Written July 2011
By Cliff Feldwick
Well, once again a highly public figure has grasped (even embraced, one might say) technology with both hands, taken careful aim and inflicted substantial personal damage. I speak, as many have, of Congressman Anthony Wiener and his use of Twitter as his weapon of self-destruction. You can talk all you like about the ego factor in politics and the expansion of narcissism, feelings of entitlement, etc, but to me it makes one point perfectly clear.
Technology allows you to be stupid faster. And with more damage.
Email has always allowed this, of course. The late night “just have to tell you” that boomerangs back to haunt you, the too quick reply without understanding the full implications, the “Reply All” button that beckons you to show your superior reasoning and grasp of the facts to everyone involved – they create many “oh, damn” moments. Facebook pictures have been widely discussed as personal poison pills. No need to go there.
But Twitter, with its abbreviated form that allows no subtlety, combined with instant spread to masses of people, is stupid on steroids.
Probably one of the first questions that could/should have been asked of Mr. Wiener (or any Twitter user, just to spread the game around) was “Have you ever taken a picture of your own crotch?” I think I can speak for many when I say that’s not something I’d have the slightest hesitation in answering with “No”. If you would have to pause in answering, maybe you need to contemplate your own use of modern conveniences such as cell cameras.
Just as an exercise, ask anyone who tweets for their own personal embarrassing moment. From the “call me” that was intended for one person but gets sent to the world – with cell number attached – to the invitation to take a running fly at a rolling doughnut sent in error to a client, they all have one. Just one of the reasons I refuse to tweet.
The main one is the desire not to be caught in the waves of vacuousness the Twitter personifies. Back in the seventies, National Lampoon had a parody song that included the words: “Be assured that a walk through the ocean of most men’s souls would scarcely get your feet wet”. Couldn’t have distilled Twitter any better if I tried.
I’m always right
If you feel that statement is true, you’ll enjoy the increasing amount of personalization sweeping most search engines. To me, personalization means never having to say “Ooops, I might be wrong”.
Unless you work in the industry, you probably don’t know that, besides tailoring the advertisements to you, most search engines also tailor their results. So two people typing in the same search phrase will get entirely different hits as the most likely match. This is based on Google’s (using the biggest example) reading of previous searches and “click-through’s” on articles
So if a friend who often browses Fox News types in “Obama” as opposed to someone who uses Huffington Post or CNN, they will get totally different experiences.
So much for “best matches”, unless you define that as “best match that reinforces my own absolutely correct opinion.”
Much has been said about the stridency of opinion and narrowness of views on many web pages and blogs, and how the reinforcing of views by repeating the things we like to hear has undermined tolerance and open-mindedness. But when the “information” you receive is “tailored” to you, that only increases. Maybe we get upset by those idiots “over there”, but if we have to defend our views from them, it usually only makes us sharper. Nothing leads to lazy arguments faster than talking with only like-minded people. Boring, too.
Backups fail
OK, time for some lecturing (what, the above doesn’t count?) about keeping your data safe. Have you tried to recover a backup disk lately? You know, those CD’s or files that you (maybe) faithfully make “just in case”. And believe me, if you do you’re a very small minority – usually people whose hard drives failed in the past. But backups don’t mean squat if you don’t have the equipment or programs to read them and get the information back.
What starts this is a client who had been saving their backups on Zip 100 disks for the last 12 years. Yes, that was how old their computer was when the hard drive cratered. But “we have backups!”
Yeah. First off, how many places have Zip disk readers any more? OK, I had two under the bench, but most places threw them out long ago.
But that wasn’t the big problem: the data had been saved using a backup program that disappeared 10 years ago. I was eventually able to recover the files from a year and a half ago – better than nothing but still a lot of reconstruction to do.
So what’s the point? Test your backups. Are you really making a backup you can recover? Try recovering a test file. Do you remember how? If the old computer died, would you even have the equipment needed? Is the backup file readable by any recent, modern program that you’d find on a new machine? If any of your answers is “uhhhh” then you’re really only fooling yourself.