Social Media Challenged...or The Challenge of Social Media

Used to be that going online for me meant that I would head over to AOL, log on and play a game of solitaire while I waited for the computer to connect with the internet, using a very weird, but oddly reassuring set of blips, beeps, dial tones and what almost amounted to a computer shout, before the little icon would pop up on the mailbox and the AOL guy would say, "You've got mail!" For a few months in late 1996, AOL allowed you to program a guest celebrity voice to tell you 'you had mail'. Mine was Hugh Grant, before the whole Divine Brown thing and movies like American Dreamz, something....the Morgans and Bridget Jones 2 and I was still a fan. Sorry Hugh... got nothin' but love for ya...but you did make some execrable movies. (Cough) Mickey Blue Eyes (Cough) Nine Months.

Nowadays the gap between me and the internet has considerably narrowed. There is a whole WIFI network in my home. No more blips and beeps. Just hit the icon and go, you are online. Frequently I am online on my laptop/tablet and my TV is too, simultaneously playing some Netflix offering.

Many days, before I've had my morning breakfast, and while I am still in my robe and pajamas, I've already started 'online' because I've no less than 4-5 sites to hit.  Outlook/Gmail for my emails, Facebook to make sure that I am still relevant and have 'friends', LinkedIn to obsess over my professional image, Twitter to check my popularity and YouTube for anything new and recreational. Not to mention blog stats, to see if anyone is actually reading this and puzzle out who the people are that are breezing by this to read and not comment.

Frankly, I am tired just reading the above.

As part of my 'career training', I have been increasingly coached and coerced into creating, refining and editing my 'online presence'.

My online presence...I started to ponder that today. Introspection reached a zenith when looking through my LinkedIn contacts and all the suggestions from them (LinkedIn) of the "People You May (Should) Know", were, I realized about 95% from Non-Company. Non-Company= pain. I  just don't want anything to do with or to have to think about Non-Company.  But how do you just delete people?  LinkedIn is a place where prestige is gained by the amount of contacts you have and how often your profile is buzzed. Hopefully it's buzzed by some multi-millionaire entrepreneur type needing a personal assistant who wouldn't mind working out of his lakeside estate on Lake Como.

Ditto for Facebook. Facebook is just pain of a more familial and social nature. Again, how do you just delete?  Because FB contacts are not just business contacts, many are personal friends and relations. Many of which you might see once a year, if that? So why do I need to be updated constantly on your activities? Most of which just serve as reminders that my life isn't as populated by cute kids doing cute things, and backyard BBQ's as yours because nearly everyone in my life is dead.

 I even tried quitting cold turkey only to be told by a career counselor, that amounted to career suicide.  Really. Could my career die a more gruesome death than it already has due to natural causes?

At least with Twitter, my feed gives me useful things, reminders about encroaching thunder storms, traffic alerts, gas price alerts, when my favorite TV shows are on, what the celebrities on my favorite TV shows are doing. By the way, kudos to the NCIS Twitter people who bonus-ed me with a nice pic of a toothsome and shirtless Michael Weatherly reading over the script for the 1st episode of the new season! Hopefully Michael was at the part where Tony DiNozzo kills the bastards who shot Gibbs and is able to ascertain that he was wearing a vest and will be okay.....

YouTube is probably my favorite. It lets me know whenever Mazda have new video of the Miata up on their feed, gives me back all of my childhood memories, in some cases lets me watch entire seasons of "I'm Alan Partridge", and the music videos that thanks to reality TV, MTV no longer play.

I know that, much like rock and roll, (which actually may have died without us realizing it) social media is here to stay. But just as the old folks who shook their heads at Elvis (sacrilege) and Jerry Lee, I don't have to like it!

Here's to future days! You know when the hackers hit the server farms and we are knocked back to an age where we have to talk to one another in person, on the phone, and listen to what we actually say out loud.

Well, a girl can dream, can't she?

School Days

You know that icky feeling of dread that you get in your stomach when you feel that you may have forgotten something, something really important?

That feeling was coursing through me at about 7:30 a.m. this morning. The Non-Company German contingent were on their way, and I'd forgotten to check whether or not their flown-ahead shipment of tools and supplies were accounted for last week, before Monday rolled around, before the Germans were set to be here. By 8:00 a.m., I'd been to Receiving and finding no crates from Germany, I, well there is no other way to say it,was absolutely 'wigged out, off-the-reservation, out of my mind'. By 8:15 a.m., I was on the phone haranguing some poor girl in the Orlando International Airport for the number for the freight connection of Lufthansa Airlines. At 8:30 a.m., I was on the phone with Lufthansa Freight, pleading with them to tell me that the shipment had made it through customs, wasn't sitting abandoned in some warehouse somewhere, or worse that it hadn't been left for dead out on the tarmac in Dusseldorf. By 10:30 a.m., relieved to find that the shipment had actually made it to Orlando, I'd finally reached the courier where some burnt out guy named Vinnie (and no I am not making this up) with a devil-may-care heavy on the Bronx accent told me that "yeah, we was supposed to deliver on Friday, but it never made it on the truck, so we figgered we'd just ship it today".

"Okay, I said wearily, biting back the epithets I longed to lob at him, "so what's your ETA?"  Vinnie considers his words for a moment and says, "well, sometime between now and noon. Youse see nomally we can tell ya if we already loaded the truck, but were still loadin' it, so we can't tell ya exactly when. Prawbly bout' an hour and a haf." Making it, you guessed it... exactly noon.

Then I proceeded to don safety glasses and steel-toed over shoes every 30 minutes to run out to the factory floor and irritate the crew in Receiving to 'check on the status'. In between floor runs, I nearly downloaded a Trojan horse virus by opening a mail I would normally have never opened had I been in my right mind, locked myself out of a Non-Company database by keying in the wrong password repeatedly, banged my shin on an open file drawer and jammed my fingers in my desk drawer.

In between, I mourned, this was my project, the first one I'd really been given the lead on in all my time at Non-Company. I'm letting my new boss down. I should have checked the status on Friday. Why didn't I check the status on Friday?

So what does this all have to do with school....

At one point today, in a lull between phone calls, between catastrophes, I saw my mobile phone blinking. A strobing blue light, which says hey, you have a message, an email, an update.  In this case a Facebook update. So I stole a moment away, strolled through my News Feed, and there I saw a photograph of my friends' daughter. Actually, the friend who was my best friend all through my adolescence, my school years. It was her daughter, all dressed up, first day of school. Fifth Grade. There were several photos. In fact, it appeared to be somewhat of an occasion, pictures with her Dad and sister, with her grandparents, walking to the bus, boarding the bus, her new backpack slung over her shoulder, new lunchbox in her hand. I once knew her grandparents well; growing up they were like a second family to me.

Looking at the pictures, it called back so many memories, this friend and I met at her daughter's age now. With about a six-month age gap between us, she would have been heading off to 4th grade and me to the 5th. But we always walked to the bus stop together. Away from school we were inseparable, the best of friends. Always passing notes, having sleepovers at each other's homes, talking on the phone until all hours. BFF's forever.

I felt hollow inside. We're Facebook friends but not friends in the way we were. Time, distance and different lifestyles have separated us. While I was wigging out at work, trying to solve my crisis, she was experiencing a milestone moment, putting her daughter on the bus. In a few weeks, I'll have mostly forgotten about today's crises, five months from now I won't remember it all, but she'll always have this day to remember. In younger days, we were so sure we'd always be friends, that we'd stay in the same place, that our kids would be friends. Sometimes it seems so implausible that I sit here, edging nearer to 40, and have no children, no spouse. A demanding job that seems to take up every moment of my life, my thoughts...my energy.

I still cherish a photo of us, well, the four of us, she and I, and my younger sister and her younger brother...we were quite a crew. And now...scattered, different states, different lives, all of them with children, she has 2, her brother 2, my sister 3, and me well....0. Sometimes I find it so hard to believe it turned out this way.

I've always believed in the core of my being, that God doesn't make mistakes, that our lives are as he would have us to be. But sometimes, a smaller, inner part of me wonders, was it God choosing this life or me refusing to be braver, to take more risks with my heart?

And every so often, at this time of year, I wish I were putting my kid on the bus.

Regrets...I've had a few

I'm in a pensive frame of mind today.

Today I'm not so much thinking about the clash of generations or generational differences but of my own personal losses.

Time does indeed make fools of us all. Thanks to social media like Facebook, Twitter, etc we get to relive those regrets on a daily basis in some cases.

Facebook I've decided, can on any given day, be both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing in that it keeps me up to date on the people that I truly care about. In an instant, I know that my sister/aunt/friend had a 'Super time at Walt Disney World' or at least as good a time as one can have paying $8.00 for a Coke after dropping (according to my most recent stats) $90.53 (can that be right!??) a head to be hurled through the air, plummeted, turned sideways, jolted, and just plain scared out of their wits on rides that make you wish you were dead! But at least, thanks to Facebook, I know that they at least loved/liked/survived the experience. Also, when next month they are 'worried about making the mortgage', I for one, know why!

No one can doubt the truly all-encompassing changes that social media has wrought on our lives. For once, I have the upper hand over my mother when we gently gossip about the family and what's going on in so-and-so's life. I've been there, seen the pictures, and bought the t-shirt.  I'm able to correct her and say that "Actually Aunt Louisa and Uncle Ted are not going to Las Vegas for their vacation, they've decided to go to Branson instead!"

On the other hand though, the dark little secret of Facebook is that once you've delved in, you are sucked into a vortex that inevitably leads you back to your past. 'Friending' this person leads to that friend who leads to this friend and so forth...you get the idea. Some friends it leads you to are just as you remember them and their life has taken a pretty predictable path, some you look at and go, "Wow, next to this guy/that girl, my life looks pretty great!"

But then, you look at the really close friends and you wonder, 'should I have taken a different path?'
When you are a 30-something X'er, looking at your other 30-something X'ers, sometimes you sit back and catch your breath and think back to the simpler times. Before they had kids, and dance lessons and soccer games to go to. When you were a real person to them, not just a name on their speed dial or Facebook Friends' list. You look at the photos of their weddings, their kids as infants, Christmases, Easter, the trip to that amusement park, that field trip and realise that the pics of you dancing with your colleagues at the office Christmas Party after you've had a little too much wine seem a bit hollow in comparison. A little too 'Bridget Jones' for comfort.

Granted, sometimes these maudlin reflections are the result of a few too many hours listening to "Now That's What I Call the 80's" Volume(s) I, II, III, too many awkward dates, too many failed relationships. Nights where you sit and reflect on 'the one who got away'. And Facebook is there to remind you of that as well. You see the one(s) who got away. Sometimes you even 'friend' them. The exquisite torture of seeing them and their spouse, children and how 'happy they are at Disney World'.

Then there is always the 'one', the incomparable, who you sit back and voyueristically marvel at, and wonder how you let someone as fantastically talented, humane, decent, moral and kind just slip through your fingers.

Yes, even in your worst hour, Facebook is there for you.
And yet... in the space of a few hours, I'm sure I'll log in again for just a little more torment...

The Preferred Risk- Generation Y

One of the other galvanizing forces that compelled me to begin writing and sharing my thoughts as a member of a disenfranchised generation was an article that appeared on the MSN Money section a few
days ago http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43976881/ns/business-eye_on_the_economy/.

In this piece the writer, a Ms. Anika Anand giddily argues that Generation Y is the best chance the USA has to 'fix' this depressed economy. Yes, I take a liberty in stating depressed but I have always heard that an economy is in recession when your neighbor is unemployed and that depression is when you yourself are unemployed.  Getting back to this piece, which it should be mentioned, is a money article that most definitely falls under the heading of an op ed piece; for me it was another of those moments when my blood pressure soared and my hackles rose for once again it was seemingly another opportunity for the press to take an underhanded swipe at X'ers. On the surface this article is a masterpiece of rose-tinted optimism that any good ol' red-blooded patriotic American loves to read, the artistically tatooed hipster riding in on his eco-friendly Prius (steed) to save Mom, Apple Pie and Chevrolet (Volt of course). But if you delve deeper into the theory, far more sinister for me was the feeling that once again all the efforts of the previous generation, my generation, were forgotten and worse than that, that they failed to learn from us.

Wasn't our generation with its dot-com startups and killer apps the original modern day entrepeneurs? Where would Gen Y be if not for the efforts of X'ers like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs? There would be no Mark Zuckerberg -Winklevoss Feud to litigate if they hadn't had the shoulders of Sergey Brin and Larry Page to stand on. Who needs Jack Dorsey, et al (Twitter) if Jerry Yang and David Filo hadn't paved the road with Yahoo back at the inception of Internet 2.0?

To read Ms. Anand's piece is to flirt with the idea that since no one else, we're looking at you Generation X, because the Boomers have all retired to Florida to spend their social security and pensions drinking Ensure poolside, is willing to take up the task. (Sigh), "We'll have to shoulder that burden and save the world". I can't help thinking it calls to mind the world-weariness of Bruce Willis'
admonishing of the crew in Armageddon, "The United States Government just asked us to save the world. Anybody want to say no?"

She further goes on to cite a Kool-Aid drinking journalist tipsy on the promise of the messiah generation coming into it's own,

"This is a generation of serial entrepreneurs," said Donna Fenn, a journalist who wrote "Upstarts!," one of the first books identifying the Gen Y entrepreneur trend. "A lot of them start businesses in their 20s and many of them don't think that their first business will be their last. They're addicted to creating things, to the startup phase. By the time they reach their 40s, they will have started three, four or five companies."
She said the so-called Millennial generation is inclined toward entrepreneurship partly because they saw their parents lose corporate jobs in the downsizing movement of the era. They also witnessed a wave of ugly corporate scandals followed by the meltdown of the financial industry. The result is that they tend to have a lot less faith in large institutions like companies or government, she said.

And yet in a stunning but not wholly unexpected piece of journalistic hypocrisy, we are told that these same millenials who 'tend to have a lot less faith in large institutions like companies or government' are apparently looking to the who else but the federal government and corporation venture capitalists to fund these civilization-saving initiatives.

Aaron Smith, co-founder of another young advocacy organization Young Invincibles, is also working with Gerber on the Youth Entrepreneurship Act. He acknowledges that now is a tough time to get anything passed in Congress, but contends that a bill helping young entrepreneurs would give the government a good return on investment.

"Increasingly, Congress is looking at ways to create jobs at a relatively low cost," the 29-year-old said. "One of the interesting things about young people is that their barrier to starting a business is small, in terms of the monetary amount. We're talking only a few thousand dollars."
Matthew Segal, founder of a nonprofit that promotes entrepreneurs under 30, has a slightly different focus. He thinks getting consumers to support young business startups should complement any potential legislation.

Have none of these people taken a good hard look at the government, the Federal Reserve, the goings on the US Treasury? Have not the 1st Stimulus, the 2nd Stimulus, TARP, bailouts of supposedly too-large-to fail AIG, GM, Chrysler, Cash for Clunkers, all been cloaked in failure?  What about our recent politically charged debt ceiling debacle, our S & P credit downgrade?  Uncle Sam has his pocket linings hanging out, we're writing IOU's for debt we'll probably never be repay at the rate we are spending and China is knocking on our door with their hands out.

For that matter, does no one remember the dot-com bubble burst in 2001-2002? As a matter fact, yes. And I'll tell you who...the Gen X dot.com startups who were millionaires one day and wiped out the next. The people who woke up at Enron in the fall of 2001 to find the 'smartest guys in the room' had just gambled away their jobs, insurance, retirement and their hope. We learned our lessons well that day, trust no one...and most especially the government.

So before you go out there Gen Y, shaking your heads at us, bent on doing what we slackers, abdicators of our country's financial future seemingly are NOT doing, you might do well to learn from us. We have our reasons for being quiet and electing to not rush in to save what might not be sound in the first place.