Author Archives: ij

I Don’t Have Time For Social Networking!!

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Facebook, Inc.Image via Wikipedia

Okay, I admit I check into Facebook a few times a day. When I look at what motivates me to do so, I realize I just want to know what everyone is up to, and that’s what Facebook is for. But I don’t really update my own “What’s on your mind?” window very often, certainly not as much as some do. My thinking most of the time is “who cares what I’m doing?”

To tell you the truth, I don’t really want to know EVERYTHING everyone is doing. I don’t care to know each time someone has completed a puzzle or taken a quiz to find out what Star Trek character they are most like. I can’t really use gifts like virtual teddy bears, or for heaven’s sake, virtual glasses of wine! Don’t be so cheap, get me the real thing!!

The whole “social networking” thing seems to be something that has taken over a lot of lives. As much as I check into Facebook, I know of others who live and die by those websites, constantly updating their status, adding photos, taking those silly little quizzes or commenting on their friend’s activities. And some of my friends have literally hundreds of other “friends”. I’m wondering if they even know half of those people.

An interesting thing about Facebook is that it seems to have attracted quite a few of my generation and older, because we really DO want to connect up with old friends and acquaintances and we actually have that many, whereas you wonder how a 15-year-old could even know a couple of hundred people yet.

I’ve never signed up for Twitter, but it appears to be somewhat the same as far as constant updates and creating more connections. And it seems that every week or two, there is more news about some other social networking application or website.

Recently, CNet did an article about ten music-related social networking websites. You’re supposed to share your favourite music, update people on what you’re listening to and check out what they’re listening to as well. You can buy music and merchandise and concert tickets on some of them, and other sites will even offer up suggestions as to what new bands or artists you might like.

It’s exhausting to even think about.

Which leads me to wonder…how do people have time to do all of these things a hundred times a day? Along with continuous texting or playing with iPod applications (there’s another place to find all kinds of useless junk!), checking into Facebook and updating Twitter…how do they have time to even eat? It seems we’ve become a society that needs constant, 24-hour connectivity or entertainment…and we can’t get enough of it. As soon as some new gadget or software or website or application comes out, we’ve got to have it. We can watch movies or TV or play games anywhere these days on our own, private hand-held devices, we can phone or text anybody from anywhere, we can update our Facebook or Twitter accounts whenever or wherever we want.

A person from a third-world country would think we had become strange, alien addicts, permanently plugged into one device or another and always looking for more.

I’m sure psychologists are out there trying to determine what this behaviour is doing to us. On the face of it, connecting with friends seems like a pretty harmless thing…but it really isn’t just about connecting with friends anymore for many people as far as I can see. It has become a rather narcicisstic, self-indulgent, me-important way of life for many, and what does that say about us?

There are a couple of people in my own inner circle who refuse to have anything to do with technology, and of course I laugh at them for not being “with the times”. But the times they are a changin’ rather quickly and I’m not sure that I completely disagree with their stance. A part of me doesn’t want to get left behind or left wondering what this or that new confounded gadget is. The other part realizes that something is being lost by filling my brain and my time with all of this nonsense.

Maybe that’s why I enjoy golf so much.

I know it’s not just because of technology that I can’t turn my head off these days, but I don’t think it’s helping either. I worry about my kids having grown up in such an environment and my grandchildren, who are about to. No, I don’t have grandchildren yet, but already I’m worried about them! Younger generations have not had the benefit of a computer-less life as those of my generation and older have. They don’t know about “boredom” or peace and quiet, they don’t know how to create games from nothing but a pile of rocks or sticks. How many times have they sat on the edge of a stream in the wilderness dipping their feet into the cool water? Many of them would likely find that laughably dull.

I don’t reject technology, obviously, or I wouldn’t be sitting here typing this blog. But as with anything in life, there has to be a little balance.

Maybe I’ll start a new Facebook group called “Turn The Gadgets Off and Go Outside!”
Probably wouldn’t go over well.

IJ

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The Writing Bug

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QuillImage via Wikipedia

This morning I decided to weigh myself. It was a bad decision, but also a good one in a totally unexpected way.

We have a scale in our carpeted bedroom, one of those digital scales…you press your foot on it to turn it on, and then once the 00 shows, you step on it. I have had trouble getting it to work lately, and I think it’s near broken. It keeps showing an error when I step on it (maybe it means I’m just too light to be weighed? Nah…), so I have to put a book under it so that the surface it sits on is hard enough to register.

I grabbed a book that was large enough for it to sit on, a black binder. It worked, so I got on it and up popped the numbers.

Ugh.

But my weight, thankfully, isn’t the subject of this story. The black binder is.

Inside are the pages of my father’s autobiography written a number of years before the onset of his dementia. I have three copies of it now. They used to be at his place, but he’s in a care facility now so I have inherited all but one copy that he keeps there. He was not the first to write one; his father, my grandfather wrote his story a number of years before that, and that’s where the whole thing started.

My Auntie Edie, my father’s sister, loved to write poetry and, inspired by my grandfather, she also decided to write her autobiography.

I found out a few years back that my grandmother used to make up songs. Although I never met my grandmother (she passed away a few years before I was born), it gave me a bit of a connection to her since I eventually became a songwriter myself. My father’s brother, who is a professor of political science at Boston University, is also a writer. He has co-written a number of books on various political subjects over many years. So for me, the urge to write seems to be in the genes. 

As I put the scale and the binder away, I thought again about my Dad and how it was a wonderful thing that he had written his life story down. My girls will read that thing one day, and my grandfather’s story too, I thought, and I’m going to write one when I’m a little older, so they’ll have an awful lot of reading to do. 

My mind wandered into the future, past a few generations or so. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if one of our future ancestors (is there another name for future ancestors?) had a whole library full of autobiographies to go through? That would be a precious thing to some. I know it would be to me. 

I shook off my depressing weigh scale incident and got on with my morning, ran a few errands and then I sat down at my computer to find an email from my cousin Karen through Facebook. I got a little tingle up my spine as I read it. I never realized that she was a budding writer too; she was sending me a link to her first blog entry which she completed just today. Is that what you would call serendipitous?

As it turns out, over the years she has been encouraged by others to write, just as I have.

And now, here I am, writing about writing. I don’t consider myself a great writer by any means, but I have always felt this urge to communicate something and it seems my life has become pretty much about that.

First I wrote songs, then I kept a journal, and teaching guitar, which is what I presently do, is a way of communicating too. I am fascinated with how people learn, and I’m always looking for a better way to explain something. I drive my kids nuts with my habit of saying the same thing about ten different ways, until I feel like I’ve found the “right” expression.

I write three blogs…this one, a music news-related one, and a songwriting one. So I definitely have a writing bug. I love a good story, and a good storyteller. There is an art to it, one which I feel like I’m only just beginning to understand.

So I’m happy to see that I’m not the only one of this generation of my family who writes. My cousin’s daughter and one of my daughters also appear to have a writing streak which means it may very well carry on down the line, just as I was imagining this morning.

That is, AFTER the depressing weigh scale incident…

IJ

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Reality Shows Bite

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I think I stopped watching television in a big way when reality shows began to pop up on every channel. I know that a lot of people love them. I don’t. So my discourse here isn’t going to appeal to any of you who watch them religiously. And why would I know anything about them if I don’t watch them?

I should explain the configuration of my home.

At night when I am finished teaching and come upstairs to the livingroom, I like to pull out my laptop and read or write. If I am to spend anytime at all with my husband, I have to sit in the livingroom with him as he is watching a 50-inch television that takes up a whole corner of the room. He watches a lot of reality TV, along with other dramatic series, and as a result I do as well. It’s out of the corner of my eye, but the TV is so dominant that sometimes I get sucked into a scene or two, until I get bored or disgusted and put my earphones on and listen to Steely Dan. 

There are two reasons I don’t like reality shows. Okay, maybe three.

The first reason is because they have become insidious; once anything on television becomes a hit, every other network and station and writing team tries to duplicate it. Nobody is original. It’s the “cookie cutter” effect. The same thing happens in pop music; songs, recording techniques and even singing styles are all copied or mimicked over and over, until pretty much every song sounds the same.

There was a time not so long ago in Nashville, for instance, that the same bunch of session players were playing on pretty much every country record that was being released!

This makes it virtually impossible for those writers and producers (and I am married to one) who are trying to come up with fresh, new ideas, to get their work on television. I can tell you for a fact that networks will reject a television show proposal because it DOESN’T have a reality aspect to it. Can you beat that?

The second reason I don’t like reality shows is because they exploit people. Now of course, these people or contestants, or whatever they are, sign up for these things and put their Joe Henry to all kinds of release papers so that producers can do whatever they want with what they shoot, so, in a sense, they know what they are getting into. Then why not put them in extreme situations and point the camera in their faces just to see how they react?

In some cases, it’s almost embarrassing to see the worst come out in these participants as they are thrown into all kinds of odd, awkward and exploitative predicaments. How about pitting them against each other so we can see who’s really nasty and who’s the wimp? It’s cheap and dishonest, kind of like a National Enquirer on TV.

I wonder how many of these participants, once they see the final production, are surprised at how the editors and producers have created all kinds of situations that didn’t actually happen. Which brings me to the third reason I don’t like these shows.

They aren’t real. They are manipulated in every conceivable way for dramatic effect, so that the audience will be compelled to keep watching. I think most people know this as they are watching…but I’m assuming that many don’t. When you listen to a conversation about the latest episode of some such reality series, people sound like they’ve been completely sucked in by the events, and yet the events are often faked. On the other hand, I’ve heard people talk about soap opera’s as if the characters and events were real. Holy crap.

But now we come to “Jon and Kate Plus 8”. I’ve seen bits and pieces of this show and participated in conversations about it, but the most recent events have really perturbed me. There are 8 small children on that show being followed around by a production team recording every moment of their little lives. That would be a strange enough environment to grow up in, but what has made it worse recently is that a lot of very personal stuff is coming to light about their parents which is probably making for even more tension in that house than usual. I won’t go into the details, you can find that out for yourself. That is, if you haven’t already heard! It’s everywhere right now; in newspapers, on television news programs and talk shows and the internet. You can’t miss it.

Just this morning I saw a snippet of a conversation between a morning news anchor and a psychologist discussing the effects of these events on those little kids.

How parents would agree to have their child’s every moment documented on television in the first place is beyond me, but I guess it’s expensive to take care of such a large family so I’m sure the paycheque helps. However, recently it has become about these very personal issues; this family could literally fall apart before the television audiences’ eyes. Do we really want to see that? It just feels so wrong to me. How they could choose to continue in light of these events, I don’t know.

But now we have another aspect to this whole nasty business. The ratings are going through the roof. Everybody loves watching a train wreck. And if the parents are even thinking of walking away from it all, you can bet there will be all kinds of heavy weights, producers, TV execs et al, begging them to continue. After all, it’s about the ratings.

So the irony of it all is that reality, true reality, has smacked this little family in the face. And we get to watch. Isn’t that great??

Maybe a few of us will get the idea and do the right thing. Stop watching. I don’t know what’s going to happen to those eight little kids, but I don’t think it’s my right to know.

Reality shows bite.


IJ