Facebook Culture

As I said in my last post, I've joined Facebook. It's an interesting little world. I've already hooked up with a lot of my old Tucson crowd, now spread over several states and a couple of countries. I've even had a few of my blog readers request to be my friends! So it's fun.

One thing I've noticed though is that it's all very frivolous. "Well yeah," you say, "It's a social networking site, what did you expect?" OK, I expected it to be a bit light, but I didn't expect people to be spending real money to send their friends virtual balloons and birthday cakes. I mean come on.

But is it really so frivolous? In her excellent book Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, anthropologist Kate Fox says that all this social networking, texting, and twittering is important for its very frivolity. It replaces the day-to-day casual interaction our species got from millennia living in villages or wandering in tribes. Now we live in sprawling suburbs or impersonal cities, and we don't get the friendly "Hello, looks like we're in for rain" that we exchanged with the farmer two fields over, or the semi-concerned "Is your mother over her lumbago?" from the second-cousin-twice-removed at the village well.

Apparantly we need that, and it only took a generation without it before modern civilization found a way to replace it.

But I'm still not paying good money for virtual puppies.

Madrid Guidebook Project

I've just signed up with Pulse Guides to write online updates for their new Madrid guidebook. Pulse Guides has a series called Night & Day for people who only have a few days in a city and want to get the best experience in a short time. Talented travel writer Lara Cummings wrote the book, but I'll be responsible for quarterly updates and expansions, a monthly letter on the website, and contributions to the Pulse Guides' newsletter. You can read my monthly letter, about Madrid's autumn art season, here.

I have a good feeling about this company. Too many guidebook publishers are still working off an old business model, thinking that simply coming out with a new edition every two or three years is enough to drive sales. Not when everyone checks the Internet for travel information! By publishing new information about every city every month, and putting a major expansion to each title online every quarter, Pulse Guides is going to leave traditional guidebooks in the dust. It's not the only guidebook to post online updates, but it's amazing how few others there are.

Internet Plagiarism at the White House

In a move reminiscent of lazy high school students, the White House issued a press release that included a biography of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi lifted straight from a website called Encyclopedia of World Biography. Both BBC and CNN covered this because the biography of one of Bush's few European allies says he is "one of the world's most controversial leaders" and his government is known for "corruption and vice."

And the insults just kept on coming. Whoever wrote the biography obviously didn't like poor old Silvio that much. The entry has since disappeared.

What the news sites didn't talk about was the fact that the flaks at the White House press office lifted the information off the internet (probably without attribution) and didn't even read it. If they had, they would have probably changed the bit where it said Berlusconi was "hated by many."

This is what happens when the Internet generation cheats their way through school and ends up with important jobs.

As an author of four books and hundreds of articles, I wonder how many times I've been plagiarized?