Beating a path through the digital wilderness

Linking to simpler times

I had a home for several years in Ashland County, Ohio, home to one of the largest concentrations of Amish in the country. Known for their primitive ways and steadfast disconnect from the “English” world, the Amish lived up to their reputation in Ohio.

For the most part, anyway.

My wife Anne made an avocation of keeping one particular basket-making family in business the first year or two with her Christmas gift buys, and she got to know the 30-something Andy – already the father of eight –- as a customer.

Separate from the world

When Anne met this Amish farmer, she told him I was a journalist and he wasn’t quite sure what that was. Join the club, Andy. But when Anne mentioned I covered the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, he drew a total blank. Then she asked him if he knew of the 9/11 bombings. He scratched his head and said that, yes, he thought he had heard something about an explosion.

It came as no surprise that this member of a nationwide Christian community numbering about 225,000 keeps himself separate from the world outside. Just how separate, however, was a surprise in a world where 9/11 is one of the widest-known events in history.

And it came as a real surprise to discover that Andy was using the Internet to sell those baskets. Since this particular community of Amish could not have electricity, they had to use some non-Amish computers from neighboring “English” families.

One way or another, however, their baskets and other crafts found their way to web sites, and they purchased some of their raw materials via the same Web.

Links to the past

I was thinking about that this week when I was at the mall buying some gifts. Thinking about the Internet, which brings us so many mind-blowing applications, also can make it easier for us to find simple, homemade, American goods.

A major web site for these kinds of products is Lehmans. In business for 55 years, Lehmans notes it is in business “to serve the local Amish and others without electricity. The Kidron, Ohio., company ships old-fashioned, high-quality merchandise all of the world.”

Says proprietor J.E. Lehman, “My idea was to preserve the past for future generations. My goal has always been to provide authentic historical products to those looking for a simpler way of life.”

A shop for Amish

Lehman’s is a kind of general store for products made and used by the Amish and their somewhat more progressive cousins, the Mennonites.  Its departments include appliances, books, home goods, natural goods, stoves, farm tools, toys, and even water.  Under this last department are things like buckets, heaters, and pumps.

Within the Natural Goods Department can be found things like, “A Book for Midwives,” a breathing hand washer (“Plunge up and down to force soap and water through clothes and linens.”), high-density heating bricks, and a supply of 20 Mule Team Borax household cleaner.

Pricey stuff

In Appliances, you can find an artisan wood-burning cook stove (for a healthy $6,295) or a 15 cubit foot gas refrigerator for $1,880.

A common myth is that the Amish are poor, but just because they live plainly doesn’t mean they don’t have money. Andy once told us he turned down a $2,000 for one of his cows.

Over in Personal Care is a book on “Basic Soap Making,” and a set of six arthritis heated hand balls in a bag (“These air-activated balls slowly heat up to a comfortable warmth, providing hours of relief from the pain of arthritis and other ailments.”).  You can also find a set of canning jar soap pump lids (“turn your new or old jars into practical, pretty soap or lotion dispensers…”), and – of course – lots of suspenders.

Simple magic

In the same department you can find a therapeutic corn pillow, a jar of carbolized mutton tallow (“recommended for use on cold sores and chapped hands…”), or a bottle of Humphrey’s Original Witch Hazel.

In the Farm Tools Department you can find a Sno Wovel Snow Shovel, billed as “The world’s safest snow shovel – the snow shovel on a wheel.” This device allows you to roll the shovel along on its 33” diameter wheel, then lift to throw the snow anywhere you want. “Outperforms snow blowers, without the expense, fumes, maintenance or noise.”

An eBay of handmade goods

Another site I recently discovered is Etsy, which opens up a huge world of handmade products. It’s a virtual eBay of classic handmade — many American — goods, including – no surprise – Amish products.

What is more Amish than quilts, and you can find many on Etsy, including one from the 1800s in a folk art pattern that sells for $1,200. Another,  featuring “traditional ocean waves,” and a “black hole design” in the middle, goes for only $450.

Global buyers

Etsy says of itself, “Our mission is to enable people to make a living making things, and to reconnect makers with buyers. The Etsy community spans the globe with buyers and sellers coming from more than 150 countries. Etsy sellers number in the hundreds of thousands.”

Another large site featuring Amish products is Amish Trader Country. This web site notes, “Amish Trader Distribution started out working directly with Amish craftsmen and distributing their high quality handcrafted products directly to store owners. “

The company did away with the retailer or middleman, selling from its “cash and carry warehouse” and shipping department. The Amish Trader Distribution warehouse is in Paradise, Pennsylvania.

Amish Trader

Amish Trader features many pieces of finely crafted wood products ranging from a large wood stove cover to a tiny hanging wooden heart. Other departments in the store are candles, craft parts, inside iron, lanterns, outside iron, watering cans, signs,  and rusty items (for decorative purposes).

Users must first log in to see the prices of the Amish Trader items.

If you’re serious about looking for some Amish-made wood furniture, a great spot is the Amish Oak Furniture Co. in Loudonville, Ohio, complete with its own catalogue web site. I’ve been in this store several times, and it is amazing to see how good Amish craftsmanship can be.

A world of wood

This stuff isn’t cheap, but you can find virtually any kind of bed, chest, bookcase, breakfront, or storage cabinet you could imagine. If it’s made of wood and made by Amish hands, it’s probably here.

When we think of the Internet, we usually think about high-tech products and services, so it’s refreshing to know that this same Web can take us back to simpler times and handmade goods.

Hmmm…using the new to connect to the old … could be some new mobile apps coming for those Droids or iPhones that take us back to the farm instead of deeper into the virtual unknown.

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The road not taken

Last year I faced one of those dreaded administrative tasks that occasionally confronts academic department chairs: Going to a remote Austrian castle to do a site check on one of our summer programs.

Tough job, but you know the saying: When the going gets tough …  So of course I got going. But the last couple hundred kilometers were via rental car, and I was driving in a country I’d only visited once before in my life.

Enter my first encounter with a dashboard GPS unit, a Tom Tom. They come as a routine upgrade with rentals now, and they are well worth the extra five bucks a day.

Meet Sheila

I was impressed with the sultry-sounding Sheila, which is what I came to call my GPS in Austria because she sounded so much like, well, that’s a different story.

Over the past few years, I have experimented with two digital communication devices that I swore would never work. One was an invisible fence we installed to corral our menagerie of dogs. No way Juggler, our Greyhound, would ever let that signal stop him, I insisted.

But it did, right in his bony tracks.

We’re talking Remote

The other was this GPS unit, Sheila, whose task was to take me from Munich, Germany, to a castle that I could hardly see when I was right on top of it in the forested Austrian Alps.

But that’s exactly what Sheila did, taking me right up to the moat and across through the front gate and into the car park.

It was not an easy job. I mean, if you’ve done much driving in Europe, you are familiar with the spider web of small quaint villages, which come equipped with at least a few roundabouts with multiple entry and exit points that can spin you out to different countries. Sheila got me in an out of each circle at exactly the right point.

A broken vow

“I will never argue again with a woman giving me directions,”I remember thinking, as I pulled into the courtyard of this 15^th Century schloss.

That resolve didn’t last long. A couple weeks ago I found myself striking up an argument with the as-yet unnamed GPS (another female voice) which came as part of the navigation package in my new Sonata. This time I knew where I was going; had been there several times before, and it was only an hour away from home.

So when the GPS routed me a few miles south to an outer loop of Indianapolis, only to tell me to turn around and head the few miles back north to my destination, I thought this is stupid.

Driving me crazy

In fact, I told her so. Multiple times. Over in the passenger seat, Anne looked at me like I was a guy debating his dashboard which, of course, I was. So I went my own way. (I live by that line from the classic “Shane,” where the title character drawls, “I’d like it to be my idea.”)

I turned west on a road that would take me directly where I wanted to go rather than doing the sweeping southern u-turn.

Should have listened to the womanly advice coming frm the GPS. The road definitely was straight, but it was also full of stop lights. About 22, to be exact. And it was Saturday, and it was crowded, and I was wrong.  For the return route, I chose her way.

I’m sold

I’m a believer now in the value of these global positioning systems and may even start carrying one on me to navigate my way around the crowded malls during December. But wait: I already have one in my Droid phone which is great at getting me around the Web and the world, but sometimes not as great as a tin can and a string at being a telephone.

Before putting this GPS chat to bed, I should say I’ve been holding off on naming my new GPS voice because it doesn’t have the familiar ring that Sheila did. I’ve also learned that I can customize my GPS to convey directions in voices that are indeed familiar.

Traveling with celebs

We’re talking celebrity voices here, and a company called Navtones – one of several start-ups who have hit this niche – offers the following selections with prices to match the magnetism of the celeb. For example, for $12.95 you can have Sex and the City’s Kim Cattrall route you to the cross-town sweet shop  or, for only $6.95, have a high-mileage David Hasselhoff steer you into a bad episode of Dancing With the Stars.

Move over Hoff

Another celeb voice is KITT, who once took the supporting actor role to The Hoff in Knight Rider. KITT was  the black Pontiac TransAm in the 80s TV show. Its enigmatic voice (think Hal, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey) can power up all your systems in ways different than Kim Cattrall could, and for the same $12.95.

Sorry Hoff. Your 28-year-old car, which GM has stopped making, now appears more popular than you.

Even MTV’s reluctant cult icon, Daria, costs more than Hasselhoff, driving you back to Lawndale for $9.95.

Personally, I’m holding out for another icon: Clint Eastwood. I wouldn’t mind having him steer me through traffic, although I fear he might lead me into a tricky Austrian roundabout only to abandon me with his famous exit line, “OK. Do ya feel lucky, Punk? Well? Do you?”

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A Web of Violence

Like a lot of young university researchers, I once placed almost total confidence in numbers as the basis of knowledge.

If a research study were done properly, the variables were all brought under control, the observations all reduced to numbers and those digits were crunched properly, then the results formed a stronger basis for knowledge than anything else on the planet.

Strongest results?

Those results were stronger than anecdotal evidence, stronger than what your mom or dad told you, stronger than common sense. In fact, a researcher once convinced me common sense didn’t even exist. I believed it until a good friend — herself a scientist — pointed out one day that everytime I came in from across a muddy yard, my shoes would leave tracks on the carpet. So take off your shoes.

That, she rightly noted, is common sense.

Since then, I’ve had new respect for that concept. I still place value in well-executed quantitative studies, but I also place a lot of value in common sense.

Media Violence

For example, media researchers will often tell you there is no body of research that proves violence on the Internet, television, video games, or in the movies leads to real-life violence. If young Edgar witnesses a spate of bodies dropping in prime time, it doesn’t follow that he is going to become the next Jeffrey Dahmer. But it is also true that the two young Colorado shooters who left 12 bodies in their bloody shooting rampage at Columbine High School were extremely heavy players of Internet games.

New York Daily News health advice columnist Dr. Dave Moore recently told a reader that  the gaming  habits of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were contributors to their bloody Columbine act, and explained why their favorite game of “Doom” was so dangerous. Doom was the hottest 3D action game of the time, launched in 1993 and named video game of the year in 1994 by PC Gamer and Computer Gaming World.

Video Game Addiction

Still, Dr. Moore told the advice-seeker, “You, and unfortunately parents, are clueless about what creates the video game addiction. What separates Doom from other video games and toys is one big point. They are deliberately programmed to make the player a ‘first person shooter’. You are not controlling a character, YOU ARE the character. Parents can see that transformation start in their video gaming kids – what addiction specialists call negative developmental changes.”

A quantitative researcher would say there were other variables involved with Klebold and Harris that would not be found in an across-the-board sample of teenagers. That’s true, but there are still a healthy number of kids out there with the unhealthy tendencies and vulnerability of these two, waiting to be triggered by mediated violence. Communication researchers have identified what they call an Aggression Stimulus Theory or Aggressive-cue Theory that shows the media violence can prepare someone — condition him or her — to act violently.

A Literal Defense

On the other side are defenders of the video game, Doom, now in its third iteration. This observation comes from a site called Old.doom.com: Choosing to take a more literal  approach to the connection between the features of Doom and Columbine,  the unnamed writer says:

“I personally believe that Doom had nothing to do with the Columbine High School attack.  I seriously doubt that Kelly Fleming was running at the shooters hurling fireballs from her hand when she was shot or that Corey DePooter was chrarging them with a shotgun. In Doom, Hell Knights don’t comfort each other under the table crying. Humans have been killing each other since the beginning  our of existence, before Doom was ever around. Harris and Klebold were going to shoot up their school no matter what.”

Good News, Bad News

Some parents might breathe a sign of relief to discover that heavy television viewing has decreased somewhat among teens, and that some video stores are having trouble keeping the doors open because of lower sales. The bad news, of course, is that young people are flocking to the Internet instead to get their kicks — literally when it comes to violent online video games. So the influence that may have helped propel Dylan and Eric is still there; it has just changed platforms.

Check These Out

If you want to attach some weight to statistics, try these from the Web site, Enough is Enough:

* American teens are more wired now than ever before. According to our latest survey, 93 percent of all Americans between 12 and 17 years old use the internet. In 2004, 87 percent were internet users, and in 2000, 73 percent of teens went online.

* 20 percent of teens have engaged in cyberbullying behaviors, including posting mean or hurtful information or embarrassing pictures, spreading rumors, publicizing private communications, sending anonymous e-mails or cyberpranking someone.

* 48 percent of K-1st reported viewing online content that made them feel uncomfortable, of which 72 percent reported the experience to a grownup, meaning that one in four children did not.

* 63 percent of teens said they know how to hide what they do online from their parents.

* 65 percent of high school students admit to unsafe, inappropriate, or illegal activities online

And the prevalence of Internet gaming?

* The most common recreational activities young people engage in on the computer are playing games and communicating through instant messaging.

Internet Violence

Here’s what the site, Teen Violence Statistics says about internet violence, its methods and influence:

“While most people think of teen violence occurring at school or in the teens’ neighborhoods, some teen violence occurs or starts on the Internet. The Internet can both encourage and prevent teen violence, depending on who pays attention or speaks up.”

And the ways that can occur? The same Web site notes:

Teen Internet violence and cyberthreats can occur in many ways. A teen may use the internet to:

• Directly threaten to hurt someone
• Indirectly threaten someone, like saying, “You’d better watch out at school tomorrow”
• Manipulate someone by threatening to hurt their loved ones
• Write about hurting him or herself, wanting to end it all, or feeling that life isn’t worth living
• Read or publish hateful information about a certain person or group of people
• Talk about wanting to hurt or kill other people
• View or post threatening pictures, songs, videos, or other forms of media
• Play games that encourage violence. Studies have found connections between playing violent computer games and acting violently toward other people.
• Visit web sites about violence or self harm
• Engage in cyberbullying

The Best Math

As I think about it, probably the best means of gaining knowledge about issues like this is to combine statistics and common sense. When it comes to the dysfunctional aspects of Web addiction, that’s when the numbers really add up.

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A new kind of memory

Indelible memories of those innocent years of grade school, awkward years of junior high, the posturing years of high school, and the challenging years of college are found between the covers of your old yearbooks.

You remember: those are the tomes filling that 60-pound box you’ve been hauling around all your life, transferring unopened from one attic the next, defying you to actually set them out on the curb on trash day.

The rituals

One of the annual rituals of school days was the yearbook signing when you passed the books around to sign and be signed, getting back the most intimate comments from people you didn’t even know you knew, and getting rather bland sentiments from friends you thought were intimates.

Later, as a parent, you were eager to see the book that set you back $25 or more, only to find your Valicia had forgotten to have her class mug shot taken and was seen only once in the book in the blurry background of a pep rally shot.

And, of course, you hoped if young Terrence were voted something like “Most Likely to Succeed,” that he wouldn’t wind up disappointing American society and becoming a Charles Manson later in life.

Economic victims

So school yearbooks can be anxiety-provoking, but they can also be a lot of fun. Sadly, however, yearbooks are also among the victims of shrinking school and family economies. The good news is that help has arrived from the digital era of communications, which we are calling the Virtual Unknown.

At the university where I teach, Indiana’s Ball State, the award-winning Orient yearbook has been gone for several years now. At my former university, California’s Azusa Pacific, the Student Government Association would like it dropped and for student money to go elsewhere. Only a president nostalgic for a past era, is keeping it alive.

For awhile, many schools tried shifting from the expensive hard-cover books to video yearbooks. Some still are using that and publishing books digitally on CDs or DVDs, choosing to forego printed yearbooks altogether. The thought is that videos, sights, and sounds are better — and save more trees — than printed books.

But a lot of schools are taking digital to another level and letting students customize their own books.

Print on demand

Some of these schools, like the Chahta-Ima Elementary School in suburban New Orleans, are going to a new kind of print-on-demand yearbook to save costs. Companies like TreeRing Corp. , based in

Redwood City, California, use Internet-based technology that saves schools money by letting them print only as many copies as needed while letting a wider group of students, faculty and parents collaborate in the process.

Other companies offering these print-on-demand services include ones like Lulu, Ziblio, and Lifetouch.

Casey Gleason, principal of Chahta-Ima told the San Francisco Chronicle, “We wanted the school to be able to have a yearbook for its historical significance,” said Gleason, whose school has served several generations in Lacombe, La. “We wanted to do it at a reasonable cost, but not sacrifice instructional funds for the school.”

Online publishing

TreeRing is a start-up company featuring a publishing model that is catching on in the book industry of printing only the number of books needed by a customer.

It’s too early tell if this model will challenge the traditional school yearbook market, in which publishing companies like Taylor and Jostens dominate. But with more schools abandoning traditional yearbooks, it could.

The publishing of the yearbooks is done entirely online, with students, faculty, and parents able to contribute elements to the book. The class mug-shot pages and student organization pages remain pretty standard, but much of the rest of the book uses the “crowdsourcing” technique of having individuals upload pictures of themselves involved in school or family activities to other pages, for which templates are provided. They can even pop in pictures of news or cultural events during the year that were meaningful for them.

Personalized books

The result is a kind of personalized yearbook that insures your kid doesn’t have to lay out money to buy a book in which he/she is only pictured once or twice. So each book may be somewhat different from the next, but you pay for only your personalized book; not someone else’s. Another plus is that TreeRing pledges to plant one tree for every yearbook printed.

Very Californian and very cool.

No unsold books

It’s also cool for the schools and their budgets, because instead of being stuck with a couple thousand dollars of unsold books at the end of the year, there are no unsold books because a book doesn’t get printed by TreeRing until they receive payment from the student or family. The books are actually printed by an Indiana company contracted by TreeRing. Most of them are done in soft cover and costs can vary from roughly $10 to $15 each, which is cheaper than most traditional hard-cover yearbooks.

With these new publishing options available, yearbooks will hopefully be around for many years to come.

A silent prayer

But you still hope that “most likely to succeed” will refer to your young Terrence doing well in an endeavor that is considered legal and, who knows, maybe even ethical.

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Stealing made easy

When I was starting out in the newspaper business (remember that medium? he asked wistfully), I wrote a lot of obits as new reporters often do. One of the earliest warnings I remember receiving from readers was that, if you list the street address of the deceased and give the time and day of the funeral, you are alerting potential burglars to the presence of an empty house.

That’s the reason some newspapers don’t list those street addresses and it’s why families of the deceased ask a friend to watch the house while they are gone to the last rites.

I was thinking about that this morning when a segment of NBC’s Today show caught my eye and ear. It concerned yet another problem area of self-disclosing too much personal information (what I call living out loud) on Twitter, Facebook, or Foursquare. The latter is the location-based social network where players use their mobile devices to report their presence at a particular spot on a map for others to see. The more you visit certain places, the more points you stack up, etc., etc.

Great. So now you not only can bore others with what you are doing; you can show them where you’re doing it.

Duhh …

That raise any red flags to you?

Apparently it has to a lot of thieves, according to Amy Roebuck’s report on Today wherein she profiled a young couple who permanently loaned two laptops and a digital flatscreen TV to house burglars who knew they weren’t home. And how did they know that? Because one of them, caught on a home security videocam, turned out to be a FB friend of one victim and had seen her post about where she and her hubbie were headed on – ironically – the day her house was to be burgled.

An obvious question

The obvious question is why don’t social networkers choose their FB friends more carefully if they’re going to post that kind of information. The reality is that most of us have a lot of “friends” on that site whom we don’t really know that well.

When you see users whose pages boast more than 1,000 friends, you get the idea.

One reformed burglar, 35-year-old Richard Taylor, told the British Web site, Parental Control, how thieves use Twitter and Facebook in the UK to plan break-ins.

“I’ve seen lots of people who post a status update about being excited that they’re going away to Spain,” Taylor said. “But if you have 900 Facebook friends, how many do you really know? You might recognise their name from school but do you also know all their friends who could also see your updates?

Hello?

“People put all kinds of information on Facebook including their address and mobile number. A burglar just has to call your mobile and if there’s an international ring tone they know you are away. These days everyone is Twitter-mad, I use it myself. But putting information that anyone can see on the internet leaves you vulnerable to a break-in. ”

As is usually the case, where there is an issue like this occurring on social networks, there is an entire Web site or sites that are launched to address, solve, or sometimes exploit the situation. Sounding a warning against helping thieves burgle your home is one such site called, plainly enough, Please Rob Me .

What this site does – or rather used to do because it has stopped – was to stream data from Foursquare, showing how many homes are left unattended after their residents have announced their plans to be elsewhere. The tagline of the site is, “Raising awareness about over-sharing.” Apparently someone felt Please Rob Me was oversharing, too, however, and it has discontinued running those lists of unattended places.

The out-of-town crier

The site picked up the information when the Foursquare disclosures were posted by users to Twitter, making it totally available to anyone on the planet with access to the Internet.

Now the Please Rob Me home page says, “We are satisfied with the attention we’ve gotten for an issue that we deeply care about … Currently we’re looking through the emails we’ve received regarding the future of the website. As soon

as we’ve thought of a suitable way to continue, you’ll find it right here. We’re not showing the Twitter messages anymore.”

One could make a strong case that this site, which launched just last February, was exacerbating the problem caused by oversharing on the social networks. That may well be the reason it is looking to reinvent itself. But Please Rob Me did succeed in getting the attention of the mainstream media, as witnessed by this morning’s NBC broadcast segment.  There is value in that.

Nice doggie

As for me, my Facebook and Twitter messages announce that I’m always home, I never go anwhere, and my 145-pound Bullmastiff is a light sleeper on his bed just inside the back door.

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Dave & Biz chat about Twitter

In our spotlight-crazy age, it’s hard to imagine an individual relatively unknown to that spotlight engaging an audience as much as a celebrity. But that’s what happened Friday night on the Indiana campus of Ball State University.

The relative unknown was Biz Stone, not exactly a household name but who nonetheless is co-founder and creative director  of a Web 2.0 enterprise with a name you may have heard of: Twitter.

The celebrity was David Letterman.

An intimate chat
Ball State’s most famous alum and the boyish-looking Stone were on campus to have an intimate conversation (with some 3,500 students, faculty, and staff listening in) about the impact that the three-year-old Twitter and the rest of the social media are having on all of us. The event was part of the Late Night entertainer-funded program called the David Letterman Distinguished Professional Lecture and Workshop Series.

“We had a vision of a flock of birds grouped around a bird in flight,” Stone, 36, said of his start-up venture Twitter.  If you’ve wondered why the Twitter logo is a bird, that’s the reason. It’s an image that mirrors the human essence of that interactive service.

Boredom pays off
“I was working on a different startup at Google,” Stone explained. “I was getting a little bored and we took two weeks off to work on something else.”

That was in 2006, and that something-else evolved into Twitter and grew out of Stone’s focus interest in combining texting into an interactive Web service.  Stone, together with friends Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams, worked on the prototype for nine months and realized they were having a lot of fun doing it, so they must be on the right track.

Today Twitter has some 160 million users around the world, and its owners turned down a purchase offer of $500 million for it last year. Stone himself was named one of Vanity Fair’s 10 most influential people and one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential.

A site about nothing?
Not bad for the co-founder of a service that many discount as meaningless and who are confounded about its popularity. Even Stone acknowledges that.

“Twitter has been called the Seinfeld of the Internet,” Stone said, referring to the immensely popular TV series of the 90s with little plot structure but great characterizations. “It’s about nothing. Right on!”

About nothing? Really? If so, then how do you explain Stone’s assertion about how helpful it has been to people around the world?

Not about technology
“Twitter is not about a triumph of technology,” Stone said. “It’s a triumph of humanity.” He told Letterman, “In Silicon Valley there is this thinking that technology is a solution to all our problems. But it’s not. It really has to do with what people are going to do with technology.”

Stone added meat to that appetizer by noting that, “People have used Twitter in ways we never anticipated.” For example:

•    In the earthquake that rocked Haiti, the only communication many people had with victims in that country, and vice versa, was through Twitter. It helped greatly in getting news in and out of the island nation about who was alive, who was missing, who was dead, and what was needed.
•    People from around the world were tweeting messages like, “Keep hope alive,” to the victims in the devastated areas.
•    The same has been true with the more recent flooding of Pakistan.
•    Last fall, when the world was celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Germans established a “Twitter Wall” where people from around the world could post tweets about other walls of oppression that still need to fall. Many Chinese were the first to post such Tweets, before the Chinese government blocked access by their people to that site.
•    Some of the 2008 presidential debates incorporated real-time tweets from the public in a crawl along the bottom of the screen, showing what America was thinking about the give-and-take of the candidates.

When Twitter is used to aid disaster victims, it may be showing its most valuable feature, Stone believes.

“We get in touch with our empathy … and think of ourselves as global citizens who care about others,” he said.

Mixed opinions
Nevertheless, the amount of time people spend on Twitter on a day-to-day basis causes many critics to wonder if all the short blurbs about who is doing what when, is really necessary or just a waste of time.

In his on-stage conversation with Stone, Letterman admitted he does not tweet, nor is he sure he understands why he should.

“I would be tweeting but I feel I don’t have anything to say,” Letterman said. “Moreover, why should I care that Justin Bieber is at the 7-Eleven right now?”

Find your own interest
Stone replied that people don’t need to tweet to get value out of Twitter. He suggested using it to get the information that is relevant to you. If you’re interested in baseball or, more specifically, the Red Sox, dig out those tweets to see what people have to say about your team.

“Twitter is not a social network,” Stone said. “It’s an information network.”

Public information
Stone also surprised the audience by noting that 90 percent of all tweets are accessible by the public and that all tweets are archived by the Library of Congress. Other stats he revealed are that 78 percent of all Twitter usage is through Twitter.com, while the other 22 percent come through mobile phone usage. In fact, if you’ve ever wondered why Twitter messages are kept to 140 characters, it is to keep it within the 160-character maximum length of cell phone text messages, allowing for the adding of a username.

Although Letterman couldn’t resist being Dave – he once noted he was wearing socks he had borrowed from the husband of BSU President Jo Ann Gora  and took them off on-stage at the end of the program – he did turn serious in displaying his interest over Twitter.

Damage to language?
One of his more serious questions to Stone was asking whether such heavy usage of Twitter would affect people’s use of the English language and subtract for their ability to write well.

Stone responded, “When you’re given less to work with, you often have to be more creative.” He noted that Twitter forces users to come to the point and be concise in their writing. He also noted that many people provide links in their tweets to longer-form messages.

No boredom here
As interesting as the on-stage conversation was, however, it was just as fascinating to watch how the audience of young people responded. It is rare that a speaker event on campus doesn’t result in scattered groups of students talking among themselves and seeing several of them get bored and leave before the end.

But few did that on Friday night, and the silence during the program and standing ovation welcoming Stone and Letterman to the stage showed the degree of interest college students have in the social media phenomenon.

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Word games that spell trouble

As a writer, I often find it easier to communicate via the written word than orally, so I tend to write long. I want to be sure my meaning comes through as I plan it. That works sometimes, and sometimes it doesn’t. But when I give thought to an e-mail and produce one that runs a few paragraphs, then get back a quick one-liner in response, I wonder, What’s up with that? Isn’t this guy treating my thoughts seriously? Is he angry with me for some reason? Or am I just being paranoid?

Apparently others are in the same boat, too. A few months ago I posted an entry that drew some discussion about the shortcomings of e-mails, text messages, and Facebook messages in conveying true meanings of the senders. I cautioned against trying to resolve disputes via e-mails, for example, because of this very problem.

So I wasn’t too surprised this week when I picked up a copy of the Ball State Daily News and found an interesting, albeit disturbing article from Kelly Dickey, about how serious electronic messaging can be.

Lost in translation

Entitled, “Conversations being lost in translation,” the article quoted students and counselors about the damaging effect these kinds of messages can have on individuals.

For example, one victims advocate noted: “From what I’ve seen and experienced, technology can be a wonderful resource to connect but, on the flip side, it can be a communication gap. If you’re texting back and forth via e-mail and Facebook, (the other person) may not know how to take what you’re saying.”

A loss of humanity

Therein lies the rub. The victims advocate, Michele Cole, said a decrease in human connection takes place when two people communicate through technology, and it can definitely have negative effects on relationships.  One reason is the oft-stated fact that most electronic communication is devoid of that all-important nonverbal communication.

Cole continued that, in the Ball State University Counseling Center, “We strive for better communication with partners and conduct programming on healthy relationships. We focus on interaction. The nonverbals are such a large component of our everyday communication that, if you’re trying to just text back, and forth there’s that communication gap.

You don’t have to have counseling credentials to recognize the problem. Sophomore speech pathology major Laura Albers sees it, too.

A disconnect

“There’s a disconnect, and it’s just going to get worse,” Albers said. “You can be in a room with your friends, and there’s no point being there because they just text other people.”

Another student, Freshman Jordan Oppelt said she’s bothered by this, too.

“When that happens I just think, ‘What? You don’t want to hang out with me? I’m not good enough?” she said.

Another vexing issue concerning the flood of Facebook and Twitter communications is the public exposure or private matters involving the sender or other individuals. This comes under the heading of, “When does interpersonal communication become mass communication? When it goes on Facebook or Twitter.”

Domino effect

The domino effect of Facebook message distribution thrusts a knife into the heart of one-on-one messaging. There is an illusion that you are only communicating to a few close friends about yourself or someone else, but the audience is often much larger than you anticipate.

Even a simple act by one person of expressing her love for a guy she’s dating, can be very embarrassing for the guy if she hasn’t asked him first if it’s okay that she posts that message on Facebook. Suppose he doesn’t feel the same way but just hasn’t told her yet? Or suppose she hasn’t even told him yet, but thought it would be less stressful on her to pop it onto his Facebook page rather than telling him face to face?

Before Facebook, this act would be like hiring a pilot and his plane to trail a huge banner across the sky over the neighborhood where the guy lives.

False security

Michele Cole of Ball State notes a lot of people assume a false sense of security when they send messages via text on or on Facebook.

“It goes back to, ‘I would text it but wouldn’t say it to your face.’ You get that false sense of courage.”

I’ve been teaching at the university level for many years, and it has been interesting to watch the evolution of students’ feelings regarding their privacy. As late as a year or two ago, many of my students didn’t seem to care if they were abandoning their privacy by posting private facts about themselves or others on the social media.

But lately I’ve been seeing the opposite: more and more students are thinking less and less about rushing onto Facebook with a revealing personal message unless they convince themselves they know who is receiving that message.

And that, by the way, is harder and harder for any of us to control in this age of the virtual unknown.

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A tail of rescue

A university colleague once suggested that my wife Anne and I might find therapeutic help by starting a 12-step recovery group called Pets Anonymous. That was the time when we had just added a fourth foster dog to our breed brood, along with a cat and another stray dog who took to camping out in our garage. Ray thought maybe we were falling into a pet addiction profile?

Over the past 10 years, we have been a way station for Golden Retrievers, Labs, Goldendoodles, Labradoodles, a Chow, several Greyhounds (very underrated by many as pets), and one strange low-body beagle mongrel we called “Mr. Stubblefield” who loved me, hated everyone else, and often got inexplicably mad at his right rear foot. He was the garage dog who couldn’t decide whether to stay or go.

The Web Connection

The connection between all these animals and the Web 2.0 media is that most of them came our way through online portals. Just about every animal rescue group has taken to the Web to find permanent or foster homes for the available animals. A very brief, partial listing of these sites includes:

• www.theanimalrescuesite.com
• www.adoptapet.com
• www.bestbriends.org
• www.puppysites.com
• www.akcorg/vreeds/rescue
• www.thepetrescue.com
• www.animalrescueinc.org
• www.purebredcatbreedrescue.org
• www.dogrescue.org
• www.animalleague.org
• www.nextdaypets.com
• www.petfinder.com

There is even a site for those wanting to rescue older dogs (www.srdogs.com) and several for those wanting to rescue horses like www.indianahorserescue.com. Then of course there are the many breed-specific sites like the Greyhound site of www.fastfriends.org.

A rescue database

To show you how these rescue sites work, let’s take a look at one of the largest and most well-known: Petfinder.com, or the last one on the above bulleted list. This outfit, which is really a kind of Grand Central Station for individual adoption agencies, is the virtual home of some 350,000 dogs, cats, horses, rabbits, reptiles, pigs, and other barnyard animals.

Petfinder is a Discovery Communications company, the same outfit that brings us the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, TLC, Planet Green, etc. Sounds like a neat group to work for if you’re into animals, or exploring/saving the planet.  Petfinder says of itself the following:

“Petfinder is an online, searchable database of animals who need homes. It is also a directory of more than 13,000 animal shelters and adoption organizations across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Organizations maintain their own home pages and available-pet databases.”

The folks at Petfinder and the myriad of other individual adoption sites know that pet lovers have become accustomed to using the Web to find pets that best match their needs. Online searches allow them to access an individual shelter’s Web page and find out what kind of pets they have, what the rules of adoption are, whether they are no-kill shelters, how they take care of their animals, etc., etc.

Petfinder is made up of animal-care professionals and everyday animal-lovers who volunteer for local and national animal welfare organizations and groups. Together, these people maintain active and accurate homeless pet lists, and Petfinder acts as a central database for most of these organizations. It is very much like a one-stop shopping mall for pets online.

Gotta read this one

I’ll close out with the tale of one rescued tail, this one attached to a fawn-and-white Whippet named Dapper

who was jettisoned to the ASPCA because he was ill and his owner didn’t take the time to find out what exactly was wrong. An employee took interest in the dog, however, had him examined and the problem turned out to be minimal. The result? The loving owner writes:

“As the saying toes, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. What a gem! Dapper was easily assimilated into my furry family of one Italian Greyhound and three cats – ass rescues. He aced his obedience class and went on to a career as a therapy dog, working with mentally challenged adults and nursing home residents. However, his most important work was with young men and women dying from AIDS-related illnesses. His story of being cast out because of an illness struck home with many. By empathizing with a skinny, old Whippet, they could finally express their own pain and anger.” (http://www.petfinder.com/before-pet-adoption/tale-dapper-dog.html)

What else is there to say other than, “Wow!” Or maybe even (grrrr…)  “Bow Wow?”

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Brave New World 2.0h!

“The social media is the biggest change in society since the industrial revolution,” proclaims an eye-popping video posted recently on YouTube.

After reading the support for this claim, I am inclined to agree. And, like a lot of you, I’m wondering where these changes will lead us in the future.

We’re talking about media rituals here, or any lifestyle habit we succumb to that is created and/or influenced by the media.

Turn the radio on

For example, radio altered the lives of most Americans when it began offering nightly entertainment and news programming. Families who had previously spent the evenings talking or reading, came to spend them clustered around the big furniture cabinet spewing out the comedy of Fibber McGee and Molly or the daring adventures of The Shadow.

Television did the same thing, as did the Internet, and the social media of Facebook, twitter, flickr, YouTube, Myspace, et al, are doing the same thing now.

Marshalling a thought

The late media guru Marshall McLuhan would be telling us from the Other Side, “I told you so! The medium is the message!”

And that brings me back to this YouTube video produced by a futurist named Erik Qualman who has written a book called “Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business.” It’s found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8&feature=related

Qualman is a 38-year-old Michigan native who graduated in business from Michigan State University, where he played basketball, and then got an MBA from the University of Texas. He is now global vice president of Digital Marketing for EF Education, headquartered in Lucerne, Switzerland, and is a professor of digital marketing for Hult International Business School.

As a columnist and blogger for Search Engine Watch and ClickZ Magazine, he spends a lot of time doing essentially what I do with this blog, only he gets paid more for it. Amazing what an MBA will do for you.

Fasten your seatbelt

Here are a few boldface observations Mr. Qualman makes about  our world and the way social media are changing our lives. Because I can’t help myself, I’ve added a comment to each of his insights. If you’re not sitting down, perhaps now would be a good time to do so.

•    Over 50 percent of the world’s population is under 30. For those of us toward the other end of the life cycle, this is depressing news enough.
•    96 percent of Millennials have joined a social network. And, BTW, a lot of their parents and grandparents have done the same thing.
•    If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s third largest. I’m still searching for a word to express my amazement at this. “Wow!” just doesn’t quite cut it.

•    Facebook tops Google for weekly Web traffic in the U.S. This isn’t bad for a media site that had to have Leslie Stahl explain its basic workings to America just two years ago. It’s also not a bad startup venture for a guy named Mark Zuckerberg who is now all of 26.
•    Social media have overtaken pornography as the #1 activity on the Web. If this is true, then it shows that not all new media rituals are bad for us.
•    1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via the social media. Like several of Mr. Qualman’s observations, I don’t know how this one was established or what it’s based on. But I do know one thing: This is how I met my wife 10 years ago.
•    Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users;  TV 13 years. The Internet took only 4 years, and the iPod did it in 3. We are becoming fast learners, no?
•    Facebook added more than 200 million users in less than a year. I wonder if Mr. Zuckerberg has bought him a real bed yet with all the money he’s raking in. Two years ago he told Leslie Stahl he has only a mattress on the floor.
•    The U.S. Department of Education revealed in a 2009 study that online students outperformed those receiving face-to-face instruction. OK, now this is a study I would really like to see for myself. I find it just a tad hard to believe, as well as being overgeneralized.
•    1 out of 6 higher education students are enrolled in online courses. This I do believe, and I teach some of them.
•    The fastest growing segment of users on Facebook is females age 55 to 65. I learned long ago not to make pronouncements about the lifestyle habits – and motivations behind them — of women. This is pretty startling, though.
• Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears have more Facebook followers than the entire populations of Sweden, Israel, Switzerland, Ireland, Panama, and Norway. Well, these two celebrity icons are easier on the eye than parts of Belfast or the Gaza Strip.

•    Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passe’. And this news comes at a time when my public library is just starting a new class for seniors on how to log on to your e-mail accounts.
•    What happens in Vegas says on Facebook, twitter, flickr, and YouTube. Vegas aside, I think I wrote a couple posts a few months ago on what the social media are doing to our private lives.
•    100+ hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every 4.5 minutes. And the YouTube monitors take down an equal amount, some of which are movies I was hoping to see before they were deemed to have copyright problems.
•    If you were paid $1 for every article posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $1,712.32 per hour. Interesting, but tell me again how the owners of Wiki are making any money at all?
•    There are over 200 million blogs. Which, of course, is why no one is reading mine.
•    78 percent of consumers trust peer reviews of products and services; 14 percent trust advertisements. This is another way of saying we have all become advertising execs, without the pay or other perks of the Mad Men.
•    Kindle eBooks outsold paper books last Christmas. Again, I would like to see the source of this assertion. Just too hard to believe.
•    Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men: listening first, selling second. If so, this is a change that is long overdue.

And the final observation is one that any journalist or media executive should turn into a screensaver for his or her laptop. As for trying to divine what the implications are, good luck. It goes like this:

•    We no longer search for the news. The news finds us.  And we no longer search for products and services. They will find us. And they will find us on the social media.

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