Tag: social networking

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Political Compass

So, on Facebook, some of you may have added the “Political Compass” application… The problem with this thingie is that it gives you 10 questions, all of which really only determine your political views based on social issues, rather than financial. As in, it’ll ask you about abortion, but nothing about “fiscal responsibility,” a traditionally conservative issue (not so much in today’s political climate, of course…).

Brooke shot me a link (from Liz?) to the real Political Compass, however, a separate website with 6 pages of many different questions that have a bit more range. Here’s how I fared:

My political views...

Here are how other political figures are depicted to fall on the graph:

Everyone else...

Needless to say, I’m rather glad I’m on the complete opposite side from Bush… 😛 The other interesting thing is that Brooke and I had different answers for some questions, yet we still fell in nearly exactly the same place…

So yeah, if you do the survey, lemme know how accurate it is for you. Personally, I think I’m in good company…

Yet, I do take exception to the “Right” being “Neo-Liberalism”…

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Of Generation Gaps and Twitter…

So, before yesterday, I’d never heard of Twitter…I had to learn about it from an NPR podcast I listened to… It’s apparently a new social networking phenomenon (a la Facebook or MySpace…) that tells the world what you’re doing at any given time. You can post, IM or use a cell phone with text messaging to post a short blurb giving everyone an update, and then you can subscribe to these updates by various means… For example, I could subscribe to your Twitter account and anytime you’d update it, my cell phone would vibrate and I’d receive a text message letting me know what’s up. You can write any message you want, from “looking at websites” to “eating a ham sandwich”…

According to the Wikipedia article, Twitter has been around since October of 2006… NPR and the New York Times, amongst others, have done articles about it… Hundreds of thousands of people all over the world use it, apparently…and this leads me to my point:

Why did it take until May for me to hear about it?

I guess it means I’ve reached something of a turning point… Up until now, I’ve kept up with technology and websites relatively well – Truman students knew about Facebook before it was even available for them to join, and well before news organizations jumped on it as a “phenomenon”… And I keep up with geeky things like that pretty regularly looking at sites like Slashdot and Engadget… So do we all eventually reach a point when our knowledge of the world becomes antiquated? You hear stories from parents beginning with “when I was your age…” all the time, and at some point, all of our parents probably realized that they were knowing less and less about the generation(s) that were coming after them… My generation is just barely involved in the whole “social networking” thing, but the high school students at church are all over MySpace – I simply have no interest in it. Back in college, I’d hear about stuff from friends in classes and new sites to visit, but we don’t really talk about such things in grad school…I’d assume that “real world jobs” would be similar…

I guess I just wasn’t planning on hitting this realization just before turning 25… I figured it’d happen after I had kids, and after they got a bit older and started getting into their own interests… I wasn’t thinking that I’d reach a point where I can visually see the generation just behind mine gradually distancing itself from mine…if only in this one sector of our lives…

I’m sure I’m just over-reacting, but with the world moving faster and faster and more information becoming available over the internet, it makes you wonder if the number of years between each generational shift is decreasing… For example, I’ve never thought that my sister and I (separated by 3 years) were in different generations, but maybe we are…

Has anyone else heard of or used Twitter, or is it just me?

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"Staying The Course"

So, the response to the tragedy at Virginia Tech leaves me rather annoyed… More specifically, a few things: all the “today we’re all Hokies” Profile pictures on Facebook last week, and the wearing of VT’s colors last Friday.

It just seems like the American public, rather than expressing sympathies and making a difference, they jumped into a “me too” response (where, rather than doing something about it, they just change a profile picture or wear a different color that day). [Note: I’m over-generalizing with that last part, and I certainly realize that not everyone is guilty, but it is a somewhat disturbing trend amongst many…] Sure, it was a terrible event that few will forget in the near future, but what really resulted from it? What have we learned from it? What will change to make sure it never happens again?

That’s the part that gets me. Let’s think about Hurricane Katrina. This was another tragic event that occurred in August of 2005. Last week on NPR, they were in New Orleans talking about how things have been shaping up recently. There are still people in trailers, there is crime all over the place, and most of the promised FEMA funds haven’t arrived. Katrina was in the news for weeks, and lots of people went down to help, and lots of donations were sent. While many religious and campus organizations still spend their spring breaks down there, believe you me, the response is “attenuated”… What about the tsunami in Southeast Asia? Lots of people were left homeless and lots of money was sent initially. What about now? When was the last time you heard a report about that? What about the 140 people that died in Iraq the day after the VT shootings that went mostly unnoticed?

I guess I’m just trying to make sense of it all… It seems silly to me that we make ourselves feel better by trying to make ourselves a part of someone else’s tragedy, when we would all be better served by making a difference in our own lives and our own relationships to make sure the same mistakes aren’t made.

A week later, the VT tragedy is only barely in the news. They’ve [read: news organizations] all moved on already. They were so important last week – why not this week? What has changed?

Very little, and that’s the problem. Much like Katrina, the tsunami, Iraq and Columbine, we shouldn’t be surprised when this happens again.

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“Staying The Course”

So, the response to the tragedy at Virginia Tech leaves me rather annoyed… More specifically, a few things: all the “today we’re all Hokies” Profile pictures on Facebook last week, and the wearing of VT’s colors last Friday.

It just seems like the American public, rather than expressing sympathies and making a difference, they jumped into a “me too” response (where, rather than doing something about it, they just change a profile picture or wear a different color that day). [Note: I’m over-generalizing with that last part, and I certainly realize that not everyone is guilty, but it is a somewhat disturbing trend amongst many…] Sure, it was a terrible event that few will forget in the near future, but what really resulted from it? What have we learned from it? What will change to make sure it never happens again?

That’s the part that gets me. Let’s think about Hurricane Katrina. This was another tragic event that occurred in August of 2005. Last week on NPR, they were in New Orleans talking about how things have been shaping up recently. There are still people in trailers, there is crime all over the place, and most of the promised FEMA funds haven’t arrived. Katrina was in the news for weeks, and lots of people went down to help, and lots of donations were sent. While many religious and campus organizations still spend their spring breaks down there, believe you me, the response is “attenuated”… What about the tsunami in Southeast Asia? Lots of people were left homeless and lots of money was sent initially. What about now? When was the last time you heard a report about that? What about the 140 people that died in Iraq the day after the VT shootings that went mostly unnoticed?

I guess I’m just trying to make sense of it all… It seems silly to me that we make ourselves feel better by trying to make ourselves a part of someone else’s tragedy, when we would all be better served by making a difference in our own lives and our own relationships to make sure the same mistakes aren’t made.

A week later, the VT tragedy is only barely in the news. They’ve [read: news organizations] all moved on already. They were so important last week – why not this week? What has changed?

Very little, and that’s the problem. Much like Katrina, the tsunami, Iraq and Columbine, we shouldn’t be surprised when this happens again.

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Facebook Update

Apparently, Facebook is listening to the complaints:

“They’ve shared all right. And Facebook is listening. On Sept. 7, the site is ratcheting up privacy protections, the result of around-the-clock coding. On their privacy settings page, people will be given greater control over what items will or won’t be included in news feeds. ‘We are giving people the control they’ve been asking for,’ says Facebook spokeswoman Melanie Deitch.”

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Of Facebook and Big Brother…

So, Slashdot had a posting discussing the new changes on Facebook, which many of you use frequently… As many of you noticed this morning when you logged on to change your status, there’s a new “feeds” feature that really ramps up the stalking factor to a whole new level… Personally, I didn’t really care that much, besides the fact that I can’t seem to find a way to disable it.

Well…apparently more than a few people are rather annoyed about it, pointing out a variety of privacy issues…according to Slashdot, though, many “protest groups” have formed, the largest of which has 10,000 members… I link to CampusProgress.org and a student homepage at some university I’ve never heard of (University of Mary Washington, anybody?) as examples of just how irate some people are over the changes. A few quotes from the latter link were kinda amusing, regardless:

“When we join facebook, we automatically give up a little bit of our privacy. To use Facebook has always been ‘socially-acceptable stalking.’ Now, though, they’ve just gone too damned far. No one wants their girlfriend or boyfriend knowing when they’ve commented on a photo, written on a wall, or anything else. No one wants people to see that they’ve left a group; it could offend someone. No one really wants to see the change in status of someone’s love life.”

And from the CollegeProgress article:

“A Facebook profile now displays your online social exploits since mid- August. It notes when you wrote on someone?s wall, and when you commented on a photo, along with other new details such as your responses to event invitations, your new friends, and what groups you join. Before, as many of us know, you could write on a wall in relative privacy. It could be a sneaky affair. And commenting on someone else?s photo was something that few would notice. Wall and comment communications, while public, were not advertised.

Now, every time you do anything on Facebook, you issue a bulletin for all of your friends. Now no one will miss the fact that you think you look horrible in a picture, or that you didn’t accept an invitation to someone’s event, or that you wrote what you considered to be a funny item for your list of activities (‘Trying not to incriminate myself on facebook to all my future employers’) and then thought better of it ten minutes later and took it down.”

I dunno…personally, I figure that if you’re posting this kind of information on Facebook in the first place, you’re just asking for trouble…but at the same time, I can understand where problems can and will arise. Needless to say, I’m a). glad I’m not in college anymore, and b). glad I’m married.

Any thoughts?