Monday, December 18, 2006

On PostSecret...



And the response:

Sent: Sunday, December 17, 2006 5:27 AM
I believe that a new religion could be based on this single postcard.


I don't know, we're only human but at the same time... maybe we're not so bad after all. The holiday season seems to be a popular time for people to forgive and reconnect and all of those things we do to reverse damage and enrich our lives. I wonder how many people want to say exactly that to so many of the people in and out of their lives... and they never do.

I wonder how differently my generation will deal with this kind of outreach, being the first generation to grow up with computers and email and instant messaging and voicemail and text messaging, and even blogging. We can say things to a gadget that we can't say to a person. We can reveal our most personal thoughts to an undefined mass of readers online which we could never in a million years divulge to some of our closest friends. Oddly enough, in a culture so concerned with privacy, we open ourselves up to all kinds of accountability for our thoughts. There are search engines which can find basically anything that was ever on a website. Ever. It's still out there. We have a false sense of security posting incriminating pictures of ourselves on Facebook, figuring that we set our Privacy Settings to "Friends Only" and that means only approved eyes may see. That is simply not the case.

Saturday, December 09, 2006

Overheard in front of Olds Hall while walking home from class:

Dude: I can't believe it.
Dudette: I know! He would never actually have done that, he was just talking about it. And of course the State News jumps all over the story.
Dude: Yeah, "MSU's independent voice." If a liberal had been talking about that they never would have said anything.
Dudette: Thank God for Fox News.
Dude: Hah, yeah.


That's the only part of the conversation I heard as our respective sidewalks crisscrossed. I was tempted to follow for a while in order to figure out what the unnamed guy was talking about doing, but the temperature was hovering around 15°F so I decided against it.