With a 65 degree, blue sky day and nothing pressing to do at home, I decided it was a good day to get out and explore. Perusing Google Maps and a few Day trips from DC articles that Google delivered, I decided on Solomons Island, MD as the day’s destination …
My imaginary Internet friend Michele posted a list of her favorite albums from every year of her life to Facebook. I thought that it was a great idea and decided to spend a couple of hours earlier this week doing my list. Six hours spread over a few nights later …
While I was working on my epic favorite album of every year I’ve been alive post I started thinking about my first memories of music. So as something to discuss until I post the album list next week, here is what I remember.
The first song of any type that …
Back before the Internet, many of us sent out lots of Christmas cards every year. For many people on your Christmas card list, it was the only contact you would have with that person every year. Long distance phone calls were stupid expensive back then. So once a year you’d hear from your former neighbor and get caught up on what was happening in their family and get a picture to see how the kids were growing. Other friends were bar friends you only saw at the pub, or the people you only saw in your adult softball league, or your work friends that you rarely saw outside of work and the occasional Friday after work happy hour. All those friend groups were siloed, with little crossover.
Then the Internet happened.
And not much changed. I launched ODonnellWeb in 12/31/1995. By 2005, I think I had reconnected with exactly one old friend due to my blog. My blog was not obscure. It was #1 on just about every search engine for my name for that entire time. Anybody from my past that had a fleeting, “I wonder what Chris is up to” thought was one search from knowing the answer to that question. As far as I know, not one person ever did that. The one old high school friend I did reconnect with was also an early blogger, and although I don’t remember exactly how we reconnected, I think it was more serendipitous than either one of us actively seeking the other out. So even 10 years after the introduction of the Internet, Christmas Card friends were still that, people you heard from once per year with a very sanitized, upbeat summary of how life was for them.
I did make many great new friends because of blogging though. Shared interests in home education, the Boston Red Sox, music, and Purdue led to many new acquaintances that I’m still friends with today. In many cases, I consider these people close friends, even though in some cases we still haven’t met in real life.
But there was no crossover at all. My friends from a certain Red Sox blog had zero interaction with the home school activist community, and probably didn’t know each other existed. The Internet had delivered the ability to connect and form communities with far flung people, but the communities for the most part enjoyed the same separation in your life that existed prior to 1995.
Then Facebook happened.
Suddenly, all those Christmas Card friends were now in your feed every day. That guy you knew only as a diehard Red Sox fan turned out to also be a diehard homophobe, and your best friend from junior high is also a conspiracy nut. Meanwhile your chief rival from high school hit the dot com home run and updates Facebook 4X a day with photos of his fabulous appearing life. The Internet, or at least the Facebook part of it, had delivered on the promise of a global melting pot. Whether or not that is a good thing is questionable.
It turns out that people, or at least this person, likes some silos in their life. Not knowing the politics of those folks from the Red Sox blog comments was a good thing, and my junior high best friend being a Christmas Card friend was also a good thing (Not referring to anybody real here, as far as you know). It turns out that we lost contact with our high school friends for a reason, we had no real reason to stay in close contact.
It’s not all bad though. I’m better friends today with some folks from high school than I probably was back in high school, and that is because we reconnected on Facebook and then in some cases have reconnected in real life. Some of those imaginary Internet friends from the blog are still friends that I’m in regular contact with via Facebook, and more than a couple of them have become real life friends too.
So I can’t just hate on Facebook, because there is some good there. But the friends with context issue is still there too. Obviously, we can not connect with anybody we choose on Facebook. However, the societal pressure is a little more subtle than that, and it’s damn hard to silo people that way. There is a general expectation of being friends on Facebook if you know people in real life. Facebook’s tools to manage those silos are pretty much unusable. Even if you try, you are likely to screw it up at some point, and suddenly your parents are very confused by the pictures of you from the Furry convention.
If you’ve read this far hoping for an answer, you are going to be disappointed. I don’t have one. But I think it’s a conversation worth having. I don’t think I’m alone, or even in a minority, in thinking the great mash up of our various social communities into one Facebook feed is generally speaking, more of a PITA than a blessing.
Thoughts? Use that nifty comment box below, or if you must, you can comment on Facebook too.
I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about 2016 for a couple of weeks now, and I’ve decided maybe it’s best if we just never speak of it again. So onward to 2017. It has to be better, right?
Right?
OK, maybe one last thought about 2016. Did you ever find yourself wondering how it felt to live through the decline of the Roman Empire, or maybe closer to home, how it would have felt to be an antebellum plantation owner in Virginia in early 1865? Hopefully 2017 won’t give us a chance to feel a kindred connection with citizens of previously fallen societies.
Seriously, looking ahead now…
Michelle’s last radiation treatment is January 12th. Then I guess we enter that weird phase where she doesn’t have cancer anymore, but we get to worry about it coming back. I wonder if it ever fades from being omnipresent in our consciousness, or if this is the new reality for us now? I guess we’ll find out.
Blocking every news source that shows up in my newsfeed on Facebook turned out to be a brilliant idea. My Facebook wall is now mostly pictures of kids, my friends’ travels, and my friends out drinking. Facebook is much better that way. So I fully expect FB to change something to stop me from blocking all news sources fairly soon.
I wrote 14 blog posts this year. Counting this one and one more planed post, I’ll finish with 16. I’m certain that is the lowest number since this site became a blog in 2001. I’ve been thinking for months that I need to get back to writing here regularly. Writing on Facebook is not the same. However, I’ve been lacking inspiration. I’m sick of politics and current events, and I’m out of the homeschooling game. That was probably 75% of my content in my heyday. However, I do have some ideas about how to get back on the writing wagon though. We’ll see how that works out.
Anybody else with a neglected blog want to commit to bringing it back to life in 2017? Seriously, Facebook does not need any more free labor from us. Also, Facebook encourages consumption of more and more content so they can serve more and more ads. I’m convinced that this is not good for our mental health. If blogs ruled online communication in 2016 they way they did in 2006, Donald Trump would not be president. I’m convinced of this fact.
One more blog post coming this year, the annual happy birthday ODonnnellWeb post on 12/31. The site turns 21 this year. It may need to drink itself silly. Or maybe that is me I’m talking about there.
A couple of weeks ago I subscribed to my local newspaper, The Freelance Star. I was hoping to avoid online news sources a bit, and be able to keep up on local news while avoiding the web site / Facebook page, and the community of bigoted racists that …
Our original plan for Saturday was to drive up to Gettysburg and do a 9 mile battlefield hike. Then my son remembered that 11/19 was Remembrance Day (anniversary of the Gettysburg Address), and neither one of us was looking to deal with a crowd. So we…
In an effort to find something to focus on that is not the hellish circus that is tomorrow’s election, I’m going to write up a review of our time in New Orleans.
We actually started the trip in Springfield, MO for parents weekend at Missouri State. It’…
Mrs. O’DonnellWeb became a fan of hurricanes when we were in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago. We, of course, went to Pat O’Brien’s to have a hurricane there. And then we left with no plans to go back, because the hurricanes there suck. They taste li…
Our first night in New Orleans we did a Drunk History tour. It was a two hour walking tour of the more macabre side of French Quarter history, with stops at bars to refill anytime anybody in the group needed a drink.
The picture above is a night time picture of the LaLaurie House. The LaLaurie house is probably the most famous haunted house in New Orleans. The high-society LaLauries brutally tortured and mutilated their slaves, many of whom died in the house. It was so bad that public opinion turned against the family, and they fled New Orleans in April 1834, never to be heard from again.
According to the newspaper, the New Orleans Bee, all of the victims were naked and the ones not on tables were chained to the wall. Some of the women had their stomachs sliced open and their insides wrapped about their waists. One woman had her mouth stuffed with animal excrement and then her lips were sewn shut.
The men were in even more horrible states. Fingernails had been ripped off, eyes poked out, and private parts sliced away. One man hung in shackles with a stick protruding from a hole that had been drilled in the top of his head. It had been used to “stir” his brains.
The tortures had been administered so as to not bring quick death. Mouths had been pinned shut and hands had been sewn to various parts of the body. Regardless, many of them had been dead for quite some time. Others were unconscious and some cried in pain, begging to be killed and put out of their misery.
If you had asked me immediately after taking that photo if there was anybody in the frame, I would have been 100% sure when I said no. The residential side streets of the French Quarter were not that busy, and I would have waited a couple of seconds for any random passer-by to clear the frame of my photo. The guy was not there when I took the picture.
Also, the reflection in the truck window is weird. There was no flash used, would the street light be enough light to create the reflection? Also, the guy’s head appears to be floating above his body, and the reflection looks more like a female than a male to me.
So obviously I caught a ghost on film 😉
Also of interest, at another haunted site, a tavern where a young woman hung herself, the tour guide pulled up a text message she got that day from someone that took her tour the previous day. The tourist had taken a picture of the dark interior, and there was a clear but faint image of a woman swinging from a noose. That one was clear enough to be a little creepy, although obviously it’s just a random occurrence of light and maybe some noise in the digital picture, along with a BAC above zero and the power of suggestion in expecting to see something. It was still creepy though.
