Where did your parents meet? In college? At a concert? At work?
Online?
Odds are, if you’re my age or older, your parents probably didn’t meet and fall in love on the Internet. For many couples nowadays, however, that first romantic spark could have happened through an online social networking site, an online dating site, a chat room — even an online game.
Nowadays, there’s an online dating site for everybody. Through the wonders of Facebook and MySpace, it’s possible to connect with singles on your area according to specifics like musical interests and movie tastes. There is a site for single parents, and one for singles with disabilities. Several of my Jewish friends have met people through JDate, a site for Jewish singles that has about 700,000 members.
“Ahoy, me Hearrrties!” the welcome message says. “If ye be seekin’ booty, ye be havin come t’ th’ right place. Pirates Passions be a 100% free social networrrkin’ an’ online datin’ site ferrr buccaneers an’ buccanneers at hearrrt.”
Despite its popularity, fears remain, like, is it really OK to meet a total stranger you’ve only spoken with in a chatroom? And what about the other stigma: that Internet dating is somehow reserved only for those who lack the social skills to meet people in real life?
How do couples who met online address this when talking to others about how they met? Would you tell your wedding guests? Your kids?
Is Internet dating still, in some ways, a taboo topic?
I’ve honestly never had the urge to try online dating. I admit it sort of scares me. I grew up in the Internet age, where the rule about never meeting online strangers in person was right up there next to the one about looking both ways before crossing the street.
I wonder if true love is possible via the Internet, though. Surely, meeting someone in a chat room lacks the romantic ring of traditional, in-person first-time encounters, like meeting on a blind date, or falling in love in college biology class — although I can think of many a thing more romantic than college biology class.
I expect that five or 10 years from now, meeting and falling in love on the Internet will become more commonplace, and maybe won’t have the same stigmas that some couples are now dealing with. In time, describing the first instant messages you exchanged could be as cute and romantic a story as any your parents ever told.
And if you met on Pirates Passions, wouldn’t THAT be a good story to tell. Arrrrrrrrr.
I’ve been followingthis story because I believe it could have some major implications for cyberbullying and fake profile pages on social networking pages like MySpace.com and Facebook … or at least the potential to start some interesting discourse about such things.
In 2006, 13-year-old Megan Meier (pictured) befriended who she thought was a cute, flirtatious 16-year-old boy on MySpace. Megan, who was suffering from attention deficit disorder and depression, thought she had finally found a friend in “Josh Evans,” when he suddenly cut off their friendship and started sending her hateful messages, including one that allegedly said the world would be better off without her.
Megan hanged herself in her bedroom closet shortly after.
It was later discovered that the “Josh Evans” MySpace account was fake, allegedly created by a mother and her daughter to find out what Megan felt about the daughter and other people. On Thursday, a Los Angeles federal grand jury indicted Lori Drew, 49, the woman who allegedly created the MySpace account, on a charge of conspiracy and three counts of fraudulently accessing someone’s computer.
Why should we care? Forget kids meeting face-to-face and beating each other up at lunchtime — now they can do that AND post the evidence on YouTube. Besides videos, sites like MySpace, which essentially allow anyone to create a profile as any person they wish (real or not), have enabled catty teenagers to take their cattiness to cyberspace and, often, inflict far more psychological and emotional damage. It’s one thing to endure a bully at school when you can call in the principal or go home after class. It’s quite another when bullying reaches the internet and it’s impossible to escape.
[As] hard as it may be to feel sympathy for Drew, what the Justice Department has done should alarm anyone who uses the Internet. The legal theory underpinning this case could just as easily be used to attack other kinds of anonymous speech online, including whistle-blowing, or to enforce dubious contracts that websites impose unilaterally on their users.
…
Terms of service online are routinely breached, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes deliberately. Violations include checking work e-mail from home (most residential broadband services forbid business uses) and submitting fake personal information when posting comments online. If a terms-of-service violation were all it took to bring federal charges, overly zealous prosecutors would be in a position to indict just about anyone who used the Internet.
Of course, the use of the statute in this case could be challenged, but just THINK about the implications.
It’s hard not to think about how Megan’s parents would feel should the people involved in tormenting her daughter be sent to prison. It’s also hard not to think about what such a conviction would mean for everyone who’s ever posted anonymously on the internet.
Traditional reporters won’t be the only ones writing news and updates from the Democratic National Convention in August. As part of the State Bloggers Corps announced yesterday by the Democratic Party, 55 bloggers will receive “unparalleled access” to state delegations and the floor of the Convention hall, and will be seated with their respective delegations during the four-day convention in Denver.
Ian Lind, of iLind.net, was selected from Hawaii to blog from the convention. Lind’s blog, written from his home in Kaaawa, is something of a go-to site for politically-minded people in Hawaii for state and local politics, media news, commentary and some pretty excellent photos of friendly felines and canines. Congrats to him.
More than 400 bloggers applied. The selected bloggers represent every state, as well as D.C., Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and one blogger who represents Democrats abroad. Some are professional efforts, some are blogs written by individuals. From USA Today:
Convention spokeswoman Natalie Wyeth said the criteria used to select the blogs included how politically active they were and Web traffic. For example, the blogs needed to be at least six months old, and have had a minimum of 120 politically-related posts. The blogs also submitted daily audience number from Technorati, a website tracking service.
Here’s the full list of bloggers by state, from the DNC’s own blog. I’m excited for August.
A meeting with my Chinese friend/tutor on Saturday turned to a very interesting discussion about China, Tibet, media bias and media control. She is from Nanjing, is in her twenties and graduated from HPU last semester. Like many young Chinese, especially those now living outside China, she is frustrated with the characterization of the Tibet conflict in the foreign press as a “crackdown” by Chinese police on innocent Tibetan dissidents.
She’s not alone. The recent protests in Lhasa, which began on March 14 on the anniversary of a failed 1959 uprising, spurred intense feelings of nationalism among young Chinese and a debate that continues on YouTube and Facebook.
A few of my Chinese friends on Facebook have posted a link to anti-CNN.com in their profiles (full disclosure: I was an intern at CNN’s Beijing bureau in spring 2005). The site, which includes several videos, is dedicated to pointing out anti-China bias in the foreign media. One friend’s Facebook profile picture is an image of a T-shirt that reads: “I LOVE CHINA.” Facebook groups that are variations on the “Free Tibet” movement have been joined by a number of groups supporting “One China.”
For example, the group “Tibet WAS, IS, and ALWAYS WILL BE a part of China” has 20,167 members and seems to be adding members by the hundreds every week. Not all comments posted on the group’s wall adhere to rules outlined in the group’s profile (”NO RACIST REMARKS” and “NO HATE TALKS”).
My friend believes foreign journalists are misrepresenting the conflict, and that is exacerbated by a view in America, popularized in part by the Free Tibet movement, that the Chinese government is oppressing Tibetans. The way she see it, she said, the People’s Liberation Army’s entrance into Tibet in 1950 was not the “invasion” it is often said to be; rather, the army entered a country that was backwards and still relying on a feudal system, and helped Tibet to modernize.
Regardless of what you may think about Tibet’s complicated history, I was interested in her frustration in explaining her views to others. We started using the word “brainwashed.” For many young Chinese, the biggest problem in explaining your opinion to your foreign counterparts besides the language barrier is the fact that many people simply EXPECT you to be in support of your government and without sympathy for Tibetans.
“Of course you think the Communist Party is right,” they nod and say, as if to a child. “You’ve been brainwashed by your government and your country’s education system.”
My friend is not naive about the ills her government has committed over the years, unlike some young Chinese I met in Beijing for whom it seemed large chunks were missing in their understanding of their country’s history. My friend only learned certain details about what happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989 after she left China and moved to the United States. She is well aware that the government exercises more control over the media in China than in the United States.
In the end, though, media bias is not media censorship. This is not to excuse the media that have been accused of anti-China bias, but to point out the irony of anti-CNN’s creators spending time rooting up evidence of foreign media bias when media censorship stares Chinese citizens in the face every day. Censorship of topics like Tiananmen and human rights is still heavily exercised in China. Earlier this month, a Beijing court sentenced Hu Jia, one of China’s most prominent political activists, to 3.5 years in prison. Hu had written controversial articles on web sites and made comments in the foreign media about human rights.
Even what Chinese citizens can read in newspapers or watch on TV about what is happening in Tibet is limited.
It may just be stirrings of nationalist sentiment, but Chinese netizens have attacked foreign media bias with a zeal that suggests objectivity and journalistic integrity are at least of some importance to them. Now if they could only do it in their own country — imagine what would happen.
A New York Times article yesterday about bloggers, and the stress associated with creating and maintaining round-the-clock content on the web, had a lot of interesting observations about the 24/7 news cycle. It relates to what we’re increasingly trying to do at the Advertiser with breaking news, blogs and the 24/7 news room, where an editor must be on duty all the time, even through the night.
The story touched on the recent deaths of two tech bloggers, both of whom died from heart attacks, and other health worries from jobs that require you to become obsessed with breaking news and your computer:
Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.
To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.
OK, I’m not seizing this opportunity to tell you about personal stress or ask you to make a donation to the “Save the Bloggers!” fund. But I do think it’s interesting how the nature of the news room and the news cycle has changed to include nearly instantaneous information available at your fingertips, and how the need to be tethered to every piece of information happening out there has created this anxiety about “breaking news” and being in-the-know about everything.
I’ll use my job as an example: a couple of years ago, the Advertiser introduced “mobile journalists” — or “mojos” as we’re more commonly called. (This, btw, was apparently a Gannett creation.)
The idea? Instead of having everybody operate out of the news room on Kapiolani Boulevard, send several reporters out into the community to watch, listen, talk to residents and gather stories. It’s an approach that emphasizes “hyper-local” news, although we’re always looking for community stories that have broader implications for the island and the state as a whole.
The technology aspect of the job is what I think relates most to the NYT article. The mojos are given a laptop computer, a Sprint wireless card and a cell phone and sent out into our respective communities. We’re also often equipped with video cameras. I’ve written stories from Starbucks, from my car and while sitting on the cafeteria floor during neighborhood board meetings. I communicate with my editor through phone and email primarily, checking in throughout the day. While I was still getting the hang of the job, a lot of my time was spent working from home. (That’s my “office” pictured above.) I also maintain this blog and try to write a post daily.
All in all, when you think about it, it’s an exciting job. I could be stationed behind a desk somewhere stapling cover sheets to my TPS reports. Instead, I’m out in the community, driving around, talking to people and generally enjoying the beauty of the place where I grew up.
There are downsides. For one, it’s a very individualistic sort of thing, even more so than the traditional reporting gig, and you have to enjoy that. When working from home, it’s also sometimes difficult to separate work hours from non-work hours. Let’s face it — if you’re a journalist in this age, you have to keep your finger on your beat at all times. News is not a 9-to-5 gig. When two planes struck the World Trade Center towers early that Tuesday morning seven years ago, if all the journalists in Honolulu had rolled over and gone back to sleep — well, you can imagine what would have happened.
This reality is what every wide-eyed young journalist entering the field has to be aware of. The news room is not what it was five years ago, and I am sure that it will be completely different five years from now. Since joining the staff of the Advertiser, I’ve personally enjoyed learning new skills — shooting video, filing a story while out of the office, using the blog software. But it’s difficult for many who have been in the field a long time to adjust to what journalism is becoming, that is, a juggling act.
While blogging isn’t threatening to do me in anytime soon (I hope), it’s becoming an increasingly complicated world out there for journalists. And that can make anyone a little stressed out.
Where did your parents meet? In college? At a concert? At work?
I’ve been 
A New York Times 
