Blog Entries
Blog entries, here and from elsewhere.
Touched
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 11/04/2007 - 21:24Today, I received a touching email from a dear friend who seems to have found her voice online and that voice rang through loud and clear. She pointed me to an article about Voyeurism and exhibitionism in YouTube, Facebook, and Apartments in New York City.
In particular, she highlighted the quote from Sherry Turkle,
We are no longer able to distinguish when we are together and nurtured and when we are alone and isolated. I can be in intimate contact with 300 people on e-mail, but when I look up from my computer I feel bereft. I haven’t heard a voice, touched a hand, for hours or days. I think people are no longer certain where the self resides.
In think my opening sentence captures a key part of my response. Can Sherry Turkle really be in intimate contact with 300 people and feel bereft? If so, I would have to question her definition of intimacy. No, if we are truly in intimate contact with people, whether it be face to face or online, we hear the voice of the person we are speaking with. We are touched by them.
Yet the issue of where the self resides, now that is the interesting question. It isn’t a new question, brought to us by our computer-mediated communications. It is an age-old question. Perhaps, part of where the self resides is in honest and authentic communications, which may or may not happen when our ear hears a voice, or hand feels a touch. Yet it seems to happen, at least based on my experiences, even online, which we hear the authentic voice of a fellow human being in their emails, and are touched by it.
When you write emails, blog entries or IMs, are you seeking to have your voice heard? To touch the people around you? Or, is our communication more like that of Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. When asked about what happened, Benjamin explains, “What happened between Mrs. Robinson and me was nothing. It didn't mean anything. We might just as well have been shaking hands.”
So, no, Ms. Turkle, it isn’t the touch of hands that matters, it is the touching of souls, and to borrow a line from Mr. Robinson, “You’ll forgive me if I don’t shake your hand”
Themes in Memes
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 10/30/2007 - 09:38Yesterday, I reflected on the San Diego fires and pondered what I would take with me if I had to flee my house. Emily at been there picked up the theme adding the comment, “it's all about family connections for me too” and going on to say,
I'd take the diaries I wrote for each of my girls during her first year, my photo albums from the pre-digital era, and the painting of my grandmother that my mother gave me recently.
There are some great comments over on Emily’s blog. She also posted about this over on the motherhood, a wonderful site, I would encourage all of you to connect with.
Beth, at mylifestartsatfortytwo.com picks up the meme as well. Beth and Rod were amongst the people I was thinking about when I wrote my blog post, so I’m very grateful that she wrote about it. She talks about having moved a lot in her adult life and has some great reflections on this.
It seems as if a key theme is holding onto memories, the symbols in our lives that lift us up instead of the objects in our lives that tie use down. Another theme is the use of digital archives to save these memories, blogs, photo archives, and video archives.
God willing, we will never face fires or holocausts. However, we all face life changing events, whether it is changes in our work, our health, our relationships or other important aspects of our lives, and thinking about what we take with us is important.
But now old friends are acting strange,
they shake their heads, they say I've changed.
Something's lost but something's gained
in living every day.
- Joni Mitchell Both Sides Now
What will you take with you?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 10/29/2007 - 09:29Various friends of mine online live near the fires in San Diego. These fires have brought up one of those great old questions that people use as icebreakers. If your house is on fire, and you can grab one thing before you rush out, what would it be?
For all of you social bloggers who love memes, please, leave a comment on your answer and/or post your response on your blog.
For me, it is an interesting question. We’ve just moved. I had been in the previous house for fifteen years. It was a large house and a lot of junk piled up. We got rid of three large dumpsters of junk. We had a tag sale. We gave away stuff with freecycle. We move most of what was left, although we still have stuff in that needs to be moved or gotten rid of.
Through this, I’ve become much less attached to different objects. What matters to me, beyond my family, is mostly up online, my blog entries, my photographs. So, I don’t have a good answer to the question.
However, I did get an interesting email from a friend in San Diego. She is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She grew up being constantly told not to get too connected to material goods because hanging on to them could result in death if you couldn’t flee in time. Yet even for her, there are objects of great importance and she wrote about waking up in the middle of the night wanting to contact her daughter to reminder her about the Shabbat/Sabbath candlesticks that her mother had brought with her from Germany when she fled.
There are objects in our lives that tie us down. There are symbols in our lives that lift us up. It is important to know which is which.
Random Stuff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 10/26/2007 - 10:15I’ve been on the road a lot over the past three days, so I’m behind on my emails and behind on the blogs. I did manage to get a few posts up while I was on the road.
As I read through my email today, I found a message pointing me to Assumptions? Do me a favour....
In it, Loz writes,
If you read this please leave a comment as to who and where you are and maybe if you feel like it why you visit here. If you are a blogger please visit the other bloggers who comment and maybe leave a comment on one of their posts saying Loz sent you ;)
I left my comment on Loz’s blog:
Who I am:
Hi. I'm Aldon, an old guard hardcore geek with interests in technology, politics, social media and networks.
I've been blogging for several years, including being credentialed to cover the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston and the Libby Trial in Washington DC.
I live in Woodbridge, CT, just north of New Haven.
My blog is Orient Lodge. Please, stop by and say hi.
I first found your blog through MyBlogLog.
I like to come back because there is a little more personality and reality to it than many of the political and technical blogs that I visit.
I've been on the road a bit over the past few days, so I'm way behind in my emails, blog reading and so on.
So, I will try to visit the blogs of other people posting here, but it I probably won't get to them all immediately.
My blog is using Drupal and requires registration and validation of an email address. Some people don’t want to give out their email address or go through the bother of registering on another site. If you are already using a site that supports OpenId, you can use that registration instead. However, a lot of people don’t know how to use OpenId yet either, so if this is too complicated for some of you, I can understand.
However, if you can leave a comment about who you are and why you stopped by, especially if you can via Loz’s post, it would be greatly appreciated.
Random Stuff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 09/22/2007 - 21:14Lebanese Nights writes, I love Ramadan... ...because it's the only time I eat with my family on the same table at the same time!!
In honor of whichever comedian did great sportscast that included the line, “Slaughterhouse 5, Kent State 4”, “Little Rock 9, Jena 6”
Today, we went to the Guilford Fair. New photos are up at http://www.flickr.com/photos/aldon/ ref=me>Flickr.
I finally got around to setting up Blogrush. You can see it in the lower right hand corner.
Enough for now, it’s been a long day.
