A lot of online social networking sites, Facebook and Twitter in particular, rest on the human need for connection. For letting people into your life, no matter how insignificant the post may be. Still, regardless of how inane the post may be, it’s still not the same as being there. There is no intimacy or sensory experience...
News as Political Agenda: Whatever Happened to Cronkite?
Our news programs have become promoters of a political agenda, no longer a broadcast of both sides of a position. But isn’t that what Walter Cronkite did–present both sides? Instead we watch Fox News or MSNBC, Bill O’Reilly or Rachel Maddow, hardly ever both. When did our news become so one-sided? When did we start choosing which...
Genealogy–Seeking Connections Past and Future
How much do we know about our own parents, let alone grandparents? To one degree or another the lives of our parents remain a mystery. Some families assign the responsibility of “family historian” to a designated relative to create and maintain a family tree. Our daughter, Maya, has just been entered into her husband’s...
Social Networking–A Mixed Bag of Tricks
I received so many public and private comments from readers about my last post on Internet usage (see “The Current Digital Divide”–Instant Gratification Anyone?), that I started to think some more about how social networks have transformed our lives. People (yours truly included) are spending more and more time on the...
The Current Digital Divide–Instant Gratification Anyone?
When a link to my daughter’s online wedding registry was sent to some aunts and uncles, it created some confusion. They had never seen an online registry before and couldn’t figure out how to find the gift list or how to purchase something online. This made me start wondering–what is the digital divide between the young...