Late in 2010 I took my client novelist ArLynn Leiber Presser out for a drink, and she told me she was about to set out on a mind-boggling quest: to meet, face to face, every one of her 325 facebook friends, many of whom lived in such far flung climes as Alaska, Philippines and India - and to meet them all within one year! Did I have any advice for her? I thought about it and said yes, bring a notepad and pen. I thought about it some more and added “Bring a gun.”

Instead of a notepad she brought an iPad, on which she has been recording her amazing journey, Face to Facebook (“f2fb” for short), and transmitting the adventures to her website. As for the gun, she declined the advice but hasn’t had the remotest need for it, for with few exceptions all her friends have been good to her, and besides, several of them have volunteered to be her personal protectors.

She’s about two thirds of the way to the finish line (meet her friends here). For those who have not been following it blog by blog, reporter Wendy Donahue has summarized it in a feature in the Chicago Tribune‘s Sunday supplement, and if there is one phrase that captures this remarkable achievement-in-progress, it’s this: “Friending isn’t the same thing as bonding.”

To learn what Donahue meant – to learn what Presser has learned – read One Woman’s Quest to Meet All Her Facebook Friends

If you would like to join her on her journey, you can visit her website and even friend her.  You won’t be among the original 325 she has set out to meet face to face, but you’ll be a virtual traveling companion to an amazing and courageous woman, and you’ll help make her sojourn a bit easier.

Richard Curtis

I haven’t seen the word “Facevook” used, so if I’m coining an original term I hereby bequeath it to Mark Zuckerberg in the hope he will give me a modest gratuity.

It seems that Zuckerberg’s Facebook has acquired an outfit called Push Pop Press, we learn from New York Times‘s Nick Bilton. Bilton refers to it as an e-book publisher but from his description it sounds more like a vook developer: “a digital book maker that specializes in interactive books for the Apple iPad and iPhone. The e-books built by the publisher feel like movies; interactive graphics with words sprinkled about cross the page.”

We’re not sure Facebook wants to get into the e-book business but vooks reflect the social networking behmoth’s commitment to delivering entertainment. Says Bilton: “Facebook’s move into other forms of entertainment, like gaming and movies, demonstrates that the company is looking at other forms of revenue beyond standard advertising. Of course, it doesn’t need to own a book company to distribute books. It doesn’t own a movie studio or a game maker.

Why Did Facebook Buy an E-Book Publisher?

And for more about vooks, read If They Asked Me I Could Write a…Vook?

Richard Curtis

Thanks to Facebook human communications are in danger of deteriorating into grunts. Lengthy and eloquent descriptions of our emotional states have been reduced to “Like” and “Dislike”.

Nowhere is this lapse into monosyllables more distressing than romance. Had Facebook existed in Edmund Rostand’s day, wouldn’t this outpouring of Cyrano de Bergerac to his beloved Roxanne – “And what is a kiss, specifically? A pledge properly sealed, a promise seasoned to taste, a vow stamped with the immediacy of a lip, a rosy circle drawn around the verb ‘to love’ – been reduced to…

Cyrano “likes” Roxanne?

Would Juliet have clicked “Like” after viewing Romeo’s countenance? Or would she have used the long form:

Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say ‘Ay’;
And I will take thy word. Yet, if thou swear’st,
Thou mayst prove false. At lovers’ perjuries,
They say Jove laughs. O gentle Romeo,
If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully.

And how about this passage?

What longing!
What fearing!
To see her,
what desire!
The crash that I heard
behind me
was Death’s
door closing:
now once more it stands
wide open,
the sun’s beams
have burst it open;
with wide open eyes
I had to emerge from Night
to seek her,
to see her;
to find her,
in her alone
to expire,
to vanish
has it been granted to Tristan.

Had Tristan simply indicated he “Likes” Isolde, Wagner’s opera would have been curtailed by about five hours.

If this post appeals to you click “Like”.  Or send me a comment of 250 words or more.

Richard Curtis

You don’t have to be an enemy of the state to be on the government’s watch-list. If you’re on the Internet you’re being watched. Nor do you have to be CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation to be the subject of industrial spying. If you shop online you’re being spied on. In short, you’re not paranoid. They’re really after you.

No place to hide?  If it’s up to law professor Eben Moglen you will find refuge in “a small device the size of a cellphone charger, running on a low-power chip. You plug it into the wall and forget about it.”

He calls it The Freedom Box. He and a band of New York University students have been developing a social network called “Diaspora”. What is interesting about it is that it’s designed to decentralize information and power, a sort of out-of-network diaspora.

In these wired times it has never been more true that information is power. Moglen speculates on the potential for political control inherent in the information controlled by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. “It is not hard, when everybody is just in one big database controlled by Mr. Zuckerberg, to decapitate a revolution by sending an order to Mr. Zuckerberg that he cannot afford to refuse,” Moglen speculated.

And it’s true.  Not too many entities can afford the $50 billion price tag for Facebook, but a few can.  How would you feel about your info controlled by a corporation like Mobil or BP?  How about a mogul like New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg or right-wing shadow billionaire Koch brothers?

To neutralize these concentrations of power, Moglen’s team is creating a cheap software antidote, “You would have a whole system with privacy and security built in for the civil world we are living in,” he told New York Times reporter Jim Dwyer. “It stores everything you care about.”

“With tens of thousands of individual encrypted servers,” Dwyer says in Decentralizing the Internet So Big Brother Can’t Find You, “there would be no one place where a repressive government could find out who was publishing or reading ‘subversive’ material.”

Richard Curtis
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

“We are being played for suckers to feed the beast,” says Anthony De Rosa, a product manager at Reuters. Who does he mean by “we”? He means you. You are the reason Facebook has been valued at $50 billion.  You are the reason Twitter is worth $10 billion.  You are the reason Huffington Post was sold to AOL for $315 million.  These titans were built on cheap or free labor – your labor, the labor of writers so eager for exposure that they will give their work away.

David Carr, writing in the New York Times, calls it “a Tom Sawyer moment.” You’ll recall that Sawyer seduced Huck Finn and other friends into whitewashing a fence by making them feel he was doing them a huge favor. “That’s a bit like how social networks get built.” says Carr.  If Sawyer were doing it today, he would say ‘You’re not just painting a fence. You’re building an audience around your personal brand’.  The technology of a lot of these sites is very seductive, and it lulls you into contributing.”

“We live in a world of Digital Feudalism,” says De Rosa. “The land many live on is owned by someone else, be it Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, or some other service that offers up free land and the content provided by the renter of that land essentially becomes owned by the platform that owns the land.”

So, suckers, whose brand have you built?  Facebook‘s? Twitter‘s? Huffington‘s?  Maybe it’s time to start working on your own?

Carr’s At Media Companies, a Nation of Serfs will give you a lot to think about – and maybe to get mad about.

Richard Curtis

From Review Horizon:

The newly announced Kindle firmware update from Amazon brings the device in the realm of social media. The version 2.5 to be released next month includes Facebook and Twitter support. It will also (finally) include support for book collections and other goodies as zoom and pan for PDF documents and two larger font sizes. All in all, a nice set of free functionality added, we’ll see how all this will impact the already strained cellular network. Based on the initial previews, the Facebook support will be somewhat limited, allowing you to share interesting passages, but we’ll wait for the release date to take a better look.

These days every manufacturer of tangible goods seeks to expand into the the digital world. But the marketing agency for detergent maker Wisk has gone to extraordinary lengths with an application called Wisk-It.

Many of you will recall Wisk’s famous “Ring around the collar” campaign. Wisk-It will do for embarrassing Facebook photos what Wisk did for shmutzik shirt collars. “We have cracked the efficient way to clean up your online profile,” says the manufacturer’s brand manager.

As explained by the New York Times‘s Stephanie Clifford, Wisk-It “assembles a friend’s photographs (you can limit it to tagged pictures of you, or pull all of her photos), lets you identify the pictures you’d like the friend to remove, and then send a request her way. When the friend installs Wisk-It, it pulls up the offending photos and asks her to delete them.”

“The stain on your reputation,” Clifford cautions, “Wisk-It can’t do much about.”

Read An Application to Help Scrub Those Regrettable Photos From Facebook

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

Back in January we told you about app addiction. Not everybody is hooked on Apple applications, however. Some are addicted to Twitter, others to Facebook, still others to YouTube. Writers are addicted to anything that will divert them from the work at hand. You go on Google to research a fact for your book and, well, one association leads to another and pretty soon you’ve drifted far, blissfully far, away from your book.

Authors have procrastinated from time immemorial, and their excuses have evolved with the available technology. In the 20th century the usual dodge was a trip to the refrigerator or pencil sharpener. Today’s authors still go to the refrigerator, but as for pencils many don’t know which end the writing come out of now that they have spellcheck and other computerized editing tools. So they seek distraction on the Internet. And its seductions are far more addictive than anything ever offered on street corners.

“You get to your PC every morning with hours of productive time ahead of you,” writes Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times. “Next thing you know, it’s 5 p.m. and you’ve frittered the day away on Digg, Hulu, Wikipedia and your fantasy football league. And no wonder — how can anyone expect to get anything done when you’re plying your trade on one of the most distracting machines ever invented? With so much available on your PC — your friends, blogs, games and even TV shows — working in a modern office can often seem as rattling as working on the floor of a Las Vegas casino.”

If you’re highly motivated and disciplined you can govern temptation, or you can ask your spouse, boss, friend or business partner to make sure you don’t stray from your purpose. That seldom works. Any chain smoker who has given a pack of cigarettes to a friend and ordered him not to give him one knows why. But now there are computer programs to monitor or curb your obsession. There’s even one that virtually pries the mouse out of your hand and redirects it to the book you’re supposed to be working on. Manjoo, himself a victim of wandering attention, tried some of them:

I’ve been using a slate of programs to tame these digital distractions. The apps break down into three broad categories. The most innocuous simply try to monitor my online habits in an effort to shame me into working more productively. Others reduce visual bells and whistles on my desktop as a way to keep me focused.

And then there are the apps that really mean business — they let me actively block various parts of the Internet so that when my mind strays, I’m prohibited from giving in to my shiftless ways. It’s the digital equivalent of dieting by locking up the refrigerator and throwing away the key.

Of course, if you’re as clever as Manjoo – he’s Slate‘s technology columnist – you can find the key after throwing it away. You can just hack the blocker app until you you’re back on YouTube or Twitter wasting hour after blissful hour. Goodness, where did the time go!

Read Taming Your Digital Distractions and prepare to take – or download – the cure.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

The New York Times‘s Brad Stone reports that our obsession with the media has overturned our daily routine starting with our very waking moment.

“’It used to be you woke up, went to the bathroom, maybe brushed your teeth and picked up the newspaper,’” Stone cites one observer’s comments. “’But what we do first now has changed dramatically. I’ll be the first to admit: the first thing I do is check my e-mail.’”

“This is morning in America in the Internet age,” the reporter concludes. “After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities.”

You can read here about some of the measures families are taking to prevent their lives from being completely taken over by their communications devices.

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.