Facebook thinks I’m old and fat.

We all should know how it works by now — Facebook takes info from your profile & IP address and then targets ads at you in the sidebars. To make it even easier for them to tailor to your consumer needs, if you do or don’t like something, you can rate it with a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down” and even tell them why you did or didn’t like the ad. Seem fair enough. I cooperate with them and rate ads sometimes, because hey, I’ve actually found some pretty interesting stuff through them, and isn’t that their ultimate purpose?

One would think.

However, the past few weeks I’ve noticed that my ads were increasingly about weight loss.

I’m going to be frank here — although I am a woman and generally we with the XX chromosome sequence do tend to be more self-conscious about our weight — I’m not fat.

I’m not as thin as I used to be, but honestly, I can’t complain and I don’t, especially on my Facebook profile. I don’t even talk about my weight in my status updates, which are constantly changing. Why? Because I’m not an insecure teenager starving for attention (otherwise I’d be on MySpace), and I’m comfortable in my own skin. Sure, I’d like to lose 5-10 lbs., but who wouldn’t?

So I repeatedly tell these weight-loss ads “thumbs down” and tell them “irrelevent,” “uninteresting,” and even “offensive.” They keep coming.

I got to the point where I just ignored them. I rated other ads that are more relevant to me, things about writing, public speaking, social media, local bands, etc.

Then I turned 30.

Now, apparently not only does Facebook think I’m fat but it also thinks I’m old. Case in point:

It should be stated that I am not a mom, nor do I look as old as 30 (I’m sure there’s a strong correlation there). As  a redhead, I am extra careful of exposing my skin to the sun for very long, else I turn into one big freckle and seriously increase my chances of getting skin cancer. “Pale and proud!” is a motto of mine. I’m OK with this, and I count my blessings for having a combination of good genes and brains enough to not tan, therefore, I do not have wrinkles.

Yet Facebook is relentless. No matter how many “thumbs down” I give these ads, according to their keyword spiders or little men on the other side of the monitor, or however these things are decided, I am now not only fat but old. And not just “aging,” but old. For the past few days, this is what I’ve gotten:

This, my friends, is Barbara Walters. Granted, Barbara Walters is one of the women at the top of my personal “Most Admired” list, but nowhere on my profile do I mention her name. And God bless Bawba Wawa, she does look great for her age (though I’m sure she’s had work done), she is 78 years old.

Now, not only does Facebook think I’m fat, but it thinks I’m old, too.

Facebook thinks I’m Sally Struthers. Or someone like her, I mean. Hovering somewhere around 60, bigger-boned than I’d like, dying to look younger and thinner.

Amazing.

What kind of off-targeted ads do you get on sites like Facebook and other networking platforms? What/who do you think Facebook thinks you’re like? I’d rather not be like Sally Struthers, but I’m sure there’s got to be worse … right?

… right?!

Waiting for my new keyboard to come — a chronicle.

January 18, 2009: Day 1 without my MacBook Pro.

Sent out tweet around 5:00 p.m.: “I haven’t tweeted all day. I’m OK, but feeling so empty and useless without my MacBook Pro. This is going to be a long week.”

Online activity sparse: Checked email, sent a couple DMs via Twitter. Read a couple blogs and commented. Couldn’t get into Facebook because it was down for maintenance or something.

People have been asking me what I’m doing this day or that day. Realized I can’t answer those questions because my schedule is in my iCal, in my laptop, which I cannot access. Yes, it does sync with my iPod, but I haven’t synced my iPod in a few days and have added appointments, etc. since then. Must do my best to remember everything. Think I’m going to follow Laurie’s lead and go back to using an actual planner that you write in. Have been thinking about it lately, the only hindrance being my god-awful handwriting that is illegible even to me.

Otherwise, have been mapping out in my head how much of my current projects I can do with this bare-bones PC and whatever tools/data I’ve got online. Think I should attempt to map these things down on paper now, trying my best to write legibly.

10:13 p.m. I’m sitting here, staring at this monitor, and I feel like I have a LOT to do … I just can’t remember what any of it was.  This is not good.

January 19, 2009: Day 2

Tweeted around 10:30 a.m.: I’m tweeting, I’m tweeting … how long is this going to last? I feel like less of a person without my MBP.

Last night I tossed around the idea of getting a new MacBook Pro. I definitely can’t afford one, but I’m in the process of officially starting my own business (attempting to, anyway), and thinking about including a new MBP in my startup costs if/when I apply for a loan. I can justify the need. Even if this had never happened, I needed to buy an external hard drive because my internal one only has about 15 GB left on it. My MBP is about 3 or 4 years old, it’s tired, and its programs/OS need upgrading. Hmm… may be wishful thinking, but I can dream, right?

There is a Tweetup tonight in Novi at B-Dubs. My presence is expected and I would like to go see everybody, but I’m also kind of in the dumps and should probably stay home and get as much work/research done as I can tonight. I don’t know.

January 20: Day 3

Went to the Tweetup in Novi last night. It was huge. Had a lot of fun (maybe too much?), met a lot of cool people, hung out with friends. Brain is kinda fuzzy today. Was going to go to Shauna’s & Kasey’s inauguration party tonight but fuzzy brain + not getting the stuff done I wanted to last night = no go.

It’s technically the third business day from when I ordered my keyboard, but it did not come. It was a good mail day, though: I received my $50 rebate card from Verizon, my $15 from the Nielson people for taking that looooooong online survey, and my coupon for a free Whopper I earned for “sacrificing” 10 Facebook friends … before Facebook sacrificed the app. (They were people I barely talked to/knew, anyway.)

I need to bury my face in some research now. Well, maybe I’ll eat first. Maybe a Whopper.

January 24: Day 4

I am so non-productive that I can’t even think of what it was I was supposed to do in the first place. My brain feels like Jell-O when I stare at my TweetDeck. Tried to accomplish what would be a relatively simple errand for anybody else but me, ended up visiting two VG’s & an out-of-order ATM with no dice. Found a dead bird in my yard, can’t wait to take care of that on garbage night.  Attempted to do a lot of research and read until I thought words were going to spill out my ears. I think my brain is broken. Nothing is going right for me today.

January 22: Day 5

Keyboard finally came. Woo-hoo! Spent an hour or so installing it and putting my computer back together. First thing I did when I turned it on was sync my iPod. And now, I am so tired of dealing with this whole issue that I’m grumpy and don’t even feel like being online. Hmph! Signing off.

January 22: Day 6

I realized that after all that, the left side of the keyboard isn’t secure and flat like it should be, and my caps lock doesn’t work. I’m going to have to take this thing apart all over again and try to adjust it. WILL THIS EVER END?!

(That was hard to type without caps lock, btw.)

Image 1 by makelessnoise, image 2 by Daniel Eizans, image 3 by hyperscholar.

In the middle of a(nother) Zoe-induced geek crisis. Back later.

I was preparing for a very productive weekend of catching up on my RSS feeds, writing a business plan, remodeling a website from the inside out, preparing a presentation, and putting together a video.

That isn’t happening now.

Thanks to my lovely, adorable, attention-demanding cat Zoe, all of the above and then some has been put on hold until I receive my replacement MacBook Pro keyboard anywhere between 3 to 6 business days.

Last summer she was the main proponent in a traumatic orange soda incident that I documented on my now-defunct other damn blog , but in a nutshell I graduated to a new level of geekdom when I decided to save a lot of money and fix it myself by taking apart the laptop, cleaning it up inside, and installing a new keyboard.  I decided to document the process because I’m that big of a geek. Little did I think that I would actually have to perform the exact same surgery again.

Fast forward to today, and I was just about to start on Task #1, when Zoe was being her usual self and not leaving me alone. She jumped on the table and was sitting on my notebook, then decided to jump down when she realized I wasn’t going to give her the attention she deserved was demanding. In doing so, the force of her pushing off the notebook to jump caused the notebook to collide with a glass of Coke, which in turn fell right on my keyboard in some kind of bizarre Rube Goldberg-like incident that lasted half a second.

Thankfully (?), this time I knew exactly what to do and took the proper procedures to reenact the prior surgery, thinking that after I extracted the keyboard from the rest of the laptop, could just pop the keys off, clean everything up underneath and (God forbid) inside the computer if it reached there, pop the keys back on, and put the MacBook Pro back together like nothing ever happened.

Or so I thought.

After taking everything apart and discovering that the CPU had not been touched (*phew*), I proceeded with the, well, procedure, and then spent I-don’t-know-how-many-hours later trying to pop the keys back on. I learned the hard way that it’s not as easy as “just pop back on,” and could not get them to stay all the way on … some not at all. Finally, I accepted defeat and realized I’d have to buy yet another new keyboard and do this aaaaaaalllllllll over again.

So basically, the majority of the stuff I wanted to accomplish this weekend and this week are on hold, mainly because the important data I need just happen(s) to be trapped on the hard drive of my naked, dismembered MacBook Pro.

I do have a PC from which I’m typing now and will be checking email periodically (even tweeting a bit), but I won’t be able to do very much except whatever I can do via cloud computing … which actually might be more than I once anticipated now that I think of it.

Still, my point is that I’m bidding adieu to the internets for what may be a week à la Celine Dion … meaning it’s not really goodbye but “I’ll be less around” … until I decide to go on another farewell tour or something.

Today’s word, boys and girls, is “boundaries”

Silly me, I thought people understood what those were.

Let’s be clear about something here: Social media, for all its benefits, can have its pitfalls.

It is no secret that the meaning of the word “friend” has been immensely diluted, thanks in part to social media networks such as MySpace and Facebook. I mean, when The New York Times takes notice, you know it’s official.

This isn’t another post on another blog about social media netiquette. Frankly, I don’t care how you use Facebook or Twitter or whatever to connect with people, whether strictly business, strictly personal, a combination of both, or to promote your cousin’s pickle factory. Really. But there’s a difference between a netiquette faux pas and crossing the line into people’s personal boundaries, and recently I’ve seen it happen more than once.

And it needs to be addressed.

Read more

The high school notebook: social media casualty?

I’ve got a milestone birthday coming up in the not-so-distant future, and as everybody gets older, they start to reflect on the past a little more. I tend to focus not necessarily on my past, per se, but on how our technology and culture has changed in my lifetime. (I guess you could say that’s my inner anthropologist.)  In the past couple years I have come to some startling realizations, including the fact that today’s teenagers don’t know what life is like without the internet.

That alone blows my mind, but at the same time, I have a hard time thinking that I could live without it, either. Yet, I remember the 1990s and the excitement I had when I got my first bag phone, and I remember when my 16-bit Sega Genesis was the most advanced video game system money could buy. I spent hours upon hours trying to beat Sonic the Hedgehog until the day I finally did, then started all over again. The predecessors of social media are hardly anything to shout about now, but remember when that stuff was cutting edge?

Today, thanks largely in part to the internet, our technologies and ideas are advancing so quickly that some are quick to dismiss yesterday’s social media before the rest of the world (believe it or not) catches onto them. I do consider myself an early adopter, but I also have a hard time letting go of the comforts of the past. Which brings me back to my teenage years in the ’90s, and I’m wondering if my main writing outlet* back in those days, is, in fact, a true thing of the past — the notebook.

In every decade prior to the internet, prior to blogs, prior to “online journaling” in the late ’90s, prior to the term “emo” being commonplace, every introspective, the-entire-world-doesn’t-understand-me, angry teenager (usually wearing black) had one. At any given time they would be seen scribbling their deepest thoughts, dreams, desires, and bad, teenage poems in their notebook, whose plain-colored cover was speckled in lyrics by their favorite musicians (“you made me throw it all away/my morals left to decay…“), doodles, stickers of their favorite bands’ logos, and other miscellany. Coffee-stained, tear-stained pages between tattered covers, these sacred teenage manifestos were carried to school, to coffee shops, to the library — literally everywhere — until the very last blank page had been filled with ink.

These were our blogs.

Only, the difference between our teenage notebooks and today’s blogs is that if somebody read our notebook, it was a devastating, embarrassing invasion of privacy that would seem like the end of the world, only to be chronicled in our next notebook in exaggerated detail of how that traumatic experience changed our already-skeptical outlook on humanity to an even more jaded, cynical state. There was an unspoken code between teens who wrote in notebooks that you do not read somebody else’s notebook unless they chose to share something in it with you, at which occasion said two (or three) teens were then on a much deeper level of friendship.

I don’t think this happens anymore.

Granted, my window to the world of the American teenager is limited to my quiet, 14 year-old nephew and a 17 year-old blond girl who plants and sells pumpkins for college money, a former espresso-slinging coworker and “friend” of mine on MySpace, a platform I rarely use anymore. But she is very into MySpace, and admitted to me she rarely reads, so I doubt she has a notebook like I and many of my peers did.

Our culture has shifted to one where teenagers want to share everything online (sometimes too much), whose lives are willingly open books, and sometimes regrettedly so. Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that “93% of teens are online, and 64% of online teens ages 12-17  have participated in one or more among a wide range of content-creating activities on the internet, up from 57% of online teens in a similar survey at the end of 2004.” (Pew Internet & American Life Project: Teens & Social Media, 2007)

The same report also reveals that about two-thirds (66%) of all teens with an online profile restrict access “in some way” with girls being more protective of their posted images overall than boys, and most teens being protective of their personal information by purposely using false information and/or not revealing last names. While this is reassuring from a privacy/safety standpoint, and the entire report is fascinating, they focus on numbers when talking about the content created, not the actual quality or subject matter of said content, which is not something easily measured.

My point is that because teens are so willing to share their created content with the world, it’s more “Hey, look at me!” and less “If anybody reads this I’ll DIE.” With the birth and the propagation of the internet came a dramatic shift in our culture and the way we communicate which is to be celebrated, but at the same time also came the death of a longstanding medium of American adolescence–the notebook–and thus, a part of our teenage culture’s past.

Am I wrong? Is the teen-angst notebook still alive and well, or is it truly extinct? Did you have one? Do you know any teenagers who still carry out this custom?

*I also wrote for the teen section of The Flint Journal, but I wouldn’t consider that a “main writing outlet,” as only a handful of high schoolers in the county did that.

**Photo by austins_irish_pirate