call her Lily – passed away about two years ago. At the time of her decease, she had all of five Facebook friends, of whom I was one.

She used to fret over her Facebook status constantly. She hated the fact that Facebook presented her as both a graduate of Harvard and Simmons. “Why doesn’t it always show Harvard first?” she asked me.

“It’s Facebook,” I said. “It addresses itself to the person looking at it. It may think I care more about Simmons than Harvard, and it’ll show me Simmons first.”

She looked murderous. “There’s got to be a way to fix this.”

Well, if you’re on Facebook, you know that there are very few ways to outfox Facebook.

Anyway, as I said, she passed away. I did not delete her from my Facebook friends, because I like seeing her name come up on my “friends” list. (Three of my seventy Facebook friends are deceased. I refuse to delete them. I like seeing their faces and names on the list. It allows me to pretend that they’re still alive.)

And then, the other day, I saw the following in my Facebook news feed:

LILY posted (five hours ago): I'm on the 6th day of Raspberry ultra drops and have lost 7lbs already, it's insane! the first 3 days alone I lost over 2lbs. it really is amazing... you gotta check it out!

Dear me. Evidently someone hacked poor Lily’s Facebook account (which was, of course, never deactivated), and is using it to promote Raspberry Ultra Drops, whatever the hell they are.

This is pretty funny, since (as I said) Lily had all of five Facebook friends, and I’m sure all of us were startled to see Lily posting on Facebook from beyond the grave.

But it made me think of George Carlin’s old joke: “If you die while you’re on hold, will the little light on the telephone stop blinking?”

We all have dozens of Internet identities and membership and accounts. What happens to them when we die?  Should I notify Facebook that Lily’s account has been hacked? If I do, will they do anything about it?

And what will your survivors do when you pass away, and suddenly six months later you come back from the dead on Facebook with news about a new weight-loss plan?

Probably it’s worth thinking about.

I love thinking about Lily, floating around in the afterlife, incensed about her Facebook account being hacked. Lily was the soul of propriety.

But I suspect that, wherever she is right now, she’s pretty calm about it.

---

Goodbye to Posterous

---

I wrote something in late 2012 about leaving Posterous. It was getting treacherous, and the website was often difficult, and I decided I’d leave it.

 

 

But – here’s the thing – when it works, it’s wonderful! It autoposts to everything! It’s so convenient!

 

 

So I decided to think about it for a while.

 

 

Well, there’s no more thinking to be done. Posterous is done, as of March 31: finished completely. Twitter is absorbing its staff and its servers.

 

 

What does this mean?

 

 

Well, it means that I’m posting this blog in five places rather than six. My method currently is this: I post these blogs on Posterous and Wordpress, and they automatically post to all of the other Internet properties (Blogger, Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter).

 

 

Now what?

 

 

I began with Posterous because some of my favorite celebrity bloggers, like Mark Bittman, used Posterous. It seemed reliable and steady, and the create-post screens were pretty straightforward. Also: it autoposted everywhere.

 

 

Except that, once in a while, it got uppity and refused to do anything at all.

 

 

Irritating!

 

 

Well, no need to worry about that now. For those of you (not many) who read me or who subscribe to me on Posterous: please move over to futureworldblog.wordpress.com.

 

 

Rest in peace, Posterous.

 

 

Social media (and especially Pinterest)

---

Social media allow us to craft our own image and present it to the world, in ways that only a few artists and writers were able to do in the centuries before us. More than that: we can do it over and over again, in various ways. We don’t have to present ourselves on Facebook in the same way that we do on LinkedIn, or Tumblr, or Twitter.

 

 

Take me, for example. My Facebook persona is pretty vanilla. I repost this blog to my Facebook feed, but I suspect very few of my sixty-odd “friends” read it. And, after all, why would they? Facebook Loren is mostly 1970s Pacific Northwest Loren. A large percentage of my Facebook friends are my school acquaintances from Battle Ground, and various Pacific Northwest relatives. As you can imagine, their politics vary considerably from mine, in most (though not all) cases. So: we stick to safe topics, and harmless photos, and nostalgia.

 

 

LinkedIn Loren is very dull: he’s just a brief resume.  He has a reasonable number of connections, but (since he’s not actively looking for a job) he’s not out there roaming the LinkedIn network very much. Mostly I use LinkedIn to find out what my various work acquaintances are doing nowadays. Now and then I’m amused to find that some of them are exaggerating their titles, and their experience, and their education, and their accomplishments. (But I won’t rat them out. Not here, anyway. Give me a call, and I’ll tell you all about it.)

 

 

Twitter Loren is a nonentity. This blog reposts there too, but I seldom look at Twitter; it’s too busy, too full of chatter.

 

 

Blog Loren is the same person on Posterous, Tumblr, Blogger, and WordPress, as this goes out to all four. Three of them – Posterous, Blogger, and WordPress – are full of windy pontificators like me, so I’m just a face in the crowd there. I’m not really at home on Tumblr, which is really more about images and memes and being cutting-edge. I like Tumblr, though, more as a subscriber (and occasional reposter) than as a contributor. Few people on Tumblr read me, but I read and look at lots of people on Tumblr, and enjoy them very much.

 

 

Then there is (or was) Pinterest Loren.

 

 

I heard about Pinterest, and decided to try it. I was sort of charmed by it; I liked the mosaic layout of the pages, and the variety, and the ease with which you can browse, and the way you can click through a pinned image to an original website. In no time at all, Pinterest Loren had lots of stuff pinned: funny pictures, and cute puppies and kitties, and cute G-rated men, and pretty landscapes, and . . .

 

 

OMG.

 

 

Pinterest Loren was a sixteen-year-old girl.

 

 

I deactivated Pinterest Loren not long ago. I don’t think he/she will be back anytime soon.

 

 

I think I did the world a favor.

---

 

 

Internet identities

---

I had a acquaintance some years ago who was active on every single social-networking site: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. He was anxious to make a name for himself. More than a name: an image.

 

 

(This is not me, by the way, so get that idea out of your head. It’s not one of those “I have a friend who . . .” things. This is a real story about someone else. You know I always tell the truth about myself. Well, most of the time.)

 

 

My friend's LinkedIn image was professional: he'd had more jobs than you could shake a stick at. He was all over the place in his profession, rising from level to level. You could trace his career growth on a graph, if you wanted to: manager, director, executive director –

 

 

Except that it wasn’t true. I knew that he'd actually lost his previous job and wasn't working at all at the moment. So: he was either making it all up, or misdating the information he was posting. I didn’t want to call him out – who wants to destroy a career? – but I had a strange feeling about all of this, as I watched him go from untruth to untruth on LinkedIn.

 

 

Then there was his Facebook persona.

 

 

On Facebook, he was Mister Philanthropist. He was all over the place: giving speeches here, making heartfelt appeals there. He was amazing. Some of his Facebook friends were buying it: he was getting “Congratulations!” comments right and left on his various philanthropic / altruistic posts.

\

 

(I, on the other hand, knew that he might or might not be making this stuff up. And, even if he wasn't, he was certainly making the LinkedIn stuff up. And, for those of us who were following him on both LinkedIn and Facebook: we had to ask ourselves how he could possibly have the time to do all these things – be a stellar businessman and a stellar philanthropist – at the same time?)

 

 

So what’s a girl to do?

 

 

I could have messaged him, or confronted him. So could lots of other people, I imagine.

 

 

But I didn’t.  Oh, well, I thought.  It’ll blow up eventually. And, when it does, it will be spectacular.

 

 

And we (who knew the truth) will be able to say: “Oh, I had no idea! I thought it all sounded a little out of kilter. But I really didn’t know he was doing all of that . . . “

 

 

A warning to all of you fibbers out there: the truth will come out.

 

 

The Internet is built that way.

---

 

Purging my Facebook page of undesirables

---

Facebook has gotten labyrinthine and arcane. It’s almost impossible to find your settings, or your privacy settings.  And just try finding a list of the things you’ve “liked” over the past few years.

 

 

I finally cleaned out my list.  Cereal companies!  Pasta-sauce companies!  Actors and actresses I liked in a couple of movies!

 

 

Most of all, however, it’s left-wing detritus.  I’m left-wing myself, and (like everyone else) I like being told that I’m correct in my beliefs, and that the other side of the aisle is crazy.  But people like Keith Olbermann are so shrill!  Olbermann is our Limbaugh: a hectoring name-caller.  He reposted a silly thing back in February or March about Rick Santorum being a porn addict, which was widely attacked and which he withdrew, lamely saying that it was “a joke,” and that people had obviously misunderstood. 

 

 

Also, he posts ten or fifteen times a day.  Try that on your Facebook feed.  (It used to be your “wall.”  Now it’s – what? – your “timeline.”  Or whatever.  I can’t keep up with the new Facebook language, and I frankly don’t much care.)

 

 

Also: Olbermann was fired by his most current employer.  He is evidently unbearable.  Which is proof positive that you don’t have to be a Republican to be a jerk.

 

 

Anyway.  Who else have I purged from my Facebook friends?  Goodbye, Neil Patrick Harris.  Goodbye, Cape Cod Potato Chips.  Goodbye, Quaker Oats.  Goodbye, some odd anti-Dick Cheney group I must have joined during the Bush administration.

 

 

My Facebook feed is slightly less cluttered now.

 

 

Now I can read all about my real friends.

 

 

Like George Takei.

---

 

 

Multiblogging

---

I started this blog on Posterous.com, because two bloggers I read and respect (Mark Bittman and Seif Nechi) use the site. It turned out to be a good choice. It's versatile, and allows me to do a lot of interesting things, and it's relatively easy to use (I caught on to most of its subtleties within a week or two).

 

 

It also allows me, charmingly and altruistically, to post my blog to other websites. Bandwidth hog that I am, I chose five: Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Tumblr, and Wordpress.

 

 

They are all very different places.

 

 

Facebook gives my friends and family an opportunity to see my blog. Eek! Do I want that? Sure. Why not? So what if my aunt Loretta sees my opinion of “RuPaul's Drag Race”?

 

 

Twitter – well, again, why not? I liked Twitter for a while, but I tired of it. It has become a relentless branding exercise for grade-B celebrities. I barely glance at it anymore; when I do, I find that my Twitter feed is clogged with Snooki and astronauts and comedians from Chelsea Lately, and most of them have very little to offer (well, the comedians sometimes).

 

 

Blogger and Wordpress are like Antarctica: frigid, windblown places. I don't think I get more than five or ten hits a day from both combined. I'm not sure what gets you noticed there, but whatever it is, I'm not doing it.

 

Tumblr is sort of a rebellious Facebook community of people who've formed their own pirate republic, full of animated GIFs and kitties and sunsets and swearwords. It's not all wasted space, to be sure. There are some real people there, and some real commentary, and some nice art. But you see the flashes of anger when someone unfollows someone, and you think – yikes! These people need to get out more!

 

But such is the Internet, my ducklings. A peculiar place, full of nooks and crannies, like a Thomas's English Muffin. A place for everyone.

 

Ouch! Someone just unfollowed me! How dare they! What the f***!

 

 

 

---

 

Sn00ki is not your tweep

 

 

---

 

On the Internet we learn by doing. I have detailed my experiences with Facebook elsewhere; in brief, Facebook and I maintain a casual friendship with occasional benefits, kind of like Jerry and Elaine on “Seinfeld.”

 

Twitter, however, is different. I have to say that I don't think I quite understand what Twitter is good for.

 

Or maybe I do understand, and I just don't like it very much.

 

I got into Twitter around the same time I got into Facebook, and in much the same way. When I signed up for my account, the little blue birdie told me cheerily to “find some people I know!”, or words to that effect. Stupid me: I thought the birdie meant “friends.” None of my friends was on Twitter at that point (I have the social life of Simeon Stylites). I badgered Partner into signing up for a Twitter account too, and he did, and we friended each other a la Facebook, and -

 

Nothing happened.

 

Do you see my mistake? I was treating Twitter like Facebook. I assumed that it was meant as a kind of friends' network, chatting each other up and generally having a giggly ol' good time.

 

Anyway, the Twitter account languished for a while. Then I noticed that a lot of celebrities were mentioning Twitter, and so I tried following them, and – hmm.

 

I suddenly realized one of the main points of difference between Twitter and Facebook: Twitter is not necessarily reciprocal. People can follow you, but you don't need to follow them.

 

I guess that's why they don't call them “friends” on Twitter.

 

Anyway, I signed up for the usual celebrity feeds. (By “celebrity,” I mean anyone well-known. I follow two astronauts, a bunch of comedians, a couple of journalists, and the cast of the Jersey Shore. So go ahead, throw stones at me.) Some are smarter and funnier than others; some have something to say, and others have absolutely nothing to say. Some use Twitter as a kind of joke-a-day vehicle; others use it to pontificate; others use it – well, here's an exchange from last night's feed:

 

Sn00ki: @VINNYGUADAGNINO I will beat you!!! #hater

 

VINNYGUADAGNINO: Lololol @sn00ki hahahhaa lolololol

 

ItsTheSituation: On way to Vegas! 4 an obligated appearance ! Sitch GTL

 

Sn00ki: That sounds filthy. Watch your mouth Vincent RT @VINNYGUADAGNINO Havin a twitter off day...Don't wanna oversaturate the twarket

 

JENNIWOWW: Please understand that my schedule is crazy busy & I don't always have time or even see what everyone writes to me....

 

And my favorite from last night:

 

VINNYGUADAGNINO: Girls that pop pills, sniff coke etc. ← so unflattering.

 

Isn't that fun?

 

This is the 2010 equivalent of Photoplay or Modern Screen, I guess; we, the adoring public, get to watch celebrities goofing around. We get to read their comments, and we can pretend we actually know them. Some are actually writing their own tweets; others aren't (read Frank Rich on this topic). No big surprise.

 

Both the tweeter and the follower can be misled into a false feeling of community. Back in the salad days of Twitter, David Pogue decided to demonstrate Twitter's outreach during a public forum, and sent out a (fake) request for information to his Twitter followers. He got lots of responses; he then laughingly told them (collectively) that they'd been part of a demonstration, but thanks anyway; and he was startled to find that people were actually angry at having been used.

 

Imagine that!

 

Pogue, who is usually smarter than this, talks in his columns and blogs about using Twitter as a “research assistant.” I don't think he realized that, by saying this, he reduced his Twitter followers to a big gummy mass of humanity, from which he can scoop ideas and opinions anytime he likes.

 

Malcolm Gladwell just had a sobering piece about this in the New Yorker. Among other observations, he points out that the well-known role of Twitter in the Iranian uprising of 2009 was probably grossly overstated, especially since most of the tweets were in English, not Farsi. If it were really being used as a tool by people in the uprising, don't you think they'd use the local language?

 

Ho hum. Anyway, all in all, Twitter's not really for me. It's good for passing an idle moment, but it's not filling a need in my life. I have exactly three followers at the moment, one of whom is a stuffed animal, so I don't think I'm depriving anyone of anything if I don't tweet frequently.

 

Besides, I have a hard time compressing my thoughts into 140 characters. If I were able to do that, I'd probably be working at a greeting-card company right now. Or a bumper-sticker factory. Or a fortune cookie bakery.

 

Actually, that's a good idea. Maybe I'll start transcribing all of my recent fortune cookies into Twitter, and maybe it'll make me famous, and then I will have thousands of followers.

 

And you can follow me too. It'll be a gas.

 

Just don't expect me to follow you. Okay?

 

---

 

 

 

 

Unfriending Facebook

 

Stevie Smith, the British poet, took some poems to her publisher back in the 1930s. They were good, he told her, but it would be much easier to publish (and sell) a novel. She took a pad of yellow legal paper and wrote, in a few weeks, a novel, which was published under the title “Novel on Yellow Paper,” and which sold moderately well, and which is actually pretty good.

 

What did she write about? Well, she mostly wrote about herself, and her friends. She was not very kind to her friends in the book (nor to herself, for that matter), but she needed material in a hurry, so she used what she had.

 

This is how she opens her novel:

 

Beginning this book . . . I should like then to say: Good-bye to all my friends, my beautiful and lovely friends.

 

---

 

I have been using Facebook for about a year and a half. I joined several years ago, but, as many people do, I did nothing with the membership; I joined mostly because someone (I think a fellow-student in a nighttime language class) asked me to be his “friend.”

 

Everybody and everything is on Facebook now. And, with the advent of the movie “The Social Network,” everyone's talking about it, looking at their Facebook experience with new eyes.

 

Looking back at my own experience, I think I can use some of the insights of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and divide my Facebook experience into five phases:

1. Mild curiosity;

2. Sudden enlightenment;

3. Total obsession;

4. Sudden disillusionment;

5. Mild resignation.

I have, in my unscientific way, spoken to friends and relations about their Facebook experiences, and they seem to mirror mine.

 

This is my story:

 

I joined, as I said, because someone asked me to, and because I was mildly curious. And nothing happened. Every time I encounter some new Internet phenomenon, I expect my computer to get up and begin to walk and talk and fly around the room and organize my life. It hasn't happened yet, but I keep expecting it to happen.

 

So my Facebook membership languished for a while. I “made” a few “friends” – mostly colleagues and family members – but none of us did anything special with the website.

 

Then, one morning, I noticed that Partner's sister had posted that there'd been an earthquake in California.

 

This was news to us. And it was exciting. We'd used Facebook to make contact!

 

All of a sudden we were friending old school acquaintances, co-workers, family members, all over the place. It was fun. I kept peeking at my status during the day, disappointed if nothing new had happened in the last five or ten minutes.

 

Fun for a while, anyway. Then I started getting a lot of spam. A lot of spam. Odd postings started cropping up - things that I was pretty sure I hadn't asked for, and hadn't initiated. I'd been responding to everything – questionnaires, trivia quizzes – and everytime the “SHARE FACEBOOK INFORMATION WITH APPLICATION?” button came up, I hit “yes.” Why not?

 

So I stopped answering the questionnaires. The stupid ones, anyway.

 

And then I realized that some of my friends weren't really . . . well, my friends.

 

It was mostly the high-school people. One of them had a profile picture in which he was posing with a former U.S. President from Midland, Texas. It gave me the creepy sweats even to look at it. A couple of the others were in the habit of praising the Lord for just about everything, which is fine, except it seemed odd to put it in a Facebook status window. Some were posting ugly intolerant political stuff, complete with big swirly multicolored American eagles, and concluding with: CLICK HERE IF YOU AGREE! SUPPORT OUR TROOPS!

 

Babe, I found myself muttering through clenched teeth, I can support our troops just fine without clicking on your stupid bigoted link.

 

And then I made my breakthrough. What in the world was I putting myself through this for?

 

I unfriended in a frenzy. It was like weeding an old overgrown garden. I knew who I wanted to keep: my real friends. What in the world did I think I was going to discover in this crop of people I hadn't spoken to in over thirty-five years?

 

I ended up with maybe two dozen friends. This makes me the Facebook version of a hermit, I know.

 

I'll say this, though: I've been lucky enough to find, and be found by, a few people from my remote past who are treasures. One, retired now, travels with her husband, and posts pictures of her garden, and generally emanates happiness. Another, in North Africa, sends me cheery photos of himself and his wife and daughters bathing in the Mediterranean. One, from high school, is doing some acting, and posts pictures of himself in costume and makeup. They are wonderful people, and I'm glad Facebook has given us the opportunity to become reacquainted.

 

The rest of them can take their bigotry and stick it up their modems.

 

I know I'm not alone in this. Most of my friends have gone through the same emotional arc; most of them realize, as I did, that they really didn't need this conglomeration of “friends.” Some of them (more than a few, actually) quit Facebook in a rage when they found they'd gotten caught up in it; they felt they'd been violated, shown too much of themselves. Some just let their Facebook accounts lapse.

 

I still peek in at least once a day. I like seeing what's going on. I have a couple of news feeds, and one or two of my friends actually post something interesting once in a while. Pee-wee Herman posts something at least once a day. So does Chelsea Handler.

 

And sometimes I think about those other people, the childhood acquaintances whom I friended and then unfriended. It was like picking up my old yearbook and paging through it; I think I had a pang of nostalgia, and it felt as if I were going back in time, revisiting my high-school years.

 

And then I remembered that I really didn't enjoy my high-school years all that much.

 

So let me say with Stevie Smith: Goodbye to all my friends, my beautiful and lovely friends.

 

---

 

Oh, and let me just mention that I'm reposting this blog to all of my Facebook friends.

 

Thank you, and good day.

 

---

 

 

 

Privacy II: The creation of a virtual Frankenstein

 

I've been seeing the following, and variations of it, for a couple of weeks now on Facebook (don't worry, it's not a link, you can't click on it):

Dan Davis likes OMG! This GUY went a LITTLE TOO far WITH REVENGE on HIS GIRLFRIEND Click HERE TO SEE 

Three guesses: spam, or no spam?

Yes, that was my guess too.

It's really making the rounds.  Some of my most sedate Facebook friends are falling for it, so it must be very cleverly packed inside a game or something innocuous-looking.

I've fallen prey to this kind of thing myself, especially when I was new to Facebook.  I thought the questionnaires and surveys and games were great. Then I began to notice the amount of spam I was getting, and some of the peculiar things that were happening on my computer (I run a complete virus scan weekly, and it was turning up all kinds of nastiness). Then I put two and two together.  I still use Facebook, but I'm much more selective about where I click, and whenever the "ALLOW APPLICATION TO ACCESS FACEBOOK DATA?" query comes up, I count one, two, three, and usually I hit "cancel."

But in those early days, I was actually doing it to myself.  I was innocently (read: thoughtlessly) linking to all kinds of websites.  I was certain, as are many of my friends still, that Facebook is a protected space and nothing bad can happen there.

I still do stupid things.  I'm no genius.  A few months ago I accessed a very harmless-looking website I'd seen featured on a TV show; when I got there, it turned out that you had to pay something like $10 for access; I clicked the wrong button in my haste to get out of there, and I ended up subscribing to this verkakte service for a couple of months, at $10/month (charged direct to my cellphone), with no visible means of unsubscribing.  (I think I finally managed to unsubscribe a few weeks ago, but I'm still holding my breath.  If you hear screaming, you will know I failed.)

Most of the security breaches I've experienced have been, ultimately, my own fault.  I'm not terribly creative with passwords sometimes, and I still click where I shouldn't click.  The only really authentic outside hack I've ever experienced was to my eBay account; someone was trying to sell bogus sports tickets, and was using my vendor name (and, ahem, immaculate rating) to drum up business.  Luckily someone notified me, and I got the bogus item cancelled, and I changed my eBay password to an alphanumeric nightmare.   But at least I'm pretty sure I didn't do that one to myself. 

(Side note: there was recently an interesting Times article about password security.  Turns out that all those fancy rules aren't so great after all.  The best and most effective website security measure is to allow a user three tries, and then to shut you out for a period of time.  Mind you, those are the websites I hate the most, because I am a rapid and incoherent typist and invariably type the wrong thing several times in succession.)

I try not to deceive myself about these things; I can usually acknowledge that I've done something stupid, and try to correct it, and turn the page.  I know people, however, who appear to be happy in their fools' paradise.  One acquaintance has burned through three computers (by my count) in ten years.  They keep breaking down, you see.  She uses them for a while, and they get slower and slower, and then all of a sudden she can't use them anymore, and then she gets a new computer.  

 

Essay question: why do you suppose her computers run slower and slower?  Do you suppose it has anything to do with the stuff she's doing online?

In my earlier blog about online identity and privacy, I talked about the creation of an online persona.  I think we largely create our own public images.  Most of us (with the exception of Mike the Situation from Jersey Shore) don't have a marketing plan; we create our personae step by step, click by click, often unthinkingly, unaware of the mosaic of information and images we're creating.  

But not entirely unaware.

Remember Marley's ghost?  "I wear the chain I forged in life.  I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it."

Be careful, children.  Be careful.

Private I

 

     

 

If you've never Googled yourself, you really should.

 

I know, I know, the ultimate narcissism.  But if, like me, you've fallen prey to the temptation, you'll understand what I mean.

 

My name, incidentally, is Loren Williams.  Very common last name, relatively uncommon first name.  How many of us could there be?

 

There are quite a few of us, actually.  There's a professor at Georgia Tech; a guy in upstate New York who is apparently one of the great authorities on tying fishing flies; a volunteer fire chief in Cosmopolis, Washington; a car enthusiast in Florida; a pharmacist in Montreal (this one's a woman); and my personal favorite, a linebacker (to be fair, this one is "Lorenzo," not "Loren.").  And a host of others.  (Sadly, the only one who shares my middle initial is a real-estate con man in Maryland who's in jail for a pretty nasty crime.)

 

I'm in there too, but only peripherally, though my place of business.  I don't come up until about the fourth or fifth page of Google results.  Same for Google Images; lots of other people (the Georgia Tech guy shows up a lot, he's very photogenic), and you'll see a lot of closeups of trout flies (see previous paragraph).  My photo - the one that I use for my profile, the dark jacket and plastic fruit necklace - doesn't come up until Page Nine.

 

My point here is that all of us have a life on the Web, whether we know it or not.  Websites like Facebook and Twitter allow us to create personae; we choose images, salient details about ourselves, and we present ourselves to the world.  (Not for nothing, the word "persona" originally meant a mask worn by an actor during performance.)  There was a great piece in the Times a few weeks ago about how Twitter allows us to construct a kind of photomosaic of ourselves, by dropping fine-tuned comments about ourselves throughout the day.  I'm at my kid's school play: see, I'm a good parent.  I'm reading the Aeneid for the fifth time: my, I'm smart!  I'm weeping while watching the Glee finale: I'm terribly sensitive, but in tune with pop culture.  And so on.

 

But there's all kinds of stuff seeping around the edges.  There are the items you've bought and sold on eBay, using the same old username.  The unflattering party photo someone shared on Flickr.  The political argument you had on some forgotten discussion board.  It survives, and it can reappear at the oddest times.  And you can't really control it.

 

(Side story: an old friend just joined Facebook two weeks ago.  It was great to see him there.  Then, one morning, I noticed one of those ugly misspelled postings under his name and thought Uh-oh, he got hacked.  He was pretty upset by it, and quit Facebook on the spot.  I don't blame him, but I sort of wish I'd warned him not to click on every shiny button in the Facebook galaxy.  But then again, I thought he knew . . . )

 

Katie, a reader of this blog, suggested "privacy" as a topic, and the way our public and private lives are blending together.  I think it's a great topic.  Sometimes I think my most private moments are when I'm walking down the street in downtown Providence, completely out in the open, but completely anonymous.  No one looks at me twice.  When I'm online, on the other hands, I'm not private at all; I may as well be painted red and jumping up and down.

 

I actually thought twice about telling all of you my full name above, but decided that all you nice folks would be able to handle the info.  Then I thought: What does it matter?  Who cares?

 

When we're online, we make these decisions all the time: sharing personal info, phone number, name, employer, images, all kinds of stuff.  And we generally shrug and keep typing.

 

For all you know, maybe I am that guy who ties trout flies.