(First published in the Bali Advertiser, May 19, 2010)
“I want to be left alone.” – Greta Garbo, enigmatic screen star of the 1920s and 1930s
People are often surprised to find that I am on Facebook. They assume that I am too cranky and crusty to get much joy out of something so social; they put me down as a curmudgeon who trolls the comments sections of online articles looking to pounce on the grammatically and logically challenged.
I will admit to being often tempted – but when out of every 10 comments after an article, only one shows any sign of rational thought, not to mention proper spelling and syntax -- then the shameless display of ignorance overwhelms and kills any desire to waste time reproving fools.
Now nothing has been more foolish recently than the flap over privacy concerns on Facebook, where Mark Zuckerberg and his cohorts are supposedly pushing the boundaries of propriety for managers of an online social network -- all in their attempt to make the Web site they created (or maybe stole, as has been alleged) into a money-making machine.
It seems to me that people who have signed up for a free service – posting contact details, full information on where they work and where they went to school, and an identifiable profile picture – don’t have anything really to complain about.
Facebooker, you have several hundred “friends” – most of whom you seldom see in person or for whom Facebook contact is the first you have been in touch with them in decades -- and you update constantly with “news” about what time you woke up or went to bed, what you had for breakfast, the movie you just watched, what your significant other did that was so awful, how hammered you got last night, your most recent insight into your feelings about your work and your boss -- and you want to complain that Facebook is stealing your privacy?
I am one of the more than 300 million people who have joined Facebook since August 2008, helping to bring the number of users to more than 400 million as of February. Every time I have opened an “app” or a game, I have always received the same warning, that the program will make use of both my and my Facebook friends’ data – and I have never been able to get beyond that point to click “Accept.” I have had to decline the joy of being a Mafia don, a Farmville farmer or the caretaker of some digital pet – because I happen to believe it when a Web site with obvious market research potential and purpose tells me that it is going to be spying on me and trying to glean anything it can from the sort of things I and my friends do.
And it just gobsmacks me that people old enough to know better will pay for the privilege to spend time on these applications and games. I would like to say that it is their own private concern – but it is their concern and the concern of everyone that gets updates on what new level they have reached or what new crisis they are dealing with in their virtual world.
We have been in the digital age now since the early 90s, with early adaptation going back another 10 years, and that’s plenty enough time for everyone – and I do mean everyone – to have learned that nothing done online can be considered private.
Come to think of it, it’s also plenty of time for everyone to have learned not to hit “Reply All” when sending back the snarky reply to a friend’s company-wide e-mail and not to code in all your friends when setting up an evening rendezvous with that secretary who does not happen to be your wife.
But perhaps those are unreasonable expectations when the people who are making the broadest and most insipid use of the newest technologies are the same ones that are daily posting evidence of their untrained and unkempt minds on forums, comment sections and Twitter. No one, it seems, heeds Mark Twain’s advice that “it is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”
Or people aren’t familiar with Garbo’s expansion on her notion of privacy: “There are many things in your heart you can never tell to another person. They are you, your private joys and sorrows, and you can never tell them. You cheapen yourself, the inside of yourself, when you tell them.”
The problem is not in the thieving nature of Facebook; it is in the willingness of people to expose themselves completely, nakedly, in an online world for a bit of a laugh.
Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
The Mother of All Pragmatism
(First published in the Bali Advertiser, May 5, 2010)
"We love the earth and the earth loves us." – a performer at the Earth Day festival on April 24 to raise funds for the Ubud Community Playground
If the earth loves us, then the old gal has got to be one tough mother. I mean, she tries to do us in all the time. At the end of April, a tornado in Mississippi in the southern United States killed 10; earlier last month an earthquake in China killed more than 2,000, with the death toll still rising; and sometime between now and the end of the year, almost surely some natural disaster or other will kill dozens in Indonesia.
Those are the kinds of things I think about whenever I hear our planet personified as a sweet, doting entity – a sentiment often heard here in Ubud, even when it’s not Earth Day.
Don’t get me wrong. I am all for the earth. By all means, use solar power; limit water use; walk or cycle instead of ride; conserve electricity through the moderate use of energy-sucking appliances; dispose of household waste properly; and encourage responsible farming by going to town on organic groceries.
But I don’t see any added value in thinking of the earth as a conscious being, unless it is as some fickle fertility goddess from whom we are never sure what to expect -- gentle falling rain and soft breezes or rampaging typhoons and shaky ground. It just doesn’t fly that Gaia or Mother Earth has any caring concern for the creatures meandering around on her surface or that she thinks about any of us at all.
Look at it like this: If our world has some infusion of a divine spark, it probably gives about as much thought to us as we do for the dust mites that feed off the skin cells we all shed. And why should any earth god or goddess be necessarily benevolent? Does it make any more sense to believe in a soft-voiced, gently tripping Earth Mother wearing a white flowing dress and with flowers in her hair than it does to believe in a white-haired, long-bearded patriarch of a god sitting on a golden throne?
Now some of you are probably asking why I should care what sorts of gods other people choose to believe in. Well, I’ll tell you, I don’t, except for this: whenever gods start getting involved as being the reason we do or don’t do things, it just makes for a big old mess. People get distracted from the tasks at hand and get to arguing theology. People start not only wanting you to do certain things, but to do them for the “right” reasons – to appease their god or to keep some anti-god demon at bay.
A lot of people would agree with limiting the use of plastics, a moderate and sustainable use of resources, and a simpler, less frenetic lifestyle, but as soon as you say, “for the good of the goddess/Gaia/Earth Mother, etc,” there will be rolling of the eyes and a turning away.
Neither is it fair to assume that all followers of a male deity are inherently ruthless exploiters of the earth, mother or not. The various groupings of the Dutch Amish scattered across the U.S., for example, have a fairly harsh interpretation of one of the most successful male-oriented religions ever, and they for the most part practice a lifestyle – in terms of subsistence – that the greeniest greenie could appreciate. Don’t want motor cars fouling the air and over-sized tractors tearing up and compressing the land? Then let’s all join the Pennsylvania Dutch in living the way our forefathers were doing in the 1800s, with only a limited use of modern technology.
If everyone were as cautious about accepting the “next new thing,” we’d have a lot fewer problems to deal with in terms of over exploitation of the earth’s dwindling resources.
What we need really is the sort of pragmatic, philosophically neutral approach to living taken by recently deceased Richard Zimmerman, also known as “Dugout Dick,” an Idaho recluse who lived 60 years in a home carved out of rocky outcropping along the Salmon River before dying on April 14 at the age of 94.
“I got lots of rocks and rubber tires. I have plenty of straw and fruit and vegetables, my dog and my cats and my guitars. … There’s nothing I really need,” he said in an interview 17 years ago with the Idaho Statesman newspaper.
Hard to think of a man who could be satisfied with those few things ever worrying about whether he was doing enough to make some old earth biddy love him. But I guarantee that if the old gal exists and has any regard for us mortals, she fell for him years ago and never had to go pining.
Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi
"We love the earth and the earth loves us." – a performer at the Earth Day festival on April 24 to raise funds for the Ubud Community Playground
If the earth loves us, then the old gal has got to be one tough mother. I mean, she tries to do us in all the time. At the end of April, a tornado in Mississippi in the southern United States killed 10; earlier last month an earthquake in China killed more than 2,000, with the death toll still rising; and sometime between now and the end of the year, almost surely some natural disaster or other will kill dozens in Indonesia.
Those are the kinds of things I think about whenever I hear our planet personified as a sweet, doting entity – a sentiment often heard here in Ubud, even when it’s not Earth Day.
Don’t get me wrong. I am all for the earth. By all means, use solar power; limit water use; walk or cycle instead of ride; conserve electricity through the moderate use of energy-sucking appliances; dispose of household waste properly; and encourage responsible farming by going to town on organic groceries.
But I don’t see any added value in thinking of the earth as a conscious being, unless it is as some fickle fertility goddess from whom we are never sure what to expect -- gentle falling rain and soft breezes or rampaging typhoons and shaky ground. It just doesn’t fly that Gaia or Mother Earth has any caring concern for the creatures meandering around on her surface or that she thinks about any of us at all.
Look at it like this: If our world has some infusion of a divine spark, it probably gives about as much thought to us as we do for the dust mites that feed off the skin cells we all shed. And why should any earth god or goddess be necessarily benevolent? Does it make any more sense to believe in a soft-voiced, gently tripping Earth Mother wearing a white flowing dress and with flowers in her hair than it does to believe in a white-haired, long-bearded patriarch of a god sitting on a golden throne?
Now some of you are probably asking why I should care what sorts of gods other people choose to believe in. Well, I’ll tell you, I don’t, except for this: whenever gods start getting involved as being the reason we do or don’t do things, it just makes for a big old mess. People get distracted from the tasks at hand and get to arguing theology. People start not only wanting you to do certain things, but to do them for the “right” reasons – to appease their god or to keep some anti-god demon at bay.
A lot of people would agree with limiting the use of plastics, a moderate and sustainable use of resources, and a simpler, less frenetic lifestyle, but as soon as you say, “for the good of the goddess/Gaia/Earth Mother, etc,” there will be rolling of the eyes and a turning away.
Neither is it fair to assume that all followers of a male deity are inherently ruthless exploiters of the earth, mother or not. The various groupings of the Dutch Amish scattered across the U.S., for example, have a fairly harsh interpretation of one of the most successful male-oriented religions ever, and they for the most part practice a lifestyle – in terms of subsistence – that the greeniest greenie could appreciate. Don’t want motor cars fouling the air and over-sized tractors tearing up and compressing the land? Then let’s all join the Pennsylvania Dutch in living the way our forefathers were doing in the 1800s, with only a limited use of modern technology.
If everyone were as cautious about accepting the “next new thing,” we’d have a lot fewer problems to deal with in terms of over exploitation of the earth’s dwindling resources.
What we need really is the sort of pragmatic, philosophically neutral approach to living taken by recently deceased Richard Zimmerman, also known as “Dugout Dick,” an Idaho recluse who lived 60 years in a home carved out of rocky outcropping along the Salmon River before dying on April 14 at the age of 94.
“I got lots of rocks and rubber tires. I have plenty of straw and fruit and vegetables, my dog and my cats and my guitars. … There’s nothing I really need,” he said in an interview 17 years ago with the Idaho Statesman newspaper.
Hard to think of a man who could be satisfied with those few things ever worrying about whether he was doing enough to make some old earth biddy love him. But I guarantee that if the old gal exists and has any regard for us mortals, she fell for him years ago and never had to go pining.
Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi
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