Likeability in age of the Internet

Watching a band do bad cover songs at a festival. Eighties band. Between the Romantics and the Go Gos and Bon Jovi the singer says. HEY LIKE US ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER AND EVERYWHERE. Then they go back to playing. The drums are too loud and you cant hear the keyboards and they aren't even together. The singer stops again. HEY GO TO OUR SITE AND LIKE US. Then they play Prince and massacre a bunch of his songs.

And it gets me thinking because the crowd is in to them. I mean they are playing to families who just want some diversion and people will probably go like them and I would if I liked them. But I don't. I don't like them. They are a bad band.No soul. No talent. They just like being on stage.  Liking should say I like this. I approve of this. But we have people telling us to like them for Google Ranking and linking. A bit like friends on Facebook. Since when was friend a verb?

But the band plays on and they are even sponsored by a beer company and they have a trailer and they sell T shirts. And the singer stops again. HEY LIKE US ON FACEBOOK AND TWEET US AND LET EVERYONE KNOW ABOUT US. And then he destroys Pink Floyd. 

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher
 

Why The Internet Wont Save You

If you have tried to get a job then you already know. Your resume goes out into cyberspace and nothing comes back. Worse you have to fill out three forms just to send your resume to a company and that wont even get you through their firewall. The truth is no one even looks at your resume. The same way no one looks at all those pictures on your hard drive or all those songs in your phone. The internet or digital tech has simply reached its level of  incompetency and is now cancelling itself out.

Lets say you want to publish a book. Boom. Done. You upload your file create a cover with Amazons dummy creator and there you go. Published. You are an author. Or you want to be a rocker. You upload your music and start selling on ITunes. You want to have your own movie. Shoot it and upload to Youtube. Of course the problem is that there a million other people doing exactly the same thing and when you go to tweet blog or facebook about your book song or movie then those people will too.

The internet then cancels itself out. Like the emails you never look at you simply cant get to what is offered nor do you want to. Think of a million hotdog stands along the road. You want one hotdog but which one do you pull into. You pick someone you heard of maybe a long time ago and ignore all those start ups. Or you just randomly pick. But what if someone flagged you down?

Lets say a real  person came out behind all those digital billboards and said come on in and try my hot dog. You would pull your car off the road and eat there. Why because you are human and so are they. You are not silicone and you are not bits and bytes. The truth is we have come full circle. The internet Yulp is now one of noise cancellation.

Better go hit the pavement.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

 

Disconnecting From The Connection Costs

Ok. Got rid of all the premium channels. Back to almost rabbit ears or at least rabbit ears and a lot of crappy reality television channels. Yes. We are going back to the stone age for nothing better than saving money. But come on. We did not watch all those channels anyway but now that they are gone it is a dark hole. Wow. There is nothing on.

Saw  my son on the couch reading a book. Reading huh? Yeah. Since we don't have television anymore. I would say we still have a good sixty channels but yes we lost the fun ones that were pushing out into the realm of a car payment. But this would be a good thing. Take out cable to get son to read. Hmmm. Hard decision there.

But yeah I miss the channels. I admit it but there is no turning back. I am attacking the connection costs and the land line is gone too. And now I am going after the cellphones. This is harder but doable. We might have to start over with flip phones. That bill is headed toward a small mortgage right now but I will get it down.

Hit the Internet .Yeah. I want your cheapest Internet. Oh that would be our  high speed Internet. No. I want your cheapest. That would be our high speed internet. Ok. I'll take that. The times are achanging. Who knows maybe I'll even read a book.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
http://www.amazon.com/The-Pitcher-William-Hazelgrove/dp/1938467590/ref=tmm_pap_title_0

The Slave Labor of the Internet

You see her every day. She sits down with her cup of water and large green tea. Her eyes are red and her hands chapped raw. She wipes the table carefully and opens her computer. She pours water into her tea and wipes her hands with a towelette. From her wrists up her hands are pink. She is gaunt. Her skin sallow. She looks like someone who never goes outside. She stares at her screen and waits for it to boot up. She takes out a small sticky pad and a pen. She then leans forward and stabs the keyboard.

For the next eight to twelve  hours she will frown and squint at her laptop. She will make notes on her sticky pad. Then she will surf looking for God knows what. But she is looking for something. Some marketing firm somewhere is paying her for hits or swipes or likes or views or just data. It doesn't matter. When they built the atomic bomb there was a giant factory to produce enriched uranium. It required hundreds of women to sit at a console and move a lever all day long day in and day out. This woman sits for hours upon hours with her hand punching the screen. Day in and day out.

She takes a break at noon  and bends her screen forward then goes for a walk around the strip mall. Usually for fifteen minutes. Then she returns and washes her hands again and pushes up her screen and starts stabbing her keyboard. She does not move for another four hours. And you see her every day and she is not married and you know from her clothes and from her frugality with the tea and the water she does  not have much money.

And sometimes she just sits there and stares out the window. Her only interaction is the dead lifeless imagery of the screen. There are now thousands  like her. Maybe millions. People doing the slave labor of the internet for a buck.

The PItcher...the story of a dream

 

The Timesuck of the Internet

How much time do you spend on the Internet and how productive are you? When you try and get something done on the Internet you are taking on the whole world. And the world pushes back and suddenly you cannot get the most basic thing done And you spend hours trying to get something accomplished. And it may be the only game in town but maybe there is a better way. Or try this. If everyone is there then who is really listening?

Take getting a job. Millions of resumes. You don't get any response. You get nothing. People send off resumes and nothing comes back. And yet you remain convinced this is the way to do it. Not necessarily. Maybe it is time to around the building and go in the back door. Lets say  the Internet is this huge building with only one entrance. The problem is not everyone can fit in that room. In fact a lot of people never even get up to the door because it is crowded.

That has happened on the Internet. You can tell. There are so many people trying to do the exact same thing that nothing happens. You get blown out by volume. Lets use a highway analogy. Too many people creates traffic and then you come to a standstill. Gridlock. This is what happens all the time on the net. The gridlock is you get drained out by the voices.

The challenge is to know when to walk away from the net and do the unexpected. You know. Like pick up the phone. I got something really radical. Go see someone in person. I bet you will have the whole place to yourself.

Rocket Man...the funniest novel since Russos Straight Man...Chicago Suntimes
 

I Got UVERSED!

Tech for the modern family is the great hemorrhage now. It is as essential as gas. Cellphones, landlines, cable, Internet. The modern family needs it all but the cost...the cost. So I was coasting along when I got telemarketed by a dude who told me he could solve all my problems. One bill. Less Cost. And he would give me a three hundred dollar Visa card for just signing up! Wow. One bill. All the headaches in one central point. And the channels, the speed, the service. Sign me up bro.

He did. And I got UVERSE. And I coasted along and my first bill was just seventy three dollars. Wow. You mean for my cellphones (3) my Internet and my basic tv and Internet just seventy three bucks? Something is wrong here. Hey, don't worry about it. You are good  my salesman told me. Your next bill will be more but you will have all the savings. Alright. Meanwhile I'm on the VERSE. DVRing from my phone. Watching shows on my phone. Styling.

And then I got my second billl....seven hundred and eighty three buckos! Wow. I got UVERSED! So I called up my now non existent saleman and was handed off to the call center. Hours on the phone and guess what I found out? It was all perfectly correct. You see I was prorated, serviced charged, over the topped, moved over, combined, double rated, adjusted, added onto, special serviced, upgraded, downgraded, new contracted, started up, signed on, subtracted, and finally specially considered and at the end I owed SEVEN HUNDRED AND EIGHTY THREE DOLLARS. Man... I get UVERSED!

And so I checked around. Yeah man. I had UVERSE. Past tense all of my friends. Nobody STILL had UVERSE. Everybody tried it and got the UVERSE Shaft and ended up back with their original carriers. So I asked for a payment plan. Oh yeah we have a plan...you pay now or you pay a week from now buy you are paying or we cut off your service...ALL OF IT. And so I knew they had me .

What about the three hundred dollar visa card? Oh  well. You have to stay with us for ninety days and then it takes six to eight weeks to get it. Wow...did I get UVERSED. So I am in my extraction mode, but it's going to take some time. So when they call you and tell you they are going to stick it all on one bill and that you are going to save a bunch of money...HANG UP THE PHONE.

Lest you get...UVERSED!

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Do We Really Need Congress Anymore?

Alright. You have a bunch of guys and gals who make very good money and get great health insurance and pensions and perks are able to publish books and go on television and parlay connections into making even more money and then we ask them to vote and put the people first and not their own jobs. Right. That's going to happen. Not in this I got mine economy. Those people do not want to fall back into the great unwashed of the sweaty middle class. They got there and they want to stay there and they will vote for what is politically expedient every time. So to hope that the fat cats in Washington are going to pull a Jimmy Stewart and suddenly become Mr. Smith is a fantasy.

So where does that leave us. Well, here is my proposal. Get rid of congress and let the people decide for themselves. In the beginning we needed a representative body because people could not vote on every issue of government. Not so anymore. We have the Internet. We are wired. Why can't the people decide for themselves? Think about it. The American Jobs Bill comes up. Ok the deadline is thirty days from now. The nation votes. You go to the site and click YES or NO. Think about it. A democracy deciding for themselves beyond the reach of Special Interests!

We can do this now. At the end of the thirty days the votes are counted and the people decide. Should the Bush Tax Cuts be discontinued for the wealthy? You have thirty days to decide. Bam. Just like that. If the people want the wealthy to be taxed then they will be taxed. This would be true Democracy because there are too many people to be bought off. Congressman get bought off routinely. Sad but true. But the people would decide what is their best interests and majority rules.

The age has changed. Congress has worked well for over two hundred years but we now have the technology to take representative democracy to the next step. We have to break the Washington Wall street Corporate stranglehold. So why not give the power to the people? It would be the triumph of the people over the oligarchy. So...why not? Just give Congress their walking papers and we become congress.

A Congress of the People. It has a ring to it.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man

The Firewall of a Book for the Writer

Writing a book is very remote. You work on books for years and years and then it is sent out. Reviews come back from many sources. Some are paid reviewers (though less and less) and many are book sites and bloggers. But they come back commenting on a piece of stone. You cannot change the book. The book is finished and someone may or may not like the book, but there is nothing you can do.  Very rarely will an author take another crack at a book and make changes after it is published.

Not so in the blog land. The comments that come back hit you right away. You literally just finished writing the thing and people are telling you what they like and don't like. Many times the comments get personal. This is unfortunate and a real byproduct of a medium that is so open. Because the writer needs a firewall. He needs something between himself and the reader or he becomes influenced and loses his objectivity. Death for the writer.

Some might say that is the advantage of the Internet. That the net is more real time, interactive, and therefore more malleable to what is now. That may be true for information driven blogs, but for fiction or even for editorials which use the same device as fiction, this does not work well. Writing is highly subjective. We have all read the bestseller we thought was terrible. Or the book a friend doesn't like and we love. This is the nature of writing. But somehow the writer must remain above the fray. He must have something between himself and the reader. A firewall that allows him to write in isolation.

So all one can do is turn off the comments or ignore them. To have your ego stroked or torn down is an infringement on the author's vision. It is simply not the same as a critique of a story or a novel. On the Internet, sadly, things get personal very quickly.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out in the fall.
www.billhazelgrove.com

The Supreme Indifference

The Internet is empowerment. This is what we always hear. It gives everyone a chance to be seen, heard from, opinion, publish, record, you name it and you an do it. We can go and launch podcasts, release press releases, twitter into our neighbors face. In Walt Whitmans words: "I will not be denied!" So this is a great thing...yes? Well it is here so it doesn't matter if it is a great name or not. But if you have sent out a resume, published a book, distributed your song, shot out your press release, blogged until your fingers fall off, then chances are you have experienced the great democracy of the internet's colossal yawn. Or to put it in a more direct way: nothing comes back. This is a strange sided effect of our collective empowerment. Let's take publishing. Once upon a time there was a thing called a publishing industry and if you wanted to publish a book then you had to deal with this beast. Chances are some of you have caught the supreme back hand of that industry in a few form letters. You had a choice, make your work better or give up any idea of publishing. Even then of course there was no guarantee, but if you did manage to get through and your book published then you were let into an exclusive club. Your book may not become a bestseller but you were a published author and this brought a certain result you could count on--a book in a store, maybe one, books in libraries, maybe a few, and respect of your peers. Let's take pubis hing now. You want to publish a book, you do it. In fact you can do it in a week. Boom. Game over. You are a published author. Might get some reviews, sell a few, maybe your book will get bought by New York. The problem is not that you have sidestepped the old publishing industry its just that everyone in the new industry is publishing a book. So what does that mean? Think of a highway with a thousand hotdog stands. You all have a product but only so many people can eat hotdogs. It is at this point you experience the supreme indifference of the internet. The great cyber void just doesn't give a damn. Self publishing is honorable. Authors from Hemingway to Faulkner have done it, but rarely was the result so instantaneous or cheap. This kept a lot of people who did not have the passion for the word from atemping this very expensive and arduous endeavor. Indifference on this scale is something few of us have had to contemplate. We usually always had someone to register our work, our individuality. But with everyone wired into the same circle there is just not enough individuality to go around. So people don't respond. You send out a hundred resumes, a hundred books, a hundred CD's and nothing comes back. That's because we are talking numbers in the thousands floating around out there. You are one of the many. And what is worse you can be dismissed with a keystroke. While others had to deal with the supreme indifference of a country scattered and barely wired, we have to deal with cacophony of voices calling from every corner for our notice. And we miss this because we are busy calling out too. Like ships in the night, we end up missing our own salvation.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/