“Getting Back in Touch” via Facebook – Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants
Filed under: A New Reality, Immigrant Moments, Life, Pop Culture, Technology
Lately, my wife Jody and I have spent a lot of time getting in touch with old friends via Facebook. It started when I received a friend request from Larry. Larry and I were best buddies growing up. But after I moved away, we fell out of touch. I’ve looked for him from time to time via Google but never found any contact information. It had been 20 years since I last spoke with him. But through the wonder of social networking, we’re back in contact.
Larry connected me to another high school friend who connected me to a college colleague. It’s been a blast.
And it got Jody and I thinking: What if there had been a Facebook when we were teenagers some 30+ years ago. The whole concept of “getting back in touch” with old friends as we are doing now simply wouldn’t exist. We’d be connected from the start and would stay that way (unless we were “unfriended” for some unforgivable offense).
As we shared status updates, we’d always know what achievements the high school jock had attained, or what type of relationship an old flame was in (undoubtedly “it’s complicated”).
That’s the difference between us old fogeys and the “digital natives” – a term from the book Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society – to describe young people born after 1980 for whom the Internet was already a given by the time they hit surfing age.
Lev Grossman at Time Magazine wrote a funny piece this week that echoes what I’m saying. He lists a number of reasons why social networking tools such as Facebook are even better for “digital immigrants,” as Palfrey refers to us, who didn’t grow up with social networking. Among his conclusions:
1. We’re no longer bitter about high school. Digital natives may be “hung up on any number of petty slights,” Grossman says, but when a person who insulted us way back when asks to friend us today, we say sure. Because we’re bigger than that now.
2. Facebook isn’t just a social network; it’s a business network. Sure, LinkedIn may “officially” be the professional social media tool, but it’s Facebook, with its 175 million users (and counting), where we make most of our work connections.
3. Facebook lets you share pictures of your children. Digital natives may be snapping shots of friends at school or the beach, but we’re just kvelling by posting albums of our grand kids.
4. Facebook means you don’t have to remember e-mail addresses. Just log on and search. You never have to leave the walled garden.
5. We’re more careful about our privacy. You won’t see us posting half-clothed drunken pictures of ourselves at a fraternity party that may lead to a potential employer, looking to vett a job candidate via Google, to disqualify us without even getting to the interview.
Indeed, the relationship to privacy is probably the biggest difference between digital immigrants and natives, the latter of whom have no problem living their lives entirely in public.
For example, my teenager daughter last night bemoaned the fact that her grandparents asked about her new boyfriend. “That’s my private business,” she wailed. “They have no right going there.”
“But you posted it all in your status for everyone to see!” I countered. She stormed out of the room.
Now, in a controversial move that had the blogosphere up in arms this week, Facebook tried to quietly change its Terms of Service to so that if a member quits the site, his or her content will no longer be deleted.
The Dubai Apartheid Tennis Tournament
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Politics, Sports
You don’t have to be a tennis fan to be outraged at how Dubai is treating Israel and her favorite tennis daughter Shahar Pe’er.
Pe’er, Israel’s top female tennis star, and 45th ranked on the international circuit, has become a cause celebre since The United Arab Emirates (UAE) earlier this week denied her an entry visa to participate in the Dubai Tennis Championships – one of the most lucrative tournaments on the WTA Tour. Why? Only because she’s Israeli.
According to Reuters, WTA chief Larry Scott has said the $2 million Dubai tournament could be scratched from next year’s calendar if UAE officials persist with their stance of barring Israeli competitors.
Said Scott:
“There certainly will be (sanctions) imposed on the tournament but we’ll make those decisions following this year’s tournament. They were awarded this tournament with a very clear understanding and their agreement that if an Israeli ever wanted to play, they would be allowed to play. But (the agreement) had never been tested until now. Whatever we decide here will send a very clear signal.”
The Association of Tennis Professionals is waiting to hear whether Israeli doubles player Andy Ram will be issued a visa to the UAE, enabling him to play in the Dubai men’s tournament.
In an interview with the BBC, Ram suggested what should be done if he’s refused a visa.
“Maybe cancel the tournament or sanction them with money or something else,” he said. “But something should be done to make sure this situation does not develop again next year.”
Tournament officials defended their stance, with the extremely lame excuses that fans would have boycotted the event if an Israeli was allowed to compete and that Peer’s safety could also have been compromised.
Alan Solow, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, called on the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) to impose sanctions against the UAE. “We find the United Arab Emirates’s decision to deny a visa to Ms. Pe’er because of her nationality offensive, discriminatory and unacceptable,” the statement said.
The Conference of Presidents also called for sanctions against the Dubai tournament.
It urged its sponsors, Barclays and Sony Ericsson, to withdraw their support, and that the tennis championships be cancelled in 2010 “unless and until appropriate corrective measures are taken.”
“If they’re going to bar Israelis, why not just rename it the `Dubai Apartheid Tournament’?” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Wiesenthal Center.
But it’s not just Jewish organizations who are lining up on Israel’s side of the court. The Tennis Channel and the European edition of the Wall Street Journal are both boycott the tournament. In an interview with The New York Times, Ken Solomon, chairman and chief executive of the Tennis Channel, called the network’s move “an easy decision to come by.”
“Sports are about merit, absent of background, class, race, creed, color or religion,” Solomon said. “They are simply about talent. This is a classic case, not about what country did what to another country. If Israel were barring a citizen of an Arab nation, we would have made the same decision.”
And tennis mega-star Serena Williams, who won a third round victory in Dubai and moved closer to a semifinal matchup, gave a backhanded compliment to Pe’er, saying in essence that Pe’er was a good egg even if she was from evil Israel.
“I know she’s previously played in the Middle East, in Doha, so it was my understanding she would have the opportunity to play here also, despite legislative issues,” she said, according to AP. “Obviously I am disappointed she hasn’t had a chance to do this because she’s a good person and works just as hard as anyone else on the tour, and should have the opportunity to play. She shouldn’t be denied, it’s not right, she’s just a person. We are all people, no matter where we are from.”
And despite defending Pe’er, Williams made it clear who she was looking out for in defending her decision not to boycott the tournament – number one.
“I have to look at the bigger picture. The big picture is that Shahar Pe’er didn’t get a chance to play but, making an immediate decision, we also have to look at sponsors, fans and everyone who has invested a lot in the tournament. We are all going to consider what are the options for next year, but [this year] we didn’t even know till Saturday that Pe’er had been denied a visa. I think there are rules and protocols as to how you can proceed.”
Don’t worry about Serena, when they start banning blacks as well, we’ll be right behind you.
So that’s how Israeli musicians make a living
In a country where you only need to sell forty thousand records to go platinum it always boggled my mind how Israeli musicians make a real living. Sure, most A-list pop musicians aren’t suffering – but they still have to do a few obligatory nights at the Caesarea amphitheater to keep up with their bills. While making it big in Israel is as difficult as everywhere else in the world, touring in Israel isn’t exactly an exhausting activity. Musicians are always within reasonable driving distance from their homes, so a good night’s sleep is their own bed is almost guaranteed. The Israel Independence Day concert circut is also considered a lucrative time, with many musicians playing multiple concerts in one evening and many even traveling abroad to play for Jewish communities in the Diaspora.
And some musicians just get lucky. Take Yael Naim for example. Naim was launched into the spotlight from obscurity (and is apparently back there again) after her song poptastic hooky song “New Soul” was featured on the commercial for the MacBook Air.
What’s a sure way to make a potential fortune? Easy answer. Have a hit in the most populous country in the world. And that is kind of what happened to Sarit Hadad. Her gargantuan hit song “In the Heat of Tel Aviv” has been translated into Chinese and recorded by Chinese pop singer Yumiko Cheng. According to Ynet it “has been sweeping the music charts in China and Hong Kong in the last few weeks and has also become a big hit at dance clubs.” On his blog, Chinese producer James Ting writes about how he came across the song, the recording process and expresses how excited he was to hear about the positive reaction to the song in Israel.
You can see the original followed by the Chinese cover below. Which one do you like better?
On-line shopping
Filed under: A New Reality, Business, Food, Israeliness, Technology
I’ve been a catalog orderer for some time now, years, really. I got started with the J. Peterman catalog, yes, of Seinfeld fame, and from there moved on to a host of clothing catalogs, eventually doing much of my shopping on-line and continuing to do so once I moved to Israel (You just have to know people who travel back and forth between Israel and the U.S.). But food orders had eluded me. That was partially because there were no Internet food shopping purveyors in Israel, no Fresh Direct types in the land of high-tech. But that was before City Direct.
City Direct is an on-line shopping system created by Omer Eilam, an Israeli serial entrepreneur who began his online shopping empire in Jerusalem, and is planning on extending it to Tel Aviv, and then, New York. It’s been in existence for two years, but I only availed myself of it last week, thinking that our new family order required some additional scaling and efficiency on the errands front.
What’s great about City Direct is that you can order from one of my favorite supermarkets (SuperDeal, in our case, a very customer-friendly, local chain where they even bag your groceries for you, very un-Israeli), as well as fruits and vegetables and cheeses from Mahane Yehuda, coffee from the Coffee Mill, ice cream from Aldo, breads from Lehem Erez and other bakeries, office supplies from Office Depot and several other select stores. Once you create a master list, you can keep working from it, adding or subtracting whatever you need, and then choosing the day and time slot that you want everything delivered. It costs just NIS 16 for the service, and Eilam makes his profit by receiving a percentage from the suppliers.
He has 300 customers so far, primarily Anglo Saxons who he believed would ‘get’ this service, love the idea that they could order from their favorite stores, and then recommend it to their friends. In fact, he’s only working by word of mouth so far, with seven staffers who help him run the system, including one person who actually heads to the selected stalls at the shuk to buy the customers’ fruits and veggies. Eventually, he wants to include every kind of service possible, allowing customers to order their movie tickets, restaurant reservations, laundry, music stores — “what you want, from wherever you want it,” says Eilam, who plans on taking this model and using it as a platform between all kinds of purveyors and customers.
I love the concept, given the fact that like many people, I spend so much time online, and this allows me to avoid doing some of the more annoying errands out there. My husband, however, points out that it takes away from the often satisfying food shopping experience. He’s the one in our family who does much of the food shopping; I’m a shopper, but not a lover of food shopping. Too much schlepping. And aside from the fact that my groceries came 45 minutes late, what’s not to like about an Israeli company that calls to find out how you liked the service? And they say Israel isn’t a service-oriented country.
The Case of the Purloined Ice Cream
Filed under: Food, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness
The kitchen.
Frankly, I’m a total nincompoop when it comes to cooking. I imagine that if I lived alone with no family, I’d be the take out king. Chinese one night, falafel or schwarma the next. There’s no lack of fast food these days in Jerusalem. We even have our choice of upscale sushi bars.
But I have three growing kids who need a well-balanced meal, and money for eating out every night isn’t exactly flowing like Dead Sea water. So before Jody left, she made me a two-week schedule of meals along with a detailed shopping list.
The meals on the list were pretty simple. There was macaroni and cheese, pasta with cheese, grilled cheese toasts, burritos with cheese, lasagna with (you guessed it) cheese.
Actually, there wasn’t anything on the list that didn’t involve flour and cheese, except for one night when I was supposed to make “orange soup” with sweet potatoes, carrots and pumpkin. But it was a long day and I had two intense deadlines that were going to take me easily past midnight. So we ordered pizza instead…with extra cheese.
All of the starch was supposed to be balanced with a nice green salad. Emphasis on the “supposed to” part. I finally got around to cutting up some veggies at the end of the first week and then only when everyone was so constipated we could barely move.
There was also what I fondly like to call the Day of Disasters. It started when 17-year-old Amir and I were putting away the groceries. A large jar of oatmeal was perched just a tad too close to the edge of the pantry.
It crashed to the ground spewing glass and oats everywhere. I thought about scooping up the flakes into a new jar but I was worried that they might be too “crunchy.”
Then when I was carrying a bottle of olive oil to the table to dress the salad, it too slipped out of my hands, landing on a dinner plate and splattering all over 10-year-old Aviv’s pants. The bottle, thankfully, didn’t break, but the plate did.
Next, we sat down to what turned out to be a highly unusual dinner. Merav, our 15-year-old vegetarian daughter was eating out at a friend’s house, so I decided to treat the boys to some meat. At the store, a bag of what looked like meat-stuffed raviolis looked tempting. And a real change – no cheese this time!
I brought it home and heated it up, just like the instructions on the package said, then served the ravioli to my little carnivores. But something just didn’t seem right about it. The meaty dumplings looked forlorn on the plates. Maybe they needed some sort of sauce?
That’s when I realized it. These were kneidelach, meant to be served in soup not on their own. Everyone chuckled, Aviv came to my defense saying they were delicious, but I felt defeated.
As if it couldn’t get any worse, here was the coup de coup de grâce (or in our case the coup de glida): The case of the ice cream. Earlier in the day, we had bought a small carton of Ben & Jerry’s butter pecan. It’s our tradition that when we buy a decadent dessert, we always take a sample as soon as we get home.
Amir was the first in. He pulled off the top. The protective seal was open. He peeked inside. A large chunk was missing. He called down to Merav’s room – had she somehow sneaked in and snagged a bite while we were still bringing up groceries from the car?
No, she said. Same question to Aviv. “There’s ice cream?” he exclaimed.
Someone apparently had opened the ice cream in the store, scooped out a large spoonful, and put it back in the freezer. Both Amir and I instantly felt sick to our stomachs. We wondered if we had been poisoned.
Clearly this all was a conspiracy, a plot hatched in some evil fiend’s mind to make us miss Jody or, when we eventually told her the story, to compel her to take pity on us, rush back from her trip and cook up a nice pot of tofu and broccoli.
Ultimately we decided not tell Jody about our fortnight of eating badly…at least not immediately. Better she enjoys her time in the States fondly thinking of us as an independent and resourceful brood rather than a collection of culinarily-challenged cranks.
And truth be told, we survived just fine. No one was rushed to the emergency room or came down with rickets.
Jody returned last night. Jet lag may delay our departure from kitchen duty another day or so, but it won’t be long before we’re back to “normal life” and the boss is in charge again.
Welcome back sweetie. We’re glad your home!
And oh yes, when you go shopping next week, don’t forget to check the ice cream!
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