About Anonymous Memes on Facebook

 PREFACE: I got caught up in a flame war on Facebook, because I couldn't help myself. When I realized what I had done, I tried to apologize and make amends. I don't know if I was successful. But I spent all night thinking about it, and ended up posting this the next morning.

I get way too upset when I see people mindlessly reposting inflammatory memes about [[insert current topic of conflict here]]. It's a personal failing; I know, and I apologize for getting worked up over things which don't matter. (p.s. I'm working on it. Your advice is not needed; however, your nonverbal support is appreciated.)

It's not the content of the memes that bothers me so much, it's the fact that you keep reposting them. If you want to know why, keep reading. If you don't want to know why, I will understand if you stop reading now. One of the things that I'm doing to help me get over this personal weakness is this: if all I see from you is reposted inflammatory memes, then I will snooze you for 30 days. If, after 30 days, I'm still seeing that same garbage from you, I'll quietly unfollow or unfriend you. We'll still be friends in real life. I just don't want to see that stuff over and over on Facebook.

If you're still reading, I'm going to cover four more points.

1.Why? Because Big Brother is watching you!

2. Where do the memes come from?

3. What are you going to do about it?

4. Try lifting people up instead.

1.Why? Because Big Brother is watching you!

Now for the why: Facebook has algorithms (thinking machines, if you will) that follow your every move on Facebook (and beyond, I suspect). They know what you look at, and they make conclusions about what you like and what you want to see. So they tailor what will appear on your news feed. You'll end up seeing a lot of crazy memes which are intended to get people angry, and which amazingly support YOUR point of view. Often, you get emotionally stirred up by them, whether you realize it or not, and you decide to repost them, as if to say (again, whether you realize it or not) "See? Amiright? That's what I've been saying!"

This gives those memes new life, and gives them a chance to upset and motivate somebody else.

2. Where do the memes come from?

Ah, that's it. Nobody knows. There's no authorship attached. BUT! Have you heard about these "troll farms", in Russia and other countries? These are people, or groups of people, whose purpose is to destroy the U.S. by sowing division and discord from within, getting us all to argue with each other, to hate each other, and to actively work against each other. Remember what Abraham Lincoln said: "A house divided against itself cannot stand." If they can break up (or FURTHER BREAK UP) the unity that can and should exist in the U.S., then the country descends into chaos, and they win.

They're like those instigators on the playground in middle school who like to play "Let's you and him fight".

All of these anonymous memes, which are designed to sow discord and confusion, they don't do anything except tear down: they tear down society; they tear down our unity; they tear down good (albeit imperfect) people who are trying to make a positive difference in the world; and worst of all, they prompt us to tear down each other.

Nobody signs these memes, or maybe those who share them don't credit the authors like they should. Therefore, nobody's ultimately responsible for their content. Yeah, but if you share them, THEN YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR CONTENT, and you deserve all of the opprobrium and contempt that your respondents heap on you.

(Detour! "Troll" in this case doesn't refer to the fairy-tale creature, although modern trolls are as ugly and sociopathic as that creature. "Troll" in this case refers to the act of dragging a baited hook through the water, with the expectation that sooner or later a fish will take the bait and be hooked. Every time you repost an anonymous meme or reply to one, you've been hooked.

Now, back to the subject at hand.)

3. What are you going to do about it?

We are all involved, to some degree, in politics. We all have opinions about not just the political, but the social, issues of the day. These opinions move us to action.

If the only action you take is to repost memes of anonymous and unknown origin, then YOU ARE AMONG THE LAZIEST CREATURES ON EARTH. It doesn't take a lot of effort to click the "Share" button at the bottom of a meme, and to feel self-satisified, like you've done your part in Advancing the Cause. The Internet calls this "slacktivism".

If it really means that much to you, then for Pete's sake, GET OFF YOUR LAZY BUTT AND GO FIND SOMETHING TO DO ABOUT IT. You will not change the world by sitting there and clicking "Share". The world wants deeds, not clicks.

4. Try lifting people up instead.

Jenna Ames Crellin and Jason Wilson are two of my heroes on Facebook. They mostly repost stuff -- but everything they repost on FB is intended to lift somebody up, to put a smile on somebody's face, or to make somebody laugh out loud. (Or to get excited about football.)

Janis Ian posts a lot of original stuff, and the things she reposts are things that she has carefully researched to make sure they're for real. A lot of what she posts is entertainment, a lot of it is to lift up strangers or to say hi to her friends, and some of it is intended to make you uncomfortable, to make you think, and to make you take action. (Real action. See above.) I don't agree with everything Janis posts, but I read and think about all of it.

Jodi DeLong/bloomingwriter has a wicked sense of humour, a vicious command of the English language, and ... well, she always posts original stuff. I don't know if I've ever seen her repost an anonymous meme. And her original photographs of her flower garden, and of the beauty of the Maritime Provinces, brighten my day and lift my soul.

Jordyn Prestwich doesn't have time to repost garbage on Facebook. She's too busy just living in Ghana and making a difference in the lives of the people there. Props to #ghanamakeadifference .

I have some other friends whom I won't name, who are on journeys of self-discovery, and who feel comfortable posting about their progress. It builds me up to see them growing and getting stronger and wiser.

I have yet other friends, whom I also won't name, who are having fun just being alive, and who share their adventures with their friends. I've vicariously traveled the world and climbed mountains with these friends.

(I guess that, in order to be named in this post, your name must start with "J".)

All of that is what I come to Facebook to see. And that is what I myself aspire to contribute. Given a choice between building up and tearing down, I prefer to build up. You can, too. That's a choice you'll have to make for yourself.

The Seven-Day Book Cover Challenge, Day One: The Lord of the Rings

Preface

This began as one of those viral challenges on Facebook: post the covers of seven of your favorite books, one a day, for seven days. On the seventh day, nominate someone and challenge them to do the same.

Multiple people nominated me, so I gave in and posted seven covers. Although the original challenge specified that the covers be posted without explanation or review, I briefly explained and reviewed my choices.

Here's the first one.

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Day One of the seven-day book challenge.

The hardest thing is going to be picking just seven books.

In fact, I'm going to cheat. This first book is actually one story in four books: The Lord of the Rings, including The Hobbit, written as a preface to the trilogy.

I first encountered The Lord of the Rings as a freshman in college, when I picked up a paperback-edition boxed set for $6.00, on my way back to the dorms for lunch. I disappeared into my room and didn't come out, except for meals, for 72 hours. By then I had finished the books, and my life had been changed.

This is an absorbing adventure, full of deep magic, deep wisdom, and all of the good and evil of humanity, on display against an epic backdrop of epic-backdropness.

If the movies are great, it's because they were built on a great foundation. This is the foundation. Read it to your kids at night. Read it to yourself, over and over. Take notes in the margin. Stick quotations on your bathroom mirror. Let it fill your life with its richness.

This guy Evan is my hero

Soooo ... this guy, Evan? He's my new hero.

Dear "Frustrated Father": Stop acting like an idiot.

The Internet is all atwitter this week about a "Frustrated Parent" (Jeff Severt, by name) who couldn't figure out "his son's Common Core math assignment" (I put that in quotation marks, because that's what a journalist wrote, and journalists are not always accurate in their reporting. (Imagine that!)).

The father's version of the homework first appeared on a conservative Facebook page called The Patriot Post. It was picked up by TheBlaze, who published a breathless article about it. That article caught Glen Beck's eye, and he did an interview with the father. From there, it went viral. For example, Yahoo has been hooting about it for days.

So what was the homework assignment? Here's the photo that was posted on Facebook. (FB lawyers: I claim "fair use." Get away from me.)

There are a number of things that are just plain wrong with Mr. Severt's response. I don't know where to start. Let's start at the beginning.

1. He didn't read the instructions. The problem says, "Write a letter to Jack, telling him what he did right, and how to fix his mistake." Mr. Severt responds that 427 minus 316 is obviously 111, and that he could figure it out in under five seconds. Well, that's great, Jeffy, but that's not what the teacher was asking for. The fictional kid got 121 for his answer. What did he do right, and more importantly, what did he do wrong and how should he fix it? An engineer should be able to figure that out. (I'll tell you below.)

2. Mr. Severt, who is so proud of his Bachelor of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering, who can do differential equations, and who (I assume) can read both an electrical schematic and an oscilloscope waveform, is unable to figure out a simple number line. I glanced at the diagram and figured out the problem almost instantly - in less than a second, anyway. (Wanna know the answer? Keep reading.)

For your information, Mr. Severt, we lose a lot of kids in K-12 when we try to teach them to do subtraction via the vertical method. Many students, like you and me, did just fine learning math that way. But a significant number of students are visual learners, some are kinesthetic learners, and some have dyslexia. For these students, it really, really, REALLY helps for them to use a number line to figure out the mechanics of subtraction. We teach them how to add and subtract on a number line, and then we show them how the number-line method corresponds to the vertical method. Eventually they have an "a-hah!" moment where it all makes sense, and then they can leave the number line behind.

It's like training wheels on a bicycle.

Or do you want an example from your Electrical Engineering curriculum? Let's talk about calculus. Do you remember L'Hôpital's Rule? Limits? Do you use those in your EE job? Well, you do calculus, right? When's the last time you actually had to use L'Hôpital's Rule? You spent a whole unit on it in Calc 1. It was on the midterm and on the final. Learning and understanding L'Hôpital's Rule was fundamental to understanding differentiation, and integration after that. That is analogous to teaching subtraction on the number line.

Five years before Common Core came about, I was teaching my seventh grade math students how to add and subtract positive and negative numbers, using a number line. It works.

3. "In the real world, simplification is valued over complication." Mr. Severt, I dare you to try to teach a second-grader about three-digit vertical subtraction, your way. Your explanation will be much more complicated, and less understandable by the majority of your students, than the number line.

4. About the number line, Mr. Severt says "The process is ridiculous and would result in termination if used." This is both arrogant and disingenuous. You know what? It's also a stupid thing to say. As I have shown above, the number line is a K-12 teaching tool, not a professional-level algorithm.

5. I will assert, with no data to back me up, that most of the anti-Common Core crowd are just repeating claims they've heard (like the silly "It's okay to say 3 x 4 = 11" claim) and anecdotes like this "Frustrated Father" one, and that none of these parrots have actually read the Common Core standards. If you think I'm talking about you, then, Dear Reader, you're probably right. GO READ THEM FROM THE SOURCE. What you are arguing against is not Common Core.

I think that this point, the point about learning about CC from the source, deserves another blog entry. Read it here.

6. For those of you still reading this, here's the answer. It takes longer to explain it than it does to comprehend it. To solve 427-316 on a number line, you start at 427. Take three 100-sized jumps to the left, one 10-sized jump to the left, and six single jumps to the left. You will end up at 111. The fictional Jack forgot the 10-sized jump and that's how he ended up at 121.

You're welcome.

(UPDATE! The Huffington Post published about this, two days after I did. Read their article here, and my observations about it here.)

(ANOTHER UPDATE! Seven months later, the Independent Journal Review has picked up on this, and published an article about it as if it were brand new. Seven months! Clearly, they're a little slow on the uptake. They also have problems reading for comprehension. Read their article here, and my further thoughts on the matter here. Too many people have forgotten the "slow" kids in their grade-school math classes.)

A School District Run by a Bunch of Idiots? Maybe.

You may recall the case of Natalie Munroe, the Central Bucks High School East teacher who was nearly fired for some coarse and uncomplimentary blog entries about her students, blogs that were supposed to remain personal and confidential but somehow got sniffed out. When the Central Bucks School District determined that they couldn't fire her because she hadn't broken any rules, they set her up to fail at the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year.We summarized her unfair treatment at Zyzmog Galactic Headquarters.

She made one blog entry in October 2011. After that, the school board passed a rule that effectively muzzled teachers, forbidding them from blogging about their students or their classes. So she didn't blog again until this carefully worded entry...

... an entry which repeated the unsettling, but unsurprising, news that the school administrators intend to follow through completely, by recommending to the school board, on June 26, that Ms. Munroe be fired. It wasn't Ms. Munroe that broke the news. She says that somebody else leaked it to the media first. In her latest blog posting, she says that although the administration and other detractors are prepared to say a lot of nasty things about her, "... I know the truth, my colleagues know the truth, my students and their parents know the truth. I stand by my work this year, and every year before."

Ms. Munroe and her lawyer are prepared to take the district to court if the board votes to fire her. She doesn't deserve this, and neither do (many of) the students at CBE. I wish her (and her lawyer) lots of power, and lots of success.

POSTSCRIPT: Her unlikely defender continues the good fight. Some of her attackers are amazed at his tenacity and his, um, ferocity. Many of them are dismayed and wish he'd just lay off. They are learning the hard way, just as Ms. Munroe did, that every choice comes with consequences, and that you can't make a choice without accepting the consequences. To use the vulgar but succinct expression, karma's a bitch.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: I have been feeling a little guilty about the title of this entry. Maybe the CBSD administrators don't deserve to be called "idiots". But then I remember the way they have played this thing out in public, the things they have said to the news media, and the heavy-handed way they have managed it, and I don't feel guilty anymore.

A school's plan backfires, making things better instead of worse

A while ago I wrote about the case of the schoolteacher in eastern Pennsylvania who was suspended because she said some offensive, but true, things about her students on a blog that was supposed to be private but wasn't.  She was quietly reinstated in August 2011, but the school administration set her up to fail.  In direct violation of their own policies, they allowed any parent to "opt out" - to withdraw their student from this teacher's classes.  And in a move stinking of hypocrisy, shortsightedness, or just plain unfairness, they did not allow any parents to "opt in" - to sign up their student for one of her classes.

The administration's intentions were obvious.  By the end of the year, this teacher's classroom enrollment would be down to zero, and they would have a justification to eliminate her position and fire her - or at least remove her from the school.

Well, their plan backfired.  Instead of three classes of 30 students each, she ended up with classes of 12, 15 and 7 students.  Those 34 students are the luckiest students in the school.  They are receiving the kind of education that a student in a classroom of 30 can only wish for.  Not only that, but they are mostly self-selected "good students."  The troublemakers, the ones that this teacher wrote about in her blog, opted out of her class, leaving only the students who really wanted to learn.

This makes for a perfect classroom environment.  And that makes her, probably, the luckiest teacher in the school.  With a student-to-teacher ratio below 20, she can give each student some real one-on-one time.  She can concentrate on the ones who need help.  She can take time to give the high flyers an extra boost.  She can phone or email all the students' parents regularly, without having to stay up late at night grading papers and preparing lesson plans.

The other teachers may be a bit envious of her. They still have 30 students per class, 3 classes per day.  They still have the whiners, the rude ones, and the slackers.  They may have students who need help, but they can't help them, because they're so busy dealing with the whiners, the slackers, and the inertia of the average.

I really hope they don't end up resenting her.  Any resentment they may feel should be directed at the administration, not at her.

The administration set out to punish her, or to make her fail. Instead, the punishment has turned into a reward, and when the standardized test scores are published next summer, their intended failure will show itself as a big success.  Her students' scores will average higher than those of the other students - not necessarily because she's a better teacher, but because she and her students had a better shot at teaching and learning.

So what are the rest of the students at this high school doing?  They're still whining and complaining. And her unlikely defender continues to fight the good fight.  I say more power to both of them.

You can read about this delightful turn of events on her blog.

They picked on the wrong victim

Once upon a time, a high school teacher in eastern Pennsylvania started a blog, as a way to keep in touch with her friends and family.  She kept her personal information to a minimum, but she used her real first name and a real picture of herself.  I imagine that she did that so that it would be more personal than the blogs that were just a bunch of words.  She didn't publicize the blog, or intend it to be read by the general public, but, being a bit naïve in the ways of the Internet, she didn't make it private, either.

As with most teachers today, she encountered a lot of frustration in her job.  Many (not all) of the students were whiny, lazy, rude, obscene - even jerks.  Many of these students' parents facilitated this behavior, or even modeled it themselves.  And she didn't get a lot of support from the administration in dealing with these students.

You may think that this was just her point of view, or a direct result of her own bad attitude.  If you think that, then you don't know enough teachers.  Most students are delightful people, and The Future of Our Country - and their parents are great people, too.  But there are an awful lot of The Other Kind.  Public school administrators are a mixed bag, too.  Some are great, and some aren't - just like the management ranks in industry and everywhere else.

So this teacher, whom we'll call "Natalie" just to pick a name out of the air, vented her frustrations on her blog.  It wasn't every blog entry - only 24 out of 84, by her count.  She was very careful to never call anybody by name.  She never even identified the school or the location she was writing about.  Granted, she did use profanity and some non-PC language - but remember, her intended audience was her friends and family.

Well, she didn't know that somebody was eavesdropping.  Some of her students found her blog, and they read what she was saying about them - even though she never called them out by name, they recognized themselves from her descriptions of their behavior.

They could have reacted in many different ways.  What they chose to do was this:  the students publicized her blog, told their parents about it, and set up a number of hate pages on Facebook.  They and other students proceeded to dogpile on this teacher on those FB pages.  The parents, in their turn, encouraged (or tacitly approved of) their children's behavior, and also protested to the school administration.  The school and the administration, rather than stand behind their teacher, as they should have done, took the cowardly way out and suspended her.  All of this happened in a very short time, in February 2011.

Her suspension coincided nicely with the maternity leave she had previously scheduled.  Still, she knew what the administrators were doing.  Somehow the whole affair went "viral," as they say, and it hit the fan - er, the national news.

(Interjection:  she was quietly reinstated in August 2011 - again, the cowardly way out, since she had been so publicly suspended.  Not only that, but the administrators set things up at the school so that she cannot succeed this year, and then they hope they will have cause to fire her.  It's all explained in the two blogs referenced below.)

What happened next could not have been predicted by anybody.  Someone on Facebook saw what these schoolkids were doing to the teacher (basically, they were acting worse than anything she had accused them of), and he spoke up in her defense.  He got pasted just like she did.  Even worse, after he created a support page on FB to counter all the hate pages, many of the teacher's opponents, parents and students alike, piled onto the support page and continued vilifying the teacher - and her supporter.  They got ugly - uglier than anything they'd done so far.  But they didn't know who they were up against.

Most people, faced with this kind of opposition, would simply have shut down the support page and walked away from it.  Not this guy - he fought back.  The kids were dumb enough to use their real identities on FB, so he looked up their phone numbers, called their parents, and told them what their kids were doing.  He called the school and district administration and told them what the kids were doing.  He notified the colleges and universities these kids were applying to, and told them what the kids were doing.  When the local school administrators responded in a cowardly and hypocritical fashion, he called them out on it.  And he started a blog, where he documented every bit of this battle.

The battle has gotten ugly.  The kids keep escalating, and some of them have crossed the legal line, engaging in mail fraud and identity theft.  He has reported this to the authorities, and he continues to document everything on his blog.

Now, you may not agree with his tactics.  You may wonder, as so many other people do, why he doesn't just drop it and get on with his life.  But look at where he's coming from.  He saw someone getting bullied, he spoke up in their defense, he himself became a victim of the bullies, and now he's fighting back.  I'm not saying he's Charles Bronson, but he does take his Avenging Angel duty seriously.

The easiest way to end this battle would be for the students and parents to back down, apologize, and admit they were wrong.  That's all he wants.  But I'm afraid it's gone beyond that.  It's fascinating to watch it play out, albeit somewhat gruesome - like watching a wasp and a spider duel to the death.  It's definitely not G-rated.  If you're interested, here are links to the two non-Facebook blogs:
The teacher
The defender

Here are links to the news story:
http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/local&id=7950562
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/28/us-teacher-blog-idUSTRE76R6ON20110728

If you want to see the FB pages, you'll have to find them yourself.

Warning warning warning!  If you feel inclined to contribute to the discussion, resist that inclination.  You will viewed as a combatant, not merely a contributor, and you will instantly be drawn into the conflict.  And they're not fighting with just guns and knives.  It's better to stay behind the glass and just observe.

If you just can't hold back, and you have to say something, don't give your real name.  This is one case where it's acceptable to post as Anonymous.

UPDATE: For an update on this situation, read my new blog entry here . Basically, the school's plan to get rid of her backfired. Big time.

Three New Superpowers! Good or Bad? Please Comment.

My first entry at Zyzmog Galactic Headquarters talked about the conflict between my fascination for, and my rejection of, new technology. I'm often heard to exclaim, "I love living in this century!" There is a lot of exciting stuff going on, and I enjoy being both a spectator and a participant in the onrush of technology.

At this point in the 21st Century, technology has granted us three superpowers that didn't exist a short time ago. Many high school students can remember the days when they didn't have these superpowers. Let me list them for you.

The three superpowers in the early 21st Century are:
1. Infinite mobility.
2. Infinite access to information.
3. Infinite connectivity.

Infinite mobility means the ability to go anywhere in the world -- and even into orbit. If you have enough time (and money), you can travel anywhere you want. In the pages of Outside, National Geographic Explorer, Men's Journal and other magazines, you can read about fantastic voyages made, not by diplomats, politicians, soldiers or spies, but by ordinary people like you and me. You can watch TV stories about those voyages on the Travel, Discovery, and National Geographic channels.

Infinite mobility probably reached its peak in August 2001. It's still possible to travel anywhere; it's just more difficult now. Okay, North Korea is still next to impossible to visit. And some places are dangerous to travel to, but this superpower gives you the ability to travel there and get into trouble if you're stupid enough.

Infinite access to information means that nearly the entire assembled body of human knowledge is now at our fingertips. The popularization of the Internet, followed by the invention of the World Wide Web, and finally the introduction of search engines like Google and knowledge bases like Wikipedia, have done for modern man what Gutenberg's printing press did for mankind in 1440. For one thing, they have fundamentally changed the way I conduct both business and research. Even in closed societies like China and Iran, anybody with enough desire can get access to this universal fount of information. The One Laptop Per Child initiative is an effort to make this power not just infinite, but universal.

At first, we were worried that this infinite access to information would lead to infinite dissemination of falsehoods and lies. Granted, there's a lot of that out there, and there always will be, and now it's even more accessible than when its dissemination was confined to mimeographs and backwater printing houses. But the social experiment that is Wikipedia shows us that a public knowledge base can be self-correcting and self-policing, over time.

Some oppressive governments, pseudo-religious groups, and other entities that live on power and paranoia may try to squelch this infinite access to information, but they have not succeeded yet, and they will not succeed. The genie is out of the bottle.

Infinite connectivity: I'm certain there are still people on this planet without an email address. You're not one of them! Even more ubiquitous than an email address is a cellular phone. In some families, even children as young as 8 or 10 have a cellphone with all the, um, bells and whistles (sorry). In countries that cannot afford the infrastructure and costs associated with what we now call "land lines," it seems as if everyone has a cellular phone.

Last year, the new computer buzzword was cloud computing, and its herald was the netbook, a minimalist computer that keeps all of its programs and data in the "cloud" instead of on a local hard disk. The trend towards cloud computing continues this year.

Then there's the phenomenon known as social networking. One day social networking, though out of style, will define this decade the way shag carpet defined the 1970s and sideways ponytails defined the 1990s. Today, though, social networking provides an important service by allowing people to maintain and to renew social and family connections. Facebook was not the first social network, but it is currently the biggest fish in the pond. The pocket-sized social network known as Twitter was hot for a while in 2008-2010, but it seems to be fading fast, a flash in the fad pan. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

This infinite connectivity does have a dark side, though: people will always know where you are. Your cellular service provider can track your location, either through your phone's built-in GPS, or through triangulation of your phone's position relative to two or three nearby cellular towers. The GPS capability in the newest phones can be remotely activated without the user's knowledge. Radio navigation, or triangulation, has been used by sailors and aviators for 100 years.

Another facet of this dark side: in this digital age, the right software and the right Internet connections can allow anyone to track your every move in cyberspace. By assembling all of your comments on Facebook and on blogs, all of your private (or so you thought) emails, and all of your search patterns, they can write a story of your life so detailed, so graphic, and so honest that it will scare you. All of this increased connectivity means that if you're not careful, your words and your deeds, good or evil, can (and will) be shouted from the rooftops. In some ways, this infinite connectivity leads swiftly downhill to complete and total loss of privacy.

--

So I want to know: what do you think? Does your having these three superpowers make your life better, or worse? Alternatively, does humanity's possession of these three superpowers make the world better, or worse? Please tell me what you think, and why.

All comments on this blog are still subject to moderation. This is just to keep the kooks out. Most comments will be approved instantly, and the rest (as long as they don't sound like they're from kooks) will be approved within 24 hours. Please avoid foul language and personal attacks, and stick to the subject at hand.

Political extremism and lengthy partisan diatribes are frowned upon and may also be rejected by the moderator. (Whew! Have I become one of those "power and paranoia" entities? I hope not. I just want to encourage a civil and rational dialogue.)

E' il mio gioco; le regole, le faccio io.

Facebook and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Facebook wasn't the first popular social networking site. And it's certainly not the only one, as other sites jump on the social networking bandwagon. But FB has risen to the top of them all. To explain why would take another blog entry, or maybe even a book. For now, it's enough to say that the creators of FB did it right.

Each blog has a charter, a purpose, a raison d'être. MySpace trumpets itself (rightfully so) as a publicity vehicle for indie bands and indie musicians. Here's what FB has to say about itself: "Facebook gives people the power to share and makes the world more open and connected. Millions of people use Facebook everyday to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet."

That really is FB's goal and purpose. But there's something else happening in FB, something that fits into their charter, but was probably neither predicted nor intended by FB's creators.

People who moved clear across the continent after high school or college are reconnecting with their friends and their classmates from years ago. Friends who used to be nothing more than fond (and fading) memories are now a part of people's daily life again. Geographically dispersed families are finding FB to be a handy way to keep in instant touch with their relatives, instead of relying on letters, email and the telephone chain. FB allows you to find out instantly what your crazy uncle or your beloved niece is doing, and to congratulate them about it immediately, rather than waiting for the annual Christmas letter.

There's no need to wait for reunions anymore, because FB is the reunion. It's a giant class reunion, a giant family reunion, and a tender reunion for old friends who think about each other every day. even if they haven't gotten together for years.

The FB goal statement quoted above makes it clear that FB's creators intended it to be a way to keep the present from becoming the past. However, I don't think they expected that FB would allow users to reach way back into the past and pull it forward, into the present. That's an unintended consequence of FB.

Along with my childhood friends, my former students, my extended family and all of the other friends I have joyfully reunited with, I offer my thanks to the creators of Facebook. They will never know the extent of the good that they have done in the world.