Saturday, May 22, 2010
Facebook privacy peeve
This week the "Slate Culture Gabest" (a podcast I always listen to) did a segment on Facebook privacy. I hadn't realize the extent of anxieties out there. True, one doesn't want the entire world ("everyone," in Facebook parlance; or "friends of friends," which for me is almost everyone) seeing your photos, very much at all of your "bio" information, your status updates. So what's the big deal? Click "Account" at the top right, then click "Privacy Settings," and generally select "Friends only" for everything. You're done. Below is a screenshot of what people other than my approved "Friends" can see of me. Now do it or stop complaining or delete your Facebook account. I don't like Facebook's top-down tell-us-afterwards style of management, but there are a lot of things I don't like about Web 2.0. So I adjust or decline. Opt out is the phrase.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
