Perhaps not obvious to everyone these days is that the primary use of these technologies in the social sense is not, in fact, sharing with your friends and family what you had for lunch (cold pizza and beer, thank you) but information curation.  If I follow you on twitter or Facebook or Google Reader it's probably because you share interesting bits of content from your corner of the internet.  Then again, you might just be a family member or a co-worker or a distant acquaintance.  

Which means that I have to police my broadcasts to suit the individuals in the crowd.  I'm no longer curating my corner of the internet for my audience, my audience is hogtying me because I have no granular control over them.  For example, there are a surprising number of friends and others who would probably find this totally uncouth and politically charged blog post entertaining--but then I'd have to explain to the rest of my audience what "wingnut welfare sugar daddy" means, among other things.  At the same time, there is a whole other subsection of my internet audience who would have thought this was hilarious…but had I just shared it through the normal channels, there'd probably be some awkward moments in my future.

As much as you can--and should--call me out as a pussy ("Share it all and let the Flying Spaghetti Monster in the sky sort 'em out!") for not wanting to offend anyone (too much) the truth remains that none of the major social broadcasting players give us the tools to properly channel our interests to those who are most interested.  There has to be a happy medium between the pure broadcast of twitter and the focused mailing lists everyone was making in the nineties.  

I have a lot of really excellent memories from college.  Most of them aren't particularly sharp, however.  Many of them have grown fuzzy just over the last few years and a good chunk more were pretty damn muddled to begin with.  Surprisingly, some of the more crystalline episodes are the political debates/arguments/drunken-shouting-matches I engaged in with my roommates and friends.

I attended a college with a largely liberal faculty and a student body that was made up primarily of the conservative sons and daughters of the Northeast's Republicans.  The comedian Lewis Black took the stage on our campus by asking, "If you guys are conservatives now, what the fuck are you going to be when you're 45?  Nazis?!"  This demographic made for an interesting dichotomy and provided plenty of sparring partners for those of us who were politically aware and more progressively minded.   

During the "War-or-Bust" Media Blitzkrieg that ramped up in the early months of 2003 I found myself incessantly engaging in a losing battle with those who had been told or decided for themselves that invading Iraq was an appropriate response to 9/11 and that the war would pay for itself, among other things.  What struck me most about these skirmishes was not the delusions or cognitive dissonance of many of my classmates, but the sheer number of them that had never explored a single political train of thought in their lives.   A truly frightening number of my classmates didn't know what they were for or against because they didn't know who they were politically.  I don't mean that in the sense that they didn't identify with a party platform or know how to vote.  More viscerally, they had yet to discover the things that would make them tick politically and how to properly separate the politically motivated and simplified assertions from the complex realities.  And it's not all their fault.  They, like me, came of age in one of the most prosperous and politically vanilla decades in the 20th century.  There really wasn't much for us to cut our political teeth on back then.  We were perhaps just too young to grasp the first Gulf War and we certainly weren't going to get worked up over a blowjob.  Our first real taste of political blood came in 2000 with the election-that-wasn't-so-much, and even that went unmarked and unnoticed by the majority of my generation.  

But now we've had a few crash courses in realpolitik (two wars, a recession, bank bailouts, Healthcare reform, etc.) and we've begun to throw our not inconsiderable weight around (SEE: Election, Obama) and that's a good sign.  The question now, very well constructed by Dan Drezner, is what will become of our generation's politics now that we've seen and understood the politics (and consequences thereof) of our parent's generation.  They saw Vietnam and railed against it and yet here we are eight years into two occupational wars.  Are we going to make the same mistakes and believe that perhaps we can do better?  Will we become isolationist to a fault as a result of the overreach of those who came before?  The answers to these questions are several elections and perhaps a few world altering events away, but it's worth wondering, now that the baby boomer echo-wave has come out of its political shell, which way will we wander?

First, the Dodgers have completely fallen apart and even Andre Ethier is looking like he'd rather be anywhere but at the plate these days.  I know the divorce is taking its toll and morale can't be all that high with Torre leaving, Vin retiring, and serious money woes, but you're still getting paid an obscene amount of money to play baseball.  Would a little team coherence kill you guys?

While I was packing and unpacking my worldly possessions (very surprised to learn that I own a blender, by the way) the whole country decided to collectively go apeshit over a community center/mosque/Ground-Zero-Fuck-You-Care-Package-Love-Al Queda.  This is really simple.  If you have any faith (whoops!) in the Constitution of the United States or even just the method by which it was created, then this is covered and you have no reason whatsoever to worry your pretty little head about it.  Particularly if you're the former-quitter-governor of Alaska.  If, however, you'd rather live in a country where popular sentiment and the government get to decide who worships what and where, Saudi Arabian Airlines flies out of New York and Washington D.C.--buy a ticket.  

Then during the first 72 hours of my, "Hey!  Get your mouth off that!" vigil--still ongoing--Google decided that they didn't really mean all that stuff they said about Net Neutrality and don't really care what happens to the state of the internet beyond, say, next year.  They're busy spinning this as "The best they could do." when in reality it's almost everything the Telecoms and Wireless providers have always wanted: a tiered internet in which they get to play gatekeeper to content and innovation alike.  Hey Google, get your dirty mouth off my internet!  

Pets are supposed to be therapeutic, right?

I have a decent excuse though, and his name is Kuma.  

© 2010 Jennifer Carlson. All Rights Reserved. www.jennifercarlsonphotography.com

Kuma came home with us on Friday night and after some ear-piercing cries and some unfortunate car sickness he has survived two days of non-stop petting, cuddling, and the indignity of having to wear a collar and leash when outside (terrible, right?) and has arrived safely at his new home.  

Since Kuma will inevitably occupy a great deal of my time (it's going to take a while to train him to eat Liz's shoes on command) he'll be integrated into the website as a recurring subject of interest—mostly on Sundays but probably whenever he does something particularly amusing.  

Oh yeah, because you'll ask, Kuma is Japanese for bear.  

Of course, like any good high school romance, my love of Weezer fizzled and faded away as I went to college and they released several albums of dubious charm and musical integrity.  But this song has just enough of that Buddy Holly enthusiasm to make me feel like as though I'm back in High School when there was absolutely nothing wrong with sing along as loudly as you could to Weezer in your car.  Which is what I've been doing.  So it's safe to say this will be the song of the weekend.  Which is good, as I'm going to spend the weekend moving and I'll need something upbeat to keep me going up and down the flights of stairs.

Bonus: (NSFW)