"Boomer volunteerism has increased during the past few decades. The volunteer rate for young boomers, ages 46 to 57, is 30.9 percent, significantly higher than the 25.3 percent recorded by the same age group in 1974 and the 23.2 percent recorded in 1989."
— PittsburghLive.com
So how do you like them apples? Looks like we are not the me, me, my, mine generation after all!
And didn’t we know it
U.S. Late-Boomers are the Last Generation Living to Remember When Choice Became Legal
As a Late Boomer I’m telling my story. This post is cross-posted from my blog, Build Peace, which is participating in a blog carnival today organized by two Hoosier-based blogs, What Tami Said and Shakesville in support of Planned Parenthood which, as you know, is under siege from Right Wing extremists. Check out the Blog Carnival here. My story of interaction with Planned Parenthood
Booming BlogHer Batman!
Hey Folks,
I was at #BlogHer11 in San Diego (yes, this is a hashtag to use on Twitter) from August 4 thru 6 then took a week off to figure out a stay sane plan for the coming semester. No, I have not gone back to school. My husband is taking a sabbatical this semester and will be around the old homestead the rest of this year when he isn’t on medium length investigatory trips related to his research. My daughter has moved back in for the last semester of her time as an undergraduate. I view this as a transition phase, a liminal phase and while I will try to finish up a book I’m working on and attend another conference, everything is in flux. Nothing new there for a Late Boomer. The type of change we have lived through is similar to those folks who remembered horses and horseless carriages and then had to deal with airplanes for heavens sake, only to find their life plans completely disrupted once they were well into adult life by the Great Depression. The BlogHer post that I have intended to write forever and just haven’t gotten around to doing, The Blogger session that stands out in my mind, well one of three anyway, was the Room of Your Own Session put together by Judi Boomer. At some point I will link to all the Booming Blogs that have a Late Boomer Edge, but as I am using this post as a test case to consolidate all my blogs in one spot on my main website, I am not going to go into detail here and now. I just wanted you to know the group exists and is gaining strength! Woot.
Consistency is Key
Just spent the morning and lunchtime perusing my online identity and determining changes I have to make to remain consistent across the social media platforms I find to be useful. At least that is how I started out the morning. The consistency task is huge and I have helped folks accomplish that for quite some time now. But as my mother would have said, “The cobbler’s children have no shoes.” I have a different kind of presence than most of my clients. I have been online forever. My first email account was in 1994. Friends for the most part as I was just a nerdy little undergrad, used and misused ARPA Net to play very, very early graphic based games. ZORK was the first “mainstream” game I played . These last two were in the late 1970s. I have a long online presence creating “blogs” and communities all the way back into the 1990s. I’m a writer. I create all sorts of content. I’m not sure I could recreate a tree or branch diagram of all the places I have places online content and had my stuff reposted, with or without my permission. So for a while I neglected my own consistency. But I am reclaiming as much of my online self as I can. It will be a long process. I think it will be an illuminating exercise. Of course if I did not think so I would not be doing it; and I sure wouldn’t be writing about it.
So here goes: Tips for Online Consistency
Determine your presence as it currently exists online. Do you post as an individual, a business, or an employee? Do you use your first name, full name, initials, a pseudonym, and what have you used in the past? What online accounts do you have? What is listed on the profiles for these accounts? Does any of the information conflict? Have info brokers or directories got the wrong info for you. Get it corrected. Is any of it out of date? Update or delete it. But please do remember that you never erase information on the web, you are only providing a current corrected version. Do your identities clash as though multiple personalities are fighting for control of your identity, or do you seem like a person with many interests who enjoys a rich full life? If you carefully craft your online identity you will appear to be the later. Nothing ever goes away in cyberspace, so frame or reframe as necessary. It your own tapestry you are weaving, highlight or blend in as appropriate.
Record or save what you find so you have a starting point for the next time you check your references. Both individuals and businesses need to check on their reputations from time to time. Schedule it. Do it. The recommended interval varies from person to person, but usually falls between once a week to once a month.
This is important. My business site should link to the real me enough that my cyber-neighbors and friends recognize my metaphorical house and can say, “Oh, so-and-so who owns or runs such-and-such lives there.” I do not have to invite anyone to enter my home, if I do not want to, but in a real community, we do have non-compartmentalized information about other members of the community. This provides a level of knowing, belonging, and trust that only comes from the overlap or repetition of information within a system.
I grew up outside of, about 4 miles outside of, small town America, in the 1960s. From the perspective of a kid, it really was all a bit Beaver Cleaverish. But their was community. Neighbors are a good thing. That is why I like Tucson. I live in a real neighborhood and I celebrate it! Cyber-neighborhoods come and go just as people move from one residence to another in real life. I think I have lived, and networked, in about 7 different neighborhoods in my online life. Some date all the way back to the Stone Age and punch cards.
I always bake cookies for neighbors on the winter holidays, I wave when I see them, I belong to the neighborhood association, and I have even helped elderly and infirm neighbors with routine life tasks (shopping, driving to appointments, and such.)
Our ever-increasing digitized communications and our ever more disconnected and geographically dispersed family groups means that community exists differently than it ever previously has in human history (or prehistory). We are social in nature. We need community connections that overlap between points of interaction and roles. Community has never been able to be self contained to one aspect of life; one area may have dominated but other areas touched even if we tried to isolate them.
So it all boils down to: know, claim, and if necessary, reframe.
A Cautionary Tale :: Blogs, Lies, and Screen Captures.
I just lost a long, long post that was supposed to have a few draft versions saved. I guess I will have to chalk it up to the Goddess wanting me to write a slightly different post than the one I was writing.
Mothers are people. Are bad mothers bad people? There are bad mothers out there. There are bad people out there too, but many people confuse people who do bad things with the much smaller set of that group of people who are bad people. That is how I began thinking about this issue this morning. I don’t believe that doing bad things makes you a bad person, necessarily. My questions and thoughts on the following topic that were spinning about in my brain initially included:
- I wonder which person in this mess is more disturbed?
- Why would anyone think that she could remain anonymous on the internet?
- Why would anyone be so happy that another person, even an adversary, was arrested? (I reserve that kind of glee for war criminal arrests, and those don’t seem to be forthcoming.)
- Are the support sites that take one person or the others’ side in this mess actually by one of the primary women waging this war.
- Boy-oh-boy the world is full of wackos!
- This is a classic example of why you have to be careful on the “internets machine.”
- I love a good investigation, and this could be good. (Comes from being a science librarian for a while.)
- This is sort of like what Liz talked about at BlogHer: false identities, pseudonyms, and such. It is so: Blogs, Lies, and Screen Captures.
- Sometimes I think social media black holes exist and suck people into them.
Okay, okay, I will give you some details:
It all started this morning when I went into my office to get away from 9/11 coverage. I already wrote my piece on that and I didn’t want to be sad today. But then on TweetDeck, my all time favorite tool for non-phone tweeting, I saw these tweets which I captured in this image:
I don’t know anything about the person behind @BreakingMomNews because her account was suspended shortly after I viewed these tweets. The picture used for the account that I captured is the same one that @military_mom uses. The snarky almost celebratory nature of these tweets reflects the tone of the blog post to which the tweet refers. Is it Laura Freed? I don’t know. ( IDK in twitter-speak.)
I did enough checking to confirm that the person arrested, henceforth Person A, probably is the same person who received a lots of media attention a while back when she tweeted immediately after her son’s death and was possible/probably tweeting as her son drowned nearby. According to a verification of identity site that I have wanted to check out, and which this gave me the rather prurient impetus/opportunity to do so, the name and alias, and places match the tweeting mother.
But then I began to wonder why this other tweeter, @BreakingMomNews (henceforth Person B), had her panties in such a bunch. She purports to be Madison McGraw. Something did not smell right. Being gleeful about other people’s tragedies just isn’t right. It probably is not as bad as tweeting instead of watching your children, if that is indeed what happened, but it is creepy too. And am I to presume that the tweeter is the same person as the blogger. This makes my head hurt.
I’ve been thinking about identity and online privacy and Facebook | Twitter | Blog wars for a long time.
I am a writer, Semiotic Analyst, an activist who probably has an FBI file, and a long time blogger. These are things with which many people in these aforementioned roles are concerned. But I’m not a person who does too much self-revelation, with a couple learning moment exceptions, nor who has close friends who I would accidentally slip privileged info to in an online, and thus public and published, conversation. I do not tend to gossip, but I love a good story.
This episode in a continuing, and tragically real, saga is part of a much longer story that I know about because of wanting to attend a discussion panel at BlogHer 2011 at which a blogging friend was a speaker on the topic of having your blog go viral. Person A was listed as a speaker on that panel the first time I checked out the info on the panel discussants. This totally sucked as I knew from my monkey watching days on Cayo Santiago Island that maternal groups will draw blood when they fight with each other. Human mommy groups share much with monkey maternal groups although there are obvious differences… one group shares mitochondrial DNA and the other does not, for example. (I’m gonna hear about this. I just know it.) By the time of the conference Person A was no longer listed as a panel participant. Don’t know why. Didn’t want to know why. I was just pleased.
As a survivor of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy child abuse I have radar that is always on for deception. Man there were blips all over the screen on this one this morning. And my general life experience has been interesting enough to have my Crazy Detector go off about the whole situation. Losing a child is the worst thing I can think of that could happen, and to want to talk about it and have to defend yourself in public about the means of death just isn’t something I can grasp. But neither can I figure out why a personally unconnected blogger would immerse herself in posts, tweets, blogs, and media interviews about her take on Person A. Both women here seem to have cultivated the attention that a death of a child could bring them. That is sick. Both women’s handling of the situation share some common ground with MSBP, which is why it caught my attention. But there is another level of bizarreness to this twitterversy: the comments on blogs and actual blogs created just to call Person B a scumbag. But that still doesn’t answer my question of whether Person B has an imposter. Person B(1) and Person B(2). With this latest blip in the saga, it should become a textbook case of some sort.
I’m sure this isn’t making all that much sense, so maybe a HuffPo article would help. Here is one about Person A as most of the blogs and Twitter accounts are no longer online, although if you are so inclined the wayback machine might take you to previous captures of the sites from the web. There are tons, and I mean thousands of references to the hate-machine that raged against Madison McGraw/Laura Freed. This is a fairly simple and good account of the mess.
But now there is this whole other level of an unverified person tweeting as though they are Madison McGraw/Laura Freed. I can’t imagine that this person wants more bad p.r. But maybe I am naive.
You should never trust anything, absolutely nothing, without verification. Check your facts. I’ve always been like that. A guy I really cared about in college got mad at me cause I checked out his father in Who’
s Who in Politics to see if he really was who he said he was or if he was trying to impress me. He was legit. Sometimes I still wish I would not have done that and p.o.ed that boy. Oh, well… water under the bridge and I still check out facts. Facts are just data points. Information is when you have enough data points to draw distinctions and infer meaning.
I have no new information or insight about this whole bizarre chain of events other than to present it as a cautionary tale. I think Laura should stick with being Moxie. This Moxie persona doesn’t seem vengeful, and has a good schtick – a blog about food based on food from novels she writes. Maybe she learned her lesson. Of course if Laura is connected to @breakingmomnews, and that is a big if, then she hasn’t learned much…. unless she really just wants the publicity saying any publicity is good publicity.
The Jumpers onto Bandwagons on both sides give me the creeps. Having read all the comments I could stomach from 2009 I am sadly disappointed in most people and how willing they are to draw conclusions, and negative ones at that, with little or no real information about a situation. I think most bloggers and nearly all BlogHers are better people than those that vilified, hurled insults at, and acted as though they knew either of the adult women centered in this controversy and tragedy.
Oh, it is not just online that you have to be careful. Remember that. As I learned on the X Files: “Trust No One!” This does not mean rag on them, as a folk singer friend says/sings: We are all born with a bit of God/Good in our hearts.
SCORE CARD: (You can’t tell the players without one.)
Person A (verified using one of those online identity verification sites to which you subscribe)
Real Name:Shellie D. Schnell
Pseudonyms: Shellie D. Ross
Twitter Accounts: @Military_Mom
Blogs & Blogonyms: http://about.me/ShellieDRoss
Other: She really was arrested in FL at the end of August for outstanding warrants in OH. Something to do with child support, I think. Or maybe skipping out on debt, I’m not sure.
Person B (1)
Real Name:
Pseudonyms:
Twitter Accounts: @BreakingMomNews (Twitter account has been suspended.)
Blogs & Blogonyms:
Person B (2)
Real Name: Laura Freed
Pseudonyms: Madison McGraw, Moxie Baker
Twitter Accounts: (I think the @MadisonMcGraw currently up on Twitter is a fake account.)
Blogs & Blogonyms: http://thespellboundcafe.blogspot.com, http://www.facebook.com/thespellboundcafe
Friday Finds #1
Posterous use is up and running. Signed up ages ago, but did not make use of it. Now I will try to use it wisely.
Apple Apps added this week: Opus Domini Why? Because an iPad 2 version is forthcoming. It looks like a planner and I like that. It incorporates goals, tasks, notes, appointments and everything I like to use and nothing I don’t.
iPad Apps added this week: foursquare. Still need to get it functioning on my Blackberry Torch!
Also signed up (actually reactivated) at Quora a question and answer site.
Set up accounts at ifttt and at GetGlue. ifttt seems like it may be seriously useful. GetGlue not so much, although for businesses in the entertainment industry it looks like a good thing.
Now if I can just get all my blogs updated and then set up feeds from them to my business blog.