Social Media

Daily Prompt: Unasked Questions

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“AMA” no longer stands for the “American Medical Association” or “Ameliorating My Attitude.” (Never heard of that one? Neither have I. It doesn’t exist.) In our Twitterverse and Redditworld, AMA is now the acronym for “Ask Me Anything.”

And we can. Even Pope Francis (yes, THAT pope) has a Twitter account, @Pontifex, as does the Dalai Lama, other religious figures, and every politician. Or at least their offices have Twitter accounts. Here is a recent papal Tweet:

The sentiment may be true enough, but what stands out is that the pope gets a lot more retweets than I do. This is irking, as I have been on Twitter (@MarkSAldrich) for far longer.

For the last few years, public figures from the president to famous actors have scheduled AMA sessions on Reddit, on Facebook, and on Twitter, the start of which is usually announced with a photo of the famous person holding a handwritten sign stating “Ask Me Anything” and the day’s date. The “holding a sign” part often makes the famous person look a bit like a hostage. Like poor Bill Gates (well, those three words do not often appear in that particular sequence!) here:

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In the old days of any time before now, if one wanted to ask a famous person a question, one had two available methods: A. Study and work very hard and become famous oneself and learn to befriend other famous people, one of whom is the person you always wanted to ask something, anything. Sidle up to that famous person and say something like, “You know, I have always wanted to ask you something. In fact, I worked and studied very hard to become famous myself and I became famous and I became friends with you just so I could ask you something. And now I do not remember what it was. What an amazing short story this would make! More caviar?” B. Write them a letter, purchase a stamp, place the letter in an envelope and the stamp outside the envelope, mail it and hope to receive a reply.

Somewhere, my mother has a scrapbook filled with autographed photos of Hollywood celebrities of the 1950s; in some rare cases the movie star hand-wrote a note of thanks. I do not believe she “asked them anything” personal, so she did not receive any news making replies. (Luckily, she did not have this mailman working in her neighborhood: “Brooklyn Postal Worker Arrested for Not Delivering a Decade’s Worth of Mail.“)

Part of the appeal to the contemporary social media “ask me anything” sessions, and to the fact that many famous actors and writers and some famous politicians personally work on their Twitter/Facebook accounts and reply to us everyday sorts, is to be impertinent to them. Call it the “BaBaBooey Effect.” This is the opposite to the “Access Is Everything” attitude which we sometimes see in the press, the “‘Meet the Press’ Effect,” in which reporters whose employment depends on continued access to important people do not ask difficult, impertinent, questions, questions that might make the important person cut off future access. People who are not reporters might shout a verbal graffito (“Bababooey”) and make some noise, become a part of the story. They are easily ignored, but so are the Sunday morning talk shows, on which news is rarely found or broken.

Instead, news is more often broken when a reporter who knows that he or she will lose access to a famous news maker if they in fact ask them anything, goes ahead and asks that one question. Or when, as with shows like “60 Minutes,” the show reports on some shady business whose practices are worth exposing by sending a national reporter who will not face backballing in his or her own neighborhood because he or she exposed a neighbor’s shady business practices, like a local reporter would.

Early in my brief local newspaper reporting career, I actually heard this from the sidewalk below my second-floor apartment: “We can’t talk here. I see the light on in that hack’s room.” That felt like a huge compliment coming as it did from someone I was publicly writing about. “I’m a hack! I’ve made it.” Then I thought, “How does he know where I live?”

It was a criminal matter I was writing about, after all. But given one question to ask one person, I might go back in time to that night and yell out my window, “How do you know where I live?”

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 26 tells us, “You’ve been given the opportunity to send one message to one person you wouldn’t normally have access to (for example: the President. Kim Kardashian. A coffee grower in Ethiopia). Who’s the person you choose, and what’s the message?”

Daily Prompt: T.M.I.

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Most of us will live somewhere around 28,000 days (75 years, give or take), and it is estimated that most Americans meet three new people every day. That comes to approximately 80,000-plus people you have met or will meet in person in your life.

(Do you say a personal hello to the person who takes your money for coffee in the morning? Count that person, or start saying hello more frequently and don’t be a Scrooge.)

I have worked as a college teacher, a reporter, and as a retail salesman, and I attend various support groups through the week, so my numbers might wind up skewed a bit higher than that, so perhaps I have already met 50,000 on my way to more than 80,000.

That is a small city, 50,000, or even 80,000. It is as if I never left Poughkeepsie, New York, my hometown, and set out to shake hands with every permanent resident there, never had any other ambitions, and never left. We would call that a weird life, a not-very fulfilling one, but that number describes most of our lives. We do not meet all that many people. It is a football stadium, and not a large one.

Going back a couple generations, when a person could live an entire life in one town, which my grandmother who lived to be 98 did, a person probably met about three people a day. Maybe two-and-a-half. One of my great-grandmothers grew up in Pinsk, traveled across Europe with a baby in her arms, came through Ellis Island, and eventually lived out her years in Poughkeepsie. She probably met three people a day. We call our lives more complicated, and claim they are growing more so, but they really are not. Not in person. I do not think that this has changed by a large quantitative margin over the generations. Most of us know, truly know, only a handful of people at any moment; many of us do not even know the names of all eight of our great-grandparents.

I have not included my online life here. Not yet. According to WordPress, this blog has received over 3600 visitors from 50 countries, from some time in late January to today, at an average visitor count of 14 per day. (Since I started publishing every day, the numbers have increased; 1300 visits have been tallied in the last seven weeks.) I have exchanged personal notes with a few readers who make me blush when I think that they know my writing almost as well as I do. I hope I am an encouraging reader for writers, as well.

Until recently, I have limited my Facebook life to friends I personally know, but I have lifted that self-imposed stipulation recently and I am happy I have. I have under 400 Twitter followers and have had perhaps a dozen lengthy personal Tweet-exchanges of some depth in my three or so years on there. In my online life, as in my in-person life, thousands of encounters to find a handful of true friends I value and hope to someday meet.

When we claim that our lives are more complicated and information-packed, we are not, not most of us, speaking of our personal lives. We are reflecting that we have given ourselves the great gift of more. There are more outlets, more ways to declare to any who will read or listen that we are living a “purpose-driven life” or some other catchphrase (sorry, Rick Warren) without actually living that life. If I am telling you I am living one kind of life or another, how do I have so much time to testify to this? (There are exceptions; sometimes the testimony is a part of walking a walk.)

And every song not only has a singer but a listener, it seems. Everything we hear and read is, in its rawest sense, “information,” but not all of it is necessary. What you prepared for dinner certainly is information, and if I send you directions to my house, that is information as well. We can and will filter out each other. I can give you a virtual thumbs-up on a nice-looking meal and forget I did while doing so. You might be amused I sent those directions that we both know you will ignore.

There is a lot of noise in this world because everyone seems to have purchased a mic and an amp and kept their utility bills up-to-date. This just means good has more ways of declaring itself and so does evil. The numbers of people wanting to be heard have not changed over the centuries, the tools to be heard have.

One hopes that most of the people that we truly know and love contribute more to the information side of our lives and less to the noise.

“… Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there’s gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows …”
—”Everybody Knows,” Leonard Cohen

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 15 asks, “‘Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.’—Gertrude Stein”

Daily Prompt: Ice Water in My Veins

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Each one of us is a part of an interest group. This does not mean each of us must carry out the duties of being an official representative of said interest group, but, for example, I might be the only Jewish person you know. As such, I try to be a good guy and hope that this represents.

(I have been that one before, actually—when I lived in the Midwest—and had some fun with it. Not that there are not Jewish people in Iowa, but one couple that I got to know had not met one or claimed to have not. Which makes me a member of another special interest group: I may be the only Jewish person you know who was the first Jewish person someone met!)

I am male, middle aged, half-Jewish, half-Baptist, an alcoholic in recovery, tall, thin, and I have a disease that is disabling me. It might be Friedreich’s ataxia or it might be and probably is spinal muscular atrophy, type 4. Do any of these things merit me tapping on your shoulder and requesting attention from your charitable impulses? Or your attention at all?

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 20 asks, “The internet has recently been swept up by the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Is there a cause—social, political, cultural, or other—you passionately believe in? Tell us how you got involved—or why you don’t get involved.” The Daily Post helpfully provided a link to the ALS web page, but I also linked to an article explaining the “ice bucket challenge.”

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I have seen this meme almost as frequently as I have seen videos of people dumping water on their heads. It is an old photo and is often repurposed to make fun of Americans.

This will be remembered as the summer of the “ice bucket challenge,” and after a few weeks of popularity, the backlash has begun. The plethora of videos of people, famous and not, giving a 15-second speech about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known in the US as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease,” and then dumping a bucket of ice cubes and water on themselves “for charity” has led to memes attacking the popularity of the challenge, accusations of “slacktivism,” and some generalized online booing. When we look back at the ice bucket charity awareness campaign, in our heads we will hear someone say, “2014” and “I wonder whatever happened with that? Did they cure … what was it about again?”

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a rare disease. There are almost 7000 rare diseases, so approximately 30 million Americans, or 1 in 10, suffer from, cope with, accept, or fight against (sometimes all of these in a matter of an hour) a rare disease. A rare disease, as a concept, is not such a rare thing. If you know 10 people, you know a person with one. Multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s are also common rare diseases, a phrase I wish did not exist. And then there are the many, many forms of cancer, a disease that one can not wish—or work—hard enough to make it become rare.

It is not precisely known who started the ice bucket challenge or when, only that it started very recently, in 2014, and it was not about one particular health issue awareness charity. An early version, in New Zealand, was about cancer. (Because it is winter in New Zealand right now, the web site has a warning about doing the challenge outdoors.) A couple people in the United States adapted it to raise funds for ALS research and awareness. It took off from there.

Most of us are not medical researchers but most of us have known or do know someone with a illness or condition. Whether it is cancer, heart disease, or a rare disease, chronic or life-altering illness touches many of us and thus many of us know the powerless feeling that comes upon hearing such a diagnosis. We want to do something about it but we are not doctors. It is frustrating. I have seen the look in my mother’s eyes when talking about my disability. She hates the idea that I have something that she can do nothing about, like cook some chicken soup.

So we raise money for the charities that have been established to support the researchers who might possibly find the cure for the disease that affects your family member or friend. Almost every disease has a support community and researchers devoting time to study—at minimum—palliative care, or to even find cures. And that is where any controversy lies: How do I know that the dollar I donated is going towards a cure instead of merely buying lunch for the people who answer the phones and take the donations? The answer is, you don’t. As long as a charity makes its expenses public, I know that some of my donation may be buying lunch. I hope they are eating healthy. But I also know that some of my donation may be paying for the science-y stuff like test tubes, beakers, and a cure.

As with anything that has become popular suddenly, like a dance craze or a catch phrase, sometimes some part gets overlooked. Is everyone who is posting a video of themselves getting wet and icy explaining how to donate to the charity? Is every video participant in fact donating to the charity that they are raising awareness for? Some are not. Some have misinterpreted the whole thing as, “Get wet to not donate and challenge others to get wet, too.” That is “slacktivism,” but even slacktivism serves a public awareness purpose. There is no such thing as the social media police, even if I wish there was, so some people are simply showing off that they do not know what they are doing. The internet is good for that. The dollar that they do not spend on the charity they are not raising funds for is not a dollar that is making people sicker. They are merely getting wet.

ALS is a progressive, neurodegenerative disease that affects the nerve cells in the brain and spine. These cells deteriorate and die and stop sending messages to muscles anywhere and eventually everywhere in the body. The muscles atrophy and paralysis follows. It can strike at any age, and it can kill quickly.

Here is where my personal special interest group membership comes into play: The motor neurons in my spinal cord are deteriorating and dying and messages are no longer being sent or received in the muscles in my legs, which are slowly atrophying. I have a form of spinal muscle atrophy called “adult onset” or Type 4, and there are many links between SMA and ALS. They are siblings in the motor neuron disease family.

sma awarenessThe majority of SMA patients are infants and children, so the majority of SMA patients are voiceless. (Here is a great blog written by a passionate activist with SMA: “Living with Spinal Muscular Atrophy.”) SMA is the number one genetic killer of infants. Few of us are adults. Those of us who are adults owe it to the children born with this disease to help find a cure. Any progress made in finding a cure for SMA will most likely be applicable to also finding a cure for ALS, and vice versa. They are that close in their origin and symptoms.

So if and when someone on Facebook or Twitter challenges you to dump a bucket of ice water on your head for charity, and believe me, they will, take up the challenge, mention ALS and SMA in the same breath, include the websites you want to benefit (ALS and SMA), and dump the water. And then donate to one or to both. Don’t be a slacktivist. Chris Mosher, below, used the challenge to bring attention to both diseases: