Why I Love Instagram

For starters, I love my iPhone. Anybody that knows me knows that. Instagram is an app originated for use with the iPhone though I hear it is or will be available for the Android as well. Also, I have a longstanding interest in photography. In a previous life I took some leisure courses in composition and 1070's era camera techniques. Several cameras later I ran out of time to continue nurturing my hobby. In recent years I came back to photography with a bit of a schtick, taking pictures of my Nancy Pearl Action Figure wherever I go. This is a lot of fun and caused me to start looking for shots where Nancy could be a fun focal point. Yes, some people thought this was a little weird, and one colleague even calls it...creepy. She has her own issues as well, though.

Anyway, several months ago I downloaded Instagram at the behest of a virtual friend from the iVote community, another phone app social networking group who like opinion polls. There I found a nice group of other iVote friends with whom I immediately became friends. Gradually I became hooked. Why do I like it so much?

• I travel the world virtually several times a day. Bruno Nunez lives in Rio. Irish_Blue is, of course, from Ireland. Photojournalist is from Dominican Republic. Jsui is a law student in Boston, and somehow I feel a bit motherly toward her. I regularly communicate with these and more "friends" from Hawaii, all over the continental US, Canada, Amsterdam, and other places all over the world. Far too many Americans think the only place in the world to be happy is the USA. I revel in sights of people enjoying life and their pursuits of happiness across this wide world. 
• I see a wide range of photographic skills and styles. Some people like using editing filters and other apps to enhance their pictures. I am just starting to get into that. Others just point, shoot, and share. These pictures can have immediacy and candor that is quite striking. Several of my "friends" are teenagers and a couple of these are already experimenting with editing and composition. They might even be setting the stage for future careers, or if not certainly for lifelong avocations.
• I get to see an amazing variety as far as the pictures' subject matter. Mac_cactus ALWAYS shares stunning shots of cactus. He has over 6000 followers and follows no one. M_gardenfav always posts pictures of plants. Mikeguevin takes stunning sky shots and landscapes. Alex D likes architecture, as do many other members. Tobaccio is into macro photography, especially focusing on liquids. Neimanji treates us to daily pictures of her amazingly compliant beagle who poses with great aplomb, always with a neutral background or setting. Her shots rival Wegman's! Bruno regales us with narratives that go along with pictures of Brazil and also of his world travels. Goldfrapp is a New Yorker and shares Big Apple shots.  Fellow librarians will want to follow Buffy Hamilton.  Lately she has been doing nature shots. Another active librarian is  KarinLibrarian, my colleague and teen lit aficionado.
• The biggest reason I love Instagram is that it causes me to look at the world in a different way. Instead of just walking by something that catches my eye, I now stop and take a picture. All I am using at this time is my iPhone camera. Because of Instagram, I now look at the world more closely and through different eyes. This is the most powerful aspect of Instagram, and the main reason I love it. It has changed the way I see the world.

PS I am including a shot I took the other day at the Houston Zoo. I was walking through a tunnel in the new African Forest section and passed under a hole through which the sky was visible. Before Instagram I would have just looked up and walked on. Instead I stopped and took the picture.

Happy Birthday to Me!

It's my birthday and I am all alone. My daughter is on a trip. I chose to stay off the roads over Labor Day because I always hate the holiday traffic. So here I am with just my dog and cat. One thing I tend to do on my birthday is remember past ones. I remember a backyard party with a pinata. Maybe my all time favorite memory is a surprise birthday party on my 16th. Another time, many years later, I looked up from the circulation desk in my library to see kids pushing a piano through the door. A wave of irritation swept over me because I had no notice of an event being scheduled that day. But then the choir trooped in and sang Happy Birthday. What a thrill! I remember black balloons on a couply of landmark birthdays. And I remember one sad day when I went to work and not a single person mentioned my birthday. My daughter was away at school and my husband was spending the week down in Houston. By the end of the day I was enveloped in gloom. I came home and checked mail. No cards there either. I had been surrounded by people all day but felt very, very lonesome.

Today I have not had any calls. No cards came in the mail, another sad reminder that Dad is gone, because he always sent one. BUT I am overwhelmed by an avalanche of great greeting! I have a wonderful collection of Facebook greetings and ecards. I have heard from old high school friends, many of them who were at that surprise party. I have heard from colleagues, students, and even some of my heroes! I do not feel a bit downhearted about my choice to spend this beautiful day relaxing on my back porch, enjoying incredible weather, and watching all the events in my back yard. I got my fountain up and going this morning after weeks of weather so dreadfully hot that I didn't have the heart for it. I am truly blessed to have such a nice day. And I am very grateful for social networking and specifically Facebook.

I am not one of those naysayers who want to claim social networking isolates people. This gloomy description still pops up despite a very credible PEW research survey to the contrary. I did a quick search and found that there are still people out there making this claim. Here is the wackiest article I could find:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1149207/How-using-Facebook-raise-risk-cancer.html

ANYTHING can be done in excess. I have had students who READ constantly and were very isolated from their peers. I had a friend whose husband got obsessed with playing darts in bars. They divorced over that. Another guy got hooked on playing those games where you snag the toys with the little crane. Shopping is fun but too much of it can break your pocketbook and your marriage.

As for me, I just want to say thanks for all the wonderful messages! I treasure them one and all. I have actually lost count of how many I have received, but counting would be a little obsessive anyway, huh? So thanks again to all my online friends. I am off to buy myself something online for my birthday...

Link O'Day: Jumo! Another brand new social networking tool!

Jumo is the brain child of one of the original Facebook crew, Chris Hughes.  It is an idealistic endeavor for people who want to change the world for the better.

The purpose is to help people find non-profits and causes, follow them, and eventually contribute or become an activist. You sign on with your Facebook account. Then you find a cause that resonates with you and follow it. You will be informed of the organization's activities and perhaps take part in them or support the group financially. I signed up last night, on the launch day. I then did a search and found a number of praiseworthy organizations. I looked for two topics, libraries and pets, and found some interesting and worthy causes. In a world where there is way too much pessimism, cynicism and bigotry, maybe this is a way to make a difference.

Danger! Protect Our Kids!

I am thinking of a resource that is very popular today, used by people of all ages. People meet up there to catch up with each other. For most people, it is a friendly, fun place, and even a place to conduct business. They may also meet there for romantic encounters. They may end up leaving this relatively secure location and going somewhere else to have sex. Child predators are known to habituate this type of environment. Often, parents have no clue what their children are doing there. This environment professes to have rules and security measures, but admits that these are hard to enforce and that 100% safety cannot be guaranteed. And yet, these environments thrive. And parents let their kids go, in fact they enable them to go by providing them with ways to get there! What am I thinking of???

OK, another analogy from me...this time I am talking about the mall. Or maybe the movie theater. The thing is, people regularly let their kids off there and pick them up several hours later. One thing kids do at the mall is go to computer stores and open/update MySpace accounts. And at the movies, kids have been known to.....well, you figure that one out. I am not saying parents should not let kids go out in public, though sometimes I think some parents let their kids be unsupervised in malls at too early ages, and for too long. But what they need to do is teach their children to be smart and safe wherever they go. And that goes for social networking sites too. Paranoria about social networking sites is NOT the answer!

In the Newspaper: MyDeathSpace

I am something of a newspaper addict. Many people now get their news online, I know, but I still like to read the old fashioned paper copy that appears on my front walk every morning. Like the crazy guy in "Heart of Darkness," I am ritualistic about how I approach my daily friend. First I scan the front section, and even read the articles that catch my eye, time permitting. Next I look at the editorial page, which is in the 2nd section. I allow myself to read the editorial cartoons, but just look at the headlines of the columns and put the section aside for later. Then I briefly glance at the local section, checking out columns there and maybe glancing the TV guide. The rest is saved for later when I continue with my orderly march through the paper. I will spare any readers that progression....All this is to say that every single day I see things in the paper related to technology that are worth exploring or discussing. Often I then mention them with students via Blackboard Discussion Board. It occurred to me to sometimes mention things gleaned from the paper in this forum as well.

Here is one: Much has been made of the way young people reacted to the Virginia Tech shootings by going to MySpace. This, to me, is one way that social networking can be beneficial. Yesterday I read in the paper about a sub-group of MySpace called MyDeathSpace. I got the feeling that this subgroup was well known, but I had never heard of it. Wikipedia explains that this site offers information about MySpace account holders who have died. I paid it a visit. While this site might sound a bit macabre, I found it to be in good taste. Not only did it offer links to MySpace users who were killed, which includes most of the students, but also to pages for other victims. I was interested in Dr. Liviu Librescu, for instance, and clicking on his picture took me to his faculty web page. Since I often pay visits to professors' web pages, seeing his somehow made him more real to me. I read about his publications, awards, and courses taught. Even though he was clearly a senior faculty member, he was pulling a full load with four classes this spring. Of course this led me to think about those classes, and how all his students must feel.

Next I moved on and visited a student's page. I was taken by the ebullient picture of Erin Peterson, just 18 and a VT freshman. Her page reflected the outgoing personality displayed in her picture. Reading her bio and the comments posted there was a touching reminder of the fragility of life. For some reason, even more moving than the tributes were the "normal everyday" comments that she probably had read shortly before her death as she and her friends communicated via MySpace.

I can certainly see how Internet places like this serve a special and valuable role in helping all of us, and especially young, technology savvy people, remember and grieve lost loved ones. If you have not paid a visit to MyDeathSpace, here is the link:

http://mydeathspace.com/