i agree with someone here who said it's nice to kind of look over the shoulders of family and friends, to see what they're up to.
my status updates are often so insider and my pool of friends so diverse that, if i crack a joke about group hug day at work (our yearly summer picnic), the folks from lbo or former workmates or former grad school mates, don't really know what i'm talking about. if i say something, as i did recently, about a book reading that lbo'ers might be interested in, the rest of my contacts haven't klew.
i forgot that this would happen. and then went to work to be questioned by those so inclined as to what the hell i actually did in my spare time. i mean: all those books you read!? who is this guy, writing stuff on your wall about the gaze of capitalism? huh? out of context, of course, no one realized that robert was talking about facebook. :)
one guy, who kills me b/c he makes it really apparent he's a big conservative (e.g., if he gives a demo to a group, he might bring up a freeper page!), caught up with me in the kitchen over coffee one morning. what is funny about this, to me, is that i thought about how someone on the fringes of conservativism feels perfectly fine with reading the freep at work or mentioning it. like, one day he sent us all a malware warning contained in a link to freep.
imagine me sending a malware warning that linked to some fringe lefty outfit. or even democratic underground.
anyway, basically, he was expressing, oh i don't know, i guess a little shock? surprise? that i must be some kind of lefty 'cause of all my friends who put commie or socialist as their political persuasion.
sort of like he couldn't actually put the two together: this person he works with who he likes an' all and this person who is - gasp! - a commie or, at least, has commie friends.
he preceded to tell me that he had an open mind an' all. in fact, once he decided to start digging around about karl marx. long time ago. when he finally got wise that it wasn't good to be isolated in your thinking. did you know, he asked, that karl marx was a hypocrite? something about his daughter with the maid.
heh. yes, i actually stood there and listened and smiled as i stirred my coffee - couldn't drink this skank stuff black if i tried! didn't argue with him -- though tempted. tempted to say, so what exactly does having an affair with a maid have to do with anything he wrote? because you know, what marx wrote, that wouldn't have been of intellectual interest. (don't get me wrong, i like this guy quite a bit. great human being.)
another guy, observing an article a fella here from oz recommended (something about labour politics in AU) on my desk, picked it up and acted all surprised that some lowly developer, you know, actually read stuff beyond his reading level even. i guess he fancied himself rilly rilly smart. like the smartest of 'em all -- going to grad school at local state college to get a degree in creative writing an' all. so who was i, to be reading stuph that's hard and boring and comes in journal articles with footnotes an' stuph? why on earth would i care about politics in AU. what good did it do me?
just why would anyone read that sort of thing?
At 03:02 PM 8/22/2008, Dorene Cornwell wrote:
>I am barely even tempted to social networking, much less to twitter. If I
>need more stimulation I just poke around at the electronic free association
>Google dishes up around Gmail.
>
>
>
>DC
>
>On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 10:13 AM, B. <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > I haven't jumped on the Twitter bandwagon yet, but
> > sometimes it is tempting. It seems like people are
> > basically using the "status updates" on Facebook and
> > MySpace as a twitter, anyway, already. Everything
> > really is being reduced to ADHD-friendly soundbytes,
> > it feels like sometimes.
> >
> > I'm close to the point of holing up in a mountain in
> > Tennessee and riding out this apocalypse:
> >
> >
> >
> http://www.amazon.com/Go-Go-Girls-Apocalypse-Victor-Gischler/dp/1416552251/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219425044&sr=8-1
> >
> > -B.
> >
> >
> >
> > shag wrote:
> >
> > "If smart people are falling into the blog brain death
> > spiral too, who the hell is going to actually DO
> > SOMETHING to advance civilization instead of just
> > linking to other people linking to something, all
> > trying to get Google ad money" Adam Beberg
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
>___________________________________
>http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
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