"I am not a dictator to block 'Facebook' but who ever uses it will be imprisoned."
"I have tried to resign from my position, but my resignation was declined by the president, who is I."
(M. Qadaffi)
"I have to right this unconscionable wrong. Many people are suffering. And I'm the only guy who can affect the change."
"The nights I don't sleep it's because there's a higher calling telling me to stand guard."
(C. Sheen)
It's hard to know what to say about the world in which we live when its dominant personalities are currently Muammar Qaddafi and Charlie Sheen. The great thing is, if they ever make a movie
about this tumultuous little span, Sheen could play both Qaddafi and
himself. Then again, the reverse might be just as true for Qadaffi. I'm about 90 percent certain they are
both using the same not-very-well-controlled substance; so the film would require not just one star
but one dealer as well--a proposition truly unheard of in Hollywood these
days, I'm sure.
The ol' Bloviator has
been moved in recent weeks to ponder various aspects of the Internet's
influence on the contemporary world, and even the most casual Googler will have
no trouble seeing that the antics of this totally whacked-out duo have gone
seriously viral. One site even challenges
you to choose either Qaddafi or Sheen as
the source of a series of particularly audacious and off-the-wall statements or assertions. Some might say such activities trivialize the
seriousness of the situation with the not only deranged but deadly dangerous
Qaddafi, but wouldn't you say that it's also hard to feel too hopeful about a society
whose principal menace is also paid $2 million a week?
Much has been written about the role of the
Internet in spawning and in spurring the challenges to corrupt and dictatorial
rulers in the Middle East, and there is certainly no disputing its importance. Yet, while You Tube can make placard-waving, rock
-throwing, and even tear gas-inhaling look cool to the mouse-clicking masses, the OB wonders whether it is a lot more effective in selling the idea of protesting than in conveying the ideas behind the protests. There is, to be sure, a bunch of good stuff to be learned and taken to heart out there in the great wide
world of web, but it often seems like so much widely scattered flotsam in a sea of ephemera
and instant stimulation. Certainly, if
even a tiny fraction of the research connecting Internet addiction to truncated
attention spans is valid, it would seem that the medium is much better suited for mere
incendiaries and habitual agitators than philosophers and theorists. The 2008 Obama campaign demonstrated beyond doubt
the WWW's enormous potential to get a lot of newcomers out to the polls, but
the turnout figures from last November raise legitimate concerns about
how many of these voters will prove to be one-hit wonders who cast their first and last ballot
simultaneously. The web's demand that
complex issues and questions be compressed into a handful or two of bytes is
not exactly conducive to profound, long-term engagement. In a recent episode of CBS's "The Good
Wife," Grace, a teenager transfixed
by a fellow teen's internet podcast about what a kick-ass revolutionary Jesus was, challenges
her more or less agnostic mom and demands to be taken to church. When Mom cheerfully agrees, however, and asks
which church Grace wants to attend, she has no clue and obviously no real
awareness of doctrinal differences among any of the denominations. When her mama also gets her a Bible, Gracie stares
at it in what seems to be wonderment, perhaps searching for its mouse pad.
The large turnouts for the demonstrations in Wisconsin and for sympathy demonstrations elsewhere might seem less surprising if somebody polled the participants as to how much time they spent surfing for video of events in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain. In the latter case, Tom Friedman, in a wide-ranging psycho-interpretive column suggesting that he just might have gotten into ol' Muammar and Charlie's stash, argues that in all of the hullabaloo over Facebook, we should not forget "Google Earth, which began roiling Bahraini politics in 2006. A big issue in Bahrain, particularly among Shiite men who want to get married and build homes, is the unequal distribution of land. On Nov. 27, 2006, on the eve of parliamentary elections in Bahrain, The Washington Post ran this report from there: "Mahmood, who lives in a house with his parents, four siblings and their children, said he became even more frustrated when he looked up Bahrain on Google Earth and saw vast tracts of empty land, while tens of thousands of mainly poor Shiites were squashed together in small, dense areas. 'We are 17 people crowded in one small house, like many people in the southern district,' he said. 'And you see on Google how many palaces there are and how the al-Khalifas [the Sunni ruling family] have the rest of the country to themselves.' Bahraini activists have encouraged people to take a look at the country on Google Earth, and they have set up a special user group whose members have access to more than 40 images of royal palaces." Old Tom may be onto something here, or again, he just may be into something.
The OB's attitude toward Facebook has never been particularly positive, and it has been even less so since he and the Missus had occasion to see "The Social Network," with its troubling glimpse into a world where super intelligence and soullessness seem too frequently to travel hand-in-hand. Still, even granting FB's recent positive role in rallying dissent where dissent is both justified and long overdue, given its unfailing capacity to spur impetuous and ill-considered behavior, it has too much to answer for in daily reports of associated homicides (such as this one from today's NYT), suicides, assaults, bullying, etc. to claim much cred with the OB.
It would be unfair and inaccurate, of course, to imply that this sort of behavior is no longer observed among the low-tech sector of the population. Take this truly distressing example of marital discord reported in the local rag:
When deputies arrived, both were very drunk with the man outside yelling profanity and the woman passed out on a bed.
A deputy woke her, and the woman explained that they had planned to go to a cockfight that evening but couldn't agree which rooster to bring. The man got angry and pushed her down onto the kitchen floor and slapped her, she told deputies. The man was charged with family-violence battery, disorderly conduct and obstruction of officers, according to a deputy's report.
As a matter of fact, the OB will have to concede that this regrettable incident might have been avoided altogether if the couple actually had a Facebook page, where they might have simply posted snapshots of the potential combatants and allowed friends to vote on which of the roosters seemed most ready to get it on--in battle, that is. In the end, one supposes, Facebook is not that different from a tire tool; whether you get positive or negative results from either one depends a lot on how you try to use them.
