Social Not-working?

Lately I've been thinking a lot about Facebook and what it means to my life. I joined in mid-May, and like most people who are new users of the site/function/world, I was quickly swept up in it. It was new and fun and crazy. Two and a half months later it doesn't feel so fresh anymore. There might be some issues.

In order to be strength-based, let's start with the good things.

Something that greatly amuses me is how much conversation happens about Facebook while not ON Facebook. Practically every day, I come home to Honey Bunny and tell him what so-and-so said on FB today that made me laugh, or I tell him about the latest childhood or high school friend that's surfaced and become my "friend". Almost every work day, I IM with my friend Steve about the latest FB goings-on with our mutual (or not) "friends". [It all feels so surreal: the self-conscious dialogue about the self-conscious dialogue.] I've also noticed how Facebook is starting to be mentioned in TV shows and movies. It's a phenomenon that's not going away anytime soon, which is part of the reason why I joined.

Warning: brutal honesty ahead. I also think it's cool to get back in contact with people who I've known throughout the years, generally people who I have no interest in being actual friends with. It's like running into someone on the street who you haven't seen in a long time (on purpose). It's a quick, "Nice to see you! What's going on in your life?", and you get the 411 on each other, and then you're outta there.

Conversely, I really appreciate the fact that I can keep tabs on all my very good friends who are far-flung. It's a quick, easy way to see/read what's going on for them without having to schedule a phone call or write long emails back and forth. Not that I don't enjoy phone calls or long emails, because I do! It's just a little easier to check FB is all.

I'm also on Twitter, which is like Facebook for really, really lazy people. Facebook is often criticized as being a venue for people to make snarky, quippy updates about themselves whilst they await their "friends" to lavish praise and approval upon them via Comments for said snarky, quippy updates. If you're one of those people who feel this about FB, do not go on Twitter, whatever you do!

Anyhow, I follow my friend Ashford on Twitter who was alone in a new, as-yet-unpacked house this week while his wife was away on business. One night he wrote, "I'm alone and lonely, making dinner for just myself." Had I read this that night, I would have called him up and invited him over for dinner. It's good to know not just what's going on in friend's lives, but what's going on in their heads as well.

Now for the issues...

I've always been one of those people who has a hard time "being in the moment" but even I'm surprised at those times when I'm more concerned with updating my Facebook status to reflect what I'm doing rather than just continuing to do whatever it is I'm doing. Disturbing!

Once upon a time, I was into MOO'ing. I was much younger and admittedly, had no life. I MOO'ed to escape a life I knew I should be building in reality, and instead opted for virtually. I was on the forefront of online technology, but I could not have felt more disconnected from the real world. I feel it happening again, and I'm not sure what to do about it because now I do have a life, and it's a good one. Instate rules, parameters, limitations on my usage? Probably.

I did mention in my list of positives that having high school, etc, friends become "friends" was nice, but there's a downside to it as well. After I ran out of actual FB-using friends and close family to be my "friends" and I started acquiring others, posting updates about myself started to feel weird. I don't feel free to say the things I would normally say in front of my real friends. I feel I have to moderate myself, which irritates me deeply. I moderate myself at work and in public all day long. I want FB to be safe. One friend just suggested to me last night that I don't moderate myself, despite this worry. "Just be yourself and if they don't like it, they can hide your updates or un-friend you. Done." Alright.

My biggest worry, though, is how it's split my life. Honey Bunny is not on Facebook, and has no plans to be. FB can be my private little life away from him, if I so choose. I choose not to, which is why I talk to him about the daily goings-on, but I don't know that it completely helps meld my two worlds... my big real world and my small (but somehow significant) Facebook world. Hmm.

You know what? In the process of writing this post, I've realized it's not so much that Facebook, Twitter or Flickr (yep, I'm on that one too) has changed me... it's more that my iPhone has changed the way I relate to the online world. If I didn't have a phone that felt like a pocket-sized super computer, I don't know that I'd even be talking about this. Boy, if someone told me back in 1994 when I was reading Ender's Game that I'd own, and use like mad, my own scaled down version of a "desk", I would have told them they were nuts.

Weird.

Food politics

I started reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver this weekend and it's pretty interesting! It's not exactly the soapy, sleepytime fare I normally favor, but a coworker gave me a copy after I told her that Honey Bunny and I try to make at least 60% of our food purchases organic and/or locally grown.

Kingsolver wrote this book with her husband and daughter(s) after they uprooted their lives in Tucson, Arizona, to live in southern Appalachia. They vowed that, for one year, they would make "every attempt to feed themselves animals and vegetables whose provenance they really knew." In addition to reducing their carbon footprint by as much as possible, they wanted to really know where their food came from (who grew it, bartered it, raised it, killed it) or more importantly, to grow and raise as much of it themselves on their own farm.

Color me surprised by her mention of food politics as it relates to fat folks. The ensuing passage follows her explanation of how "the government rewrote the rules on commodity subsidies so these funds did not safeguard farmers, but instead guaranteed a supply of cheap corn and soybeans." These two crops were/are parlayed into not just feeding people, but feeding animals that are being raised for slaughter, "to make high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils and thousands of other starch- and oil-based chemicals." The net result is that farmers were/are overproducing those crops just to keep their financial heads above water -- but where does the overage of these crops go? Well, the food industry apparently had some ideas on what to do with it...

No cashier held a gun to our heads and made us supersize it, true enough. But humans have a built-in weakness for fats and sugar. We evolved in lean environments where it was a big plus for survival to gorge on calorie-dense foods whenever we found them. Whether or not they understand the biology, food marketers know the weakness and have exploited it without mercy. Obesity is generally viewed as a failure of personal resolve, with no acknowledgement of this genuine conspiracy in this historical scheme. People actually did sit in strategy meetings discussing ways to get all those surplus calories into people who neither needed nor wished to consume them. Children have been targeted especially; food companies spend over $10 billion a year selling food brands to kids, and it isn't broccoli they're pushing. Overweight children are a demographic in many ways similar to minors addicted to cigarettes, with one notable exception: their parents are usually the suppliers. We all subsidize the cheap calories with our tax dollars, the strategists make fortunes, and the overweight consumers get blamed for the violation. The perfect crime.*

Worth mentioning (at least to me): Barbara Kingsolver is not fat, nor is her husband or children.

Coincidentally, I read this article by Marion Nestle in the Sunday, June 21st, edition of the San Francisco Chronicle Food section. I have often, myself, wondered, "Aren't organics elitist?" Nestle's response was completely eye-opening and furthers that of Kingsolver's assertion above.

*Kingsolver, Barbara (2007), "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," pg. 15, Harper Perennial.