Facebook Tag

I would like to share something that happened to me on Facebook earlier this week, and no, it had nothing to do with cat videos or a political yelling match. Monday afternoon I came across this piece in Gizmodo. For the “too long, didn’t read” crowd, it is a case study in Facebook’s community standards. User Erin La Ninfa, who runs the blog “Just Another White Hoe,” created and posted the above image to Facebook to find that she and the friends who shared it were flagged and the imageRead More

If only Facebook had a dislike button… If Facebook users everywhere could just NOT be that guy…that’d be great.     1. Inviting friends to play Candy Crush Listen up Candy Crushers, we are all very much aware of the inescapable presence of Candy Crush on Facebook. So if we don’t have it, it’s because we have no interest in playing it, and therefore made a conscious decision not to download it. Maybe you’re a first time offender and didn’t consider the aftermath that could potentially stem from you clicking theRead More

In Junior High, I wore pleather pants from Wal-Mart, probably accessorized with leopard-print sneakers and 12-too-many butterfly clips in my crafty up-do.  I proudly told people that I didn’t care what anyone thought about me.  I was lying.  Truth is, I wore my hair like a drug addict because I wanted to stand out.  And as far as the pleather pants, those were in style, okay?  My little sister got a pair too because I’m a terrible influence.  We were a couple of tweens in mass-market pleather.  With braces.  Visualize that.Read More

I’m not sure why people think it’s appropriate to post graphic material on social media. It’s one of the questions that perplex mankind; akin to “What’s the meaning of life?” or “What’s on the other side of a black hole?” or “If you’re so fancy, and I already know, then why do you feel the need to sing me a song about it?” Seemingly every day my Facebook feed blows up with memes about battered women and children, or a blog article about how a woman was brutally raped, orRead More

On Facebook, friend is a verb. I’m friending you on Facebook, girlllll.  Friend me back. You can request a friend, ‘add’ a friend, even full-on delete a friend, without any social interaction at all.  Fan-freakin-tastic.  If you find someone’s posts mildly annoying, you can ‘hide’ him or her with the touch of a button.  Poof!  Friend-be-gone!  It’s not real life.  It’s Facebook. Let’s discuss the 8 most annoying types of Facebookers that warrant a defriending immediately. How to Lose a Facebook Friend:  The Top 8 Worst Offenders 1.  The ChronicRead More

Today is perhaps the greatest era of social commentary, even more so than just yesterday. We live in a world where everyone is a publisher and one-to-many-communication is the easiest it has ever been. Of course I am talking about social media. Any single person has the opportunity to express, document, and publish their view on anything – this restaurant, that movie, what your girlfriend did, how pretty your dog is. Lighthearted, flippant posting is great social fun, but challenging hard issue on social media brings a new level of responsibility to theRead More

Sitting still for an entire hour—it sounds easy enough. It’s simple to turn off your phone, power down the computer, find a quiet space, and sit. You don’t even do anything—the requirement is to literally do nothing! Almost seems like cheating, right? Right? Recently, I had the opportunity to see for myself just how “easy” it would be. One World Still  is an organization with a simple objective: meditate for an hour once a month. No dues or fees are necessary to be part of this event, and no registration isRead More

If you would have asked me ten years ago if I would have done most of my socializing online, I would have given you an emphatic no (and probably would have thrown the nearest drink in your face).  While everyone was busy glitzing up their MySpace profiles, I wagged my finger in the background swearing that social media would never take off.  Well, you can’t be right about everything.  There’s no getting around it, our lives today are inexorably tied to a little social network that you may have heard of. Read More

I’m pretty lucky when it comes to dealing with anxiety, because anxiety and I have a fairly straightforward relationship. Whenever I think I’m doing marginally okay, or feeling particularly productive, anxiety pops into my brain and quickly takes the wheel. It doesn’t matter how much I have achieved in my short 24 years of existence, anxiety has this trick that makes those achievements seem insignificant—it likes to remind me that I’m only one of approximately 6 billion humans on a planet floating in a vacuum of infinite space as weRead More

One thing is for sure: social media is here to stay.  We’ve become so engrossed in what’s happening in the lives of people that we kind of know – as well as that one friend from high school that you still talk to, and your family that now stalks your profile tirelessly – that if all social media shut down tomorrow, people would riot.  Mark Zuckerburg’s house would be in flames and that dude that you automatically follow when you create a twitter account would mysteriously disappear.  The first socialRead More

EnterViews is Hilary’s weekly series with emerging artists via various forms of digital communication. Last week as I sat down at work, I did the first thing we all do—check Facebook. It was then that I saw a link from two New York friends. The site was StroudFunding. It was a cheerful looking thing, in blues, whites, and blacks, with the tagline “Changing the way Ian Stroud makes money.” In 2009, the current popular crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter, hit the streets of the internet. Soon, film students across the country wouldRead More

Barbecue sauce, weekend benders, porn, television, movies, Hulu. What do these all have in common? In reasonable doses they can add new dimensions of fun and texture to your life, but too much and the law of diminishing returns kicks in. What’s delicious? Hot wings and barbecue. What’s disgusting? One wing in a tub of Stubb’s. This is what personal media has become to me: a constant binge of distraction. Let me clarify something. I’m 28. I’m in the doldrums of the twenty-something. I’m now filling the void which wasRead More

This will only apply to half of you. As a filmmaker, writer, creator, dreamer, and human being, I’ve held onto physical copies of things since I was a kid. I saved every letter from cousin Maria, I cut out every newspaper article on the Oscars. I scrapbooked each family reunion which included The Plate (a sign-in paper plate record of who attended that year). I have a collection of DVDs, VHS, and blu-rays. I have the binder paper where I wrote my first story in 8th grade to cope withRead More

Baby falls 3 stories; saved by mattress Earlier this week in Burbank, CA a child fell 3 stories but was luckily saved by a stranger and his box spring mattress. Konrad Lightner spotted a toddler hanging from a third-story window and called the police. Miraculously, Lightner happened to have a mattress with him and placed it next to the apartment complex. He waited for the child to fall, caught him, and both collapsed onto the mattress. The toddler is doing fine with now, with apparent signs of trauma. Lightner explained,Read More

Instant gratification is exhausting.  We are a generation that can get what we desire immediately, we want what we want when we want it, and we can have it.  In a time like this, the word “patience” can be as foreign to us as the idea of mailing hand-written letters for communication purposes; both unnecessary and rather annoying. This instant gratification mentality can leave us in an uneasy state of quantity versus quality, and distracts us from a more meaningful existence full of things out of our control – aRead More