9 years too late

While I was in Bloomington recently for the funeral of a friend's mom, I was driving down Kirkwood and mentally noted the place where "Oz Bach's Boogie Woogie Burger Bus" had had its short life. It was kind of a greasy grill, but it had character ... and I thought to myself "I should look that guy up."

I did that this evening, and I immediately found the Oz Bach was the bass player for Spanky and Our Gang. You know, Sunday Will Never Be the Same, Lazy Day, and other pop goodness. I had a feeling that with a name like Oz Bach, it could only be the same guy, and when I went to the Spanky and Our Gang page devoted to him, there he was looking out at me - the same Oz Bach that I had bought hamburgers from in his old bus sitting on Kirkwood Avenue in 1979.

He was about 40 then, and he died in 1998, just shy of 60. I wish I'd figured it out sooner.

characteristics of information

A video by the same person as the one Nancy put on her recent post:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM

(About ways we think about information, and the way those ideas are changing.)

But it's SHALLOW and POINTLESS!

This is a response to several blog posts that talk about the inanity of this 2.0 application or the pointlessness of that 2.0 application.

A lot of the "social networking" applications might seem shallow and pointless as stated. One of the interesting things about Learning 2.0 - to me - is that there are a lot of ways to think about the various applications, and it's interesting to me to figure out what would be a good way to think about some of the shallow and pointless ones.

Both your creative side and your analytical side can play a part in figuring out how to make a 2.0 application work for you. Of course, there's no obligation to do anything more than try them out.

Everyone has one (at least!) that they can't get past ... *cough*MYSPACE*cough* ... but I see both Twitter and Facebook as windows into people's lives that ordinarily I wouldn't have. For instance, I'm friends with Jessie Voors on Facebook. I know her slightly, from Teen Summer Reading, and from being connected through the library family ... but when she went off to college, I could have lost track of her altogether, except perhaps for twice yearly updates from Mary. But with our connection through Facebook, I not only get absolutely delightful (and sometimes outrageous) updates about what she's doing and thinking about, I also exchange emails with her once or twice a month, with an observation about something similar that happened to me in my college theatre career, or just to congratulate her on getting a part in a play.

The fact that I knew a cool kid like Jessie while she was growing up has great value to me. The idea that I can continue to know a cool person like Jessie because she allows me this little window into her life has immense value to me.

Telephone v. online communication

Just read Pamela's post about everyone at her daughter's party being on their cell phones to people who weren't at the party. I was just in Bloomington for a funeral, and saw lots of people walking around campus talking into their cell phones. I'm just not that way - I don't really want to spend any significant percentage of my life on the phone.

Oddly, I don't mind being connected online as much. Maybe because telephone conversations are more immediate/demand more of your attention. We introverts just want to be alone with our thoughts much of the time, and with instant messaging, it's much more common to stop typing for a long span for whatever reason, and it's not considered terribly rude to simply get up and go do something else. Somewhat rude, I guess, but not terribly. Nowhere near as rude as hanging up on someone with no warning.

I'm sure that there are still teenagers who don't even have cell phones, or who have them but talk on them about as often as I do. But I wonder if the average teen spends more time on a cell phone today than the average teen spent on the old-fashioned phone 30 years ago?