Beeeeware the Beeeehive!!!

-pretend you're Ferdinand. Just sit and sniff the flowers


Many are the turkeys who are busy revamping FB in time for a splashy announcement at a tech conference this Thursday. This ilk presume to know what it is that you or I want without actually asking us.

Really, the paternalistic attitude is a bit much. This is the 21stC. Are we not supposed to be reaching a consensus on ideas, rather than allowing them to be pushed down our throats - then mumbling our gratitude as we tug our forelocks??? (At least, that is what the computer community has been pouring into our heads for the last decade and a half as they raced desperately toward blanket coverage of the planet. Everyone must get plugged in! instantaneous communication will be the new order of the day, just like that at the basic building block, the cell. Or the bee in the hive.) We are already more than halfway there. And it's been handled cleverly - at least until the great recession sprang upon us.

Everyone happy? no? then you should check your status to see whether your friends have included you in the latest event - check the ticker. What has become the social principal networking site, Facebook appears to be constantly worried about losing market share. Many and often are the changes thus pushed onto the users. Consequently FB is becoming less and less friendly as the company pushes its users toward a pay-as-you-go model. It is not enough to make billions from advertising, there are a few drops left in ye olde lemon, time to squeeze them out! hurry before google does! or myspace!(LOL)

It is not that one is against change; it has never been that. Rather, it is unnecessary change, illogical change, more time-consuming change, change simply for the sake of change, to give the illusion of movement. After all, is this new world not supposed to be one of constant change? constant adaptation? a more ruthless sink-or-swim?

The usual note from those working for FB and every other internet company has a tenor which can only come from being hopped up on 15 cups of lightly roasted java, and usually has the aura of just-enough-sense to make one sound sane.

The idea that there is virtue in being chronically overworked, overstressed, with insufficient resources to combat the incipient cold, the burgeoning conviction that it is all for naught, strikes me as absolutely ridiculous. Not just that, but also so tragically counterproductive. Other applications and other sites have had their moment; some did not change and others changed too much but all of them had this in common with FB - the same rabid attitude that has infected the online world and now spills over into reality.

I am for temperate movement of ideas as well as people, projects, communications. The email composed in anger and sent off in haste has haunted many a sender. Reflection is not supposed to enter into this new, reflexive world. The idea that sometimes an idea does not work even after it has been considered and debated, or tried, seems to have no place in this universe. The inference that things that do not work at lightning speed ought to be obsolete is, in fact, an obsolete idea.

There is value in everything, even the unconsidered afternoon sitting in a field, thinking or simply being. but not in this universe, which is supposed to be profitable everywhere and at all times, with everything superfluous jettisoned as a drag on speed.

Speed, however, can only go so far. Even now Google is falling over itself while one is entering a search term, anxiously shoving into one's face answers projected from one's partial entries.





-yes, this is what you'll get with reindeer urine! ©Ernst Barlach

While researching a title of a woodcut made by the great German expressionist Ernst Barlach I entered "Reitender Urian" - before I had finished, it was anxiously asking me whether I didn't really mean "reindeer urine, you great clomping twit, hopelessly challenged as you are by your fingers, are you certain you don't want to get your brain wired into Google?" No, I did not want reindeer urine, not in fact and not even in scintillating pixels. We appear to have gone into the deep end with all this nonsense. Machinery - whether mechanical or electronic - is meant to serve us, to aid us, to be there as a great resource. Not our master, not our director. We should take ten and think on it.



- everything one needs: oxygen, sunshine, time to think.

unattributed images ©Daisy Morant