I couldn’t help but wonder where the Aspen Institute’s wiki was (say that three times fast) when I ran into the following analogy by Richard B. Adler, “rapporteur” of “Next Generation Media: The Global Shift.”
In describing Craig Newmark’s altruistic reasons for keeping craigslist noncommercial, Adler writes, “In this sense, Newmark is spiritually closer to Dorothy Day of Hull House than to Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com or Bill Gates of Microsoft.”
The problem with that is, Dorothy Day is not of Hull House. That was Jane Addams. Dorothy Day was the cofounder of the Catholic Worker Movement.
I went looking for a mechanism to submit my correction but in the appendix found only notes and biographical information, along with directions on how to order other reports. The “contact us” link on the home page delivered an impressive two full screens of names and hyperlinks but nothing about errata.
The cumulative effect of this week’s readings and online investigations was to remind me that the Web is far from a finished product and not always hospitable either.
In the ink-and-wood-pulp Los Angeles Times that arrived in a plastic bag at the foot of my apartment stairs this morning, I read about a virtual bank within Second Life called Ginko Financial that apparently vamoosed with some amount of participants’ real money (as opposed to the Linden Dollars the avatars carry). Linden’s reaction was to order all the remaining banks to liquidate pronto and leave the world.
I signed up for Facebook a few years ago when I was writing an article about college students using the site, but I never went beyond registration. Re-registering for Facebook and for some other sites like it (MySpace, Friendster, etc.) reminded me of why I hadn’t plunged in originally: I didn’t understand the point of participating.
I still don’t. The sites speak enthusiastically about reconnecting with friends and business acquaintances, but I don’t think I’m the only person who already stays connected with the people with whom I want to remain connected. And vice versa. I found hardly any familiar names among those registered on these sites, leading me to wonder, if nobody I know is using these sites, is there any reason I should?
From one of the sites I sent friendship invitations to five people. These were ignored by four of the five. The only one to respond was my daughter, age 22. Yes, I do have friends, but they either don’t know about these communities or they don’t consider them to be worthwhile.
If these social networking sites want to penetrate the calcified consciousnesses of more-mature people, I suggest they make it obvious what the advantages are of participating. Providing real-world examples would help. So would a video-style demo of how to develop and design a worthwhile page.
The same goes for Second Life. After choosing the attributes for my avatar and being told I’d completed all initiation tasks successfully, I was left to wonder, “Now what do I do?”
Actually, although I haven’t traveled anywhere yet in Second Life (where’s the door?), I just received a communication from someone inside. “Fatapussy Farrjones” has invited me to join her(?) group. As she explained(?) in an email, and this is cut-and-pasted verbatim, “we are a Publc Relations Group= we provide to find friends for all lands and new/old groups in SL... you can call Gen. Manager Fatapussy Farrjones for more informations.”
I haven’t called.
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