Semantics, Social, and Personal

Dear Faithful Furious,

Many moons have passed, many suns have shone, but still the Fury lives on. My last post, though laden with lauds and latent understanding (let alone a myriad of lonely and mawkish murmurings), was heavy for this beleaguered but burgeoning blog. This will not follow suit nor suit those stuck in 'samey', saccharine situations.

I post instead a Furious Verse...some random poem from deep within. But first, a story:

Late in 2004, I posited (amongst many) that our droll, daily lives might yield an Acqua Santa sought by so many marketers. Lo and behold: Facebook v Google and FourSquare v GoWalla. Now, these nepotistic (check their heritages), neophytes in New Media might seem cutting-edge, but we've long-laboured to share our (pardon me) 'private pieces' with those for whom we care most. We now have the wherewithal and means to post our private lives and share special moments with our sacrosanct circles. But at what cost?

Fortunately, Facebook found a 'solution' to the problem: forego privacy for publicity, and create a semantic surplus of seemingly 'free' information to advertisers. That basically sums up F8's outcome. Granted, I'm a cynic and I've stood by social networking since the early days of BBS, then Yahoo!, then MySpace, then .

This is NEWS. Facebook has created the incentive and means by which all information on the web is searchable, indexed, and linked to one's account. Your search results for a dynamite dildo could be influenced by a friend's un-redacted diatribe. Do you really want to know?

I digress. I need to share a short (I promise) bit of poetry started earlier today.

"Friend, where are you?"

Walking, walking all the day, I found myself approaching you,

And while the premise slowly played, my choices became far and few:

Run and hide in guise of work, or play it out to find the end?

But, as always, fortune found an afternoon with faithful friends.

Walking back I found anew a sense of sacred solitude,

And to my place of daily grind, mind and body thus renewed.

What transpired, some devine, was made from many months of grind,

So from my quiet quarters soon to merry with a liker kind.

What I found was surface still. I traveled home to get some rest;

The city bright, but blacker will, at times, proffer and suggest

That we who live among the lost may count among our many costs

A certain interval of pain, and, on this ocean, tangled, tossed,

Just a moment to regain a sense of our own ending: friends.

Thank you for listening.

Be well. Be strong.

And for Fuck's sake...

:)

Be Furious.