So, after what seems like months of not writing, I come to my blog and discover that despite captchas, spammers have infested my blog with junk comments. My choice was either to delete them a post at a time - an all-night proposition - or to simply delete all comments. So I did. My apologies to friends who have posted comments. It’s not you, it’s them. Scum of the earth. And now comments are moderated, though I still don’t know how to get the comments to come to a current email address. I wish I knew enough programming to be able to bombard any spammer with enough email to crash their servers. On the other hand, maybe it’s better that I don’t know these things.
Social networking reverting to a global local village model?
I was listening to CBC’s program, Spark, about a discussion with Washington Post’s Marc Fisher that was an editorial on a Snow Day story, where a high-achiever student called a school administrator to know why school hadn’t been canceled because of snow, and the administrator’s wife left a scathing message for the student, which got posted to FaceBook.
For me, the original story wasn’t so interesting [sidebar: Students’ judgments aren’t fully formed yet (hey, that’s why they’re students) and are supposed be learning from the adult role models around them. The administrator’s wife is evidently not fit to be one of those role models. I learned from one of my co-workers long ago that if you’re not prepared for your words to be published on the front page of the New York Times, you should abstain from articulating whatever you’re thinking. This woman learned it the hard way.] but the subtext to the story was: how technology, and in particular the social networking phenomenon, has potentially eroded our privacy, making us hyper-aware of our every move.
What’s interesting to me, being over 50 and from a small (and I mean small!) town in rural Ontario, is that what is being described is the social network from my youth, only on a much larger scale. In essence, what social networking has done is return us to the “global local village.” As Fisher was talking, I was doing a mental check in my head of the similarities.
In a rural setting, when a car drove by, you looked up and noticed who was driving by. My dad would say, “There goes old Jack. Must be going up to see Jim – heard the horse was sick.” The men of the community kept track of social comings and goings through the local coffee shop/feed store. Ours was called the Two-by-Four. When a petty crime happened, we all knew whose kids did it, even if the police could never prove anything. When I bought an experimental pack of cigarettes, the store owner told my dad. My mother’s big shame would have been for a teacher - they all lived within a few miles of there - to see me doing that. My mom told me I couldn’t wait at the corner store to get picked up from the school bus any more, with the cool kids who played the pinball game and smoked. I had to take a different school bus home now; I had to ride on her school bus. Privacy? What privacy?
We knew where our teachers lived, and they bumped into us everywhere. I took piano lessons from the prinicipal’s wife; another teacher went to the same church as my grandmother and lived two doors down from my aunt. Mornings, I walked a quarter-mile to the school bus stop, and in inclement weather, waited in the porch of the teacher who lived on the corner. There was no formal contact between teachers and students, but to be sure, students knew that their teachers were everywhere, and they were continually interacting, just as a part of their community status and part of community life. We knew lots about our teachers, all 12 of them, and they knew lots about all 350 of us.
If there were an angry outburst with a student, the next day everyone would know. (If a teacher’s wife were to have an angry outburst, that would have been unthinkable. It would have been gossip fodder for years!) In our school, the school bus was the unmediated public space – the low-tech IM - and by lunch time, all the students were mimicking the teacher’s words and tone out of earshot of the playground supervisors. Similarly, when our French teacher left his wife and children for a grade 12 student, we all knew – and he was gone. After all, you couldn’t really go far without someone seeing you and the rumors starting. And reputations were forever – the fact that I vividly remember the incident 32 years later speaks to it. The permanence lived on, just as a farm would go by the name of the owners for the last forty years, not the ones who lived there “only” the last ten. The grocer knew what you bought, and shared your reputation by the soundness of your food choices. The low-tech FaceBook was the gossip network, and it was kept active by men and women alike.
When I moved to the city, the anonymity was a novelty. The move away from local grocers to big-box stores was a novelty. Fill your cart with frozen dinners and there was no one to criticize your moral fiber. The tight weave that existed during my school years didn’t exist for my son, and other than some pre-internet circumstances that mirrored social networking (a chance discussion in a YWCA pool change room, with my son’s grade 2 teacher, both of us naked, discussing a problem my son was having, sticks out in my mind), there was little substance to the social fabric. But that has become the norm, and the norm is not easy to change. Instead of a new, not-yet-understood phenomenon, maybe we can see the social networking phenomenon as a return to the local village, albeit in a larger scale – a kind of global local village.
I recently gave up trying to keep my separate professional and private life separate, and decided to live my life the way I did as a kid in my rural Ontario roots. After all, search engines will inevitably find my personal blog when people do a search on my professional life, and vice-versa, so my best recourse is to conduct myself honorably and know that no matter what they find, there will be no embarrassing photos, no reports of unethical conduct, no blue-language rants, just me being me, going about my business, the way I would if I were driving to my parents’ farm, waving at the neighbors, and realizing that if they’re going out of their way to pass judgment, it’s just because they’ve got a little too much time on their hands. I predict that will become the new norm, and it won’t take another complete generation for the shift to happen.
Somehow, I’ve never really gotten into the whole MySpace or Facebook thing. It’s one thing to have a blog; it’s another to fill out forms that require me to disclose personal information in a central place that could be used as a clearing house for identity theft. But a friend who keeps changing his email address invited me to be a Facebook contact, and reluctantly, I filled in the absolute minimum to sign up. And then another friend invited me, and another ... So now I am a reluctant community member, and find myself requesting my forgotten password on a regular basis to be able to link in. But I don’t want to “share” and “poke” (I know that as a euphemism for sex, so find it a rather smarmy phrase) and “write on walls”. It’s not that I’m technophobic - I’m in the technology business, after all - but it just doesn’t suit me. (I already find it annoying having to block provocative invitations from younger men in far-off countries who find me through skype - do I need to fend off more credit card theft types trying to convince me to become his fiancee for purposes of fencing stolen goods? I think not.)
Anyhow, I started doing some research on Facebook, and came up with a YouTube video (below) from a Hindi acapella group called Penn Masala. Aside from being an extremely witty video (and perceptively insightful, given the reported behaviour by the stalker/killer on the West Virginia campus) , the group’s regular music is great. It combines English and Hindi lyrics, and North American and Indian sounds, and it all comes together beautifully. I’ve always been an acapella fan, from a guy group popular in the 80s and 90s, whose name escapes me at the moment, to the Flirtations, to Sweet Honey in the Rock and the Canadian Four the Moment, and Bobby McFerrin when he does his voice-pure performances. Penn Masala is a wonderful addition to my admittedly eclectic musical collection. What a wonderful side-effect to my facebook experience!
So my buddy helped me out with installing Expression Engine and a template. If I’d done this on my own, it would be another year before I got around to it. A big public thanks to him. We met in 2001 and became unlikely friends. I adore him and his wife and their adorable daughter.
Life is too short not to be the best you can be. Me? In no particular order: Woman. Wife. Mother. Grandmother. Aunt. Friend. Business owner. Writer. Musician. Jew. Scrabbler. Traveller. Lesbian. Taxpayer. Volunteer. Blogger. Social critic. Voice of reason. PITA. Inspiration. Visionary. Advocate. Convert. Pet owner.