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Phone Call

~ Lee Swanson ~ Leave a comment

Something unusual happened to me today. My phone rang.

Now, I spend a lot of time with my phone in my hand. A lot. Facebook, news sites, texts, the occasional game, Twitter, the occasional game, but I virtually never talk on it.

I’m not entirely sure why it’s called a phone.

A name came up on the screen when it made that odd ringing sound that I rarely hear, and it was someone I haven’t talked to in several years. I mean, several years. Like, forever. This was one of those many people we all know who we pretend to connect with through Christmas letter.  Now that I think about it, I’m not sure how she knew my number.

My first thought, of course, was “oh my god…what’s happened?” It isn’t my birthday, it isn’t her birthday (I don’t think so anyway), so something awful must have happened.

But, no. Not really. I mean, some people we know in common have died, and I’m not saying that’s not awful, because, it is, but it didn’t happen today and we both knew of it. So, my point is, there wasn’t a real motivation to call. She just wanted to ask me how I was and what was going on with me.

We talked about each other’s families and reminisced about when we used to work together and people we both knew and what we knew of them now–living and dead.

And then, in fairly short order, ten or fifteen minutes, we said goodbye.

But it was the best part of my day.

Once upon a time, if you wanted to communicate with a friend, you either wrote a letter or called. Now, we email, text, or post on Facebook or Twitter or something equally stupid. True enough, you can’t send pictures during a phone call (at least I can’t). But you also can’t hear someone’s voice on Facebook and you can’t react to the emotion in what they say.

Social media might have a lot of values, but nothing beats talking to a friend. An actual living human being, without a keyboard between you.

We’re separated by miles, and years, and yet when we were talking to each other, we were right there, in the moment. As though I never left. Social media, as “social” as it may be, doesn’t do that. Too many Facebook posts start with the second paragraph, assuming we’re on the same wavelength, watching the same TV program, the same game, experiencing the same whatever; and the truth is, I’ve no damned idea what you’re talking about.

I’m sure there is a lot of research and more than a few doctoral theses on the value of social media or, conversely, the breakdown in communication and human interaction because of social media. But I haven’t read any of that. I’m just a guy whose phone rang today. Out of the blue. And I’m sitting here thinking, why don’t I use that phone as a phone.

I’ll still text and post on Facebook, but, if you know me, or we knew each other once upon a time, don’t be too terribly surprised if your phone rings one day. And it will be some odd number you don’t recognize and you’ll let it go to voicemail. Then you’ll discover it was me. And I hope you’ll call back.

And whoever you are, reading this, if there’s someone you haven’t talked to in a long time, maybe you should pick up your phone and push that phone button.  That’s what it’s there for. (It’s the one with the icon that looks like what a phone used to look like.) You might be surprised at what happens.

Facebook and Friends

~ Lee Swanson ~ 6 Comments

Facebook has done something to annoy me again. And no, I don’t mean the threats to change the privacy settings or the plan to charge users for every mouse click. I’m fine with all that.

The thing I find annoying is the list of people in the middle of the page who Facebook has decided I might want to add as friends. Facebook is not supposed be a place to find new friends; it’s supposed to be a place to connect with the friends you’ve already got so you don’t have to actually talk to them.

Friend, in the Facebook world, being an illusory term at best.

The friend Facebook wants to introduce me to are friends of friends or friends of friends friends, and in almost every instance, no one I’ve ever heard of. Sort of friends once removed. So I ignore the suggestion. It’s hard enough to keep track of cousins once removed, or even to understand what they have been removed from, without having to categorize other people.

(Grammatical side-rant: “Once removed” is redundant. A cousin, or
anything other than a cat, cannot be twice removed. She’s either removed or she’s not).

Every year or so, when I was feeling even more curmudgeonly than usual, I would look through the list of Facebook friends I have accumulated, and cull the herd. It’s not something I had to do. If people consistently post idiotic claptrap (like this post for instance), I boot them right away. So what is left are the people who aren’t overtly offensive. But I sorted through it anyway. Just, because.

First to go were the people from work who, for some god-forsaken reason, I felt compelled to friend. Most of what they post are things they are compelled to post, by work. They’re gone from my list because, with a retirement date in sight, I have less and less reason to be appropriate.

If you know me—that is to say if you’re on my friends list—you know that I’ve never had any patience for doing the appropriate thing. So just imagine what I’m like now.

(Grammatical side-rant two: Facebook has made friend a verb. Another loss for the language. You no longer have to “make a friend.” You just “friend.” “I friended her.” And to think I was sure we had hit bottom when “effort” and “task” were made into  verbs. “We’re efforting that right now.” “He’s been tasked with efforting that.”)

Next to go are the people who post pictures without explaining what they are pictures of or who is in the picture or why they are significant, interesting or out of focus. I don’t know who those people in the picture are, whose wedding they are attending, where they are vacationing or what that symbol is on your front yard. After all, who do you think you are, a friend?

You would think I would expunge the people who rarely post anything, because, they’re just added baggage. But I am one of those people and I can’t be too hard on us.

So who does that leave? Well, there are the people who actually post interesting things. They’re keepers. I also keep the people who mostly post pictures of their kids and grandkids because, even though I don’t know the kids, you can’t delete kids or dogs. It’s just wrong. Cats, on the other hand…

Curiously, I keep the people who only post memes they have clipped from somewhere else. You know the ones; they look like they were made by American Greetings. A pencil sketch and a piece of short wisdom in Helvetica. It’s always the kind of thing George Carlin used to say, even though it turns out George Carlin never said most of the things he used to say. The stuff that makes you wish you had thought of that. Once in a while I read one that I had thought of, but I’m not good enough at graphics to make it into a post.

I do find these cut and paste memes annoying. I’d rather read what people have to say for themselves. But I’m willing to put up with them because I have no interest in going to whatever those sites are to find that stuff for myself.

I keep some friends just to bulk up the list. One of the few things I post, other than sarcastic and annoying comments about other peoples’ posts, is a link to these infrequent blog posts. I’m still childish enough—or perhaps I am once again childish enough—to watch anxiously to see how many people read my blografitti. Through diligent study of search engine optimization and marketing this blog now has a loyal and deeply disturbed readership in the mid-10s. For that I have my Facebook friends to thank.

And that gets me down to the last list. My actual friends. It’s a very short list. And getting shorter. But I keep them. I’m funny that way.

An Infinite Number of Monkeys

~ Lee Swanson ~ 3 Comments

I opened Facebook to find that a friend had posted on my timeline. And to think that just a few years ago I didn’t even have a timeline. This was a link to an NPR story and a suggestion, actually more like a directive. “This story has your name all over it. I’ll be waiting for your blog!” she said.

I could have ignored that. I’m sitting here now thinking I should have ignored that. But my ego kicked in and I started wondering what it was about this article that made her think it would interest me. I mean, she is right. I am interested, somewhat appalled and feeling rather smug all at once. But that’s my problem. Why should I write about it?

So here’s the deal. The story is about a computer program that writes news stories. Hundreds of thousands of them, for places like Yahoo and the Associated Press. Because the AP is using them, there’s no doubt you are reading them – if you read news. It writes pretty basic stuff; there is after all a difference between news writing and news reporting. The computer isn’t gathering any facts. It gets that stuff from somewhere – maybe even someone – else, ingests it, digests it and defecates it out onto the screen.

NPR got this idea to put the computer to a test by pitting it against an actual reporter. They chose their White House correspondent Scott Horsley. And they chose a business story, the quarterly earnings of Denny’s. Scott might have had a leg up. Back when I used to bump into him at the NPR station in San Diego he was a business reporter and he is comfortable enough in his own skin to admit he was once a regular at Denny’s.

The competition had two parts. One was to judge the end product and the other was to get to that end first.

We all know where this is headed. The computer has already won at chess, Jeopardy and trying my patience. So it’s no surprise it was done with Denny’s in two minutes while Scott was savoring his greasy spoon prose for seven minutes. But part two, what did they write?

Here’s what the computer program shit out:

Denny’s Corporation on Monday reported first-quarter profit of 8.5 million dollars. The Spartanburg, South Carolina-based company said it had profit of 10 cents per share. The results beat Wall Street expectations. The average estimate of four analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research was for earnings of 9 cents per share. The restaurant operator posted revenue of $120.2 million in the period, also beating Street forecasts. Three analysts surveyed by Zacks expected $117.1 million. Denny’s shares have risen nearly 6 percent since the beginning of the year. In the final minutes of trading on Monday, shares hit $10.90, a climb of 61 percent in the last 12 months.

And here’s Scott’s:

Denny’s Corporation notched a grand slam of its own in the first quarter, earning a better-than-expected ten cents a share, as restaurant sales jumped by more than 7-percent. Operating revenues topped $120 million. Adjusted net income jumped 36 percent to $8.7 million. Denny’s is one of the nation’s largest full-service restaurant chains. The growth in sales suggests consumers are opening their pocketbooks for pancakes, eggs, and hash browns. Earnings were also helped by lower costs for raw materials. Denny’s results were also helped by the re-opening of the high-volume location inside the Las Vegas Casino Royale restaurant. After sales grew faster than expected in the first three months of the year, managers raised their sales forecast for the remainder of 2015.

The computer program may have come out ahead in search engine optimization, but Horsley comes out ahead in everything else.

The truth is, however, if these are supposed to be broadcast stories, they both suck. Honestly Scott, you get props for “grand slam” and did manage to mention Las Vegas, but what took you so damned long?

The cardinal rule of broadcast news is don’t bore the audience. If people aren’t still paying attention by the time you get to the end of the story, or if they forget what you said as soon as you’re done saying it, you’ve failed.

Scott lost me at “adjusted net income.” But in his defense, the story is a loser to begin with. Earnings at Denny’s for godsake. Nobody cares. Nobody. I doubt Denny even cares. The only reason anyone ever goes to Denny’s is because it’s still open after the bars close and you want something in your stomach when you throw up on your way home. So maybe you care if they announce they’re raising prices of their inedible menu, but that’s as far as it goes.

This whole computerized writing is another sign of the deterioration of news. Years ago the television station where I worked wanted news writers to both write the news and edit the video. I argued against it because, first, they are distinctly different skill sets and second, it takes longer to write and edit a story than it does to just write or just edit one. Yet the writers will still have the same number of stories to write and the deadline doesn’t change. When I said it would hurt the quality of the product the general manager actually snorted and I looked over to see him shaking his head.

Quality is such a quaint idea.

Not that we shouldn’t keep trying. I remember lamenting the consolidation of ownership in the media and was complaining to a friend who had worked at a couple television stations, a few newspapers, a magazine and at least one university that someday we would all be working for the phone company. “Yeah,” he said, “but those fuckers will need editors too.”

Apparently not.

Mailbag

~ Lee Swanson ~ 1 Comment

A couple of interesting things popped up in the mail this week.

Stuffed in along with the gas bill was a flyer titled “Five Ways to Heat Your Home for Less.”  None of them will work of course, because if people actually did use less gas to heat their homes the gas company would raise the rates because in the utility world less is more.  More is more too, and they like that better, but they have to at least pretend they are being good citizens by encouraging savings and conservation.

Anyway, the number one tip for how to heat your home for less is this:  Set your furnace thermostat to 68 degrees or lower when you’re at home. You can save 5% for every two degrees you turn the thermostat down.

In other words, the best way to heat your home for less is to heat your home less.

This same advice can be followed in other endeavors.  To save on doctor bills, stay well. To save money at a restaurant, don’t order food.  To save money driving, park.

I knew there was a reason I never look at the junk attached to the gas bill.

The other thing I found intriguing was an e-mail from the Pew Research Center.  The Pew Internet and American Life Project did a study titled Why Most Facebook Users Get More Than They Give.

Here’s what they found:

  • 40% of Facebook users in our sample made a friend request, but 63% received at least one request
  • Users in our sample pressed the like button next to friends’ content an average of 14 times, but had their content “liked” an average of 20 times
  • Users sent 9 personal messages, but received 12
  • 12% of users tagged a friend in a photo, but 35% were themselves tagged in a photo

Yet more evidence the average person is sub-normal.