No
That's the message that I interpret from the numerous job listings that I read. They are far afield of my interests and experience. I have both a bachelor's and master's in communication. I finished four years of a PhD program and successfully completed comprehensive exams. I was a candidate and withdrew my candidacy shortly after I turned 31. I realized that I had no interest in the paper I was writing--my dissertation.
Now that I've said my piece about my past 15 years of education, I know my qualifications:
- I am qualified to teach numerous topic under the umbrella discipline of communication
- I am qualified to study organizational communication; most with my qualifications end up working as organizational change consultants
Now the question remains why I'm not pursuing any of these fields. I dislike a stereotype I have of communication majors. They're slick communicators. They're PR professionals. They're unethical. They're the sophists.
I dislike the disposition that I feel is developed by the profession. But here I stand, hungry, indifferent to my job prospects and my interest in cultivating them.
I am angry and sad. I first had these very feelings when I took a course on business and professional writing. I felt that I had no prospects, and all around me were people who either were beginning to develop their work disposition or were indifferent to their prospects. "I'll cross that bridge when I get there." That was the attitude I saw in others. I felt that something was deeply wrong about what I felt was a synthetic constellation of attitudes toward work, expectations for behavior, and one's willing concession toward these behaviors and attitudes.
I had an office job. I was doing fine. I saved my money while there and bought myself a car. I still drive that car. It's still going strong, but it's only a matter of time before it breaks down or gets broken into. That's the reality principle in our make-believe world. That hit me hard last night.
I was standing on my porch. The birdsong that I heard outside raised my curiosity, so I took the last peanut butter sandwich in the house with me outside and ate it. Out there, at about two in the morning, I ate the sandwich and marveled at the bird's chirping.
For about 30 minutes I listened to the bird return to some familiar sounds but add in a different range of sounds, some quite strange. The bird's song sounded like cellular phone rings. Some of the sounds reminded me of rings in various states of disrepair. That solitary bird, of unknown type, filled the night with its song. Surrounding it were the sounds of cars racing along a nearby road. I could see a hospital in the distance. A cellular tower's beacon blinked behind the trees. The bird's song continued. I looked around. I was alone. The neighborhood homes were all darkened, their occupants asleep. I wondered if the residents of the home in whose yard the bird was located could hear the bird? Would a man come out and try to shoot it quiet? I then expected that the majority of these residents were more interested in the sounds coming through their television, their radios, their computers. Their attention focused on other things, their minds slumbering in preparation for another day at work, contributed to the neighborhood's collective ignorance of the bird. I almost cried.
I wanted to scream out in the night, but nobody would answer my screams. Nobody was interested in that bird that had perhaps returned to this tree year after year. It could be calling to a mate still finding its way back. Its ancestors flew to this area before this neighborhood existed. The bird and its strange birdsong, the meaning and purpose about which I could only speculate, was a life form. I am a life form. My neighbors are life forms. So much life goes unrecognized. I then realized that I could easily leave this urban world behind. I could leave into the wilderness and squat on federal land. I know very little about how to live in this wilderness. I'm too sensitive.
I could live alone and never see another person again, but I need people. My desire to be alone and my ability to do so is a privilege. My vacillation about my future and my path there, my disinterest in love and intimacy, my continuous interrogation of who I am in light of my job prospects, all of these are privileges. I have a car that runs. I have a savings account that cushions my fall. I have a small job that stops most of its bleeding.
I've discussed this so many times, and I've gone nowhere and arrived no closer to an answer.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Thursday, April 22, 2010
time to make the doughnuts
Disclaimer
I come here to write until I cannot write no more. I need the practice. I need the discipline.
I saw a movie where actor Matt Dillon played an accurate Charles Bukowski. His character was named Hank Chinaski, and the film was called "Factotum" which apparently means a person employed to do odd jobs. Dillon's character does a range several jobs, serially, and they all end with his employer tracking him down at a local bar and telling him he's fired.
The reason I bring this up is because Hank Chinaski considers himself a writer. He's basically possessed by writing, and so every time he takes a puff or a drink he also has a pencil in the other hand jotting down story lines. Usually, in an adjacent scene we see Chinaski mailing off his material to the New York Times or Black Sparrow Press. Owing to his nomadic living habits, he never receives the numerous letters he receives indicating which stories were submitted and which were ignored. One of his landlords reads them over her morning coffee, tucking the positive reviews in her dress pocket. It's her own little voyeuristic release.
I send my missives into the ether for nobody to read. I've shared this blog with very few people, and as you can tell it's more diary-like than it is instructive in how to write. I spend too much time on procedural issues, navel gazing, mirror watching. That can and should stop, but it's a square one for me. A unit of measurement, a cup to be filled, a telos in the fulfillment.
I'll just sit and write for a while. I had a topic. Oh yes, personal electronic devices with web access, what some call 'internet appliances.' These are the hyped up cellular phones with keypads, phones, and audio/visual capabilities. Everyone uses them, they're intuitive, touch friendly, and help us share our senses with others. But what does that breed? A fidgeting subject.
Technofidgeting
The fidgeting subject is the person whose most recognizable public behaviors are the subject's withdrawal from public interaction. Instead, each person uses time in the public as an opportunity to retreat into the small glowing, touch-sensitive screen through which this person stays in contact with the people the subject prefers. The corpus of behaviors of the fidgeting subject reveal a level of obsession and compulsion with addressing unanswered messages, double checking messages, reading sent mail, looking at stored pictures, generally being enamored with information retrieval, search, and maintenance. This is a behavior based in information storage.
Storage
I recall being in an airport as a young teenager with my cousin. I was obsessed with computers at the time and took on a series of small jobs to save money for one. I never did save that money. I had a mother who had some kind of habit she kept secret but which surfaced in her habit of taking from my stash of cash. I spent a summer with my cousin in Lawton, Oklahoma. It was a post-Garth Brooks, "achy breaky heart" era: summer 1992. We were in the airport and one of the big hard drive companies had an advertisement/display of their latest products. One was a gigabyte hard drive. It was mounted on the wall display behind plexiglass next to one of their smaller multi-megabyte drives. The gigabyte drive was monstrous in comparison with numerous platters on which information was stored. That was a glimpse into a future, a saurian relic, which would become the nimble fleet-footed avian storage device of today. Now we have tiny storage devices with enormous capabilities. A drive holding 1000-times the data as that huge gigabyte drive is about the size of a pill box. This has an important effect. We can store more.
Storage, search, information retrieval--I can't think of better buzz words that define our current moment. We now have the capability to place storage devices in cars, phones, appliances, personal media devices, televisions, and so on. And the economy of storage justifies this. It's cheap to add more space as a feature on next year's cell model. It's cheap to add a hard drive to our next-generation automobile consoles. These storage devices, in their current capacity, allow us to time shift. If we miss a segment of a live broadcast, we can simply rewind, catch-up, and still have access to what is currently streaming, perhaps minutes ahead of our consumption in the car next to us. "Live" has suddenly become a less pressing format. We don't have to plan our day around it. We just need to be able to tell our preferred storage device to record it. That's one outcome of the storage boom. What's the other?
Well, for some storage becomes an obsession. A man who stores a terabyte of naked images on his hard drive loses track of what he has and what he hasn't. Storage outpaces a way to interface discreetly with it. We lack an appropriate index, something that will allow us to discern what we have and don't have and where to find it, in an instant. We return to the picture, the snapshot, the global perspective as a metaphor for knowing all at once what we have stored in the trillions of bites of data on that device the size of an AC power adapter. So in our free time, or in our make time, we search, catalog, move, delete, copy, and rename our stored files. When storage media become cheap, human memory becomes our burden. Namely, we must continually access our storage media if we want to maintain a grasp of what we have. Like a hafiz, we must practice recitation of our drive space's contents, and we do this all the time, like a person who bites one's nails or twirls one's hair. It becomes an incessant, obsessive, and mindless execution of tiny behaviors. That is our current situation.
Recursive behaviors
Waxing poetically while driving down the highway I stated that we've become the dead mannequins to our technical devices. The devices hail us. We rely upon them as augments to our own attention, helping us keep track of appointments, names, numbers, contacts. Some slices of the technosocial milieu I'm describing reflect conscious tactics to access the device purposefully. All the other time is filled with those device's power to direct us.
It's a matter of viewing culture as a temporally recursive medium through which we live, grow, and understand that we reproduce in the tiny rituals of search, retrieval, access, recall, copy, paste, delete, send, receive. Those who see time as a straight line may miss the subtlety of the argument. I claim that once we incorporate the devices into our lives, it's our returning and slowly adaptive use of them, which figures the devices so prominently in our daily lives. If we find them useful, we use them. As we shape our day around their use, we feel we cannot live without them. But that's always been the case. We use tools, which allow us to expand our scope of action and the density of our societies. To the extent that our lives, our society, our identities grow increasingly into these areas of expansion--these lands reclaimed from a sea of impossibility--we become reliant upon the tools which allow it. That's a material condition. The cultural-material element, once again, are our ritual activities, which punctuate tool-use behaviors. Those become the recursive elements that fold our identities and our behaviors into the return to these tools again and again.
Psychopathology
So what does this leave us with? The criticism relies upon using a metaphorical DSM classification to define this techno-fidgeting as pathological. Alas, the definitions of abnormal psychology require a ground of normal behaviors against which we places them and discern their difference. Psychology of this sort is not only culturally specific, it's based upon a metaphorical bell curve with outlier behaviors falling within the category of psychopathology. That being said, how much longer until we lose this ground against which we judge these behaviors?
The last frontier is the mind.
I've been working on an argument within the vein of Richard Dawkins. His "Selfish Gene" theory suggest that animal behavior is driven by a gene's desire for survivability. That's a simple enough argument, and I may have mangled his characterization altogether. I've been considering how ritual, as repetitive practice, is a way to economize brain tissue. If you're having the same experience repetitively then you're practicing what some studies call 'neuroconsolidation.' In short, the same experiences call up and reuse the same neural connections. This way the brain doesn't have to rewire itself too often, which could be a costly activity. I tried this idea on for size by attempting to shake myself of some deep-seated anxieties and the behaviors they spawn. I've had no luck so far, but I'm a messy experimenter. All I've been doing is selling off my stuff en masse. What I am thinking is that, given my argument above, our gadgetry and gadget-related behavioral disorders are re-ordering our brains. Perhaps they aren't. Our behavioral tendencies already reinforce obsessive and reward-based behaviors. These behaviors are much older than the hominid mind and body. If we can structure environments that elicit this in rats, then we're seeing a much older survival strategy. So maybe we aren't 'changing' the brain all that much. But maybe the argument doesn't require evidence of wholesale change, just small stuff. I'll keep thinking about it.
I come here to write until I cannot write no more. I need the practice. I need the discipline.
I saw a movie where actor Matt Dillon played an accurate Charles Bukowski. His character was named Hank Chinaski, and the film was called "Factotum" which apparently means a person employed to do odd jobs. Dillon's character does a range several jobs, serially, and they all end with his employer tracking him down at a local bar and telling him he's fired.
The reason I bring this up is because Hank Chinaski considers himself a writer. He's basically possessed by writing, and so every time he takes a puff or a drink he also has a pencil in the other hand jotting down story lines. Usually, in an adjacent scene we see Chinaski mailing off his material to the New York Times or Black Sparrow Press. Owing to his nomadic living habits, he never receives the numerous letters he receives indicating which stories were submitted and which were ignored. One of his landlords reads them over her morning coffee, tucking the positive reviews in her dress pocket. It's her own little voyeuristic release.
I send my missives into the ether for nobody to read. I've shared this blog with very few people, and as you can tell it's more diary-like than it is instructive in how to write. I spend too much time on procedural issues, navel gazing, mirror watching. That can and should stop, but it's a square one for me. A unit of measurement, a cup to be filled, a telos in the fulfillment.
I'll just sit and write for a while. I had a topic. Oh yes, personal electronic devices with web access, what some call 'internet appliances.' These are the hyped up cellular phones with keypads, phones, and audio/visual capabilities. Everyone uses them, they're intuitive, touch friendly, and help us share our senses with others. But what does that breed? A fidgeting subject.
Technofidgeting
The fidgeting subject is the person whose most recognizable public behaviors are the subject's withdrawal from public interaction. Instead, each person uses time in the public as an opportunity to retreat into the small glowing, touch-sensitive screen through which this person stays in contact with the people the subject prefers. The corpus of behaviors of the fidgeting subject reveal a level of obsession and compulsion with addressing unanswered messages, double checking messages, reading sent mail, looking at stored pictures, generally being enamored with information retrieval, search, and maintenance. This is a behavior based in information storage.
Storage
I recall being in an airport as a young teenager with my cousin. I was obsessed with computers at the time and took on a series of small jobs to save money for one. I never did save that money. I had a mother who had some kind of habit she kept secret but which surfaced in her habit of taking from my stash of cash. I spent a summer with my cousin in Lawton, Oklahoma. It was a post-Garth Brooks, "achy breaky heart" era: summer 1992. We were in the airport and one of the big hard drive companies had an advertisement/display of their latest products. One was a gigabyte hard drive. It was mounted on the wall display behind plexiglass next to one of their smaller multi-megabyte drives. The gigabyte drive was monstrous in comparison with numerous platters on which information was stored. That was a glimpse into a future, a saurian relic, which would become the nimble fleet-footed avian storage device of today. Now we have tiny storage devices with enormous capabilities. A drive holding 1000-times the data as that huge gigabyte drive is about the size of a pill box. This has an important effect. We can store more.
Storage, search, information retrieval--I can't think of better buzz words that define our current moment. We now have the capability to place storage devices in cars, phones, appliances, personal media devices, televisions, and so on. And the economy of storage justifies this. It's cheap to add more space as a feature on next year's cell model. It's cheap to add a hard drive to our next-generation automobile consoles. These storage devices, in their current capacity, allow us to time shift. If we miss a segment of a live broadcast, we can simply rewind, catch-up, and still have access to what is currently streaming, perhaps minutes ahead of our consumption in the car next to us. "Live" has suddenly become a less pressing format. We don't have to plan our day around it. We just need to be able to tell our preferred storage device to record it. That's one outcome of the storage boom. What's the other?
Well, for some storage becomes an obsession. A man who stores a terabyte of naked images on his hard drive loses track of what he has and what he hasn't. Storage outpaces a way to interface discreetly with it. We lack an appropriate index, something that will allow us to discern what we have and don't have and where to find it, in an instant. We return to the picture, the snapshot, the global perspective as a metaphor for knowing all at once what we have stored in the trillions of bites of data on that device the size of an AC power adapter. So in our free time, or in our make time, we search, catalog, move, delete, copy, and rename our stored files. When storage media become cheap, human memory becomes our burden. Namely, we must continually access our storage media if we want to maintain a grasp of what we have. Like a hafiz, we must practice recitation of our drive space's contents, and we do this all the time, like a person who bites one's nails or twirls one's hair. It becomes an incessant, obsessive, and mindless execution of tiny behaviors. That is our current situation.
Recursive behaviors
Waxing poetically while driving down the highway I stated that we've become the dead mannequins to our technical devices. The devices hail us. We rely upon them as augments to our own attention, helping us keep track of appointments, names, numbers, contacts. Some slices of the technosocial milieu I'm describing reflect conscious tactics to access the device purposefully. All the other time is filled with those device's power to direct us.
It's a matter of viewing culture as a temporally recursive medium through which we live, grow, and understand that we reproduce in the tiny rituals of search, retrieval, access, recall, copy, paste, delete, send, receive. Those who see time as a straight line may miss the subtlety of the argument. I claim that once we incorporate the devices into our lives, it's our returning and slowly adaptive use of them, which figures the devices so prominently in our daily lives. If we find them useful, we use them. As we shape our day around their use, we feel we cannot live without them. But that's always been the case. We use tools, which allow us to expand our scope of action and the density of our societies. To the extent that our lives, our society, our identities grow increasingly into these areas of expansion--these lands reclaimed from a sea of impossibility--we become reliant upon the tools which allow it. That's a material condition. The cultural-material element, once again, are our ritual activities, which punctuate tool-use behaviors. Those become the recursive elements that fold our identities and our behaviors into the return to these tools again and again.
Psychopathology
So what does this leave us with? The criticism relies upon using a metaphorical DSM classification to define this techno-fidgeting as pathological. Alas, the definitions of abnormal psychology require a ground of normal behaviors against which we places them and discern their difference. Psychology of this sort is not only culturally specific, it's based upon a metaphorical bell curve with outlier behaviors falling within the category of psychopathology. That being said, how much longer until we lose this ground against which we judge these behaviors?
The last frontier is the mind.
I've been working on an argument within the vein of Richard Dawkins. His "Selfish Gene" theory suggest that animal behavior is driven by a gene's desire for survivability. That's a simple enough argument, and I may have mangled his characterization altogether. I've been considering how ritual, as repetitive practice, is a way to economize brain tissue. If you're having the same experience repetitively then you're practicing what some studies call 'neuroconsolidation.' In short, the same experiences call up and reuse the same neural connections. This way the brain doesn't have to rewire itself too often, which could be a costly activity. I tried this idea on for size by attempting to shake myself of some deep-seated anxieties and the behaviors they spawn. I've had no luck so far, but I'm a messy experimenter. All I've been doing is selling off my stuff en masse. What I am thinking is that, given my argument above, our gadgetry and gadget-related behavioral disorders are re-ordering our brains. Perhaps they aren't. Our behavioral tendencies already reinforce obsessive and reward-based behaviors. These behaviors are much older than the hominid mind and body. If we can structure environments that elicit this in rats, then we're seeing a much older survival strategy. So maybe we aren't 'changing' the brain all that much. But maybe the argument doesn't require evidence of wholesale change, just small stuff. I'll keep thinking about it.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
a reason not to plug your ex-girlfriend's name into 'google'
We all succumb to that temptation, and so we search.
We look up old names. We look up ourselves. I looked up Susan who was the last woman that I dated.
She was the last who I dated. You could even call her the first who I dated. We both agreed that we were dating, at least for a while, which is more than I can say about the last two women I was seen with in public. That's when I decided to tell her that she was lied to by her friends. I never told them that I was interested in her. Without that lie, that little white lie, I wouldn't have gone on that date or could count Susan on that short list of sex experiences.
I never stated my interest in her to her friends, but nevertheless there we were, together, in this dingy bar on Pearl Street in Boulder, together. A few drinks later the women who conned each of us into going out had left,. We were left together, but we weren't alone. This dingy bar was packed to the gills. So we left and had more drinks down the street.
I learned two things that night. She didn't go dutch with me, and she had absolutely no problem setting the drinking pace. She also seemed to like me. But I never call that learning anything because I never trust the intentions of another. Maybe I should begin to trust again. As much as I fear that emotional sucker punch to the gut, if I don't open up or let down my guard I may never feel anything again other than that sweet, sweet ache of being alone, wishing for contact.
I put Susan into the Google today, and she looked glamorous. She didn't look frumpy or have that short hair that I remembered. Her hair was long and it made her look elegant. Don't get me wrong. The picture was tiny. She was wearing a dark pair of sunglasses. And the picture was cropped in tight to her chest and head. Her hair looked beautiful, and she looked happy. I smiled briefly, then I stood inside my kitchen pantry for a few minutes and stared at the floor feeling somewhat ashamed at what I had done.
I haven't dated since, and I was happy to rid myself of her at the time. I had a million things on my mind. I didn't have the time for her, and I continually questioned why she'd be with me. I was a broke-ass sucker but not as broke as I am now. She was funnier than me. I haven't had sex with a woman since. That was almost 5 years ago.
I cling to the moment because it's all that I have, a last vestige of my intimate past.
She forced me to say the things I dare not say. She wanted to know why I didn't want to vacation with her. I told her that I would feel trapped. I just don't feel comfortable sharing intimate space for long periods of time. I guess I better get over that one or I'm going to spend another 5 years alone.
I have less hair now. I have fewer chins as well. I have fewer job prospects and more time to spare. I may look better in the face by someone's Polaroid imagination. The longer I go without contact, the more I feel I lose touch. And the stranger these searches become.
We look up old names. We look up ourselves. I looked up Susan who was the last woman that I dated.
She was the last who I dated. You could even call her the first who I dated. We both agreed that we were dating, at least for a while, which is more than I can say about the last two women I was seen with in public. That's when I decided to tell her that she was lied to by her friends. I never told them that I was interested in her. Without that lie, that little white lie, I wouldn't have gone on that date or could count Susan on that short list of sex experiences.
I never stated my interest in her to her friends, but nevertheless there we were, together, in this dingy bar on Pearl Street in Boulder, together. A few drinks later the women who conned each of us into going out had left,. We were left together, but we weren't alone. This dingy bar was packed to the gills. So we left and had more drinks down the street.
I learned two things that night. She didn't go dutch with me, and she had absolutely no problem setting the drinking pace. She also seemed to like me. But I never call that learning anything because I never trust the intentions of another. Maybe I should begin to trust again. As much as I fear that emotional sucker punch to the gut, if I don't open up or let down my guard I may never feel anything again other than that sweet, sweet ache of being alone, wishing for contact.
I put Susan into the Google today, and she looked glamorous. She didn't look frumpy or have that short hair that I remembered. Her hair was long and it made her look elegant. Don't get me wrong. The picture was tiny. She was wearing a dark pair of sunglasses. And the picture was cropped in tight to her chest and head. Her hair looked beautiful, and she looked happy. I smiled briefly, then I stood inside my kitchen pantry for a few minutes and stared at the floor feeling somewhat ashamed at what I had done.
I haven't dated since, and I was happy to rid myself of her at the time. I had a million things on my mind. I didn't have the time for her, and I continually questioned why she'd be with me. I was a broke-ass sucker but not as broke as I am now. She was funnier than me. I haven't had sex with a woman since. That was almost 5 years ago.
I cling to the moment because it's all that I have, a last vestige of my intimate past.
She forced me to say the things I dare not say. She wanted to know why I didn't want to vacation with her. I told her that I would feel trapped. I just don't feel comfortable sharing intimate space for long periods of time. I guess I better get over that one or I'm going to spend another 5 years alone.
I have less hair now. I have fewer chins as well. I have fewer job prospects and more time to spare. I may look better in the face by someone's Polaroid imagination. The longer I go without contact, the more I feel I lose touch. And the stranger these searches become.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
same sex animal pairs
I love shit like this. The bible babblers who espouse the natural and right behavior of heterosexual activity for the sole purpose of procreation cast their view of their community like a big steel net across the wide world.
Then I read an article from the NYT about same sex animal pairs.
"Male Amazon River dolphins have been known to penetrate each other in the blowhole."
and
"One primatologist speculated that the real reason two male orangutans were fellating each other was nutritional."
Both quotes reference observed behavior by naturalists. The second provides some sort of 'natural' or 'functional' objective.
I cannot help but consider these studies in light of their significance as responses to a larger, nearly universal, ongoing debate about sexuality and civil rights. This science, as it gets filtered through the press, becomes an polyphonic utterance in that debate. It is a voice of many addressed to an audience that is fully aware of the contrarian's opinions and agenda. The reader cannot help but frame it this way not because the reader is well read or currently abreast on this topic but because that's how we view speech as it pertains to our lives. Communication is quite communal, and studies about porpoises penetrating fellow porpoises' blowholes smacks both of 'gay porn euphemism' and recognition that we categorize the world according to human concern. That same article, which extended for several ad-filled pages, mentioned this. The scientists involved in this work say that such categorizations, like presuming heterosexuality as an evolutionary default position, lead to biased science and research. I cannot agree more, but approaching animal sexual behavior naively won't make the science any less biased. The human outline is the measure of all things that we feel concerned enough to measure. Humanity 'gets props' in all that we say.
Then I read an article from the NYT about same sex animal pairs.
"Male Amazon River dolphins have been known to penetrate each other in the blowhole."
and
"One primatologist speculated that the real reason two male orangutans were fellating each other was nutritional."
Both quotes reference observed behavior by naturalists. The second provides some sort of 'natural' or 'functional' objective.
I cannot help but consider these studies in light of their significance as responses to a larger, nearly universal, ongoing debate about sexuality and civil rights. This science, as it gets filtered through the press, becomes an polyphonic utterance in that debate. It is a voice of many addressed to an audience that is fully aware of the contrarian's opinions and agenda. The reader cannot help but frame it this way not because the reader is well read or currently abreast on this topic but because that's how we view speech as it pertains to our lives. Communication is quite communal, and studies about porpoises penetrating fellow porpoises' blowholes smacks both of 'gay porn euphemism' and recognition that we categorize the world according to human concern. That same article, which extended for several ad-filled pages, mentioned this. The scientists involved in this work say that such categorizations, like presuming heterosexuality as an evolutionary default position, lead to biased science and research. I cannot agree more, but approaching animal sexual behavior naively won't make the science any less biased. The human outline is the measure of all things that we feel concerned enough to measure. Humanity 'gets props' in all that we say.
Monday, April 5, 2010
the new yahoo
I enabled the new yahoo mail system and it has a new and improved spam blocker as well as more features to make social networking easy.
The problem I've found is that the spam blocker tends to block the e-mails I send to myself in order to save a URL or a print-friendly news article. I have to prove my humanness by recognizing and typing out some warped words, and I almost always mess them up. Then after several attempts, I become blocked by this spam system from sending any e-mails to the target address, i.e., myself--the same e-mail address I'm using to send the mail. It's a strange situation to be in as the spam blocker challenges your authenticity and increasingly makes a once convenient ability to e-mail oneself into an incorrigible series of hoops to prove the authenticity of my mail.
The second problem I've found is that the social networking functions, which are now a tab aside my compose e-mail tab, is populated by one type of message: 'female name + series of numbers' wants to add you to her contacts. I always decline these requests because I know they become ways for the social networking service to spam me with a web address to some cam site or some other I-ntimacy service.
So here I am staring at two functions to make my personal web page more approachable and more social being co-opted to alienate me from my normal uses of my web page and to offer a flattering front door to intimacy spam.
I truly doubt that I'll find sexy singles in my area as the same pictures are used to represent some of the sexy singles while the IP address of my connection changes the cities in which these singles are located. I find the whole notion of reducing the need for sex into an automated search application a rather strange way of grafting search onto sexuality.
The problem I've found is that the spam blocker tends to block the e-mails I send to myself in order to save a URL or a print-friendly news article. I have to prove my humanness by recognizing and typing out some warped words, and I almost always mess them up. Then after several attempts, I become blocked by this spam system from sending any e-mails to the target address, i.e., myself--the same e-mail address I'm using to send the mail. It's a strange situation to be in as the spam blocker challenges your authenticity and increasingly makes a once convenient ability to e-mail oneself into an incorrigible series of hoops to prove the authenticity of my mail.
The second problem I've found is that the social networking functions, which are now a tab aside my compose e-mail tab, is populated by one type of message: 'female name + series of numbers' wants to add you to her contacts. I always decline these requests because I know they become ways for the social networking service to spam me with a web address to some cam site or some other I-ntimacy service.
So here I am staring at two functions to make my personal web page more approachable and more social being co-opted to alienate me from my normal uses of my web page and to offer a flattering front door to intimacy spam.
I truly doubt that I'll find sexy singles in my area as the same pictures are used to represent some of the sexy singles while the IP address of my connection changes the cities in which these singles are located. I find the whole notion of reducing the need for sex into an automated search application a rather strange way of grafting search onto sexuality.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)