Archive for July 2009
I’m currently in the process of deleting and archiving my old posts on Facebook, and a few of them are going to end up being re-posted here, mostly for historical purposes and having all of my writing in one place finally. Because they go back as far as February 2007, a lot of them are written from a very different mentality, and I was (rightfully) called out on some of my arguments that I didn’t support as well as I should have. I’d like to think that since then, I’ve improved my ability to coherently argue a point and respond to rebuttals. I do still have trouble with detecting the difference between sarcastic responses meant in jest, and snarky passive-aggressive comments intended seriously. So if someone’s just trying to rile me up with their comments, I tend to fall for it hook line and sinker. But I’m getting better. One particular comment did jump out at me, though.
I was commenting on a recent death that had occurred and been reported in Japan, where an English teacher had gone to a person’s apartment to give them a private tutoring session, and ended up dead. Among the other teachers in the country, the news spread like wildfire. After reading about the known details of the case, I posted a few thoughts; the teacher was naive to have gone to a stranger’s place so willingly, the police screwed up badly in their initial handling of the case, and the whole affair was a tragedy that highlights the fact that yes, there is in fact crime in Japan. A few people responded with their own opinions on how safe the country was, but one person said she thought my analysis was “unnecessary and badly timed when people are no doubt still suffering.”
I suppose it was unnecessary in the sense that I didn’t have to say anything about the case, and could easily have dismissed the whole issue with a few meaningless platitudes about how sorry I was for the family. But by that logic, everything I write is unnecessary. I write as a way to get my thoughts out in the open and prompt others to do the same, so if I’m not going to try and encourage discussion then I feel there’s not much point to writing at all. But the “badly timed” accusation interests me, because it implies that there would have been a better time for me to post my thoughts. Of course, exactly when that better time is is left to the reader, but I assume she meant some time later, after the initial shock and grief caused by the death had died down. My comments were inappropriate, but had I posted them at some unspecified point in the future, they would have been appropriate. I was making my comments “too soon.”
The term “too soon” usually is applied to comedians making jokes about tragedies that are still fresh in their audiences mind, but the implication is the same. People who are grieving are not comfortable with people making light of their tragedy, and they feel that it diminishes or trivializes their suffering. Complaining that a joke is insensitive or in poor taste is totally valid; hell, some comedians build their careers off of that kind of material. But complaining that a joke was made too soon suggests that, once the grieving process is over, those same people will be able to laugh at the material they previously were offended by. And the question that is never raised is where exactly the line is drawn between “subjects that occurred too recently to joke about” and “subjects that occurred long ago enough to joke about.” How long do you have to wait to discuss an issue objectively without fear of offense? How soon is too soon?
In my opinion? Never.
It’s never too soon to critically analyze something, it’s never too soon to have an honest and truthful (but hurtful) discussion, and it’s never too soon to make jokes. I don’t think off-color comments suddenly become acceptable once enough time has passed between the event and the commenting. If a comment is inappropriate today, it will still be inappropriate tomorrow, and next week, and at any time afterwards. And if a comment is appropriate now, it was always appropriate to make. Speaking the truth at a time when no one wants to hear it doesn’t make it any less true, and making a joke when no one feels like laughing doesn’t make it not funny. Stop me if you’ve heard this one:
“You shouldn’t joke about the Holocaust. My grandfather died in a concentration camp.”
“Oh, really? I’m sorry…”
“Yeah, he fell out of a guard tower.”
I know, it’s not a classy joke. Some of you may think it’s in such bad taste any potential humour is lost, and the joke preceding it probably was the same. If that’s true, ask yourself if you can imagine finding the joke funny at some point in the future. My guess? It’s been 65 years, so if you can’t laugh at it now, you probably won’t later. On the other hand, some of you may think it’s just a funny response to someone else’s joke about the Holocaust. That may be so, but I bet you can think of at least one person who you wouldn’t tell this joke around, because you aren’t sure they’d react as forgivingly as you would. It seems reasonable to expect that people with a closer personal connection to the Holocaust wouldn’t find jokes about it particularly funny. But it doesn’t seem reasonable to think that at some point in time, it became acceptable to joke about the Holocaust, and some people just haven’t gotten the message yet.
It’s not about the time since an event has occurred, it’s about the audience’s connection to that event. I wasn’t personally invested in the death of that teacher, so I could view it objectively the same way I would any other tragic event, as did the other people who replied to my comments. The person who took issue with my comments was not only in the same situation (single young teacher alone in a big city), but was from the same town in England as the victim. Theoretically, it could have been someone she knew. She had more personal connection to the story, and so was upset by my (from her perspective) trivialization of what could just as easily have been tragedy. As time goes on, details are forgotten and connections weaken and break, and eventually people can hear jokes and blunt commentary on issues without feeling that emotional reaction. But the comments never changed; the audience did.
Consider the big tragic event of our generation; the destruction of the World Trade Center. It’s been long enough that we can look back with a clearer eye on not only the events of September 11th, but the political climate that led to those events, and the bizarre mentality that the U.S. adopted to all kinds of different issues. Remember when Bill Maher dared to suggest that launching cruise missiles from across the world is more cowardly than hijacking a plane and crashing it into a building? On its own, it’s a commentary on the distinction between physical and moral cowardice. But when he said it on TV a week after the attacks, he was promptly strung up for it, and his show was cancelled within the season. The official White House response even said “This is not a time for remarks like that…” They didn’t complain that what he said was inappropriate, or tasteless, or insensitive, or even incorrect; They complained that he said it too soon.
I look at the words I wrote back then, and I stand by what I said; she was naive to go to his place, and every English school I know of actively warns their teachers against giving private lessons at their students’ houses, specifically because they’re afraid of that kind of thing happening. My comments were insensitive to people connected to the case, but they weren’t wrong. And just because I make a joke about something doesn’t mean I’m not taking it seriously. Sometimes you have to laugh at tragedy, because if you don’t you cry, and there’s enough of that in the world already.
Addendum: While writing this, I took the time to look up the original murder case I commented on, and found that the killer has still not been captured two years later, and the Japanese police force has made a giant mess of the whole thing. Their latest idea is to use life-size cardboard cutouts of the suspect with voice recordings to jog people’s memory. There are exactly five of them, two of which will be inside the police station. Shame on you, Japan.
For those of you not living in Toronto, you lucky people you, let me bring you up to speed with what’s been going on here. A few weeks ago, Toronto’s public employee union (the Canadian Union of Public Employees, CUPE) went to re-negotiate their contract with the city, and suffice to say it didn’t go well. While the information on what exactly went wrong isn’t accessible to the public, it sounds like the city wanted them to make concessions from their old contract, and the union understandably refused. Instead of both sides working together to develop a new contract that the union was happy with and the city could actually afford, the union decided that this was an important enough issue to strike over. And so they did.
I’m somewhat on the fence about unions. I think they do serve an important function in protecting workers from being mistreated and taken advantage of at work, and regulating the service that its workers provide. But let’s face it, unions evolved from 18th century guilds, and back then worker abuse took the form of child labor, toxic environments, imprisonment, and withholding pay. The protection that unions provided was necessary to keep people from literally working themselves to death for nothing. But this isn’t the 18th century anymore, and while unions are still trying to defend worker’s rights, we’re starting to see a lot more cases where unions are using their influence to obtain or defend huge benefits under threat of strike, regardless of whether the actual union members want it or not.
Let’s look at the pivotal issue with this strike. Under CUPE’s old contract, employees could bank up to 18 sick days per year, and then cash them in on retirement for up to a maximum of six month’s pay. The idea of this measure was to motivate workers to only take sick days when they really are sick, and it’s similar to the deal a lot of other municipalities had with their unions. But while those municipalities realized how much money this would cost and re-negotiated early to buy people out (which worked), Toronto didn’t, and is now looking at paying a lot of city employees a LOT of money. To avoid doing so, the city wants the union to give up their banked days, which is paramount to cutting their retirement package by $20,000. You can see why the workers would have a problem with that. The city made one hell of a mistake in agreeing to such an expensive contract, and they’re paying for it now.
But let’s face it; the current CUPE contract is way better than most non-unionized employees, and most notably, better than the essential service workers who are not legally allowed to strike, like police and firefighters. The union is claiming that it wants the same benefits afforded other groups, but I have never worked for a company that lets me bank sick days or any kind of days off. They do a lot of tough jobs, and I realize that and thank them for it, but private workers who do the exact same jobs get paid a lot less and receive fewer benefits, so there are people out there who are willing to compromise. All the union has done so far is destroy any sympathy the public might have had for them by bringing to light how good their benefit package is, and then holding the city services at ransom because they feel they are entitled to those benefits. Now the workers are mad because they’re not working and not getting paid, and I bet a lot of them don’t fully agree with the decision to strike anyways. Strikes work against private companies because they implicitly cut off the flow of income, but that doesn’t work against government, and the city is saving millions of dollars every day the strike continues. And the residents of Toronto are seriously pissed off, and not just at the arrogance of refusing to work when unemployment is at its highest. Not only has this strike led to the closure of day cares, summer camps, pools, and a lot of other city-run services, it’s also canceled the one service people benefit from every day without even realizing it; garbage collection.
The same union went on strike a few years ago, and no one was prepared for what Toronto would be like after 16 days without garbage pickup. People just went on creating trash waiting for the strike to end; by the time that happened, the city was an absolute mess. Dumping and littering were rampant, trash cans were overflowing onto the streets and sidewalks, and the smell was so strong you needed a mask to go outside. Thankfully, this time a lot of people remember the previous strike and are accounting for it, so after 19 days the city isn’t nearly as bad as it was, and proper dump sites have been set up to help. But it’s starting to get bad, and just from looking around my neighbourhood, not everyone is changing their habits. If the strike goes on for too much longer, the city will find itself back in the state it was in last time; a horrid, smelly mess. And yet, in the long run, I think this strike is good for Toronto, because it’s forcing us to deal with a fact of urban living that many take for granted:
Every time you create garbage, that garbage has to go somewhere.
Convenient trash disposal systems have led to people treating trash as a temporary issue; you throw it in a bin, empty the bin into a can, the garbage men empty the can into a truck, and then the garbage is gone. But it’s never really gone; it’s just removed further and further from your immediate vicinity, and it’s a process that doesn’t continue indefinitely. At some point, that garbage is put in a static location and left there, because quite frankly, we don’t know what else to do with it. Some of it is composted and returned to the environment, although recent reports have shown that may not be true after all, and some of it is recycled and returned to us to eventually be thrown away again. But the vast majority of it sits in a landfill in Michigan, and there have been rumblings that they’re none to happy with that arrangement. We could find another place to haul our trash, or start a landfill closer to home, or ship it to any number of places, but none of those really solve the problem, do they?
Now that we have miniature dumps around the city, we’re being forced to live alongside the garbage we create, and I think it’s the perfect opportunity to change people’s thinking. Instead of asking “Where can we put our garbage so we don’t have to deal with it?”, what if we started asking “What can we do to create less garbage so no one has to deal with it?” My housemates and I are doing what we can; buying in bulk, re-using bags, saving anything that may be useful again in the future. We generate maybe one black bag every two weeks, and that was even before the strike. Our downstairs neighbours have a compost in the back that they’re asking us to contribute to. The city itself recently mandated that stores must charge $0.05 per plastic bag, and I’ve seen a lot of people carrying re-usable bags because of it. They’re the really inspiring kind of changes; you think they don’t make any difference when you’re the only one making them, but when you see lots of people making them, suddenly things start to improve, and you know that you were a part of it.
At the same time, not everyone has gotten the message. One of our downstairs neighbours is still generating a huge amount of trash that stinks up our front yard. The litter bins in my neighbourhood have piles of trash around them that get bigger every day, which may simply be due to living in Chinatown and the people living there having a more accepting view of litter. And even though the plastic bag charge was announced months in advance, people are still complaining about it as if they’re entitled to their plastic, dammit! It’s not an easy sell, but considering the strike has shown no signs of ending soon, I think for a lot of people this will be their wake-up call. We’ve always had the means to become a clean and green city, but there’s always been a lack of motivation and proper direction, in particular an utterly baffling resistance to putting in proper bike lanes. Toronto is now faced with the reality that closing your eyes and saying “Not In My Back Yard!” isn’t going to make this problem (or smell) go away. If necessity really is the mother of invention, then now’s the time for the city to invent a way of producing less garbage, because a lot of people really need one.
When you consider the number of people signed up with Facebook, and the impact that it has had on the Internet and the whole idea of “social networking,” it’s hard to believe that it’s only a bit over five years old. That’s a long time to stay around in an industry where companies can explode with potential and collapse from negative press in the span of a few months. Part of their success has arguably been due to the way they’ve grown their user base; people who were already in the network generated enough word-of-mouth advertising to ensure that when the network size increased, there would be a flurry of people ready to sign up on day one. People at Harvard generated buzz at other schools in Boston, people at those schools generated buzz at schools state-wide, and then those people generated buzz at schools nation-wide, and then world-wide, and then workplaces, and then high schools, and finally everyone else.
I remember when Facebook announced that you would no longer need a university e-mail address to sign up for their site. A lot of people (full disclosure, including myself) were worried that the site would become flooded with exactly the type of users we came to Facebook to avoid. People with user names like “xXxEminem69xXx,” throwing around racial slurs like confetti, uploading 500 pictures of themselves making pouty faces or gang signs, filling their profile with animated gifs and quiz results about what character of Twilight they are. You know the type. Facebook was better than that simply by virtue of every member of the site being university educated, which brought a level of intelligence and maturity to a method of communication that didn’t previously have one. I know I’m making it sound like some kind of ivory tower, but the clean interface and simplicity and lack of advertising really did put it in a totally different class from similar services. For people like me who wanted to stay in touch with friends without having to deal with a site like Myspace, it was glorious.
But that was a long time ago, and as social networking has changed, Facebook has changed along with it. Twitter performs the most commonly used part of Facebook (wall posting) in a much superior way, smartphones are becoming better and better at keeping people directly connected, and Facebook suddenly isn’t the only game in town. Over the past few months they’ve made a lot of changes to their site, some of which have been met with mixed reaction, to say the least. Users complained that Facebook was becoming like Twitter, but in hindsight of course it was; Twitter was on to something, according to people who make money predicting that kind of thing, and it would be absurd to expect Mark Zuckerberg to listen to his non-paying user base instead of his highly-paying advertisers and investors. This guy turned down a $1 billion offer from Yahoo, so he’s either naive enough to value his reputation among Facebook users who don’t even know his name, or he knows he can hold out for more. And while people cried about the changes, they eventually stopped crying, and I don’t know of anyone who canceled their account because of it. Now I’m starting to think I may have to do exactly that.
See, for me, the real advantage of Facebook has never been the interface or the limited user base; it’s been the privacy settings. With other networking sites, I had a choice of not uploading content, making it visible to no one, or uploading content, making it visible to everyone. But what if I had an album of my friends and I going on drunk adventures, that I didn’t really want my co-workers to see? Maybe I don’t want my family members to know about my relationship status, or I only want specific people to know my political stances. I didn’t have the option of saying “I want some people to see this content, but not other people” and for a long time that held me back from putting anything online. I’ve grown up around computers; I understand that once something is public on the Internet, it’s almost impossible to make it private again, and I had no desire to get bitten in the ass by dumb photos I uploaded ten years after the fact. Facebook let me define exactly who I wanted to see what, right down to the individual photo. I’m not sure how many people used the security settings extensively, but I know I did.
Now, in an attempt to make Facebook more competitive with Twitter (according to TechCrunch), the newest option is to make content accessible to “everyone.” Not everyone on Facebook, but everyone on the Internet. On the one hand, this allows for “real-time search capabilities,” whatever that means. On the other hand, the fact that they are actively encouraging users to make information publicly accessible eliminates my entire reason for using it instead of other social networking tools. Even if I set my photos to be private, what if my friends don’t? With this change, I’ll be losing the last little bit of control I had over my online presence on the site. Someone can upload a picture of me, tag me, and based on their security settings, that picture is publicly available to anyone in the world until I un-tag it and hope that no one saw it in the meantime. That, my friends, is bullshit.
I’ve already been drawing back from Facebook for a while. I deleted all non-friend photo albums because of concerns over their privacy policy and apparent inability to communicate to their end-users how and why they were allowed to re-use uploaded photos. I untagged myself from almost all photos involving alcohol after I was reminded that potential employers were likely to look me up on Facebook. I don’t receive very many messages or notifications, and I haven’t updated my profile in a long time. Maybe the site has changed, or maybe I’m just not their target audience anymore (in fact, I know I’m not). Regardless, I’m thinking about getting out entirely and having all the notifications I care about sent to my e-mail. I’d still leave the account open, but really, I only need to check it when something that interests me turns up, and that’s happening less and less nowadays. Maybe I’m just getting older.
I know a few people who’ve taken the drastic measure of deleting their account entirely, mostly during exams or other busy times when they can’t stop procrastinating by F5′ing their account just in case something has changed. I’m not sure I’d ever outright delete my Facebook account, as it’s still useful when it comes to hearing about social happenings that people would rather invite their friends to en-masse than pick and choose from a mailing list. But if I can combine Flickr, Twitter, this website and my e-mail into a system that gives me all the functionality I need without any of the annoying privacy concerns, I wouldn’t feel bad at all about having one less site to visit every day.
