Facebook and the internet

As the opening credits of the Holy Grail scroll by, moose and all, I am writing this.  It took me some time to make the decision that this movie was one that would only moderately distract me as I tried to write my blog post.  That said, coconuts blaring, I will continue on with this morning's thoughts.  Actually, they are more of yesterdays, but after percolating a bit, they get written today, and as such become today's posting.  That said, it occurred to me today how Facebook has become the sharing medium of choice.  People jot down their thoughts, post their pictures, and share news stories there, while blogs have become something a bit more focused in regards to theme.  People decide their blog will be about "something" like their exercise regimen or cooking experiments, and focus the blog on those.  Mine is still a sort of hodgepodge, with really old posts showing drawings, while the newer ones mention poetry, and throughout it all there has been a bit of my opinion on the news of the day.  I have posted many photos of art over on FB that did not get shared here, and I know people tend to post family all over the place there, as well as news articles they find interesting.  Facebook has in a way taken the place of the half-filled, periodic blogs that people otherwise busy might once have had.  In addition, with the share feature offered by so many news sites, there is a fair amount of news there as well, so people really don't need to venture away from there.  It is as if Facebook has become the new AOL with the walled garden being decided upon by their friends rather than a corporation.  If you have a limited amount of time in a day, all you need to do now is log into FB, check your feed, and then you think "you know what you need to know" for the day.  The newsfeed on FB has become the web, though factor in a few favorites as well, and people don't really explore past that.

With the spate of "fake" news everywhere, and the fact that people don't seem to be able to differentiate between fake, satire, and unfavorable is a sad reflection of our society.  The fact that FB hasn't traditionally cared if "fake" news fills the newsfeed or not reflects the short-sightedness of its managers, and the naïveté of the same, in thinking that people aren't influenced by what they see online.

Eventually I think folks will repeat the past when they broke away from AOL and invigorated all those sites that didn't try to "curate" the web for you.  Perhaps they will discover that in allowing their friends to be the curators they have missed out on too much.

Reminded of Neruda (and other thoughts)

In the February 6, 2017 issue of The New Yorker, I found a poem by Charles Simic that reminded me a great deal of Neruda's The Book of Questions.  I know I have quoted some of the Neruda poetry in the past, so I will spare myself more exercises in transcribing, since those poems are in a physical book for me, rather than electronic.  I think the fifth line of Simic's poem, "Does the sound of the surf remind it of itself?" is probably what the parallel most strongly to mind.

Aside from feeling vaguely unsettled, likely due to a lack of exercise in my daily regimen, there is little to report.  I spent the weekend at work, reading a bit of this and that as I had time.  I will say, electronic readers are great for allowing that, with John Donne (I am reminded there is a poem I wanted to share, but that will be another entry), John Milton, TE Lawrence, and Walt Whitman all authors that I read bits and pieces from.  I also did some browsing of the news, looking for anything I might have missed during the week.  From the latter, I did find this interesting piece in Slate in which the author talks about how the Trump administration is using calls of "Fake News" as a the equivalent of a schoolyard taunt to distract the media and put them on the defensive.

A Correlation too good not to post

As anyone looking at the photos of my book piles will attest, I generally have a bit much on the to read list.  Anyway, after I finished Smith's poetry earlier this evening, I picked up "Art in America," which is a series of essays, and which I started a few weeks back, reading something now and again as the mood struck.  Tonight, I was reading James Agee's "Introduction to Helen Levitt's A Way of Seeing,"  and what struck me most is that in much of Agee's description of photography, you could substitute internet and still be accurate.  All the hubbub over "Fake" news is what makes this section seem particularly important.

"It is probably well on the conservative side to estimate that during the past ten to fifteen years the camera has destroyed a thousand pairs of eyes, corrupted ten thousand, and seriously deceived a hundred thousand, for every one pair that it has opened, and taught."

That is the first bit that caught my attention.  Substitute internet for camera and the figures still likely match up.  The internet makes it incredibly easy to find something you can "believe," whether it is factual or not seems irrelevant, since, as the phrase goes, "it is on the internet."

"It is in fact hard to get the camera to tell the truth; yet it can be made to, in many ways and on many levels.  Some of the best photographs we are ever likely to see are innocent domestic snapshots, city postcards, and news and scientific photographs.  If we know how, moreover, we can enjoy and learn a great deal from essentially untrue photographs, such as studio portraits, movie romances, or the national and class types apotheosized in ads for insurance or feminine hygiene."

Again, replace camera with internet and this time replace photographs with websites.  Eventually you begin to see the picture that is being painted.  By website, I am referring to something lost in the ether, when the internet was newish and folks actually posted things on "their" website, rather than using Facebook or Google+.  Both of those allow some of that when you look at photos and ignore a newsfeed populated by friends rather than what the individual posted.  Facebook though, and I am guessing Google does it too, is automated enough that its hand in what can be posted can seem heavy, just recall the fracas over the Vietnamese girl Agent Orange picture when it surfaced in FB.  World famous photograph showing the horrors of war, but (until it reversed itself) FB thought it was pornography, because the girl was naked, and naked people are just not allowed.  In the age before that, if someone had complained, a computer would not have automatically censored the photo, which is why I mentioned the earlier age, before the hosting of "personal" websites actually became an act of giving all sorts of personal information to a corporate keeper.  (I am on both Google+ and Facebook, and realized Blogger is owned by Google, so I am not pretending anything or advising anyone to disconnect.)

Back to James Agee and what he said about photography.  I think the internet, for the casual peruser, can provide as much misinformation as a poorly cropped photo, where there are so many questions, it doesn't take much of a suggestion to answer them with nefarious suggestions.  Our last election cycle proved the truth of this.