Ask Me Anything
Today’s a bit of a nailbiter; we’re going to get the results of Rebecca’s MRI this afternoon. If it’s bad, then things will be very bad.
So I can’t really focus today. This is usually the time I ask for distractions, so today’s a good day for an “Ask Me Anything” entry. The rules are the same as always.
Ask me a real question. On any topic. I’ll do my best to answer honestly.
(Fake questions like “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck?” are neither clever nor useful. You can do it; it marks you as the kind of person who doesn’t realize the joke is so obvious it’s been done a hundred times before, and I’ll think less of you for being tedious. Hey, I told you I’d answer honestly.)
All other questions will be answered politely, and to the best of my ability. Go, if you please.
How Facebook Is Like The Mirror Of Erised
My sister-in-law Susan said this on Facebook:
“So you know that delicious-looking recipe all over FB with the crescent rolls and chocolate chips?”
No.
No, I didn’t.
I have never seen a recipe on Facebook in my life.
I’ve seen penis cakes, and turduckopiggens, and elaborate food-sculptures weaved of cooked bacon, but I cannot recall seeing an actual recipe on Facebook ever. Let alone this universal crescent roll with chocolate chips that seems delicious, but according to Sue even the dog wouldn’t eat it.
Yet that’s Sue’s experience: recipes. She doesn’t even bat an eye at indicating that a recipe is all over Facebook, which if I noted it, I’d say, “Odd that I’m getting recipes in Facebook now.” Which indicates that to Sue, recipes are all over her Facebook – maybe not as common as selfies, but a thing that crops up regularly.
Which is the terrifying thing about social media, really. In the distant past, we had a handful of newspapers and three channels to watch the news on. And the news was narrow, so narrow that whatever stories didn’t make it into those informational gateways might as well not have existed, but you knew what when you watched CBS, you were seeing the same Walter Cronkite story that the rest of America was watching.
Now, in social media – most prevalent on Facebook, with its algorithms that choose what’s of interest for you, but you can self-select to your liking on Twitter and Tumblr and Google+ – you can see an entirely different world, and never notice it.
To someone, Facebook is a place filled with recipes and cleaning tips and advice columns. To someone else, Facebook is a welter of lamentations that their sportsball team lost, car photos, bawdy jokes and pin-up girls. And to me, Facebook is a place of XKCD cartoons and cat macros and scientific breakthroughs.
And they’re all the same site.
I don’t know how many people realize that Facebook is such a customizable experience that each person sees a radically different thing. I know a lot of people are confused when they posted something vitally important on Facebook – a death in the family, a graduation, a book sale – and I didn’t see it. They’d assumed that if we were friends, and they posted something, I saw it. So if my technologically-adept friends often don’t understand that Facebook doesn’t show their posts to everyone, how many of the general population understands?
And I think this effect is weirdly insidious. It’s been shaping politics for years, an echo chamber kicked off by Fox News, and slowly everyone is being fitted for their customized bubble. Everyone I know has heard of this latest sexist outrage in science-fiction… but quite literally, I may be in touch with all the people who know and care about it. Yet to me, it seems huge, and there’s no easy way of objectively correlating it. I don’t have easy access to web traffic (“This blog post you see as universally-seen has received 3,000 hits”), or statistics showing me how much of an outlier I am, or any of that.
Yet every morning, logging into the Internet, I am presented with a world. A world that is, and continues to be, radically different from other people’s experience. And that world shapes my reactions in ugly ways. If everyone I know and see is calmly discussing Obamacare as though it’s a universal good, then I begin to think “Well, everyone believes this,” and a) my urgency in fighting for these causes lessens because I think it’s handled, and b) I get outraged and threatened more when I see someone attacking Obamacare (“Why is this person so unreasonable when everyone else understands its goodness?”), and c) my facts are skewed. I am acting according to a customized illusion of the world presented to me not as the world exists, but according to what algorithms inside some server think would comfort and entertain me.
That’s a terrifying thought. And yes, you can fight that bubble fairly easily, by broadening your news sources or having some friends in the opposition or just doing more Google searches. Yet my point is that the bubble is enclosed around you transparently, without any warning of “DANGER: Opinions in this zone have been tailored to reflect your biases,” and if you’re not observant then you can wind up looking into a hall of mirrors.
Somewhere, there’s a person for whom Facebook has no politics; it is just recipes and kid pictures, a serene place because its owner wants nothing to do with conflict or debate. In that same web page, there’s a person for whom Facebook is a continual stream of conservative cheerleading, a steady stream of triumphs of individual gumption. In that same web page, there’s a person for whom the Trayvon Martin case was such a slam-dunk that it was clear to her that Zimmerman would be prosecuted, because she’d read fifty articles showing exactly how clear-cut this case was. And to that person, Trayvon Martin’s case had to be the result of jury tampering or corruption.
None of them know they’re seeing different worlds. All of them may be acting as though this was a universal world. To them, Facebook is Walter Cronkite the news announcer, bringing them the day’s events, but Walter is whispering a different thing to each of you.
And slowly, surely, we all begin to drift out of touch.
Things Dogs Don't Understand
She still walks around like she’s hobbled, looking up at us with a deep and aggrieved confusion.
A Small Restriction, Nothing More
Last January, after my heart surgery, walking outside in the cold air was like breathing knives. Like broken ribs. My chest constricted, giving me an instant asthma attack – but unlike asthma attacks, which are panic-inducing but not hurtful, the chill air ate into my lungs, dug at my ribs.
But what did that matter? My legs were also numb after my surgery, the result of several major nerves being rudely jangled. I was weakened by the trauma, could barely walk. Surely all of this would go away.
Except, as I found last night when I went to take Shasta for a walk, this hadn’t.
I had to stop halfway down the street, snow skirling about me, and calm myself as my breath came in short hitches. The high winds weren’t helping, but that old familiar pain was back.
Now I have to prepare for it.
As Gini noted, I now need a scarf. I’ve never needed scarfs. Hell, I’ve never needed much in the way of winter outfits to begin with, as my innate cold resistance used to let me go for long walks in the snow wearing nothing but a T-shirt and jeans. But I need to have something thick to breathe through, just in case the cold becomes too much for me.
It’s a little death. Nothing too big. Just another lifestyle change to add to the pile. And considering I have friends going through life-threatening turmoil, battling cancer and other ailments in attempts to keep breathing, “a scarf” is a pretty small thing.
Yet the one thing my triple bypass gave me was a window to the end. I remember being trapped in a chair, too weak to move, my body unable to comply with my mind’s kind requests. I remember pissing into a cup because I could not get up. I remember drifting off because even the act of talking for half an hour was so strenuous that my body switched itself off like a circuit-breaker. And I’ve recovered, but I know that one day I will degrade; there is a nursing home with my name on it, a wheelchair I will be pent to, and I got a bitter taste of it.
The scarf is not a scarf. It is a step down that road.
It’s a long road, yet. I have probably thirty, maybe forty years of good existence left in me. I intend to write a lot of stories, grab all the snuggles, have all the laughs. Seeing the end goal is not a cause for despair; I have so many years left, and that finish line tells me I’d better make each one count. So with hard work and hard play, I maximize what I can do.
Yet there is a chill wind outside. Winter is coming. Decrepitude is coming.
Life is leaving, slowly leaving, as it always is. But sometimes you feel its ebb a little more keenly.
A Brief Thought On Dream Sequences In Books
I generally don’t like dream sequences in books, because they’re often one of two dislikable things:
1) A fake horror. “Oh, let’s have you struggle to get invested in something weird you think is happening, and then tell you that it was all a dream!” I know, I know, you think you’re delivering mood and information, but realistically since dreams are dense and bizarre and jarring, we’ve usually just wasted energy parsing something that turns out to be forgotten instantly upon awaking, “As dreams do.” Which teaches the reader an unfortunate lesson: Don’t get too attached to anything, as portions of this book might turn out to not matter.
2) A lazy plot device. The protagonist falls asleep, and information is delivered to him via dream or psychic flash or mystical sending from the beyond or whatever. Which is a deus ex machina, a way for the plot to hand your lead the next goal to find, as opposed to the protagonist seeking it.
I understand why you do it. That’s usually the author’s excuse for “I can’t think of a way the character would otherwise run across this chunk of much-needed backstory, so she’ll dream about it, wandering to the misty realms of flashback!” I’ve done that, when I had no choice. But it’s far better to engineer some way that your lead character actively stumbles across this information, which teaches us that the character can do something more interesting than “falling asleep.” Because, as Pixar said, “Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.”
Now, there’s a third style of dream in fiction, which I do like, which is dream as foreshadowing: think of Danny in The Shining, dreaming of Redrum and mallets and terrible things stalking him down halls, all of which turn out to be true. But in that case, the information matters, and in fact becomes a reference point. But in general, I find most fictiony dreams to be a misstep, and usually a waste of time.