The Time We Kill...

The last two days, I've been pretty busy.

I've only opened Facebook about twice. Not so long ago, I would have written about my lust to open my notifications like a child on Christmas morning, but today I sit on my couch with 20 notifications, two PMs, and two friend requests, choosing to blog instead of socialize.

Is my addiction broken?

Nahnope. I’m planning to go through them after I post this.

I never wanted to quit Facebook cold turkey; I really don’t mind social media. I've just effectively cut down my dependence on the site for entertainment purposes, and for that I am glad.

My day at work yesterday went much smoother without the distraction of Facebook IMs or the temptation to “Facebook creep” on my friends. Last night I sat down and read a Q&A with Ron Wood from Rolling Stone’s early October issue. I worked on a drawing for my art class for about an hour while my friends played games. It was a nice day.

I opened the site once yesterday. Once. And that was to create an event to invite a large group of friends over for a party next week. I saw that little red balloon coming out of the half-inch globe in the top left of my screen, yet I chose not to click it.

I've been contemplating why I don’t feel the need to quit socialnetworking in general.

I know how bad it is for my work ethic, how unproductive a Facebook tangent can be. How obnoxious my posts to Twitter must seem while I’m with friends.

The truth is: I’m not a robot. Facebook is fun, Twitter is also fun, Myspace is (was) fun, Last.fm is a lot of fun. I really don’t see the need to be 100 percent productive 100 percent of the time.

These sites have their practical uses too.

Facebook is the best tool I know of to keep in touch over 400 of my friends and acquaintances, Twitter is the best way I know of to send a message to a large group of people without having to message them individually, Myspace (though barren compared to it’s active population in the early 2000’s) is still a great place for bands and emerging artists to showcase their music, and Last.fm is a great way to find new artists to listen to.

I’m not sure if going on Facebook tangents is such a horrible thing…

They have the capacity to distract and can certainly lessen one’s productivity. Twitter, for example, can surely take away from an experience when people feel the need to remove themselves to send a 140-character message to their followers. I'm sure the men and women who excuse themselves at parties for a cigarette probably feel like myself and my fellow Twitter users most likely feel like we don't care either. For that I am truly sorry.

However, if someone enjoys these acts and somehow manages to avoid being consumed by them, then I really cannot judge them. Some people like to scrapbook, some people like to play video games and some people like to socialize on the Internet.

I think this is best said, or sung rather, in a song by Rise Against,

“The time that we kill keeps us alive.”

Grandpa Phone

Since being shown the ad for the new Windows phone in class I have seen it on just about every commercial break I have viewed from most of the shows I enjoy watching. To be honest, it’s a good ad. Everyone can relate to watching people fall into each other while texting on their cutting edge, 3G capable, app endowed, sleek, sexy, exciting phone. (coughcoughiPhonecough)

The Widows phone is for people who don’t want too many of the aforementioned frills. The point of the ad is to show that the phone gets the user in and out of the interface with out any dawdling. It enables the user to do what they have to do and get on with their date in a fancy restaurant or back to the open heart surgery they have taken two minutes out of to check the score of the Boston game.

(Because I know that happens to me every time I perform open-heart surgery.)

Something this phone reminds me of is the gradpa phone. \/


It’s a phone for people who don’t even really want a phone; only the Widnows phone seems to be a smart phone for people who don’t really want a smart phone. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It’s for that 50/60/70/perhaps even 80 or 90 year old who throws their hands up at new technologies, but at the same time realizes they need them.

I’m not sure what this means for the smart phone market, they have become the latest and greatest thing to carry around. However, they bring with them lifestyle implications. One who owns an iPhone becomes a hipster and one who owns a windows phone becomes a grandpa. I’m not sure if there’s a better or worse in this scenario. It seems to me that the only way to really come out on top is to not let your phone dictate who you are.

Laptop Party

I am sitting in a room with seven people. But I am completely alone.

It's a paradox, but it's true.

How? We're all on respective laptops. Two on facebook, one playing a sandbox game called Minecraft, two playing Doom II on a British server, one reading a blog, and one writing a blog; a scene that Postman and Keen would surely shake their heads at.

Ever since I started writing in this blog I have gained certain sensitivity to this scene. It’s something my friends and I have been doing since we came to college, gathering in our common room to do what we will on our computers. This year has been an especially popular year for the “laptop party” because of the addition of WiFi to our dorms.

I find this scene particularly interesting because it happens for various occasions. There is the music sharing laptop party, the facebook laptop party, the general laptop party, and the ever-elusive study laptop party (which never goes according to plan). It’s just how we do things now.

I’ve come to value the time I spend with my friends without the distraction of Facebook or the allure of Stumble Upon sitting in their lap. Every time I look up to find the glow of a computer screen upon my friend’s face, fears of total media saturation come to mind. A generation swallowed into the virtual world, like so many cheesy 90’s movies.

My only hope is that people continue to value time spent away from their various devices more than the time they spend on Facebook.

Guitars

I love guitars.

I have since I was in the 11th grade. Playing, buying, or fixing them, I just love guitars. Guitar Center is the primary place I go to satisfy this addiction of mine and like any junky, I just can’t get enough.

One think I have learned since I picked up the hobby is something that has remained true to this day: never trust the comments on guitarcenter.com. No matter what type of guitar (acoustic, electric, hollow body, solid body, vintage, or brand new) the comments will always be five out of five stars with a short rant on how the guitar produces the music of the gods.

If I were to base my purchase solely on the comments left on guitarcenter.com I would never be able to choose an instrument because they are all made out to be the greatest guitars to ever be crafted by human hands.

It gets ridiculous too, after a quick search of the site I wasn’t able to find a front-page review lower than 4 stars on most of their selection.

A five star review of an Epiphone AJ-100CE Acoustic-Electric Guitar posted anonymously read, “I recommend this guitar for anyone that can't afford a really expensive one. It sounds and feels great. I do not regret buying this!”

Tell me if that sounds like a real person, or a person working for Gibson (the parent company that owns Epiphone) to try and boost sales of that instrument.

I can’t take a comment seriously unless it’s negative in some way. One left by Bernie T. on the same guitar read a little differently saying, “I just received my new AJ-CE100 and I’m quite disappointed due to the 6th, 5th, 2nd and 1st strings actually touching the first fret. It is not producing any "rattle" or "buzz" sound, but no note at all???I have to use a capo for it to produce a proper note! With the capo on, it actually produces a good quality sound, but I paid for a guitar that didn’t need a capo on it to get it to produce good music!!!” – the spelling/grammatical errors make it a tad more believable too.

This practice of purely positive comments on most of their guitars plays right into Keen’s flattening of culture. If everyone is on a level playing field on the web, then the honest opinions of average people will get shoved aside for more favorable opinions from PR reps and paid yay sayers. It makes it impossible to tell what’s really going on sometimes when it comes to things like buying goods or determining the quality of an object because if a product is genuinely excellent, it cannot stand above the rest. At the same time if the product sucks, it will have positive reviews or no reviews at all.

Guitar Center has a flawed system in place for anyone just trying to buy a good guitar. The only real and honest way to purchase one is to go to the store, play a bunch, and find the one you love.

the whole truth and nothing but

I find the following notion both interesting and disheartening: all we know through the media, we only think we know. Most of my knowledge acquired as a man of the 21st century A.D. comes to me through thin wires and large satellites from hundreds, thousands, even million miles away.

The Internet is a tool, which I use everyday to work, play, and communicate. The experiences I have online are, however, fictive. They exist as second hand experiences, stories told to me from people far away, from people that I will most likely never meet.

This information comes to me, not directly, but through a filter that we label as the media. Information disseminated from privet organizations, snap shots of hellish war zones, messages from my government have been screened and packaged for my eyes and ears. They have been tweaked and modified to better represent what I should hear, what they want me to hear. Through “them” this information becomes distorted, and my understanding becomes clouded.

It upsets me to realize that I truly only know a fraction of what I think I know. My personal experiences are the only things I can draw upon that have not been filtered or altered; they are my own visions and snapshots of life and no one else’s, however they only account for a small fraction of my knowledge.

Klosterman talks about this concept in his essay, Fail, when he points to the manifesto written by the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. “We are living in a manner that is unnatural,” says Kaczynski. “We are latently enslaved by our own ingenuity, and we have unknowingly constructed a simulated world.”

He might have been crazy, but he had a point. He goes on to say, “they [media outlets] do not compensate for the overall loss of humanity that is its inevitable consequence. As a species, we have never been less human than we are right now.”

I can’t say I agree with all that Kaczynski and Klosterman say. I believe that technology, like most things, is a mixed bag. We can use it to create or solve problems, including those caused by the technology itself. Media technology is an especially mixed bag. Every device invented proliferates media content, while impeding our ability to keep our attention on just one thing. Klosterman and Kaczynski take this one step further by saying that the information conveyed by the devices is false in some way, because it is second hand.

I agree with this. I believe that when you trust someone to disseminate information to you, you trust them to tell the truth. The problem is that people seldom tell the whole truth and nothing but.

Stripper Football

Still groggy from waking up for Adam Bosch’s 8 a.m. J2 class I stumbled back into my dorm and plopped down in front of my TV with a nice greasy bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich in my hand. After flipping around a bit I decided to peruse the trashy channels to look for some Springer or Jersey Shore, which ever came first. Instead of angry midgets or angry orange people I found something I really didn’t expect: Football.

It’s called the Lingerie Football League, and it’s trashier than the Jersey Shore and Jerry Springer combined. Scantily clad females playing a game of football for popped collared bros drinking Bud Light. The catch is that this is no powder puff football game or even flag football; this is real full contact American Football. The field might be slightly miniaturized and the game might be a half hour long. But the tackles and the dog piles are all too real for these women dressed in nothing but shoulder pads, bikinis, and some sort of lacrosse/hockey helmet hybrid.

At first I watched this from the perspective of one of Gitlin’s “ironists”, raising my eyebrows and chuckling at the bros in the crowd, who appeared to be rocking out to Nickleback. After the half hour long game of stripper football I realized that I had been sucked in. I found myself rooting for Philly, something I pray I never do again, and realizing that this trap being broadcast on MTV2 had captured my attention long enough to show me advertisements.

I was ashamed, I had fallen into the pitfall of the ironist: joining the crowd you are tying to mock.

This common mistake aside, I found the game intriguing. The entire time I was watching this game I was asking myself the same question, “is this degrading or liberating for these women?” By the end of the game I had come up with the game being a bit of both.

It appeared to be something straight out of Idiocracy, a fusion of the NFL and Hustler Magizine, much like the fusion of news and porn in the movie. Besides the standards of American football there seems to be one rule to this sport: no uggos. All of the women are trim and athletic women who have managed to find a balance between being trim female athletes and curvy voluptuous women. None of the women on the field seemed to be “real.” I have never met a woman who fits the 36-29-38 dimensions of a “perfect” body AND have the ability to take a hit like these girls can.

After sitting and musing on the whole idea behind the LFL I became quite disgusted. I found myself drawing a startling conclusion: women aren’t allowed to play in the NFL, so instead they have to put on Lingerie and play half naked with little to no protective padding in a Roman coliseum type spectacle.

A feminist’s worst nightmare.