Filling my heart with joy

Strange, isn’t it? The Internet is a great democratiser, but it’s also helped to concentrate power in only a few hands. I’m sure this isn’t exactly groundbreaking news, but my “I built my own website!” self is really having trouble coming to terms with it (but embracing it at the same time, I know I’ve written about it before but I can’t find it).

The web is shrinking! With the popularity of Facebook and Twitter (and their apps), there are probably five gazillion more pages out there. But the information on these sites lives and dies there.

It makes my life easier as a marketer to have these huge, aggregated sites that almost everyone visits — I can plan strategies with much more ease (notwithstanding my current question on how well these applications will display on mobile devices as they get more and more complex). I’m still occasionally obliged to build and/or manage a microsite, but one thing I’ve noticed there is a real dearth of these days is the fan site. There might be one or two that are real draws, but more people are likely to pledge allegiance in their profiles or on the Facebook Pages themselves.

It must be human nature to be lazy. The Web was this Wild West-y sort of place and it still sort of is — but for the most part, the mainstream have decided to take the path of least resistance and join up with these mega sites so they are ‘hanging out’ where everyone else is. I’m betting there are fewer weblogs now that social network and micro-blogging sites have really taken off.

There are still some excellent sites, thank goodness, but I guess this is the way the world works. There may have been a technological revolution and there’s all this talk about how kids are so different because they’re ‘digital natives’, but there hasn’t been a revolution in human behaviour. We’re still lazy shits who, generally, want to enjoy the fruits of other people’s labours.

Random thoughts I should probably keep to myself…

… but I like to share inappropriately.

Do adolescent cliques re-assert themselves now that we’ve found old classmates on Facebook?
We had the cool crew, the wild girls, the bookish ones… we’re all grown up now, but I wonder, if there was a giant school reunion that we all miraculously were in Singapore for, would the groups continue to segregate according to ‘coolness’ lines like they did back then? Some of the ‘wild’ girls I knew back then are happily-married mums now.

(I am really loving Facebook right now for letting me find my old junior college classmates. They are all really interesting people.)

Why can all my colleagues acquire, edit, publish, and market books so damn brilliantly but so few appear able to rinse their crockery before putting it in the dishwasher or change the bog roll in the toilet when the roll runs out?

“The H—”
I can type it, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to utter the word “Husband” anywhere near the word “Neil” just yet. He’s been The Boyfriend for so long that changing that description just seems too weird. It’s been almost three weeks already and I still can’t do it. There must be something in my subconscious that thinks if I address Neil as The Husband, I will shrivel up and die of old age.

Yesterday I was actually chatting with someone and said, “My boyf—I mean Neil,” and that was when I realised I’m a total freak.

Another identifying trait of mine is clumsiness beyond the bounds of reason
How many people do you know can slip and fall on their hands and knees while trying to avoid someone who has slipped and fallen? Granted, I was wearing shoes I tend to slip in, but we were like a comedy duo — the middle-aged chubster slipping and falling on his arse, and me going, “Whoa…”, undertaking the evasive manoeuvre of leaning right with the soles of my feet evading the pavement and my knees not evading the road.

And finally, the granddaddy of weird thoughts I frequently entertain:

Why are females so damned feminine?
I don’t give two shits about handbags or what’s “on-trend” (except to be amazed that women follow this stuff when the stylists and designers tend to wear the same damned things year after year because they know what suits them) or hair treatments or manicures or pedicures or wedding videos or wedding dresses or diets (I am on the classic See Food diet) or anything so many women I know or see on teevee seem really intent on. I’m like Christina Yang on Grey’s Anatomy except I’m not that ambitious.

It also drives me nuts to read about celebrity women who profess to be tomboys but are constantly in high heels and full make up. WTF?!

Facebook in real life

That’s pretty funny.

No, I don’t know them*

* But if I’d stayed in Singapore instead of tramping around the world doing random jobs I probably would.

I’ve just looked at Facebook’s People you might know application — I definitely don’t know Jeffrey Zeldman, and it’s really interesting to see how small Singapore is. A lot of people I know who I wouldn’t think have a connection in any way have mutual friends.

Excuses, excuses

Life is pretty busy. I came into work this morning to find a cutting from the latest Harper’s Bazaar on my desk, called Caught in the Net. I’m obviously not going to reproduce it here, but here’s a summary: OMG! If you use Facebook and MySpace and Bebo, you friend all these people you don’t know and YOU COULD GET YOUR IDENTITY STOLEN! Or you could come across looking like a wanker!

I haven’t quite worked out yet why people don’t treat the information they put on the Internet with the same care that they would when dealing with real life. As I’ve suggested before, sites like Facebook or MySpace should supplement, not replace, your offline interactions, i.e. only add real friends to your list.

(I have a couple of Internet friends on my list — I met them elsewhere.)

This only adds to my belief that journalists think / believe, rightly or wrongly, that the general public is pretty damn thick.

Yup, I’ve been away…

… kinda.

But now I’m back and trying to catch up with work. Hopefully I’ll be able to download my photos (Doug the monkey reckons they’re hilarious, but that’s because I gave him a single malt) some time this weekend.

Loads more old classmates on Facebook, by the way.

No chance to finish my re-design, either, which means I might change my mind and have to re-re-design this site. Ha.

Connecting with the past

I’m finding (well, they’re mainly finding me) so many old classmates on Facebook — I’m especially tickled that one of my old friends, Angela, still loves Gleaming the Cube. Back in the day, we were the tomboys of the bunch, skateboarding like fiends. There’s also Rachel and Jianyan (Karen, Pene, the other Angela, and Jean I’ve been in touch with, so they don’t really get a mention — haha).

Wow. Join the Singapore network and the SNGS group (class of 1992), y’all. So far Angela and I have been saying good morning to all the things (yes,things) Mrs Hwang made us say good morning to every Monday and Wednesday.

Sunbathers burden on society, official cause of death, tools have morals

Mainly from BBC today, and some bleedingly obvious comments.

  1. Singapore Bans Gay Rights Forum. Aiyah. Singapore, why do you embarrass us expats so? How can we explain to others why Singapore is so uptight we can’t even talk about OTHER countries’ stance on homosexuality?
  2. Hardcore sunbathers ‘know risks’. I take it sunbathers who deliberately get burned for a tan and know it increases their risk of skin cancer will be using private healthcare when they are diagnosed, and won’t be expecting the NHS (and the taxpayer) to pick up the tab? Ha! As fucking if.
  3. Post-mortem on airport attack man. Will they be calling witnesses who will confirm the man set himself on fire, and shock horror, burned? He then went to hospital with 90% burns and subsequently died. It’s not exactly a covert Russian-style poisoning. So he’s an idiot, but how he died isn’t exactly news.
  4. Firms withdraw BNP Facebook ads. I’m not really interested in the Facebook news (although Facebook should surely be able to control what ads go where), but it brought up a discussion over how sites like YouTube should censor content, while I would argue that these sites are simply tools (discussed previously), and while they should be attentive to what gets posted — especially if there is a criminality issue involved — it is not their responsibility. The responsibility lies with the parents (if the posters are children) and those who upload the content. The more consequences for bad behaviour are divorced from the occurrence of that behaviour (i.e. someone else being forced to take the blame), the worse the problem will be.

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