Have you ever fallen in love on the internet?

Articles like this question to Dr. Phil essentially belittle the concept of falling in love on the internet. We are such a shame based culture, even though we have become secular. I know a number of married people that met their partners online in the 1990s.  Back then they had to hide how they found their partners. Today (in the states), about 1 in 5 relationships begin online and although it is becoming more prevalent I would suggest the shame factor is still there.

I have had experience in this department myself.  The falling in love bit, not the finding a partner bit.  And just like when it has happened to me in person, I had that moment of surprise when my heart and mind connected for that magical feeling I associate with love.  That falling feeling of euphoria.  I remember it distinctly with Daughter (thx birth hormones) and a few other (in person) lovers in my life.  But the feeling of falling in love whilst sitting, alone, in front of your computer is equally compelling and even more mysterious because there is no one to touch and when you feel that feeling the first thing you want to do is touch in order to cement the connection, right?

But in the current era falling in love over the internet is unrequitted in that there is no touch available (not until the transporter thing gets a little further along..which it is lol).  Let me detail my own story, in brief:

I was sitting in front of my computer in early 2007. A new message came in from some random stranger I had been communicating with furiously for months. This was not on a dating site. This was on one of the first successful communities built online that didn't focus on any particular interest or subject. This was social media before there was social media. Users chose who to follow and what interests to stumble through (you followed anyone you wanted). Yes, people used it for dating. In that fledgling community I made it clear early on that I was not looking for dates.

By 2007 I was already exhausted with online dating efforts (as a late 20s-early 30s woman dating online in the late 90s and early 00s there was a lot of interest so it took bucket loads of time to sift through results...which were paltry, at best, but fun occasionally too - by 2003 I found the whole effort disheartening and still feel much the same). The message I had received that night was so thoughtful and sweet and had been preceded by many many many similar such messages from the same user. I read the message and cupid struck. It was not a romantic message. I did not know how to react to the feeling. It was pleasurable, yes, but baffling. Some random dude in another country had managed to (unintentionally) shoot an arrow into my heart and I didn't know how to deal with it. I felt the same as the moment I realized I had my first serious crush in Grade 8. Awkward. I probably blushed like I did constantly back then and still do on occasion.

At that time (or subsequently) I didn't confess my feeling. Nor have I with the other two internet 'strangers' I met on that site and had similar moments where cupid's arrow struck.  I am pretty sure there was a similar spark in each case. If my travels ever land me in their vicinity I will definitely be trying to arrange a face to face meeting. It won't be to try and recapture past feelings but because the spark I felt back then was genuine and based on a deep level of attraction to an intellect and a persona that seemed to care. I don't think their in person behaviour will differ. I am connected to all of them on other social media accounts now and love the occasional interaction we have. They are like a stable of past crushes that remind me of the type of people I'm capable of connecting deeply with. I suspect a lot of interactions like my own happened on that site. The men I interacted with were not looking for dating interactions with me and that's possibly why I felt safe enough in that online space to be real with them (and they with me perhaps).  In the flurry of electronic bytes sent between us over a period of a few years, real relationships were formed even though I have yet to meet them offline and perhaps never will.

The internet, she be magic in more ways than one.

My Slow Media Diet

At no other time in history have we had so much information.  It is like a primordial soup of information out there.  And I am the first to admit that occasionally I drown and have to be resuscitated with a good solid dose of self imposed solitary confinement away from all of it.

I did that this past weekend.  And upon my return I reflected that each and every time I return to the 'soup' I think...."Wait just a gosh darned second...I don't need this shite....most of it is not life enhancing."

It is the 'most' bit that gets me each and every time.  The fact of the matter is that there actually is some utility in the information and that marginal utility is what prevents my digital suicide each and every time I contemplate it.

I enjoy (need) to hear about the day to day activities of loved ones that are not near.  I enjoy (need) to hear about the activities of loved ones that are near too.  I also find that most of my news is obtained via social media streams and I love the fact that I can mute certain streams if they no longer meet my needs.

I need interaction.  I believe we all do.  Forcing oneself into isolation is an activity encouraged only in small doses and in today's dispersed and time-deficient world we interact electronically alongside face to face.

This week's viral article on "Listening to Complainers is Bad for your Brain" reminds me of the essence of my discomfort with all of this information:  It is, for the most part, negative.

In the last year I have consciously chosen to try and live-talk and e-post only good news stories except when my blood pressure simmers to the point of needing to climb to the top of the rooftop and literally scream my displeasure.  A negative article or comment from me is the equivalent of a gorilla pounding her chest.  I am a passionate (and, um, unmedicated) person so this tends to happen on a regular basis.

Slow media is a lifestyle that encourage others to do the same.  Thoughtful and conscious consumption and production of media could radically change our world while maximizing the opportunities for significant and positive world change that technology affords us.

Words are not Wordz

Lately I find I often grapple with the words to describe things.

For example, I worked long and hard on this sentence:  "The idyllic days of youth are more closely strung together whilst in our elder years the moments are."


I intended the quoted sentence to be a central theme to a blog post and I guess it is but not in the way I had originally jotted down my thoughts.


And that's the gist of this post.  Words are often not used as they were originally intended.  This post is going to be about two particular words that are pervasive in our culture and have acquired meaning beyond their original one.  I am not going to name them as yet because I'd like my thoughts to be digested before evoking a reaction from you, dear reader.


When Daughter was around six years of age we had our first meaningful sex education moment.  I think she already knew the birds and the bees (or birds and birds or bees and bees, I've been quite liberal in my approach to these issues, much to her chagrin as she got older).  I think she had probably just discovered, on her own, the pleasures of touching yourself 'down there' and she was doing this around me, at home.  I think she was doing it over her clothes...and perhaps even subconsciously, I don't really recollect the specifics.  At any rate, once I was certain of my observations I said to her that she needed to stop doing that in public because yes, it feels good, but there are things that we do in private and this was one of them.  I told her that what she was doing was called masturbation and it was a very pleasurable activity, yes, but it was something that each of us did in private.


The clearest part of my memory of this rather ordinary yet quite significant parenting moment is that her eyes widened at some point during my mini-lecture and she said, with incredulity in her voice:  "There's a word for that?  Wow!".


Hopefully you'll think that story was as cute as a button because that's what she was, in that moment, to me.  Absolute innocence.  It is also a stark reminder of the power we parents have, eh?

When people talk of their maiden names I always wonder (and sometimes voice) whether they were a virgin before they got married.  Not so long ago, women were property and men married virgins as unspoiled property and calling yourself a maiden harkens back to that time.  So why do most women still do this whole name changing thing again?  It truly baffles me the number of people that do and refer to themselves as maidens.

Anyways.  Back to words.  They have power.  Using the words masturbation or maiden in 2012 is, for the most part, uncontroversial despite my hatred of the word maiden due to the patriarchal culture it reinforces.

But these other words, the words I have in mind, used to be ones that caused no controversy and yet in the last week one of them has been tossed out into our cultural landscape without regard to the legions of mostly silent people that are most offended by it's use.


Have you guessed them yet?  Before I let them out of the hat let me talk about a speaker I heard at TEDxStJohns, Philip Riteman (pictured below).  In the photo I've posted from the event he is holding up his arm to show the audience something.  His Auschwitz tattoo.  His permanent reminder of the horror of losing each member of his immediate and most of his extended family.  His tale was powerful.  It took him forty years to tell his story, the pain was that great.  He choked up numerous times during his talk and it humbled each of us in attendance, I'm sure.  He put it best:  "Each of you live in heaven."


Now imagine Mr. Riteman attending a stand up comedy show and the comedien saying "some very generalizing and declarative statements about nazis always being funny."  Imagine Mr. Riteman then shouting out from the audience: "Actually, nazi jokes are never funny."  Would the comedian responding with "Wouldn't it be funny if that guy got taken by nazis.  Like right now.  And his whole family too." get a laugh out of the crowd?


Is that funny?  To anyone?  Would it be funny if he was not a holocaust survivor?  Why?  


A comedian in the States thought that using the word rape in almost the exact same context this week was appropriate and his attack was met with laughter. Note that I have no idea if the person who shouted out from the crowd has been a rape victim.  And I don't care.  I applaud her actions and hope that I would be as brave in a similar situation.  The ensuing 'controversy' over this guy's remarks (and the number of supporters he has) has made my head hurt.  Note that he has apologized.


So suffice it to say that these two words:  rape and nazi, are words whose uses are almost sacred to me and to many people that it has affected either directly or indirectly.  I dream of an age where these words will just be ancient relics of a barbaric society that also used terms like maiden to describe a human being with a high market value.

Today's culture is full of mostly wordz it seems and it saddens me to think that after the events that went down this week, rape is one of the new wordz on our radar joining other ones like nazi and feminist and maiden.  Do you have any others to add?

Holocaust survivor Philip Riteman showing his Auschwitz tattoo.
Click on the photo to go to the TEDxStJohns fb page where this was originally posted.

Hero Worship

Me with Michele Landsberg, a personal hero.

Last night I went to a showing of Miss Representation here in Toronto that was hosted by Crankytown.ca and Fresh Restaurants. In a curious twist of the universe and its gazillions of electrons, one of my own personal lifelong heroes attended as well. I am beaming with her in the above picture.

If any of you know her then you will not be surprised at her lofty status in my own story. She is a feminist. She was the only feminist in any mainstream Canadian media throughout my childhood. Her weekend columns were shared ritualistically and often aloud at the dining room table by my mother with a pot of coffee on lazy weekend mornings in our pyjamas. My mother often vocally cheered for her. She also often remarked on what a pioneer this woman was. My young fertile ears soaked this in.

I blame my mother, and Michele Landsberg, for my 16 yo daughter coming home one late night last summer and saying: "Thanks Mum, you've made me a feminist and boy am I angry." She was upset by the contradictory manner her male friends treated the females in her larger social group. I knew that my most compelling role as a parent had been fulfilled at that moment. Thanks Mum. Thanks Michele.

A couple of years ago I added Michele as a friend on facebook. My political connections on facebook had grown to the point that her name kept being suggested as a friend. I sent her a message informing her of her pivotal role in my formative years and how honoured I was to be connected virtually with her. She wrote back and thanked me, THANKED ME !?, for giving her the inspiration to keep plodding away finishing her latest book (Writing the Revolution, which is now on my to read shelf).

That message from her impressed me even further. Michele has a long road behind her of inspiring and serving the voices that are misrepresented in our culture. And last night, she shared with me her views on this awareness raising film in a manner that continues to reflect her absolute dedication to humanity: "Everyone needs to see this film."

Namaste Michele. I pledge to light my torch with your flames and soldier on towards the day when we can all stand up and say: WE Represent.

Social Media and Reputation Economics

Social media.  It's an oxymoron.  The only thing that distinguishes today's media from the past, and therefore deeming it 'social', is that we can respond immediately.  Letters posted in the 19th century (and earlier) were also social media.  As were the cave drawings in Europe from 32,000 years ago.

I believe that today's social media has allowed us to bypass the knowledge economy and move directly into a more transparent reputation economy.  It is not what you know, it is who you know.  The promise of an economy growing according to [knowledge generated] patents does not get very far without the money to build, test, market and improve said patented item.  And where does the money come from?  According to the Occupy Wall Street movement, the money belongs to only 1% of the population.  So if you've got a great idea you are going to have to gain access to some of that wealth in order to generate wealth with that idea.  And that, my friends, is where reputation is key.

I spent many years pursuing a doctoral degree.  The brick wall I came up against while researching my topic (Investment Decision Making in New Technologies) was the fact that time and time again the venture capitalists and the angel investors were not modelling anything when making these decisions.  It was the handshake and the reputation that sealed the deals.  To be sure, a thorough examination of the knowledge aspects were part of the due diligence process.   But the final decision came down to the handshake and the reputation of the development team.  This reality, as well as the chaos of my personal life, forced the ending of this academic route since handshakes are not only difficult to measure but a dissertation on the 'soft' aspects of investment decision making was not likely to be easily defended in an engineering faculty.

I learned a lot about communication networks in this field of study.  I've even published on the matter.  The idea of lead users is quite compelling and feeds nicely into the foundation of a reputation economy.  With social media you no longer have to rely on face to face connections or peruse trade magazines and conferences.  If you have an idea, you can actively search online for people looking for solutions that fit your idea.  Or conversely, if you have a problem you can look for ideas that solve it.

And how does the 'wheat get separated from the chaff'?  Reputation.  And this is greatly eased by the immediacy of social media.  Letters of introduction are no longer needed (my father brought a few with him when he emigrated to Canada from Ireland in 1967).  Answers to questions like:  How many twitter followers does the person have?;  LinkedIn connections?;  Blog traffic?;  Youtube videos?; Conference presentations?;  TED talks?; will allow a potential investor to ascertain quickly whether there is enough 'klout' to warrant further investigation or a seed investment.

The sad thing about bypassing the knowledge economy is that there might be some truly great ideas out there that will go nowhere in the reputation economy.  The world transformed itself in the space of a mere decade, leaving knowledge junkies like myself hankering a bit for a bygone era and resigned to blogging for a better world.  A 3.0 world where reputation is based on quality rather than merely quantity.

LBF: Life Before Facebook

Events in my life have taken many twists and turns in the last couple of years so that by the end of July I thought, I need to unplug from the greatest friend debauchery the world has ever known.  Even if it is only for a wee while.  So I took a month off of facebook this past August.

I can report that after one month exactly 4 of my 661 facebook 'friends' contacted me via phone/email.  I have 3 immediate family members and luckily we maintain regular contact.  So, as a mathematician I have to evaluate this using the cold hard facts.  4/661 people are really my friends.  I interacted with approximately 0.6% of the total publicly declared number of connections that facebook deems friends.

I don't know about you, but that's about the same as LBF.  In my adult life I have found that in a given month I socialize with about 5-10 people and since I actually do know people that don't have a facebook account that number is about correct for my facebook free month.

Facebook clutters my life and I'm not sure I can return to it again.  I've poked around a bit in the few weeks since I 'returned'  (pun intended) and I feel like a lost sheep.  The spell is broken.  The charm has ceased.

I am now officially living LAF:  Life After Facebook.  This 'new' life will include this blog.  Or another blog (I have a  habit of creating new blogs....maybe I will commit to one eventually).