Category — Caught My Brain

I would have called this “caught my eye,” but that sounds a little too surface.  You know how sometimes a post or article catches your brain, seeps into your skin and you think about it all day?  I bookmark a lot of things, but I think I’ll unload them from time to time much like the Friday Blog Roundup, except at irregular intervals based on what is in my bookmarked folder, not necessarily about ALI subjects, and sometimes from personal blogs and sometimes from larger sites.

The first was the story of Karl Kesel, a comic book writer and inker (who created Superboy, a character I collect for the twins right now), who is selling off his comic book collection to pay for the bills associated with the adoption of his child and his child’s medical bills.  I don’t know why I was so drawn to this story: because he wrote the infamous Thing storyline where he came out as Jewish (which was meaningful to me)?  Because I am so touched by the idea of a person wanting to be a father so much that he’d be willing to trade his most valuable tangible things for a chance to be in the life of this other person.  Because this is the manifestation of love?  My G-d, if that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.  But I was drawn to this post and kept returning to it.  And I hope the “Save Karl’s Comics” campaign takes off because it would confirm my idea that people are ultimately good at heart despite how they behave in comment sections.

The next is a post called “I Don’t Want My Kids to Be Addicted to Technology.”  Take out “kids” and replace it with “loved ones” because this feeling doesn’t just extend to the twins.  I worry about all of us addicted to technology.  I worry about us taking cues from each other about what is appropriate socially and all of us leaping off the technology-usage cliff like lemmings.  We see our friend checking her phone in our presence, so we start checking our phone in her presence and then checking our phone in other people’s presence… you can see where this leads.  Phone peeking frightens me more than mindfully sitting down at a screen and immersing yourself in screen time.  I’m trying to peek less — both for myself and for the example I set for others around me.  And at the same time, I know that peeking is a stress-reliever for others.  That if someone took my books away from me and told me I had a book addiction, I would be more than just a little annoyed.  I do have a book addiction; taking my books away from me would be the way you’d get me tweaking.  But I think it’s interesting that — as adults — we’d never admonish a person for being addicted to books (though I was definitely mocked by my peers in grade school) though we assign a judgment for being addicted to technology.  Why is that?  Especially when we apply it to technology that divides (ear buds and an iPod) AND technology that draws people together (FaceTime)?

The last post is a two-parter.  I’ve been thinking about Mat Honan’s hacking story for a few weeks now, as well as his follow-up post about how he got his digital life back.  It made everything seem fragile online, as if there were no systems that were air-tight, impenetrable.  I mean, there aren’t.  But stories like this remind you of how much human error factors into our relationship with machines.  It also confirmed my suspicion that for every piece of technology that we celebrate for convenience sake (cloud computing!) is also the very same technology that works against us (cloud computing!), that creates those soft, muddy holes for worming in.  I don’t know — I think I’m just highlighting it as a PSA even though it sounds as if Amazon and Apple are working to change their policies based on this story.

So that’s what caught my brain recently.