Flat Spamley

We live in a fast Forward world. Not the VCR kind. I'm talking about the kneejerk junk mail-forwarding mentality manifested by the tangled Web around us.

We've all read the same ridiculous chain emails -- the electronic brood beget by their send-to-10-friends-today-or-die paper progenitors. We've read the amazing claims about investment scams, abduction plots and political ploys. And we've all been guilty of forwarding them to our friends and families (sometimes multiple times) with our incredulous tagged-on comments like "This is REALLY TRUE" and "YOU HAVE TO READ THIS, it may save your life!!"

The fact of the matter is, most of that forwarding is just an unconscious reflex...a spasmodic mouse click of mindless mechanics. Admit it, half the time you don't even read what you forward. It's just a way to "show someone you care" by sending them droning digital drivel that has circulated every corporate cubicle farm since 1996. It's the same sterile, binary affection afforded by the Facebook "poke" or the cellphone "knock."

But I'm not here to talk about the heartless, anonymous flame-a-thon world the Web has fostered. Not today.

I'm here to talk about the latest incarnation of this insidious forwarding trend: Flat Stanley. For those of you who have spawned offspring and they've reached second or third grade, you've probably been introduced to Flat Stanley. Teachers might think of him as a dynamic, engaging exercise in communication. I think he's a surreptitious avatar of spam.

If you don't know about Flat Stanley, the concept is simple. Your kid's teacher gives your child a paper voodoo form of varying shape and size. Most have the silhouette of a gingerbread man. I've seen some letter-sized, some life-sized. Your child then comes home and shovels it off on you so you can recruit unwitting friends and family members to welcome Flat Stanley into their homes. Said friends and family are then obligated to take Flat Stanley around their towns for a week or so, introduce the scrap of paper to the hard realities of life, and take pictures of the progress. They then have to send Flat Stanley back to you, along with pictures and chronicled adventures of their time together, so your kid can write a "report."

Personally, I think the only lesson the kids learn is how to pass the buck...or the Stanley...off on their parents and how to write a meaningless report that hopefully has some funny pictures from their grandparents or uncle so their little friends will giggle in class when they see them.

Right now, there are probably millions of Flat Stanleys traversing this majestic nation of ours, employing thousands of postal workers and making millions of recipients roll their eyes and sigh with resignation at the tiresome task that awaits them. Our youngest daughter's sits on my desk as I type, awaiting its imminent departure to Arizona.

Maybe I should like Flat Stanley. Maybe I should appreciate him for being one of the last vestiges of a world not dominated by email, text messages and tweets. But to me, he's just junk mail of another form and fiber.

Facebook, Gen X and Social Nerdworking

I joined Facebook in late November of '08 to see what the hubbub was all about. (And to figure out how to profit from it at work.) After an initial week of "Yeah, so?" nonchalance, my interest in it grew in direct relation to the size of my Friends list.

Reflecting on it today, I got to thinking about my generation. Gen X, they call us. The first generation to witness the computer age. I still recall with great fondness how amazed I was by the first computer I used in sixth grade. Beige-shelled, green-screened, monolithic and seeming to seethe with promise. (And probably with a tenth of the processing power of my iPod.) I would play hangman on it with the mindless excitement of a Neanderthal seeing fire for the first time.

I remember getting Pong circa 1975 and being stunned with controlling shapes on my TV. That began my long love affair with video games, as I moved from digital mistress to digital mistress...Atari, Intellivision, Commodore 64, Vectrex, Sega, Playstation, Wii.

Today, I find myself immersed in a profession throat-deep in computer technology.

However, there's a decided gap between Gen X and the Ys and Millennials that followed us. They were the first ones BORN with computers and cellphones in hand. And the resulting behavioral distinction is clear to me. The novelty of Gen X has worn off. The march of technology is poised to trample us unless we endeavor to keep up.

Over the past few weeks, Facebook has continued to reach out its tendrils and find friends and acquaintances I haven't thought of in decades. And rediscovering them evokes this odd mixture of nostalgia and dizziness. More than just lamenting the rapid approach of my 40th birthday, I recognize how susceptible our memories are to losing details. I have a fairly exceptional memory, but let's face it, the brain is an imperfect storage device. I've written over so many faces, names and events.

I've had the discussion with a few people about how different our lives...our friendships...would've been had we been born even 10 years later. Today, kids are soldered together by their cellphones. They look around their environment and see it neatly organized into address books, playlists and bookmarks. It's a dropdown, double-click world that lets people remain close and interconnected.

But what's weird is...despite our evident desire to reach out and reconnect (hence the advent of the entire "social networking" marketplace), the Internet still conditions us to prefer anonymity. As I witness friends come out of the virtual darkness into Facebook like cautious prey animals approaching a hunted watering hole, there is this clear reticence to commit to connect. There is safety behind our keyboards. Facebook lets you screen people, ignore them, report them, block them, reject them...all of these little countermeasures built into a tool engineered to connect us. I think it's just funny. Just like when caller ID came out, it was followed a few months later by the ability to block it.

While I understand the very real need for privacy, it just strikes me as ironic that we're so guarded. Maybe it's just our generation. We all tease our parents...the Baby Boomers...but maybe the technology feels invasive and alien to us. Maybe our generation understands that the world has become a place where it's nearly impossible to escape each other. We are the last generation to witness a disconnected world. And maybe that isolation feels familiar and comfortable. Safe.

If I had all this gear 10 or 20 years ago, would I be a different person? Maybe. I doubt fundamentally, but it very well could have altered my life's path.

I didn't go to any of my high school reunions. I've been back to UofA maybe once or twice since graduation. All but a core group of friends have faded into oblivion. But I'm enjoying the process of rediscovering those long forgotten. It reminds me of a lot that I've been missing. And maybe all of us have.