Social media becomes more problematic for me to use by the day. Liberals can say whatever the hell they want with absolutely no fear of censorship. Conservatives can't tell the truth without Facebook or Twitter slapping some half-assed "fact checking" claim that is usually a pathetic joke of biased interpretation passed off as truth by a lazy press corps. Politics cannot be avoided, but only half the conversation is being allowed. I've always used Facebook and liked the interface until I began to realize how intrusive their data mining has become. For example, somehow Mark Zuckerberg found out that I took a business trip to Ireland in 1998. Facebook wasn't launched until six years later, so I could not have posted photos of my trip or published my travel itinerary, not that I would be stupid enough to advertise to burglars when I'm not around to protect my home. I am 99.9999+ percent certain that I have never mentioned that little tidbit of information on Facebook. So, the question is, how did Facebook find out about my trip and mention it as one of the fun facts about me that others can learn without my intentional consent. Ah, but there's the rub, isn't it? To what have I consented, when I clicked "Agree" to their book-length terms of service agreement? I understood that the social media application was going to use information learned about me from my use of Facebook and the internet itself to help advertisers market products to me while I'm using their product. Again, information about my travel to Ireland can't even be on my own computer, because my laptop … [Read more...]
When snowflakes melt
I have this serious love/hate relationship with social media. I love staying in contact with family and friends scattered all over the world. But social media can be a horrific waste of my time, and I don't think of myself as retired or ready to die. As the poet Robert Frost famously wrote, "But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep." I am self-employed as a writer. If I don't sell a book or a short story, I don't earn any income. If I waste hours upon hours each day engaged in asinine, juvenile arguments with presumably adult men and women about religion, politics, or Georgia Bulldog football, I'm wasting hours of precious time that should be dedicated to my work. Earlier this year I threatened to quit Facebook entirely, having purged my Twitter account, with the idea that I would focus all of my attention on professional work, instead of writing for fun or worse, arguing with somebody who has assumed they know more about a subject than I do. However, publishers in this digital era of mass communications expect writers to develop and maintain a social media presence. To my eternal surprise, my wife also opposed a permanent self-imposed ban from Facebook, even though I did manage to delete my membership from all the large forums where most of the arguments seemed to take place. This left me in a bit of a quandary. Could I remain on social media, without getting sucked into a black hole of absurd arguments? The challenge may not be insurmountable, but it has certainly proved to be formidable. Today has been a prime example of why I "hate" … [Read more...]
The reality of miracles
Landen Hoffman About a month or so ago, my life dramatically improved after I basically stopped arguing with people on social media. First I announced that I was leaving Facebook entirely, only to have my wife talk me out of it, by surprise. But I did hold true to my promise to remove myself from all the "debate" forums where I wasted WAY too much of my life in ultimately fruitless conversations with people uninterested in reason and evidence when it might have an adverse effect on their current thinking. In fact, one of the most ridiculous arguments that I have had to deal with during my time spent as a Christian pugilist (never been very apologetic about my own thoughts and opinions) on the internet has been the claim by a few of the more outspoken atheists that miracles do not ever occur because God does not exist. It is ridiculous to argue about miracles because (a.) the definition of one is nebulous and (b.) people who don't believe in miracles can easily reject them as failing to meet their nonexistent criteria for one. To an atheist, a miracle probably requires them to see a physical manifestation of divine intervention, and even then they might dismiss their witness of a miracle as a hallucination their mind imagined because most atheists don't want to believe in God. Why would I say that? It sounds kind of harsh and judgmental, I suppose, but I said it because it is true. Atheists have made up their mind, and just like everybody else, they don't want to be wrong. This explains why there are so many atheists wasting their lives on social media arguing with … [Read more...]
Looking on the bright side
Bill Tush Ted Turner revolutionized the information world when he bought Channel 17, a local Atlanta television station, and started bouncing its signal off of a satellite so people everywhere could watch, and it quickly turned into the first cable "superstation," running content 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Before Turner forever changed the industry, the Big Three national networks (ranked in order of their marketshare) were CBS, NBC, and ABC. The three major networks all stopped offering content during the early morning hours and from around 3:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. every morning, only a test pattern was broadcast over the airways. Ted owned the rights to a lot of old movies and the Atlanta Braves, which meant he had a virtually unlimited supply of content. The FCC decreed that once Channel 17 evolved into a national network, Turner had to broadcast a news program in order to maintain the station's federal license. In a move of sheer genius, Ted didn't even try to go against the Walter Cronkite-style news anchors during the "normal" news hour from 6:00 p.m to 7:00 p.m. Instead, Ted hired a comedian named Bill Tush and offered the news at 3:00 a.m. Turner figured nobody was going to watch his station for the news, anyway, but at that hour of the morning, his SuperStation literally had no other competition, and Tush made it fun to watch the news. Some of his on-air stunts were hilarious and became legendary, as the video below demonstrates. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy8MTBxP7no Another brilliant and innovative move was when Turner began … [Read more...]
Internet censorship
I just finished conducting a simple experiment that produced some pretty interesting results, in my opinion. I typed the name of my website (southern prose) into the Google search engine and checked the results. As expected, three of the first four search results were "me" -- either a link to an article, the website homepage, or the author bio page. Enclosing the search criteria in quotation marks didn't appear to have any impact on the results. No smile for the mug shot, Jussie? Then I began repeating the experiment, while doing my best to apply the scientific method. I added the name of my friend and guest contributor Frank Boccia to the search criteria, noting that the results only changed slightly when quotation marks were used around "southern prose". Instead of the top three results matching my website, Google now found four unique articles. A slight improvement. Over a number of iterations, the search results were fairly consistent...as I'd think of another subject or guest contributor at www.southernprose.com and modify the search criteria, at least one article from my website matching the criteria would inevitably show in the search results, as my queries correctly matched and located articles about Rose Kopp, P. Z. Myers and Hector Avalos and consistently listed them in the top two matches. When I substituted the name of the world's most hysterical climate alarmist, Google even found an old article about hate crimes that wasn't even about Al Gore, but merely made a brief reference to him. And when I added famed atheist Richard Dawkins to the search … [Read more...]
