Ideapad

Blogging since 1998. By David Wertheimer

Category: Observed (Page 5 of 24)

Having one’s Facebook cake and eating it, too

April 16, 2012 /

Sean Bonner: Facebook makes me feel like a shitty friend.

Facebook made it easy. So now I have to wonder am I only staying in touch with those people because it requires absolutely zero effort on my part? What kind of a person does that make me? What does that say about how much I value their friendship?

Earlier this month I found out about a friend’s wife giving birth via Facebook, and only Facebook. It’s not the first time this has happened (indeed, not even the first time with this friend). And, to use Bonner’s turn of phrase, it made me feel kind of shitty.
Social media sites are wondrous things. I am in touch with more people in infinitely more ways than I ever expected. The problem lies with scale and distance, as the same interactions that feel immediate to the author can feel very different to the reader–both more and less intimate than originally intended, depending on the recipient. What Bronner and I are observing is less technological than sociological: replacing important real-life touchpoints with digital ones can be inherently, and inadvertently, disappointing.
Social interactions have myriad levels of nuance. Facebook is different from Twitter, for example. Email distribution lists remain popular alongside social networks (for my demographic, at least). And each type of action carries its own etiquette. Checking into the hospital on Foursquare and tweeting the delivery of a child can be fascinating and energizing and fun. Extreme example: Matt Haughey live-tweeted his vasectomy! But the same broadcast capabilities that bring levity to such things also defy conventional levels of friendship. When inner-circle, 20-years-of-history friends post the same birth notice to you as to 680 of their digital connections, that inner circle takes on a much flimsier feel. (Let the record show that in each case of “hey, I saw on Facebook that you’re a dad now,” I replied with a phone call.)
I rediscovered Bonner’s post because yesterday he quit Facebook altogether. I don’t think I’m in quite that drastic a frame of mind. My own Facebook usage is quite minimal: after all, if you’re concerned about privacy on Facebook, limiting what you tell Facebook goes a long way toward mitigating its pervasiveness. My profile there is no more robust than what you find about me on Twitter, LinkedIn, et al. with the exception of a handful of photos and some basic banter with my friends. My privacy settings are finely tuned. I can live with Facebook knowing and using that much about me.
And indeed, I almost need Facebook, because its wall has become many people’s primary mode of communication. I only log onto Facebook once a week or so, and when I’m gone for too long, I miss out on news of life-altering events. The privacy concerns are valid, sure, but many people have decided, however unwittingly, that they’re willing to live with the trade-offs of privacy and reach. And while I’d probably be fine not residing within the Facebook social graph, I don’t terribly want to dictate terms to my friends regarding how they keep in touch with me. So for now, they’ll post, I’ll call, and we’ll all go to bed happy.
Social media is an amazing tool. Even more so on one’s own terms.

I hope I was what they were looking for

January 13, 2012 /

According to LinkedIn, 1% of my profile views in the last 90 days came from searches–more than one!–for (marketing or product or strategy or cmo or intelligence or ceo) and management and director and not president and not sales and manager and not social and not budget and not plan and not direct and strategy and not solution and business and not product and not develop and online. (Oddly, I get no results from that link. Maybe I don’t know anyone like that.)

Trends versus perspective

November 15, 2011 /

November 2: Syms and Filene’s Basement file for bankruptcy.

Company CEO Marcy Syms said in statement the two discount chains were burdened by increasing competition from department stores offering the same brands at similar discounts and by a rising number of private label discounters. She also said there was less overstock for her company to buy as businesses continue to manage their inventory carefully during the tough economy.

September 22: Century 21 opens a 60,000 square foot store on the Upper West Side.

“The expansion is giving another area of the city a chance for everyone to look good all the time,” said Director of Organizational Effectiveness Boyd Howell. … “Brand-driven guests can come in and find their brand instead of having to dig through hoping they’ll find something.”

Hidden envy

September 15, 2011 /

Loved this observation from Felix Salmon regarding New York’s new bike sharing program and the reaction from Sean Sweeny of Soho Alliance:

“DOT and Janette Sadik-Khan’s problem is they say,
‘Here’s what we’re doing, take it or leave it,'” said Sean Sweeney of
the Soho Alliance, a frequent DOT critic. “Instead, it should be,
‘Here’s 20 racks, where would you like them?'” He expressed concern
about whether the stations would be located on too-narrow sidewalks or
in valuable parking spaces or other inopportune locations.

Still, he said it would be nice if done right. “I walk a lot, I’ll
walk from 59th Street downtown,” Mr. Sweeney said. “Let’s say I don’t
want to walk or take the subway, then a bike sounds nice. But it’s still
a matter of giving over public space to a private company, so we have
to be careful.” He added that no stations should be place in Soho.

I love the way that Sweeney starts by implying that he would be happy
to place 20 racks around Soho, underscores that by saying that the
scheme “sounds nice” — and then, at the end, drops the bomb that he’s
already decided that the optimal number of racks in Soho is precisely
zero.

When I was a kid in New Jersey my brother once got a toy (long since forgotten) that enraged me to the point of public complaint. I made a sign and posted it for all the family to see. It read, more or less:

I HATE that [new toy]!
I HATE IT HATE IT HATE IT
I don’t EVER WANT TO SEE IT AGAIN!

P.S. You’d better let me use it!

Felix posits that Sweeney isn’t open to the idea. Quite the contrary: he’s actually jealous, to the point of distraction, and he can’t bring himself to admit it.

I wish I could remember what the toy was. I wonder if I wound up using it at all.

Ten years

September 10, 2011 /

A confession: I’ve spent the past week two weeks willfully avoiding most September 11 commemorations. I certainly know why, although I have had a hard time putting it into words. Am I not ready to recollect? Do I find it too sad, too ugly? Does it feel too obvious to me?
Perhaps all of the above, or something else, subconscious and intangible, that drives me away from the past. Different things evoke different responses. I blithely skipped past The Economist’s coverage of the anniversary, but I can’t even bring myself to crack open the New York magazine special, and I have been noticeably averting my gaze whenever I spy the billowing smoke on its cover. A decade on, I am not at all inured to the visuals of the event–if anything, I have a more visceral reaction now, in remembrance, than when it actually happened and we all couldn’t stop looking.
My wife pointed out, rightly, that we as a society need to remember, to reflect, to refresh our memories, to celebrate the heroes and respect the innocent and the fallen. I had friends who experienced a far more dramatic 9/11 than I did, and friends who lost their lives.
Perhaps that’s where I am: I haven’t reflected because I haven’t forgotten. I can tell, in vivid detail, the story of that day and the entire week around it: where I was, what I did, how I felt, what I smelled. It was my reality and remains my experience. To that end, America’s insistent media saturation leading up to Sunday’s commemorations are invaluable: no one is being allowed to forget, just as I, and many others, already cannot.
Tomorrow is a somber and important day for all of us, however explicit our reflections may be. My thoughts are with those whose memories are far more painful than mine.
—
On and after September 11, the Internet was both a lifeline and an outlet for me. My blog posts from 9/11 through the 23rd are available in a single-read archive, and I invite my readers to explore them. For historical accuracy, the girlfriend cited in the posts is now my wife; we have long since moved out of Union Square to the Upper West Side, where we will be spending a quiet 9/11/11 at home.
In 2001 I also published my friend Adam Oestreich’s first-hand account of the attacks, which remains a compelling read. At this time of year it is always the most popular page on this website. (Adam, it can be noted, now works in midtown.)

Obama’s grand miss

August 7, 2011 /

Regular readers of this space know that Ideapad rarely touches on politics. But Drew Westen’s What Happened to Obama? in the New York Times Sunday Review is a must-read. It’s a compelling, gut-wrenching and accurate exposition on how Barack Obama failed at a terrific, and important, opportunity to shape the nation’s future.

With [Obama’s] deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics — in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time — he has broken [“the arc of history”, Obama’s paraphrasing of Dr. Martin Luther King] and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation. … The real conundrum is why the president seems so compelled to take both sides of every issue, encouraging voters to project whatever they want on him, and hoping they won’t realize which hand is holding the rabbit.

Data points from the debt cap deal

August 2, 2011 /

Behind the rhetoric, some fascinating numbers coming out of Washington this week.
As part of the deal, the 2012 Congressional budget will be reduced by $22 billion. Of course, the 2012 baseline budget is $3,639 billion. Which makes the budget cuts 0.61% of the budget–perhaps less–and basically meaningless besides as a data point for stump speeches. (The article linked above suggests that the entire deal could be fiscally meaningless, although it’s politically huge.)
Tea Party representatives took a hard-line stance against taxes, but among voters, 53 percent of Tea Party members supported a combination of tax increases and spending cuts for this deal. And a whopping 66% of voters encouraged the Tea Party representatives in Congress to work toward compromise last month.
Ultimately, the pragmatic center carried the day, with 95 Democrats and 174 Republicans voting in favor of the bill, and 95 Democrats and 66 Republicans voting against. Forging middle ground is almost quaint in 2011 Washington (even if it is heavily tilted toward the Republican ideal).

On overstating

March 4, 2011 /

Steve Jobs’ reality distortion takes its toll on truth, on Fortune Tech.
I hate when hyperbole overshadows fact. (It’s one of the reasons I have never gotten deeply into following politics.) This article posits to fact-check Steve Jobs’ iPad 2 keynote, but Seth Weintraub’s corrections are surrounded in so much arm-waving frustration that they undermine the root arguments behind them. They also overstate the corrections.
To wit: Jobs included a bullet point that said the iPad has greater than 90% market share. Weintraub wrote in response, “‘>90% market share’. OMG Math,” then asserted, “Apple would have needed to sell 3.2 million more to reach 90% of 2010’s tablet market share.” Which, in itself, isn’t accurate either. If the market is essentially the 14.8 million-sold-in iPad and the 2 million-sold-in Galaxy Tab, then Apple’s sales in 2010 weren’t 90% of the market, they were actually (wait for it) 88.1%. OMG Math.
Then, in trying to compare apples to apples on component pricing, Weintraub starts with, “The XOOM’s are simply better.” He then chooses to pick at various items on the iPad’s spec sheet which don’t match up to the Xoom’s, and says Apple doesn’t measure up. But in doing so, he’s playing the same game in reverse: focusing on factors where his preferred device is stronger (RAM, storage, speakers) and ignoring the ones where his is not (processor, size, cameras). It’s a winless argument.
Thinly veiled disdain is good for speaking to a base of like-minded individuals. But it won’t win any broader discussions.

Assessing the importance of North American cities by their major league sports presence

January 31, 2011 /

I have contemplated on and off for years the way certain cities have a more of a major-league sports concentration than others. The factors that lead to each specific case are numerous and complicated. On a more base level, though, a quick glance at a city’s sports footprint says much about that city: its size, its presence in multiple markets, its interests.

Herewith, a tally by city of the major sports markets in America (covering MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL), in descending order of size, organized by my own arbitrary but numerically derived categories.

The majors
New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Miami, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Washington, DC. These 11 cities are the hosts with the most: a team from every sports league. Of them, New York is the most major of all, as it has two teams in every league except basketball–that is, if you include Long Island and exclude New Jersey, although come 2012 the NBA Nets move to Brooklyn, making the Big Apple that much bigger, and of course ignoring the fact that the NFL Giants and Jets don’t actually play in New York, but we’ll get to that. Chicago gets bragging rights for its two baseball teams, while Dallas gets a partial bye, since its baseball and football teams technically play over the border in Arlington.

The anomaly that the National Football League would rather you ignore
Los Angeles. Not only is this the only major broadcast market without a football team, but LA boasts six pro teams across the other three majors (if you include Anaheim in the tally, which MLB does, so we’ll let them claim the Angels and the NHL Ducks too). From this angle it’s crazy that there’s still no football team here.

The mid-majors
Cleveland, Houston, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, San Francisco, Tampa Bay, Toronto. These cities have 3/4 coverage, not a bad haul, especially for cities you wouldn’t otherwise think are major or important on other scales, like Tampa. Surprising, actually, that there are only seven cities with this kind of sports presence. I almost demoted San Francisco because the NBA Warriors still refer to their location as “Golden State,” which makes no sense to me, even with the Golden Gate Bridge in their logo. Also, bonus points to Toronto for being so American that it boasts several of our pro sports teams.

The players
Charlotte, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Kansas City, New Orleans, Oakland, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Nashville. Each of these cities has two pro teams. Interestingly, all of them count a pro football team as one of the two (with the exception of Milwaukee, which has Green Bay up the road). Indianapolis and Nashville get less credit here than the others, because they have teams that cite a hometown state rather than the city.

States that matter, because their cities don’t
Minnesota and New Jersey each have two teams that don’t bother to name-check any town in particular. New Jersey’s sports footprint is so schizophrenic that the two football teams who play in the state actually have “NY” in their logos and pretend their port of call is across the Hudson River. And Utah has a lone sports team, which migrated there from New Orleans but retained its name, so we get to enjoy the dissonance of a team in straightlaced Salt Lake City called the Jazz.

Legacies
I love cities that have a sports team much larger than they would otherwise deserve. Green Bay, for one, with its legendary football club. And San Antonio with a leftover from the NBA-ABA merger in the 1970s–which, by the way, also explains the New Jersey Nets.

Canadian cities that make the list thanks to the NHL
Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver. I bet the CFL has a team in each of these cities. (Montreal had an MLB team until a few years ago, and Vancouver briefly sported an NBA franchise.)

One-sport oddities
Columbus has a hockey team. I don’t know why. Jacksonville has a football team, and not even the NFL is sure why. They play basketball in Memphis and Oklahoma City, mainly because wealthy men chose to buy teams and plunk them across town from their estates. Orlando, on the other hand, has a fairly strong basketball presence but no other teams.

Portland has a lone and legendarily popular basketball team; Sacramento also has an NBA presence. A few miles south, San Jose has a hockey team, which I’ve also never understood, although they always had a pretty terrific logo.

And speaking of hockey, the NHL has a team in Raleigh, N.C., which is probably why they call themselves the Carolina Hurricanes. Got all that?

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