"I can't imagine why we've all got time enough to cry"

R.S. linked to this really interesting series on time over at NPR. Food for thought -- take a taste and tell me what you think!

Your time — almost entirely divorced from natural cycles — is a new time. Your time, delivered through digital devices that move to nanosecond cadences, has never existed before in human history. As we rush through our overheated days we can barely recognize this new time for what it really is: an invention.

It's an invention that's killing us.

The Tyranny Of Modern Time, Part 1

The recognition of limits stands as the global culture's strongest imperative to move beyond its current time-logic. 

But on the level of the individual, the imperative to change emanates from a different source. As individuals, the desire to build a new time springs from our deeply felt need to reclaim value and balance in our lives.

The Tyranny Of Modern Time, Part 2

As someone who struggles with the persistent feeling that there's not enough time for everything, but also with a fair amount of doubt as to the value of many of the things I feel like I need time for, I'm inclined to agree with much of this. Interesting to see it tied so directly to issues of overconsumption -- I hadn't really thought of it that way, but can't really disagree with the claim as stated. I'm interested to see what he thinks can actually be done to change things...

TMI

For as much as he's invested in sharing, though, Zuckerberg seems clueless about the motivation behind the act. Why do you share a story, video, or photo? Because you want your friends to see it. And why do you want your friends to see it? Because you think they'll get a kick out of it. I know this sounds obvious, but it's somehow eluded Zuckerberg that sharing is fundamentally about choosing. You experience a huge number of things every day, but you choose to tell your friends about only a fraction of them, because most of what you do isn't worth mentioning.

--Farhad Manjoo (Slate), Not Sharing Is Caring: Facebook's terrible plan to get us to share everything we do on the Web


Now and again (by which I mean all the time), a website will ask me if I'd like to log on with my Facebook account. I almost invariably way no. Maybe this is a little paranoid of me, but I mostly don't link things to Facebook. I'm afraid that it will broadcast what I'm looking at, what I'm buying, what I'm reading, without letting me vet first which things get shared. And that makes me uncomfortable. I'm a fairly open person in a lot of ways, but I really don't want to share indiscriminately. If I'm going to provide too much information, I want it to be because I chose to overshare. And I don't really want to be shared with indiscriminately, either. Pick. Choose. Think. I am, in fact, quite a fan of this type of discrimination. Don't be the one who forwards emails without any thought to whether or not I'll actually get anything (useful information, pleasure, etc) from reading the message you're sending. Don't be the one who replies all when replying to one will do.

Mark Zuckerberg and the team over at Facebook do not agree with me.

"Oh, come on - a little bit cool."

So, you know how you owe someone an email, but then it takes you a while to get to it, and then it's been so long that it feels awkward, so you figure you'd better have something really interesting to say when you do write back, and then, eventually, you just send that message that's like, "So...I suck. How are you?" That's what this blog is like. I was just being lazy, and then I was sick, and then I was moving, and then I was like, "Hm, I should write a nice long, funny, full-of-interesting-something-or-other post, since I've been quiet for so long," but that felt daunting, so I put it off, and here we are.

So, rather than trying to go over everything that's happened over the summer, I'll just jump back in with a post about The Vampire Diaries. I've spent much of the last few days in Mystic Falls, watching the 2nd half of season 2, which I'd fallen way behind on, in anticipation of tonight's season 3 premiere. My basic response at the end of the second season was "So. Much. Drama."

In a little more detail, and to quote Elijah, "OMG."