Men, Fatherhood & the Internet

A lot has been written on women writing and blogging about their experience as mothers. A couple of my friends have been very consistent about sharing their lives for the past year.  

Many people argue that the Internet has seen an increase in women writing on motherhood whereas some say that women were always writing about this even in a non-digital age. Still others say that it is a new trend - women who have active careers writing about motherhood.  

But what happens to men when they become fathers today? How do they look at this experience? Is it any different from my Dad’s generation? I started thinking about this when my parents observed how my brother spends a lot of time with his children. When pointed out that Dad was equally involved with us while growing up the discussion  became very confused. But question still remained - what do men think of being a father today?

Since my brother does not blog, I started to look  among friends. But none of them actually write about  fatherhood. Two men whom I have know for some time have a different approach. One of them actually has his FB identity as his “child’s father”. That according to me is the ultimate celebration of fatherhood online. Where your online personality only exists as your child's father. 

The other friend has opened an FB account in his child’s name and regularly updates photographs about activities in the child’s life. They do not have other FB accounts where they write updates about themselves. Am sure you would know of such fathers around you. The photographs they upload have a lot to tell.

When I talk to young parents, both men and women agree that parenthood has changed them but the way they express it online is very different. Women are articulate about their experience whereas men generally do not want to discuss their inner stuff.

Oh.

Women want to talk about it. And men would rather not open up.

That sounds very familiar.

Without the Net

Slate has this account of eight reporters who went offline for a week. That is no Internet for a week. While continuing to work. And carrying on with their lives.

The rule was that if they had to get in touch with someone they had to call or meet the person. Reading their accounts takes us through various debates of technology, society and how our behaviour is changing as we include more technology in our lives.

I often ask myself how long could I do without the Internet. Often times this is not about how bad technology is but how much we are using technology as an excuse to fill our time doing useless things. Of course people on FB would love to know what I am doing NOW. But on an hourly basis? Really?

I have written about television elsewhen. Not having cable TV has definitely helped me return to writing and reading. But what about the Internet? This is a far more complex creature than television in the sense that it is just not about entertainment or information – a lot of our work is tied to it.

But all of us who have been using email for the last decade would be the first to admit that today we do log on too many times to delete junk mail or update our status on a networking site. With mobile phones we have reached a point where we hardly think about the act of going online.

So how long can you go without the Internet ? 1 hour? Two days? A week ? Want to test this out?

The trouble with OURBOOK

Yesterday A announced that it was time for her join Facebook. She had not been a member of any networking site till now. Never felt the need for it. So here all my friends were declaring their relationship status with their other half on Facebook and I was “married” but to whom no one knew.

But the timing is all wrong. Just when I was getting bored with the site, A is ready to jump into the networking game. The past month there has been much debate on the nature of the site and who owns the content and NOW-my-life-is-going-to-a-open- book kind of chest beating on the Net.

The entire thing turned me off. For one Facebook was trying to be silly and try to own data which was generated by users. Seems like this had been their business plan all the time. What is the point trying to pretend that you were going to just be happy with the traffic and the ads on the site. No they wanted to sell details like what book you like to read in the loo and how what is the profile of members in the group “I support the ban on yellow coloured SUVs” to the highest bidder. Anyway they reversed their decision and things were back to normal.

By which I mean we continued to share photographs of last week (or ten years ago) party at a farmhouse or join a group which was going to march to Delhi and ask some serious questions (they were still trying to figure where to meet and whom to ask these questions !).

I am not sure whether the problem lay only with Facebook owners. Yes the whole idea of making money out of gory details of my life is wrong but what’s the idea of putting all these silly details of your life and feeling “hurt” when someone wants to “sell” it. Do you really care? OK if Facebook were to agree to share the profits with you would you agree?

Looking at it practically, I am not sure if I decide to shut down my account whether it would be possible to remove all references to my name or where I appear. My name might still be attached to " What kind of a dog are you?" or " Are you the most popular friend of all time?".

Since 99.9999999999% of stuff on Facebook is created by the users, they should use this “crisis” to look at what is their idea of a networking site. What would we like to do with it? How can we contribute and make it better?

Once they can stop "poking" or sending "kisses" to each other.

Cartoon : Blast Media

A midlife crisis of blogging

Marshall Herskovitz has this interesting take on Internet sites:

They're boring, one-dimensional, and unoriginal. Who decided that all Web sites should have a top nav bar and be rectangular in layout? Who decided they should abdicate any sense of design and be white and clean and uncluttered? No one did, and that's the point. It just happened, because the creators of the Internet were thinking about other things. Because the creators of the Internet are a very distinct subspecies of humanity:

Boys.

Geeks, engineers, and boys.

While i do not agree with his entire argument, it set me thinking. Of course we have moved away from the basic websites that populated the Net about seven years ago. The dot com boom ensured that.

I think the real problem is that as users we are unsure where we want this technology to move. Yes the technology is more democratic and all that crap, but as with democracy in the real life the movement towards a better world is often mired in a lot of confusion. Most of us still use the Internet as we used to ten years ago.

In 1997, I was using the Net mostly to send emails. Then about five years ago I started using it for searching stuff on the net. If getting addicted to the New York Times online can be listed as my achievement in the last one year, that's hardly any different from my reading addiction, that I have written about earlier.

Do I hear Orkut, Facebook changing the way we live? One look at the networking sites is good enough to understand that the experience is a repeat of the same shit in our real lives. How many us can claim that being part of a networking site has made a real difference to their lives? Worse we even claim to be 'friends' with people we don't even know, just to keep up with internet etiquette.

I am blogging, yes but would i be still doing it if someone offered me a byline in a magazine and paid me for it? Would it still excite me? Is it just a case that am fulfilling my dream as a five year old and my friends are humouring me?

Holy shit! What am i talking about? Maybe I'm going thru a mid life crisis in my blogging career. But can that happen ? Can i have a mid life crisis about my blogging identity on the Net? Has it been that long?

What next? Shrink sessions online!!!!

Microsoft offers to swallow Yahoo!

It finally happened !

Microsoft has made an offer to buy Yahoo! for some 45 billion USD.

However they will have to figure what new can they do with interactive shit - mail, blogs and social networking sites. Microsoft never really bothers with what its customers wants and Yahoo! had also become a little laid back with its services.

I had moved over to GMail much before Hotmail and Yahoo! had slipped up on their services. I mean I really did not need unlimited mail space, just that the Gmail interface was much better. But I hope these companies merge and give Google a run for the money. It will only help us in the future...

help for internet addicts

Korea leads the way

According to the nyt :

" South Korea boasts of being the most wired nation on earth. In fact, perhaps no other country has so fully embraced the Internet. Ninety percent of homes connect to cheap, high-speed broadband, online gaming is a professional sport, and social life for the young revolves around the “PC bang,” dim Internet parlors that sit on practically every street corner "

the activities the participants remind me of school camps or corporate training
with a little bit of army stuff mixed with AA thrown in
listen to this exchange between a camp member and his instructor:

“Do you have anything to tell your mother?” the drill instructor shouted from below.

“No!” he yelled back.

“Tell your mother you love her!” ordered the instructor.

“I love you, my parents!” he replied.

“Then jump!” ordered the instructor. Chang-hoon squatted and leapt to a nearby trapeze, catching it in his hands.

if this sounds bizarre, the boy in question (yes he is only 15) used to think that spending 17 hours on line playing games was not a problem. After the camp he will play for 5 hours (!)

the story also points out that "Compulsive Internet use" has been identified as a mental health problem in the US. Here is a short quiz to find out if you are really addicted.

so it seems that universal access to the Net is not a good idea.

of course Google has more complicated plans to turn us into lazy, inefficient slobs....

new york times searches

take a look at this
what the world is
searching for on the net

india is still trailing
china
and
iraq

but is ahead
of hillary
and obama

in spite of their histronics

breaking up in the internet universe

The Internet is supposed to have improved our lives. But breaking up is no longer that easy.

Earlier (in 1995) all you had to do was call up, break the news and hand up. The maximum the closure could be stretched to was one long session at Nirula’s. Later, if you were nasty you could make crank calls but very few people had a telephone. And in any case most of the time her dad or sister might pick up the phone. Your friends could try to talk to both of you but it was really up to you to get back.

Today its different.

I am not talking about the real world. The Internet conspires to keep you together. Picture a scenario. You break up and pretty soon one of you have to travel to another city or country. But the minute you log onto gmail your lover is there. Its like coming to a virtual party and then you realize she also on the permanent list of invitees.

Orkut or Facebook is worse. If you delete the person off the list, you will be inundated with queries from common friends. In the real world they would already know what was happening. But with Orkut you can connect with a long lost friend who is in Detroit but still thinks that you are the same person you were in school. She UNDERSTANDS your pain and wants to help you. Whatever be their motivation they will not let you forget it so fast.

The best thing is to go for that dinner. Break up and move on. But do not delete her name from your Orkut list.

Or just blog it. That way you will know how many friends actually read your blog.

problems with internet technology

How too much dependency on email can be bad

and how blogging does not necessarily mean that you are communicating

And of course blogs addicts beware! Coming soon !

this century belongs to the amateur?

Throughout our education (10 + 2 + X system) there is this emphasis on becoming a specialist. it was no longer relevant to be a BTech or BA. You had to specialize even if you were not going to teach in that subject. The funny thing is that the geniuses (Leonardo, Picasso, Einstein) we are taught about never performed well in school but dabbled around till they found their passion. In our case we all became specialists. We ended up learning more and more about less and less.

Now this system is under attack. Through the internet. Specifically through bloggers. In the book The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen argues that instead of becoming a source of good quality information and encouraging hidden talent the internet has become a joke. The result is that it has become a whirlpool of mediocrity. Most of the opinions and information are subjective and cannot be authenticated by independent sources. He says:

If we keep up this pace, there will be over five hundred million blogs by 2010, collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics, to commerce, to arts and culture. Blogs have become so dizzyingly infinite, that they’ve undermined our sense of what is true and what is false, what is real and what is imaginary. These days, kids can’t tell the difference between credible news by objective professional journalists and what they read on joeshmoe.blogspot.com

Of course bloggers have reacted to this criticism.

A conspiracy theorist would argue that the Internet may not have been created by the eilte but it was funded and encouraged to keep the masses distracted from the real issues.

Is this not a problem of technology and how making it more accessible is going to lead to these situations? Even in the field of film technology the availability of cheaper video cameras has resulted in a profusion of amateur filmmakers. These people are young enthusiasts who can shoot edit and direct their films. Some of the stuff that comes out is good most of it is really boring stuff or copies of other films. But this does not deter them. New films and enthusiasts emerge.

But I guess in the case of the Net we tend to believe a lot of the things are written on it. Wikipedia is NOT God (Who is God is another blog). Remember most of it is a personal point of view. Even this one.

How would you search on the net before Google?

I am a search engine junkie. You ask me to find something on the Net and I will be on it figuring what key words to use etc. Even after finding what I had to I would keep looking since I would have found something else to distract me!!!

What was I like before the Internet. Well we had a mammoth Encyclopaedia Britannica. You could spend hours reading and searching for stuff. I would constantly move between different volumes since there would be a reference in another volume for a sub section (which was of no importance) but my parents thought I was learning something and not wasting my time playing in the sun.

Before Google, searching on the net was mostly a lottery. You actually ended up looking through many search engines and still not find the exact thing. My favourite ones were Lycos, Hotbot, Excite, Dogpile and the big daddy AltaVista. Yahoo! had different system of indexing and I never got excited with that.

Uptill Google showed up and proved that all these systems were silly, you could actually waste time in offices and pretend that you are doing research. Now you hit a search on Google and 9 out of 10 times you get what you want. Damm!

Gone are the days of searching through lakhs(millions for you Amrikaans) of search results and finding your info like Christopher Columbus. Google has taken the joy out of search engines.

Random fun (sponsored by google ads)

I am a recent convert to Google ads (if you scroll down and check the left panel you can see what I mean). Someone came up with this wonderful idea that they can post ads that are relevant to the text being carried on that page. Therefore you will feel less offended and will not get random ads about fasteners or beach houses in Florida.

You can see this on Gmail. If you receive a mail which has the word house in it you might get an ad on houses on rent or houses for sale in your area in a little box on the side . For example my earlier posting on the Ash Abhishek marriage had ads on wedding running alonside. Sometimes the ads are funny to read but you cannot predict what might land up on your page.

In this post I am trying an experiment - by putting random works . Words like BASQUE. Or SKYDIVING. Maybe TREKKING is better. Words that have no relevance to this post. Like the new CROCS sandals I have. Lets see what adverts come up now.

Random words are always interesting. The surrealist used to make up poems putting random words together. I remember writing a poem when I thought I was in love (now I know I am) called 52 words between you and me. Random words. Common words. Words unrelated to each other. Words that had other meanings for me and my lover.

I tried this trick during a workshop I had participated some time back. We were supposed to write something in appreciation of each participant. I printed a set of twenty adjectives, cut them out and put them into my pocket. These were words like – intelligent, talented, hard working etc. Each time I would meet someone for the first time at the wrap party, I would fish into my pocket and hand them a piece of paper. I had no clue what word was there on that piece of paper.

The reactions I got were priceless. They would sit me down and ask me why I used that word to describe them. I had to rack my brains to think of an explanation since I had handed the word out randomly. (Of course it became funnier when my friend used the same printout in the same party. Participants ended up getting words which contradicted each other !!!)

Horoscopes in newspapers also follow the same system. If you study any such predictions for a week you will realize that the words they use are common and often interchangeable for all sun signs. I am not arguing that words have no meaning and can be used randomly. But using them randomly can be fun.

Like if you were to randomly write the last line –

Arguing no words can randomly used be am and have meaning that not I

OR

Have used that words not I and no arguing randomly can am be meaning

Type random words and leave it on your blog. Or use them while typing a letter on GMail. Watch how the ads change on your google ads as you type irrelevant random words. !!!!!