Jonesieblog

I enjoyed this tirade against Facebook:

I hope you’re beginning to see the light. This is your life, and it’s ending one click at a time. Facebook brings out the worst in people. You put so much time and energy into something that makes you a worse person. Do you WANT this? I’m surprised you’ve made it this far into the article without changing tabs to check if someone wrote on your wall…

Reading things like this makes me feel immensely glad to be past the intensely social years of my youth.  Not that I’m a recluse exactly, nor do I have one foot in the grave, but folk in long-term relationships in their forties don’t really have the same frenetic drive to socialise as single folk in their twenties!  I have plenty of good friends, and not enough time to see them all regularly enough, so the expansion of my social circle is not a high priority for me (not that I am averse to making new friends!).  Nor do I care so much about what people think about me.

The construction of a social identity for one’s self has always been a potentially fraught journey (but also potentially exciting and fun!) – it seems to me that it might be more fraught now than ever, and I’m glad to be past it

This post makes me sound like a tedious old sod – am I bothered?

Stumble it!

This blog is misbehaving.  If you click on the link for a page or a post or a comment, you get shown the feed for the site.

Has anyone else experienced this?  I thought it might be evidence of hacking, but can find nothing to suggest that my server has ben compromised.

[UPDATE] The creation of this post seems to have fixed it.  Some kind of cacheing problem?

Stumble it!

Via Doug Belshaw and del.icio.us/popular I read this fascinating article about British youth. It does not make for cheery reading. There’s one aspect I’d like to pick up on:

On the whole, British children were more disconnected from their families, with nearly half of 15-year-old boys spending most nights out with friends, compared to just 17 percent of their French counterparts.

Our kids are also spending more and more time on computers talking to each other rather than with their parents. In the light of this statistic, would it be heretical of me to suggest that this is not such a great thing? I know that Bebo sometimes looks to me like a virtual Lord of the Flies.

As a society we lose the plot when we lose sight of the simplicity of our needs. In order to flourish, children need a secure, loving home environment and the time and attention of adults that care about them. These needs may not be sufficient, but they are certainly necessary. Web 2.0 does not provide anything that children need.

A child born today could reach the age of 18 without ever touching a computer or seeing a TV, and go on to lead a happy, successful life. Kids need the time and involvement of their parents, not the technological artifacts we have bought whilst working longer and longer hours away from them.

If children are already getting what they need, then these virtual adventures are great, but it appears that many of them are not. And in that case time spent online is just so much more lost opportunity to engage in the nurturing face to face interaction with adults that they so desperately need.

Stumble it!

I love where I live

Yesterday I spent the morning teaching, then sailed with school pupils in the afternoon, and went out again at the Sailing Club “Fun Friday” event in the evening. There was a thick sea fog over North Berwick in the morning, but it cleared to sunshine about lunchtime. Being out in the Firth of Forth in a sailing boat is just wonderful.

This morning, I strolled up to school to do a bit of last-minute preparation for the new timetable on Monday, then wandered down to the high street and along the beach to the harbour, where dozens of boats were lined up for the Sailing Club regatta.

After lunch on the beach watching the sailing, I headed home over the golf course.

The sun is shining and life feels very mellow.

Stumble it!

There’s an interesting story on the BBC news site today:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6711071.stm

The key to a happy relationship could be to accepting that some miserable times are unavoidable, experts say.

“Pure Buddhism”, I thought, and lo  and behold, the article goes on to describe how the therapists are recommending Buddhist mindfullness meditation as a technique to help to cope with family suffering.

“Life is suffering” is the first Noble Truth of Buddhism, and people often see this as a very pessimistic starting point for a philosophy of life, but in fact it’s not at all.  It’s just true

It amuses me that we think we have advanced so much as a species since 250BC, whilst in fact we are ailed by exactly the same afflictions as we were back then, and the path towards wholeness described by Buddha is just as relevant.

Stumble it!