In other words, how do i choose to use facebook differently than google plus? What would make me write a blog entry on my domain blog vs. my livejournal? What constitutes a twitter status over a fb status or a g+ stream post? Some of these questions can be answered, but some of them cannot, and it’s the ones that cannot that i feel i need to focus on and refine.

With my two blogs, i deliberately separate what content i choose to put where. My livejournal blog is about my life and my friends and thoughts of a more personal nature, whereas this wordpress blog is my more public face with content bent towards thoughts of a more long-winded and cerebral nature. I call this wordpress blog my thoughts blog. I call my LJ my life blog. Even though there is sometimes a degree of blur, i think it’s pretty clear to myself and to my audience what content belongs where.

It’s this sort of distinction that i feel like i need to have between facebook and google plus. Like my two blogs, i feel like the purpose and audience of those are very similar, and therefore the uniqueness of them comes entirely from the content that i choose to write. despite the fact that one *could* use fb in the same way as g+, doing so arbitrarily is problematic because of the audience i’m trying to reach. I want my friends on fb to get something different than those who subscribe to my g+ feed. To have a heavy degree of duplication or even similarity in style between those two feels wrong; someone would likely only subscribe to one or the other, or those that subscribe to both wouldn’t get much different out of one versus the other, and that’s not what i want.

Despite the recent changes facebook has made that has seemed to alienate some people, facebook still holds my largest audience and thus it acts as my “hub” for most of my other social media, meaning that i import some of my tweets to fb, i post links from select blog entries here and LJ to fb, and i post links from my youtube page to fb. But i don’t want to use facebook as a hub for google plus. Google plus needs to stand out on its own in the same way that my blogs stand out on their own.

But how should that happen? I don’t really want fb or google plus to have the same professional vs. personal distinction that my blogs do. And despite my desire to not have a heavy degree of duplication between fb and g+, the fact is that what i choose to share of myself on the internet doesn’t have much content variance other than that.

So maybe this is an opportunity to change that. g+’s Circles has a great deal of flexibility as it relates to selective sharing, so it’s possible that i could write things of a more personal nature if i structure it in a way that i trust. Or maybe this is an opportunity to ween myself off of any direct relationship to fb and use it merely as a conduit, because the new changes that fb rolled out have some advantages, but they also a direction change for that platform that enhances everything about fb that i dislike.

That last statement warrants some expansion. There are two aspects of the new fb changes that bother me the most.

First is the upper right news ticker. That news ticker doesn’t seem like a huge change, but i have to hand it to fb: it’s absolute genius.

Tickers are one of the big reasons why i never watch rolling news channels and why i can have issues watching sports channels. When you first get introduced to the idea of a ticker, it seems like a big distraction, but the more you watch the channel, the more you get used to it and incorporate it into your understanding of how that channel works. I don’t watch sports obsessively, but i watch enough of it that that i don’t notice the bottom ticker unless i want to. I don’t watch news channels ever, so those tickers are a constant source of flash and distraction, but if i were to watch the channel more often, i know that i would absorb and become accustomed to it. And once you get used to the ticker being there and what it represents, the ticker’s purpose has been maximized: to provide another avenue of constant change of information that’s designed to keep you watching.

The internet in general hasn’t really used the ticker paradigm for much; the NFL uses a variant of it on their website with big neon flashing signs whenever there’s a score change or a big play during a game that you’re not tracking or watching. But now, fb is changing that game, using that ticker formula in a way that will try to keep people logged on that much more often because they can and will always look at it for change of information whether they want to or not. And sure, most people hate it now, but give it some time for people to get used to it, and before you know it, it will seem Normal, and that constantly shifting and changing ticker of useless information will help make fb an even bigger time suck than it already is.

Secondly, fb has added a higher degree of customizability to how people view their feeds, and normally as a guy who is all about data and loves having the ability to be versatile with it, the way in which fb has incorporated this flexibility is counter to how i want to use fb.

fb is a dominant part of our culture. i don’t think that it’s inherently bad or good; like any tool or piece of technology, how bad or good it is is dependent upon how it’s used.

My use of fb as both a poster and a viewer is deliberately designed to be all surface – as a poster, fb acts as a good conduit for me to contact people and to get some basic interaction with those people. What fb does *not* serve as is a place where i want to have any real meaningful interaction. It is not a platform for my political views, it is not a place where i want to divulge the real personal details of the person that i truly am, and it is not a place where i am going to put important details about anything going on in my life in a way that assumes that people who are close to me are going to read it.

As a viewer, i want to see on my news feed a slice of what has happened the most recently with whoever has happened to post. i don’t assume that my friends that post important information on fb expect me to get that information only from fb; if i catch it, awesome, but if i don’t, then it’s not a big loss because i would assume that the people closest to me would tell me important things outside of that fb context.

And this is where the customizability of the new fb becomes useless to me, because all of the customizability assumes that i want to control that information in a way that takes fb much more seriously than it should be taken. “i care the most about seeing feed items from these important people in my life, so i’m going to tailor my fb feed to see their stuff the most.” But the amount of time that it would take for me to micromanage and microcontrol fb’s settings to make it do what i want is simply not worth it. To customize it properly would take constant adjustment – more time spent on fb – just so that i can make fb more appealing to me – and thus spend even more time there than i currently do.

It’s food for thought. We’ll see what happens in the next month or so as fb and g+ and their respective userbase evolves, and as i start to refine my thoughts about how the fb shift and my use of both platforms could potentially change. i know i’m not going to delete my fb, but it may be that it becomes just my virtual business card – an easy way for people to reach me if they don’t have my current info – and not much else.

The old fb profile page supported fb’s original paradigm that a person’s fb presence was predominantly about statuses. It’s true that on a news feed you get a glimpse of an entire breadth of a person’s fb activity, but when you clicked on a person’s profile page, what you were given was the person’s name and their status that served as what was essentially the “title” of the page. Any other fb activity was hierarchically and literally below that title of name+status.

It’s because of this that i generally prescribed to the no-more-than-one-status-every-twenty-fours-hour rule. to me, statuses had a degree of semi-permanence and importance over anything else that i did on fb as it related specifically to the fb paradigm. importing blog entries, posting up youtube links, even fb photos served more as a conduit, something in which fb was the engine but not the main source, whereas fb statuses *was* essentially facebook.

The new fb profile page abandons putting status messages as a part of the person’s “name title”, and for me that represents a huge hierarchical shift, demoting statuses to an equal level of all other fb wall activity. Statuses no longer stick out over links, photos, game feeds, &c, so amongst a wall where all of that activity is happening, they get lost in the shuffle instead of being immediately in your face.

Resultingly, i feel like my main focus as a fb user has lost its appeal. I still like using fb as a conduit for my other primary residences on the internet and i like keeping up with other people on my wall, but my own status use feels like it’s diminished greatly without that semi-permanence and my conduit use was starting to trend towards overtaking my statuses in any case.

So i’ve decided to do something that i never thought i would do: open a twitter account. twitter is going to completely replace my fb statuses (as in i’m no longer going to do any facebook statuses or at least going to try very hard not to). the original intended twitter paradigm also makes me psychologically feel okay tweeting multiple times in a twenty-four hour period, so chances are i’ll be doing that.

I’m also making a deliberate choice to not import anything relating to my twitter to my fb page. As twitter is essentially the same thing as a fb status, it doesn’t make sense for me to abolish the concept of fb statuses as a main fb focus only to import what could be perceived as a fb status in a conduit format. Particularly since i intend on tweeting more often than i update fb statuses, i have no interest in spamming my friends’ news feeds with that content. fb is better served as my blogs conduit where at most i’ll write twice a day and rarely that. if people are interested enough in my short thoughts, they can get it directly by subscribing to my tweets.

we’ll see how my use of twitter evolves over time, what sort of stuff i may opt to emphasize in my tweets versus others, if at all. I may also just for fun intersperse a random meaningless fb status every once in a while just to throw people, or maybe install one of those rotating fb status things and put up a bunch of nonsense. that kind of fits my sort of aesthetic.

I’ve been sick for a good four or so days now with some sort of cold/flu/feverish thing that’s been passed around. I”m not 100% back to full health, but i was feeling alert enough earlier to get some work done and then decided that i wanted to venture over to the mall even though i knew it was probably going to be a madhouse.

And it was what i expected it to be: traffic was fussy both in and out, parking took an extra twenty minutes, lines were long because there were so many people there even for crappy mall food and there wasn’t really anywhere to sit to eat. On top of that, I didn’t accomplish what i set out to accomplish, which was to buy something for the white elephant christmas tradition for my trip back to PA, mainly because i was being too picky about it. Two hours or so later i was sporting a bad headache and a feverish sort of feeling because i had run out of flu medicine and didn’t buy any more earlier because i thought i had kicked it.

In general it should have been a pretty miserable experience. And i absolutely loved it.

Back in 2004 i wrote a livejournal entry whose main thesis was that so much of my life does not involve standing in line for anything that sometimes standing in line is not merely something that i don’t mind doing but is a welcome change of pace. The experience i had today was akin to that; it had a different sort of flavor but still had its origin to the philosophy behind that thought that i still hold to seven years later.

which, when it comes down to it, has something to do with “experiencing life” or some other catch-phrasey nonsense.

there were two thoughts that drove the whole experience. The first was, “i haven’t really done anything at all in the past four days other than watch a lot of british telly and play ‘Hidden Dimensions’ on Kongregate because i’ve been sick.” The second was, “I have absolutely nowhere to be today.” Both fueled each other. Firstly, it was a delight to be out of the apartment and feel alert enough to do something other than just sleep, eat and take drugs. Secondly, in my head, the only real result of getting the experience done quickly was to get back here sooner to do what exactly? Waste more time doing the same thing that i’ve been doing for the past four days? it wasn’t even that i wasn’t in a hurry, it was that i didn’t *want* to be in a hurry.

so the whole experience was a journey, a puzzle, a data-collection manager, &c. When i first hit the parking lot and its bottlenecks, i had thoughts about the design of short parking lot rows, while at the same time i deduced i’d be better off parking farther away than trying to deal with the bottleneck of the short rows. When i went into the actual mall i was overwhelmed with people in a sense that i normally only get at airports and it felt fantastic. I remember walking into the Apple Store, saw all of the red shirt employees thinking, “huh, last time i was in here all the employees were wearing blue, i wonder if it’s a holiday thing”. I saw a kid using one of the store lappys to chat on facebook and a question popped in my brain about age limitation use of facebook given the recent LJ announcement that they’re no longer allowing users under 13 to use Livejournal regardless of parental consent. As i was standing in line for bad mall food the two people behind me were having a friendly debate about flat tax versus weighted tax and the way that they spoke about it and spoke in general, even to the people who were serving the food, made it clear that they were successful or aspiring-to-be-successful businessmen. Even as i started to get a little delirious from my fever while in Brookstone, i remembered thinking to myself how at odds the front of the store was with the back of the store because of the employees who were charged with attracting customers by playing with silly one-off trinkets rather than things in the store that have more long-term worth.

Some of those thoughts weren’t new, some of the people and experiences were just variants of what i’ve seen before. But all of it was *fresh* given my recent vegetableblob state, and fresh is really what i needed and made me realize that that was the reason i decided to make the trip in the first place.

And it’s a good reinforcement of the attitude that i try to have towards life. It wasn’t even an issue of practicing patience because as far as i was concerned there wasn’t anything to be impatient about, there wasn’t anything to “tolerate”. It’s more that in the face of an experience that most people would dread and find annoying i can find something absolutely wonderful about it that contributes to my own emotional and mental well being.

Good thing too, since i need to shop again tomorrow.

so yeah. i got three teeth extracted today. it needs to be documented.

the first thing that i did after the dentist’s assistant (darlene) put me in the chair was to read and sign a form that stated that i understood what was being done to me, that i had had a discussion about the potential side effects and complications and yadeyade. It’s the second time i’ve signed something like that in which one of the potential complications listed on the form was “death”, the first being when i went skydiving in 2004. Other than that, the form was pretty straightforward with those typical “things could go wrong, you could get infections” nonsense that to me has the sort of odds like the nut flush against the straight flush. Sure, it’s *possible*, but the odds just aren’t there, and even if by some stretch something were to happen, it’s not unfixable.

So okay. i signed the paper, the oral surgeon guy then went over what he was going to do, and discussed options for one of the teeth to be extracted, as in two of the teeth were my wisdom teeth on the right side which was fine, but one tooth on my left hand side was my second molar which would leave a gap between my left wisdom tooth and my first molar. He said that if i wanted to i could just leave it alone and then over years the two teeth would likely push closer together which isn’t a big deal, or i could get a replacement fake tooth to go in there instead which would cost a bunch of money, but is an option. He didn’t want to sway me one way or the other, but he did say after i essentially decided that it was unnecessary that he probably would have done the same thing and just left it alone. I also have the option of changing my mind if i want down the road. He mentioned some potential low-risk dangers and some low-to-moderate numb-like side effects that could go on for days or weeks or months, but that that would only happen if he was sloppy. He had an accent that i couldn’t quite place because it was fairly light; it was definitely either european or eastern bloc. He said his last name, but it wasn’t something that i caught because it was somewhat complicated or else i wasn’t listening properly.

They put a thing over my nose that was supposed to introduce nitrous oxide into my system. Darlene told me that it was just supposed to relax me, make me feel like “i had just had a couple of cocktails.” After a while i started to feel a tingle in my legs, but other than that my sense of awareness didn’t seem to dull at all. I said as such, so she let it run some more, and after a few more minutes, she applied some topical novocaine to the areas of my teeth. After a few minutes, the oral surgeon stuck needles into my mouth to put the more Heavy Stuff into my mouth, and then we waited to allow the numbness to go into effect.

While we waited for the heavy novocaine to settle in, Darlene asked me where i was from and all that and i gave a basic answer, and when i said that i marched in the Saints Victory parade, she said that she was there and that brought more of her background into the light, that she had lived here all of her life, her parents got married in the big chapel downtown in the quarter. So i asked the question that’s been on my mind ever since the saints won the super bowl and we did the parade, “so the saints winning the super bowl was a very personal thing fro you, then?” and her face kind of lit up (over her facemask) and said, “absolutely.” and it spurned a small conversation about how the super bowl was such a unifying thing for the city, a topic of a separate entry in my head.

She asked me how i was doing with the numbness and with the nitrous, and i said that i was feeling pretty numb from the novocaine, but i wasn’t sure about the whole nitrous thing. i mean, more of my body was feeling numb, but my brain still felt very alert. She left me for a few minutes after that, which i think was an effort to distract me less so i could breathe the nitrous more completely.

After a while, the oral surgeon came back and said, “i’m going to do some stuff and all you should feel is pressure. if you feel pain, let me know and we’ll give you more anaesthetic.” So he did some stuff, saying out loud, “some pressure, some pressure, a little pressure, a lot of pressure…” and i didn’t feel any pain at all, so he got to work.

and i would have loved to see a video of what he did. not because i was particularly interested in the process, but because i felt like what he was doing would have really really hurt if it weren’t for the numbing stuff. i know it must have been pretty bloody since i’m still bleeding a lot (have to replace gauze in my mouth every half hour or so), but whatever. i’m normally squeamish about blood, but this is different, maybe because it’s mine, or because i knew what it felt like which wasn’t much at all; i don’t know. But it was just interesting to feel tugs of pressure without pain for something that feels like i should have been screaming in agony.

Two of the teeth were difficult to extract apparently; one because it just had a long root, the other because that tooth has been broken for a while and so it was more fussy to get out. He did a bunch of a drilling and then pulling and then drilling and then pulling. When the teeth actually came out, i only felt one of them. The other two i was only aware that they came out because i could tell that what the assistant was doing was dealing with gauzing up the bleeding as opposed to assisting him with the process. With the tooth on my left side, he put in a stitch, which marks the first stitch i’ve ever had in my life.

The whole thing took about an hour to do (starting with the topical novocaine – the actual extraction was maybe ten minutes each?). After it was done, Darlene switched the nitrous to a concentrated oxygen to “clear my head so i can drive”, and honestly, i thikn i got gipped out of the nitrous experience because when i went back and evaluated the way my head felt and my body felt overall, i don’t think i felt any effects of the nitrous other than the initial tingly feeling in my limbs. My head still felt pretty alert but relaxed, but not in a way that was moreso than normal. maybe i was just that unaware of whether or not it had any effect, but if i had known that it would go like that, i might have asked to not have it, especially since it was an additional $95 charge that didn’t get covered by my insurance.

After i was taken off of the oxygen, Darlene gave me a brief overview of what i needed to do post-extraction, which strangely includes not rinsing or drinking through a straw for twenty-four hours. Apparently rinsing and suction of any sort can complicate the whole healing process, so until 14:00 tomorrow i can’t really brush my teeth. I can eat soft foods, but i’m probably going to stick with yogurt and liquids, maybe throw in some sliced meats. i’m not supposed to eat rice or strawberries or anything that could potentially lodge itself into the areas where the teeth used to be.

I have three prescriptions: one for amoxacillan which takes me back to my younger asthmatic years, one for percoset which i can take as needed, and one “oral rinse” deal that i need to start to do tomorrow after i’m actually allowed to rinse. i’m not sure if i’m going to take the percoset since it’s just a pain killer as opposed to anything that prevents infection, and i generally shy away from that sort of stuff. i figure that if i could march an entire week of 8+ hour rehearsals at 160-200 BPM with a pulled groin muscle (Crossmen 1995 finals week), i can deal with some stupid pain in my mouth for a week or two. i have a followup appointment a week from now so they can make sure that i’m all healing properly.

it’s now 16:15 and the bottom half of my mouth is starting to finally get feeling back, which is a good thing. i hate having to talk or eat or do anything with that feeling of numbness. when i was younger and still went to the dentist, i eventually started having my cavities drilled without novocaine because i preferred the short term pain over the long term numbness. my attitude is less strong than it used to be which means that i’ll take the novocaine with a shrug, but the numbness and how long it lasts is still pretty annoying.

there’s one other part of the whole visit that’s worthy of mentioning, but that part will actually go into an oscillate entry instead of here, and also be picture number twelve of my 40 day lent scheme.

But there’s a distinction i make between technology that i feel serves as positive enrichment versus progress-hindering. A while back i wrote a reaction to the Robotic Drumstick Haptic Guidance System, and i still stand by its thesis that such a device is poorly conceived as a pedagogical tool and that anyone who uses this as the basis for their musical knowledge and understanding could become an excellent “note player” but would become a poor musician.

i’ve also gone off on why i further disliked iPods when they could start playing movies and i still find value in that stance, although i think it needs to be refined somewhat. There’s no doubt that sometimes kids need attention and sometimes a parent needs to focus on other things. Distractions are a good answer to that, but i think that distractions need to be approached cautiously, first in the kind of distraction involved (i like to think that some degree of cognitive distraction is better than nonsense distraction), and secondly in the mindset that distractions of that sort of nature should never be an excessive or complete answer to everything (like if the iPod runs out of battery during a long car ride, the parents have no idea what to do beacause they’ve never actually talked to their kid in the car before). In that sense, the use and/or abuse of technology has to do with degrees and where to define the threshold of something moving from enriching/harmless distraction to harmful and potential long-term negative effects.

And now there’s a new technology trend that i feel is teetering dangerously away from its initial positive enrichment to progress hindering and backwards thinking: too much accesible information.

In the decades in which the World Wide Web continued to develop and grow, there were various stages of mindsets. In the early days, it was a “i can find useful academic information” mindset. As the internet became more mainstream and information outside of academics started to gain presence on the web, the mindset evolved into, “I might be able to find some of the answers i need on the web.” And then in what i consider the post-Google era, the mindset evolved into, “I can find anything on the web!”, or slightly more sinister, “Why can’t i find everything on the web?”

in a lot of ways, i think the easy access to any sort of information or opinions and the ability for so many people to connect in ways that weren’t possible before is fantastic and has a lot of potential to be more on the positive enrichment side of things. the problem is that there’s as much useless information as there is useful information out on the internet, and the ability to pull up any information at any point can make it too easy for people to transfix themselves on trivial information that ultimately serves no real purpose, and with the recent surge of mobile internet trend set by Apple and the iPhone, people can now increase their habit of merrily finding out whatever they want whenever they want whether they need to or not.

Let’s take a hypothetical example and compare mentalities:

You’re walking in the park or in a long car ride or whatever with a friend and you’re discussing the three live action x-men movies. In trying to compare the three movies, you remember that in the last movie, Kitty Pryde has more of a spotlight role than the previous two movies and that triggers a question, “wasn’t Kitty Pryde played by a different actress in the second movie? maybe even the first?”

in today’s Mobile internet world, finding the answer to that is a snap. pull out your smartphone, go to IMDB or wikipedia, find the answer you’re looking for instantly.

in yesterday’s world of internet-houses-all-information, you have to wait until you’re in front of a computer to find the answer. So one of two things happens: a) after the long car ride, you remember that this was information you wanted to know, so you find a computer, find your answer, and receive satisfaction for having answered an unanswered question, or b) you completely forget that you were curious about this tidbit of trivia and the question never gets answered which is fine because you didn’t remember that you asked the question in the first place.

in the pre-internet era, finding the answer would be damned difficult. likely it would involve more thought than the information really warrants; trying to trigger a memory, calling up someone else who has seen the movies on the offchance that they know the answer, or something similar. And eventually in your head you discover the answer (or what you think is the answer) or else you let it go or shelve it for later and move on with your life.

What’s striking to me about all of these scenarios is that i feel that the end result doesn’t actually change anything or fulfill any sort of enrichment. Whether you discover the answer to that question or *any* trivia question or not, the path that your life is taking remains the same. You could say that now you know something that you didn’t, but that doesn’t say much about how well you will retain that information (and in a world where the information is readily at your fingertips, there is less incentive to retain it on your own) nor does it speak to the value of the information.

So then you may argue, “if the end result is the same, then why does it matter? If immediate access to the information is a different means to the same sort of end, then i don’t see the problem.”

The problem is two-fold:

First, the easier it is to discover useless information, the more useless information people will fill their lives with. In the above example, particularly with IMDB and wikipedia, it becomes too easy to start link-hopping to tangenting articles, statistics, and other random findings. Oh, that’s right, Kitty was played by Ellen Page in the last x-men movie. I wonder what else she was in? Ooooh, she was the one that was the lead role in Juno! I loved that movie! When did that come out again? oh, i didn’t know that John Malcovich produced it! That “Being John Malcovich” movie was so cool. Didn’t that have John Cusack in it?… and on and on and on, so that now a harmless curiosity with a simple ten second answer turns into a thirty-minute tangent filled with information that is likely forgotten a month later, and that thirty minutes could have been used in a different way. And sometimes that thirty minutes can turn into hours of wasted time.

Secondly, becoming used to a paradigm in which information is expected to be so accessible can resultingly cause a new kind of psychological anxiety when that information is no longer accessible or if a partiuclar piece of information is not easy to find. this is well parodied in the South Park episode Over Logging, and it’s also reminiscent of the reason why i decided a long time ago to never wear a wristwatch which i blogged about on oscillate in 2004:

many many years ago i wore a watch around my wrist and… I reached a point where i would look at the time every two minutes out of habit, and that evolved into a *need* to know what time it was every second. I remember distinctly the first time i forgot my watch or lost my watch and there was no time piece nearby. i was in a state of total panic. I felt so afraid and insecure and alone and kept on looking around everywhere for something or someone to tell me what time it was. After that i… vowed never to ever wear a wristwatch on a regular basis ever again, opting for some sort of pocket timekeeper instead. because of this, a) i’m a much more relaxed individual, and b) i’ve developed the skill of knowing pretty accurately what time it is when asked even if the last time i checked a watch was hours before.

While not exactly analagous, i think it’s a close enough resemblance: we’ve reached a point in our culture where the expectation of information is so great that any information gaps regardless of its value can cause stress.

Again, the issue i have isn’t really with the technology itself, it’s with how it’s being applied. And it’s something that i have to be particularly careful about because of my own addicition to information. i love absorbing a wide variety of information whether important or not, and it’s for this reason that i’ve determined that mobile internet and smartphones are something i need to keep out of my life or give myself strict restrictions on how and when it is used. i’ve developed enough bad internet habits as it is.

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Originally posted on darkblog resonate. I prefer any thoughts or comments there.