1 in 4 say internet can replace a spouse, says poll
I don't know what you personally expect from a spouse, but apparently "the internet" can perform all those functions for you, according to a recent poll that found 24 percent of Americans believe the internet "can serve as a substitute for a significant other for some period of time."
The poll was conducted by two firms: research company Zogby International and PR consultant 463 Communications. There were 9,743 adults polled online and the companies claims there's an error margin of plus or minus 1 percent.
Slashdot poster Sully_51 pointed out on a forum discussion that a poll conducted online probably can't truly reflect the attitudes of all Americans -- it only reflects the attitudes of those Americans who already use the internet.
Furthermore, we really need to know what percentage of these poll respondents are single to begin with. How many have never been married? Are they qualified in their life experience to compare a significant other to the internet?
When I think of the internet's functionality, I think of communication: e-mails, social networking sites, forums, discussion groups, etc. I think of information: news, blogs, videos, columns, easily-sorted research, etc. I think of art: self-expression in many forms, commercial and amateur. And, of course, we all think of porn online--even though here in America our top google searches have more to do with sports or history than porn.
When I think of a spouse's functionality within a relationship, I think of love: romantic dinners once in a while, emotional support, companionship, etc. I think of sex, and the physiological benefits as well as emotional benefits of that. I think of household affairs: chores, maintenance, cooking, cleaning, paying bills, etc. I think of stability: jobs, home, health.
Where do the two overlap? What can you find online from the above list? You can't get help with chores at all online. You can't really find sex online, though if porn or cyber-sex is all you want, I guess you don't need a significant other for that. You can find companionship online, sure, with other real people... but that is replacing one real person with another as opposed to replacing them with the internet. And is online companionship really anything like spousal companionship?
By my experience, "Internet friends" chat with each other, give each other advice, and have fun online together. But you only really see someone online when they want to be seen - when they feel like talking, and when they have chosen to spend time with you. You don't have to deal with each other after a hard day at work, or when you are grumpy because the dog ate your couch. You never have to fight about who will do the dishes.
Does that sound ideal to the internet-using population of America? Perhaps that eliminates some of the challenges of living with another person and allows a relationship to be more perfect. But won't it be less rewarding?
According to the poll, 78 percent of adults between the ages of 18 and 24 have social networking profiles, and that more than a fourth of all Americans have profiles. To quote the breakdown:
More Democrats have a social networking presence than Republicans (32% to 22% ). But few Americans say it plays a large role in their identity as a person. Only 14% say the Internet is an important part of what they consider to be their identity; 68% responded it’s just how they identity themselves online; it’s not really who they are.
That suggests the people polled already know their internet selves are different from their real selves. Right away we're starting out with a false base on which to build a meaningful relationship. If you fall in love with someone's online face, how can you know that's who they really are? How can you expect them to understand who you really are? How is that rewarding?
Relationships are not easy. Living with another human being has many challenges. Despite that, I suspect most of America knows the amorphous body of knowledge and lies called the internet cannot replace the companionship of a real human being.
Honey, I'm home!
Monday, October 29, 2007
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Fair Trade Trick-or-Treat: End Child Slavery
Want to know something truly spooky?
Child slavery does still exist, according to a 2001 report by the International Labor Organization. In African countries such as the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon, child laborers are forced to help harvest the cacao pods that are later made into our favorite chocolate bars. Children may be sold by their parents into slavery, or tricked into working for a wage less than what was promised to them.
From a Global Exchange report:
Parents in these countries sell their children to traffickers believing that they will find honest work once they arrive in Ivory Coast and then send their earnings home. But as soon as they are separated from their families, the young boys are made to work for little or nothing. The children work long and hard -- they head into the fields at 6:00 in the morning and often do not finish until 6:30 at night.
Rural cacao farmers in West Africa are often very poor. Exploited by middlemen to sell their beans to chocolate processing corporations that do not buy at a fair price, the farmers are kept poor even if chocolate prices rise.
Everyone loves to be spooked at Halloween, but this is one sad story that doesn't need to be told.
Fair Trade Certified chocolate bars, fortunately, guarantee a fair, stable price goes directly to the bean harvesters through cooperatives dedicated to developing sustainable farming economics and put an end to abusive labor practices.
Fair Trade chocolate can be purchased at Trader Joe's, online at Global Exchange, or sometimes in the health food section of the supermarket.
This fall, Global Exchange offers a Fair Trade trick-or-treat package of fair-trade chocolate and awareness postcards for $15, guaranteed to be delivered by Oct. 31.
When shopping for chocolate, be sure to look for this Fair Trade Certified logo!
Child slavery does still exist, according to a 2001 report by the International Labor Organization. In African countries such as the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon, child laborers are forced to help harvest the cacao pods that are later made into our favorite chocolate bars. Children may be sold by their parents into slavery, or tricked into working for a wage less than what was promised to them.
From a Global Exchange report:
Parents in these countries sell their children to traffickers believing that they will find honest work once they arrive in Ivory Coast and then send their earnings home. But as soon as they are separated from their families, the young boys are made to work for little or nothing. The children work long and hard -- they head into the fields at 6:00 in the morning and often do not finish until 6:30 at night.Rural cacao farmers in West Africa are often very poor. Exploited by middlemen to sell their beans to chocolate processing corporations that do not buy at a fair price, the farmers are kept poor even if chocolate prices rise.
Everyone loves to be spooked at Halloween, but this is one sad story that doesn't need to be told.
Fair Trade Certified chocolate bars, fortunately, guarantee a fair, stable price goes directly to the bean harvesters through cooperatives dedicated to developing sustainable farming economics and put an end to abusive labor practices.Fair Trade chocolate can be purchased at Trader Joe's, online at Global Exchange, or sometimes in the health food section of the supermarket.
This fall, Global Exchange offers a Fair Trade trick-or-treat package of fair-trade chocolate and awareness postcards for $15, guaranteed to be delivered by Oct. 31.
When shopping for chocolate, be sure to look for this Fair Trade Certified logo!
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Making worthy enemies
You lied to me.
You insult my intelligence on a regular basis.
You steal from me, and you kill my friends.
You and I are enemies, George W. Bush.
...Phew. It feels good to get that off my chest! Thanks to my new Facebook application, "Enemybook," I have announced to the world how our president "done me wrong."
"An antisocial utility that disconnects you to the so-called friends around you," is the slogan for this application. Its creator, 28-year-old Kevin Matulef, is the most common profile marked as an "enemy," followed by George W. Bush and the band Coldplay, according to a Boston Globe story. Republican Ann Coulter comes in fourth.
The application, which lets you friend the enemies of your enemies, was really designed as a backlash to the unreal numbers of people who "friend" each other on Facebook, but don't really know each other. It started as a joke in the MIT dorm rooms, Matulef said.
However it started, though, some people are taking it seriously. Embittered ex's are complaining about each other publicly with it. The creator of a similar application called Snubster told the Boston Globe two people involved in a lawsuit were snubbing each other... and eventually the snubs had to be removed.
Petty squabbles? My ex hooked up with my roommate so I hate her? Blech! Talk about a boring show! At least supervillians have an interesting relationship with their goodie-two-shoes counterparts. We can count on cinema or comic book enemies to exchange theatrical threats, to plot cunning, dastardly foils, and to circle each other, eyes narrowed and weapons drawn, respectful yet cautious, taking turns gaining the upper hand in a conflict based on a difference in morals. Much more sophisticated and enlightening for everyone involved than a pair of sour lovers craning their necks out of a whispering huddle of rumor-mongering facebook friends to occasionally glare at one another from across the room.
We can't all have supervillian enemies, but we can get creative. Dubya's been done before - he makes a good symbolic enemy. But why not create foe profiles for things like "pollen," "traffic," or even "illiteracy?"
A group such as Room to Read, a nonprofit group that funds libraries and book publishing in rural communities throughout Nepal, could make a whole PR debacle out of it by inviting folks to mark Illiteracy as their enemy. To follow up, people could donate to the cause... and create a whole new meaning to the phrase "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." They could build a network of "enemies" dedicated to foiling a particular social ill.
It would be a way to be positive with something negative. I like the idea of choosing my enemies. I really like the idea of having enemies that are worth my time. And I think there's something to the idea of personifying a social ill as a supervillian. It makes for a good relationship. Our exchanges would go something like this:
"You'll never catch me!" cries Illiteracy, as he cackles with wickedness and steals another child's future by denying it an education.
"Wrong again, Mr. Illiteracy. This time I know your weakness!" I shout as I bonk him on the head with a book. The book bounces off his newly-detached head and soars into the child's outstretched hands, who cheers for me. I high-five the sidekick researchers who discovered my nemesis's weakness.
Pretty cool, don't you think?
You insult my intelligence on a regular basis.
You steal from me, and you kill my friends.
You and I are enemies, George W. Bush.
...Phew. It feels good to get that off my chest! Thanks to my new Facebook application, "Enemybook," I have announced to the world how our president "done me wrong."
"An antisocial utility that disconnects you to the so-called friends around you," is the slogan for this application. Its creator, 28-year-old Kevin Matulef, is the most common profile marked as an "enemy," followed by George W. Bush and the band Coldplay, according to a Boston Globe story. Republican Ann Coulter comes in fourth.
The application, which lets you friend the enemies of your enemies, was really designed as a backlash to the unreal numbers of people who "friend" each other on Facebook, but don't really know each other. It started as a joke in the MIT dorm rooms, Matulef said.
However it started, though, some people are taking it seriously. Embittered ex's are complaining about each other publicly with it. The creator of a similar application called Snubster told the Boston Globe two people involved in a lawsuit were snubbing each other... and eventually the snubs had to be removed.Petty squabbles? My ex hooked up with my roommate so I hate her? Blech! Talk about a boring show! At least supervillians have an interesting relationship with their goodie-two-shoes counterparts. We can count on cinema or comic book enemies to exchange theatrical threats, to plot cunning, dastardly foils, and to circle each other, eyes narrowed and weapons drawn, respectful yet cautious, taking turns gaining the upper hand in a conflict based on a difference in morals. Much more sophisticated and enlightening for everyone involved than a pair of sour lovers craning their necks out of a whispering huddle of rumor-mongering facebook friends to occasionally glare at one another from across the room.
We can't all have supervillian enemies, but we can get creative. Dubya's been done before - he makes a good symbolic enemy. But why not create foe profiles for things like "pollen," "traffic," or even "illiteracy?"
A group such as Room to Read, a nonprofit group that funds libraries and book publishing in rural communities throughout Nepal, could make a whole PR debacle out of it by inviting folks to mark Illiteracy as their enemy. To follow up, people could donate to the cause... and create a whole new meaning to the phrase "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." They could build a network of "enemies" dedicated to foiling a particular social ill.
It would be a way to be positive with something negative. I like the idea of choosing my enemies. I really like the idea of having enemies that are worth my time. And I think there's something to the idea of personifying a social ill as a supervillian. It makes for a good relationship. Our exchanges would go something like this:
"You'll never catch me!" cries Illiteracy, as he cackles with wickedness and steals another child's future by denying it an education.
"Wrong again, Mr. Illiteracy. This time I know your weakness!" I shout as I bonk him on the head with a book. The book bounces off his newly-detached head and soars into the child's outstretched hands, who cheers for me. I high-five the sidekick researchers who discovered my nemesis's weakness.
Pretty cool, don't you think?
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Shared context, social media - YouTube as a Verb, Ideal
This summer I was lucky enough to travel in Europe with my family for a wedding. The various cousins, step-cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends of the family conglomerated in Edinburgh pubs to meet each other, talk together, eat together, take photos, make memories, and share memories. We stayed in rural cabins with no access to technology, and I discovered as I got to know my cousins and began to share my interests with them, I distinctly mourned the lack of YouTube.
That's right. I did not miss American food or sensible American accents or even hot showers so much as I missed YouTube. I realized that sharing with my friends the queer snippets of Scrubs or a particularly poignant song or the time-wasting, mind-boggling antics of a dancing banana had become an important social activity for me... it is a way to relate to others, a way to share part of myself, and a way to collectively mock and learn about the society around me.
TechCrunch's Mark Hendrickson says YouTube has become the generic verb for video sharing. I think he's right. It's not about the brand name "YouTube," which started in 2005 and was bought by Google for $1.65 billion a year and a half later. People will often use competing video sharing sites--but it is the idea of broadcasting yourself. In fact, I'd go farther than using YouTube as a verb. I think it is an ideal - as if one could be a broadcaster with his or her own channel, with hand-picked, hand-produced content--commercials and revenue and censors be damned!
What more can be said about YouTube? Either you know and love the world of video sharing, or you don't own a computer.
My friend Erica Jolley-Meers, a media consultant for the California Newspapers Publishers Association, said YouTube can be considered an art medium, because there is content produced specifically for and only distributed via YouTube, such as the Lonelygirl15 weblog series.
Aside from the original content created by YouTube users, it also spreads existing content that carries with it that special internet joke flavor. (As great as Saturday Night Live is, I doubt "Dick in a Box" would have spread like wildfire via traditional TV broadcasts. The song has just the right flavor for the Internet attention span.) For more examples of the Internet joke flavor, you should watch the music video Internet People, and visit the Internet People Rundown if you don't recognize all those YouTube references.
I know only two people who have been on YouTube personally, and one of them is a dog. So the joy of YouTube can't really be, for me, about seeing people I know and love in video. It has to be about sharing my media.
I'm not sure why I am not content to simply view my amusing snippets online. Something drives me to share them with others, so that we can laugh together, be awed together, or waste time together. And I realized while in Scotland that I felt there were many YouTube videos relevant to our family's discussions. The conversations felt incomplete somehow--un-enhanced, maybe--without the shared context of a snippet of relevant, quirky media.
My friends and I keep a log of our favorite videos. The count is up to 40 links now. They run the gambit from just plain silly to highly educational and interesting. What about you? What are your favorite videos about? Would you care to share them? Come YouTube with me, and revel in the ideal of free media.
That's right. I did not miss American food or sensible American accents or even hot showers so much as I missed YouTube. I realized that sharing with my friends the queer snippets of Scrubs or a particularly poignant song or the time-wasting, mind-boggling antics of a dancing banana had become an important social activity for me... it is a way to relate to others, a way to share part of myself, and a way to collectively mock and learn about the society around me.
TechCrunch's Mark Hendrickson says YouTube has become the generic verb for video sharing. I think he's right. It's not about the brand name "YouTube," which started in 2005 and was bought by Google for $1.65 billion a year and a half later. People will often use competing video sharing sites--but it is the idea of broadcasting yourself. In fact, I'd go farther than using YouTube as a verb. I think it is an ideal - as if one could be a broadcaster with his or her own channel, with hand-picked, hand-produced content--commercials and revenue and censors be damned!
What more can be said about YouTube? Either you know and love the world of video sharing, or you don't own a computer.
My friend Erica Jolley-Meers, a media consultant for the California Newspapers Publishers Association, said YouTube can be considered an art medium, because there is content produced specifically for and only distributed via YouTube, such as the Lonelygirl15 weblog series.
Aside from the original content created by YouTube users, it also spreads existing content that carries with it that special internet joke flavor. (As great as Saturday Night Live is, I doubt "Dick in a Box" would have spread like wildfire via traditional TV broadcasts. The song has just the right flavor for the Internet attention span.) For more examples of the Internet joke flavor, you should watch the music video Internet People, and visit the Internet People Rundown if you don't recognize all those YouTube references.I know only two people who have been on YouTube personally, and one of them is a dog. So the joy of YouTube can't really be, for me, about seeing people I know and love in video. It has to be about sharing my media.
I'm not sure why I am not content to simply view my amusing snippets online. Something drives me to share them with others, so that we can laugh together, be awed together, or waste time together. And I realized while in Scotland that I felt there were many YouTube videos relevant to our family's discussions. The conversations felt incomplete somehow--un-enhanced, maybe--without the shared context of a snippet of relevant, quirky media.
My friends and I keep a log of our favorite videos. The count is up to 40 links now. They run the gambit from just plain silly to highly educational and interesting. What about you? What are your favorite videos about? Would you care to share them? Come YouTube with me, and revel in the ideal of free media.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
'Snarky before Snarky was cool': Joel Achenbach
Blogger Christopher Potter Stewart says columnist Joel Achenbach "was Snarky before Snarky was cool."
That’s about the best way sum up Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post.
Whether he is writing about the youth of old people ( Rise of the alpha geezer) or the changes facing journalism (
"I really need you to read this article, okay?"), Achenbach’s columns and blogs are snarky, flowing, and funny.
Achenbach graduated from Princeton University in 1982 with a bachelor's in political science.
At least by 1985, possibly earlier, he was reporting at the Miami Herald, and was there at least until 1989. He fought and lost against a court-ordered subpoena as a witness to an arrest while gathering news for the Miami Herald.
He has been a science column writer for “Who Knew?” at National Goegraphic, though he was writing about science long before that. He's also been a keynote speaker at the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, and has written a book, "Captured by Aliens: The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe."
His history, at least via Internet archives, is difficult to piece together. At some point he moved from the Herald to the Washington Post, where he is today. During his career there he has had several columns (Rough Draft, Why Things Are, and his blog, Achenblog) and written several books, including “It looks like a president only smaller: Trailing campaign 2000.”
The Achenblog began in 2005 and its readers—the Select Audience Of 15, as the regulars are called—garnered a lot of attention for commenting prolifically on the blog, sort of. Well, why don’t we let Achenbach explain it? This is an excerpt from his column “The Tail that Wags the Blog.”
The blog originated in January [2005] as a catch basin for mental detritus, for the kind of stuff not good enough for print, but too good to waste on casual conversation or, worse, mere thinking. But this spring I began allowing "comments," and the blog suddenly mutated. America, it turns out, is full of smart, clever, creative people who happen to have no interest in working and whose employers have unwisely given them Internet access. Thus every day, on my blog, these strangers show up, just to shoot the breeze, flirt, kvetch, veer off topic and, most of all, pay zero attention to what I have written.
Let's cut to the chase: The blog ignores me.
His blogs (“the kit”) regularly have 300 comments (kaboodles) or more, and from that community has sprung a large list of inside jokes and terms. Sometimes the conversation spans several blogs.
There is no way to do his words justice; you just have to read them for yourself. Even if you are not so interested in the subjects of his writing, you will become interested in his writing for the sake of it. It flows. It has a strong voice, and addictive doses of humor. His observations, no matter how wacky, carry with them a sense of casual relevance.
Relevance, you know, is the essence of snark.
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