For those number-oriented folks out there who have a vested interest in social networks, Michael Arrington with TechCrunch delivers your Christmas gift early. In a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece, he provides a perspective which, I think, threatens to overturn our current (e)valuation of social networks - on both a fiscal and a social level. In Modeling the Real Market Value of Social Networks, Arrington suggests that the true worth of a social networking site should be measured not by how many unique users have registered with it, nor how many page hits it has per day/month/year, but rather by how much advertising is spent on each individual user. Arrington and company have built "a model taht looks at social network usage by country/region and compares that to available data on total Internet advertising spent in each of those countries. The model is then able to turn an apples-to-oranges comparison into an apples-to-apples comparison." As he goes on to state, "the early results are surprising.

Although I'm deep down uncomfortable with assigning different human beings with varying levels of value, I have to admit in the current state of affairs, such a formula only makes sense. Were the world totally flat, as Thomas Friedman imagines in The World is Flat, then each user might be valued totally equal to every other user. After all, their opportunity to "plug in" will be the same as everyone else. Now, though, the Internet pie is uneven and inequitable. As many respondents have pointed out, Arrington's model has some flaws. Nevertheless, I find the perspective refreshing and am excited to see what comes out of later models.

If you thought Facebook and MySpace were the height of social networking, think again. Likely you've already heard whispers about sleeping giants like SecondLife which are touting the same opportunities to "find" and proclaim one's identity, but are also making their services more "sticky" through creating a virtual world in which its users can do more than just interact, but also participate. Like the July 14 Business Wire article entitled "Gaia Online Completes Series C $11 million funding" goes to show, it seems that SecondLife isn't alone. Already more than 5 million individuals have plugged into Gaia's network and the number is climbing. Although the trend of people turning towards online landscapes for socializing surely doesn't surprise you or I, what should capture our critical attention is the manner in which they recruit the generation of boys, girls, men, and women currently coming into their own. After all, what reflects more accurately upon a group than the advertising ploys that suck them in?

As you can see from the picture I've included below (taken from Gaia's homepage on July 18, 2008), the biggest persuasive element is the bold, flashy phrase "Express Yourself." The captioning below that runs "There are millions of members on Gaia, but there's only one you." Our individuality, or particularity, is so crucial to us -- even the designers at Gaia recognize that, and yet still we attempt to express our particularity through a medium which cannot possibly contain or communicate it (see Dr. Corey Anton's essay "Agency and Efficacy in Interpersonal Communication: Particularity as Once-Occurence and Non-Interchangeability" in the Atlantic Journal of Communication). And while issues of expression are legitimate and demanding, I must confess to being amused by another persuasive element which apparently appeals to today's teens: right above the "Start Here" button rests the caption: "Registration is easy, secure and not boring." Not boring? Hallelujah.

Fair warning: I could be very, very, very misguided in the observation I am about to make.

Earlier today I was driving on the freeway and happened to be listening (by chance) to the Rush Limbaugh show (hosted today by Mike Davis). I'm not conservative by any means, but I'll occasionally listen to Rush just to test my ideas against his. I have always believed if you can't weigh your thoughts and opinions against the opposition and have them come out stronger and better honed, what's the point of having them in the first place?

I listened incredulously as Mike Davis bemoaned the rising number of government enforced smoking bans because they were yet another example to him of government curtailing American liberty; as he slammed Michelle Obama because of her recent appearance on The View; as he comforted a caller (Marie) who articulated her despair over how easily people were falling to Obama's gimmicky rhetoric. This last caller, Marie, emphasized that she would be compelled to move out of the country if Obama is elected. Davis was quick to soothe her, saying, as best I can recall, "Now hang on a minute Marie, tap the brakes on all of that. I know that you feel strongly about this, but if we survived eight years of Bill Clinton, if we survived the Jimmy Carter presidency, if we survived....then certainly we can survive this. Not that we're going to, because Obama will certainly not be elected."

Throughout the time I was listening to this show, I had been again wondering in the back of my mind why a liberal or democratic radio show had not been able to take hold on American airwaves. It had been attempted, but never gained steam. I've heard Limbaugh criticize the attempt before, citing its failure to the fact that there simply aren't enough American's willing to jump on the democratic bandwagon in order to justify a radio program, in addition to other justifications. Today, however, I arrived at my own possible explanation.

I wonder if the reason why conservative talk shows are so much more successful than liberal talk shows isn't because contemporary individuals feel a greater need for shepherding, cheerleading, and a balm for uncertainty, whereas more liberal individual prefer a more independent, laissez-faire way of gaining knowledge and forming opinions. This occured to me as I realized that I grew most irritated with Rush or with any other talk show host at precisely the moment they began to preach, rather than to reach out to listeners. Occasionally they will leave the microphone behind, stop describing current affairs, and step up to the pulpit, where they proclaim what other people ought to think.

It seems reasonable to me, if only considering the stereotype, that conservative individuals of the baby-boomer generation are much more comfortable with a "big-brother" figure who is looking out for them, telling them what to think or what to hate, than liberals. In contrast, liberals would become irritated by such an attempt at making them conform. I should emphasize that I do not mean to suggest that conservatives can't (or won't) think for themselves, that liberals are "free-thinkers" who are smarter than conservatives, and nor am I trying to place a value on one or another mindset. I'm ambivalent, in general, to people's political orientation. In this instance, I was simply led to wonder if a part of the conservative/liberal paradigm might be empirically related to a certain level of Uncertainty Avoidance, and if the tipping point would correlate to one's political orientation.

Interesting.

The latest from PC World is as ironic as it is fascinating. Robert Strohmeyer reports on a burgeoning new crop of websites which are unlike anything we have seen before. These novel services are predicated on the impulse people feel to connect on social networking sites (SNS) and seek to drastically enhance the layperson's ability to connect online. Recognizing that many SNS users are generally active on not just one but a swath of SNS, these services capitalize on the fundamental trusim of their market generation -- that multitasking is always a plus -- and condenses the SNS a person is active on down to one convenient loctaion.

From my perspective (increasingly not the norm, I find), the irony lies in the fact that where one might suspect a person seeking "authentic" connections online might desire to put all of his or her eggs in just one basket, rather than spread them out all across the farm, now we see a service which allows you to spread all of your eggs across the farm, and hold a digital basket where you can keep your eyes on them at all times. It provides the illusion of solidarity, but promotes quite the opposite.

---
See
Robert Strohmeyer, "Web Apps Manage Social Networking Overload" (Pc World, June 2 2008).

Jemima Kiss, writing for PDA: The Digital Content Blog recently wrote an article covering wadja.com, a relatively new social networking site headquartered in Athens, Greece. Although nothing stands out as particularly exceptional about Wadja.com itself, it has gained increased attention lately due to a controversial move by Facebook. Apparently, perhaps out of fear for unwanted competition, Facebook has banned messages which include the words "wadja" or "wadja.com." On reading this, I was initially skeptical. Not willing to take Jemima Kiss' word for it, I logged into my Facebook account and tried to message one of my friends about wadja. Sure enough, the message wouldn't process, even upon repeated attempts.

Although this sort of corporate underhanded behavior shouldn't prove overly surprising in the current era of cutthroat business tactics, it strikes me as odd and out of character for organizations belonging to this particular industry. Can social-networking combines, such as MySpace and Facebook, ardently claim socialization and networking among people as their top priorities and then comfortably pull stunts like this without fear negative PR? It seems to me that in light of this recent event, any member of Facebook has gained the right to seriously question this service's dedication to seeing its members connect with other individuals. Not to mention Facebook looks especially bad when contrasted to the cavalier demeanor of Wadja.com's managing director Alex Christoforou, who observes that despite "Facebook [banning] the word Wadja.com throughout the whole site," he simply found it "weird and quite amusing. Here is this big Silicon Valley social network banning the word Wadja, an outfit based in the Mediterranean, having fun connecting people." Since when did "having fun connecting people" cease to be the goal for Facebook?

Are we social network consumers left to believe that combines such as Facebook and Myspace aren't having fun connecting us any longer? Have we become the numbers that they energetically affirm we are not? Additionally, perhaps more importantly, are we being subjected to the tyrannical control of our free speech, thinly veiled as a measure to protect us from "spam?" With this sort of arrogant display of un-legitimized power we could be witnessing the foreshadowing of a significant shift in social networking industry for the worse.

-----
See

Jemima Kiss, "Elevator Pitch: Wadja's social network is big in Greece - and in big trouble with Facebook" (pda: the digital content blog, 30 May 2008).

Marshall Kirkpatrick, "Facebook Censoring User Messaging: Spam Prevention or Unaccountable Control of Conversation?" (ReadWriteWeb, 21 May 2008).

Perhaps it’s just because I’ve been feeling lonely and down the past week or so, but I’ve found my thoughts drifting steadily towards platonic love. I wonder how many of us don’t nurture platonic love as much as we ought; how many of us cast our eyes downward rather than smile and say hello to a stranger; how many of us don’t realize that we could last a lifetime on deep friendships if we were a bit smarter about them. Maybe. In any case, I was thinking about this right as I started to read what continually strikes me as “canned” coverage of the Middle East crisis. I got tired of hearing of scandal, and started nosing about for other stories – warmer ones.

I know it sounds stupid, but I began to think of Hugh Grant’s monologue in the introduction of Love Actually:
 
“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around.”

Lo and behold, I found a rather Love Actually-esque picture of a Canadian soldier grasping the hand of an Afghan boy during a patrol near Panjwaii village in the Kandahar province, Afghanistan.

REUTERS/Finbarr O'Reilly

Tell me that doesn’t warm your heart a little? To know that despite all the sadness and terror the world finds itself muddled up by, that we can still look into one another’s eyes and know that there is something precious, something common that unites us. I just wish more people would start looking for it. I suppose I need to start with me though, eh?

Meanwhile, these melancholy-ish thoughts encourage me read, which appears to be the best way for me to meditate, or think through things. Stuart Dybek recently published a piece in The New Yorker which was really quite good. It is called “If I Vanished.” If you’re looking for a diversion or a pretty solid read, click here. Otherwise, here’s one passage that drew my attention, possibly because it very accurately captured my general mood at the moment:  

“It was a mistake to stop here. Not only has the spell of what had come to seem like a quest been broken but a night that had felt spontaneous now seems manufactured. The snow is real, Jack thinks, and the music. Lines he hasn’t thought about for years, from a poem in “Doctor Zhivago,” come to mind:

It snowed and snowed, the whole world over . . .
A candle burned on the table;
A candle burned. “

A few weeks ago I was thumbing through a GQ and somehow or other got sucked into a narrative piece about a writer’s attempt to reconnect with a one-time primary school bully ("Running with the Bully." GQ June 2007: 122-127, 164, 166-167). The piece was fairly well done, though at the time I wasn’t necessarily excited to be reading  it (I think that after I read more than a quarter of something, I’m compelled to finish it so that I can convince myself it wasn’t a waste of time – probably not a good system). In any case, one thing that did push me to keep reading the essay was the surprisingly lyrical quality of the writer’s prose. Alex Abramovich managed  to keep my attention throughout the entire essay, largely by virtue of perfectly crafted sentences, innovative syntax, and energetic insight dispersed throughout.  

I like to visualize the people whose work I’m reading, so I hopped online and googled “Alex Abramovich.” I don’t recall ever having found a picture of him (if you find one, send me the link!), though I did find a book with his name on it: a compilation of his "best" essays, curiously titled Cinderella Story: Notes on Contemporary Culture. I was attracted to the name – somewhat prescient, I couldn’t help feeling – and started reading up on it. Eventually I had read so many reviews and summaries I figured I could have read the damn book already, so I ordered it on Amazon for the convenient, low, low price of $9.95.

As always, my hope was to be astounded by the brilliance of the author and enriched by his writing, while my expectation was to finish the book weeks after receiving it, grumbling darkly about having felt the need to read the entire book just in case the last few strides redeemed the load of shit that had preceded them.

As it turns out, my expectation was far exceeded and my hope very nearly realized. The collection starts off with Abramovich’s strongest, most poignant piece by far (after which the collection is titled), though it readily, and startlingly, displays his well-practiced fluency with the critical analysis of cultural texts. Readers are not confronted with a neophyte, here, but a full-fledged initiate; someone skilled in the tools of his trade. Very quickly he lives up to the praise that Sam Lipsyte, his one-time editor, lays at his feet in the Preface: “Abramovich is that rare kind of critic who can set himself aside enough to see what he is seeing. Rare too is the grace and energy of his prose and the startling power of his imagery” (Abramovich 9).

This first piece, “Cinderella Story,” runs just 10 pages, but in that incredibly short stretch of paper Abramovich accomplishes so much. He begins simply, holistically reviewing the convention of the romantic comedy as it has emerged and progressed in American cinema. Through his recap he notes that the quality of romantic comedy scripts has steadily declined, that they once “were pure in a way that nothing seems pure anymore.” He wisely judges that the major accomplishment of good romantic comedies was that they allowed audience members to lose themselves in the film, and that current products issued under this genre have largely failed to achieve this distinction with any consistency. Abramovich focuses on intimacy as the major culprit of the romantic comedy’s fall-from-grace, stating that it is “no longer viable as either a cultural or commercial commodity.”

Underlining that sentence, I wondered, and proceeded, becoming more and more convinced that Abramovich’s perspective is clear and well-honed. Intimacy has somehow become less possible in our own culture: “intimacy – the space two people create to ward off the trespasses of the world at large – now runs counter to the interests of the people who shape the tone and tenor of our lives” -- media moguls, as I understood it (Abramovich 12). While his vision of the retreat of intimacy is valid and suggestive of some of the greatest issues society faces today and young generations will face with greater urgency in the near future, Abramovich would benefit from considering the many shades of intimacy on a spectrum ranging from “casual,” perhaps, to “authentic.” I wonder if it isn’t that intimacy has lost its importance, but that we have gradually abandoned the best ways of achieving it, and have steadily become less aware of what really satisfies that innate, human need of ours to be intimate with others.
 
Had he considered the difference between authentic intimacy and other types, he may have been better prepared to slice through the rest of his essay. Still, though, his does admirable work. Using Julia Roberts as his main cultural text and her various romantic comedies as examples (especially Erin Brockovich), Abramovich confidently traipses through the process of building an impressive argument. Essentially, while romantic comedies may no longer offer us the chance to escape within them as a way to sate our need for intimacy, a nascent form of film, the deposition movie, is taking the reigns in that regard. We haven’t stopped looking to film to satisfy our needs: we have just altered what cross-section of celluloid we turn to. Through the deposition film, Abramovich sees us relating to people who suffer (such as those affected by pollution in Erin Brockovich) and coming to depend on their defenders (e.g. Erin Brockovich/Julia Roberts) to deliver us to a catharsis when the wounds we have adopted are addressed (I can’t wait to see if he ever attacks Law and Order). Appropriately, Abramovich proceeds to remark on the place of celebrity in all of this mess: the ways in which people grow to depend on celebrity figures like Julia Roberts to act as our personal saviors. Abramovich warns us away from this approach, and wisely so, finishing his essay with one of the most powerful observations I have ever read:

“How do any of us [sleep at night]? More and more, it seems, we sleep alone, or not at all. As the common ground of geography, community, and family disappears, we’re forced more and more to connect through contexts that are pre-established for us, and find ourselves with less and less to talk about. We spin in a cultural centrifuge, the earth drops from beneath our feet, and all that’s left to look at is the blur of faces spinning next to our own. Ultimately, we all begin to look the same, and to check the same boxes on movie-screening questionnaires. Meanwhile, art – the most direct, intense means we have of connecting to what’s inside another individual’s head, and a last refuge from cultural vertigo – no longer seems to be made by individuals, or for them. Certainly, it isn’t being made about them” (Abramovich 10).

When I came across this passage, a chill ran through my body. I stopped reading, set the book down in my lap, and thought long and hard on the state of the world, as well as on my own place and practices in it. Anyone interested in popular culture, critical theory, film, the ways in which we connect with each other, or just a damn good read will benefit from reading – no, not reading: absorbing – this book. Readers beware, however: Abramovich will likely challenge you to reevaluate assumptions about the world and your place in it. Although powerful, his observations can also be unsettling.

Bravissimo, Alex. I, at the least, am grateful for your work and will be thinking on your words for a long, long time.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Abramovich, Alex. Cinderella Story: Notes on Contemporary Culture. Cybereditions, 2002.

Buy on Amazon.
Buy as eBook.

My level of satisfaction with Daily Kos fluctuates with frequency. On many days I find the postings a little distasteful simply because of an unmitigated puerile rage that lines the very characters on screen. Occasionally though, they post a gem. This was one of those days.

Meteor Blades supplied a quick post as commentary on the Fourth of July. He started by declaiming the word hero, noting its egregious and "promiscuous" usage. I'll admit that it is a word we are often quick to reach for, but promiscuous? I was about to wander on when I saw Frederick Douglass mentioned on the next line. Curious, I read on, and became even more skeptical. Meteor Blades lauds Frederick Douglass as his one archetype of heroism. I'm not sure that I buy that completely; I've never really cared for him or his work (his narrative was boring, I'm sorry). However, the piece Meteor Blades selected as evidence was convincing. Apparently Frederick Douglass had once delivered a speech on a Fourth of July (you can almost hear the deep 'U' that your imagination demands Douglass must have spoken with, despite being born in Maryland). The speech is good. Very good. I won't reproduce it here, though those curious should certainly click on the link above to view the speech as Meteor Blades provided it. I will simply offer one observation, a quotation that caught my attention, and be on my merry way.

My observation: I don't celebrate the Fourth of July. I never have, really. I don't care for fire works. I never have, really. (You've seen them once, you've seen them all, y'know? Unless you find someone who can work Gandalf's particular brand...) I stopped going as soon as I could manage to excuse myself from family affairs, and since that time have spent every Fourth of July contemplating why I detest the way we celebrate this holiday.

I think, just maybe, I'm a little angry that we're celebrating. I am grateful for this nation, yes, yes, yes. But most days I see too much deviation from the vision we're supposed to be sharing in, accomplishing, spreading, to feel comfortable sitting back and celebrating what our forbearers had achieved. Celebrating such a holiday seems to suggest that those bacchanalians carousing beneath scintillating, fulsome light displays are complicit in the assertion that all is well; that the Mission has been accomplished. 

Maybe I’m a little too harsh here, but when I see that the wrong words in the Declaration of Independence are still adhered to literally in some situations -- that every man is created equal --  while in others they are casually ignored to permit the discrimination of race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion, I get angry. (Have you ever noticed how the Declaration begins, “When in the course of human events” and then flutters into “man” this and “man” that? That’s substantial enough for me to believe those myths that Jefferson drafted one version with just the word human and then was pressured into changing it. But hey, call me Mr. CSI).

I spend my Fourth of Julys remembering what we fought and died for. I spend them in mild solemnity, not just remembering the path we have taken and missteps we have made, but also reminding myself of the journey we have yet to complete and the long road ahead.

Perhaps I have underestimated Frederick Douglass. His words certainly have a timeless quality about them:

“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms- of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.” -- Frederick Douglass, 1852.

 

This summer (like the previous summer, the summer prior to that, the summer prior to that, so on and so forth) I am interning at a neat little company (by little I mean “huge”) that happens to be the leader in its industry. It is truly great work experience, though I’ll admit to becoming slightly disillusioned as my life plans and job description have veered incessantly in opposite directions. More on that later, maybe.

The important part about this particular summer of interning is that through it I am fulfilling a requirement for my Leadership program at school. In order to get full credit for the internship, I have to complete what is known in academic jargon as “an internship journal.” I use this diary, I mean, ahem, journal, much as I would a blog; I just try to reign in the commentary to subjects related to academia. It really isn’t that hard, because academia is my life (woe is me). In any case, last week I actually wrote about something that really, truly interested me, and I wanted to flesh it out here. In fact, I grew so excited that I e-mailed Gama Perruci (one of my professors, the Dean of our leadership center, or “He Who Will Grade Me and My Journal, I mean, My Journal and I”) just to give him the skinny: that I had stumbled upon a corporate blog.

Now, obviously I’m neither new, nor adverse to the whole blogging scene. I’ve kept a blog of my own for four years or more, but never in these four years had I imagined a blog endorsed – more or less – by a corporation. I found this corpblog (be prepared for me to toy with names until I stumble upon a portmanteau with mystical possibilities) while browsing our corporate directory (basically a boring Facebook or mySpace). I had just met someone while at a friend’s cube, and wanted to double check that I had remembered his last name, or something. I guess I forget why I was looking him up. In any case, the address listed for his “team website” seemed interesting, so I clicked it. Lo and behold, I’m confronted with this man’s blog. Cruising through a few entries really quickly I notice that the blog mostly deals with company-related material, or at least material that could be used for employee education. Nevertheless, I’m stunned. Riding along the top border in bold white letters is the corpoblog’s title and a techie witticism: “Biller Direct HumVee – Like Tony Soprano – Always Looking Over My Shoulder.” Amused, I poke around a bit. Falling down the right side of the screen are the compulsory links to other blogs, thereby fulfilling the requisite connection to the “community” necessary for anything to be considered a blog these days.

From an English and Communication standpoint, it is fascinating to see how the corporate identity project has evolved over time. Most of us will be familiar with the stereotype of model employees engaging regularly in niceties and platitudes while on company grounds, but when out to lunch will immediately (and almost unconsciously) launch into diatribes about this sonofabitch or that asshole. The first time I experienced this dropping-of-guard I was caught unawares, but it struck me as more humorous than inappropriate. When considering this personally, at first I thought it was cowardly. I told myself I would never engage in that sort of behavior, because I would always be brave enough to speak my mind on the job. That is, I wanted to be me all the time; none of that play-corporate-self stuff. Aside from the personal authenticity I felt I would be achieving, I also thought that being open and honest would be the only way to get things changed. Make constructive criticism and people will listen, right? A month later I was in the car on the way to lunch with a few colleagues when I caught myself mid-gripe. I paused and inside my head began to ask, “Wait? What…what’s going on? Why wouldn’t you have just said this at your desk?” Now I understand a bit better that the corporate mask isn’t always an act of cowardice as much as it is an effort to keep the peace. After all, if you only have to be stuck with someone for eight hours a day, five days a week, you might as well just save up the frustration for a sixty-minute lunch and use it to bond with your “friends,” right?

And so it has been. Griping, criticizing, as an effort of bonding. It is one of the most clear and evident glues adhering people in a wide variety of environments and relationships; the corporate world especially. And not just bonding, but also establishing one’s personality. In all of our interpersonal interactions we embed little gems of self-disclosure in what we say and how we say it. Through these bits of “me,” we build an image in other people’s minds of who we are. Complaining is naturally one of the most accessible subjects of conversation. I mean, who has to think long and hard to complain about something that completely sucks?

What fascinates me about this situation, this team blog on our company server, is that there is a department in our corporation that is not necessarily waiting until their lunch, or until they are outside the “forbidden zone” of company grounds to begin dissecting their troubles. Instead, they are engaging each other in personal woes online, at a website that is accessible to everyone. Naturally they are not using it as a human dart board, putting up people who piss them off and attacking mercilessly at will (though there’s an idea…). Here, on this department’s blog, they are writing with the aim of de-toxing and sharing solutions to some of their complaints as a team. Specifically on this blog, one of their issues is about company resources – to use Thing A or Thing B (not from Dr. Seuss, you perverts) as a shared resource for each team in a specific division of our company. Where I could imagine my grandfather going out to the shooting range forty-years ago with a bunch of his buds and start ripping his absent boss a new one while ripping a target sheet a dozen new holes, or my own father listening ten years ago to a co-worker bitch about this new upstart colleague that’s causing him hell on the job while munching on Wendy’s, now I’m able to traipse through our corporate servers to find a team baring their all not just to get issues off their collective chest, but also, well, to do something about it and improve the company’s processes. 

Is this really happening, I wondered? Are people really bonding over a blog while simultaneously making strides to solving enterprise-wide issues? Curious, I started doing drive-by’s. That is, on my way to refill my cup of coffee, I’d take the long walk past where this specimen group sat. My first trip or two didn’t provide much. But eventually I started noticing noises that were out of place when compared to other teams. Really strange noises to being hearing at 9:00 in the morning when most of our minds are only just cracking open one eyelid on the way to becoming fully awake. The noise I started hearing was laughter, mixed with sentence fragments followed by more laughter, which could only be jokes that were spliced between instant messaging conversations and “real-world dialogue.” A week or two of team-stalking later, I realized that this may be one of the closest teams I have ever encountered. I began imagining them as a tightly knit unit doing everything together – lunch, breaks, Friday-night cocktails, graduation parties, baby showers, so on and so forth. I began to imagine them as a family that had been imported directly into the company. And what was the glue? Well, it appeared to be blogging. For now, I’m wondering whether or not this is a corporate endeavor that should be given more time and attention. Is this a way to increase cohesiveness on teams, improve morale, or is there a negative side to this that I’m not realizing yet? When time and opportunity allows, I hope to talk to this compblogger to get his opinions on the issue. I’m very interested in how members of the team personally value this blog and measure its success. Were the people I imagined as corporate family members only commenting on the blog because this guy is one of those bloggers, harping on all the people whose names he knows until they read enough sentences of his entry to make for semi-intelligent commenting? Or, are they actually drawn to what he is saying, to a forum where they may also say and have things heard, to a place where they can learn something relevant to their careers, their life, their relationships?


(P.S. I’ve decided that blogs which are either endorsed by a corporation or are geared specifically to address corporate issues will be known as “comblogs” (as in company-blog). Those who read or write them shall be “combloggers.” I have spoken.) 

En route to work this morning, a commercial streamed across my talk radio station of choice (it's the only one that comes in, really), 610-WTVN, that struck me as rather hilarious.

An announcer whose gravelly voice's grumbles were reminiscent of dramatic do-or-die moments began the spot by intoning "it's not just golf, it could be the last game of their careers." I immediately found it amusing that whomever designed the ad felt it necessary to dramatize golf. Football and soccer you can just record a blend of screaming fans and band play. Baseball can bring in fans with a dime-a-dog night (disgusting). But golf, golf needs to be painted in angry, on-edge hues in order to bring in observers (not fans, fans do something; observers simply watch while their hands wander the insides of pockets on the search for wayward change).

A faulty emotional appeal, anyone? I'm sorry, but golf is boring. And I'd probably rather die than watch it for an extended period of time.

(I've just imagined an ironic twist of events: any day now I'm murdered and buried underneath a golf course. My unsettled spirit rises into a purgatory state where I can wander the lengths of the greens moaning my horror and torment. Great.)