Considering I spend the majority of my work time and a solid portion of my personal time (hiking is not as much fun this time of year, in the arctic-like temps of Rochester, NY) in front of a computer, I’m always reading something, be it tweets or client emails.
Rather than bore you with the parade of business-oriented emails and IM’s (though some are quite funny), I’ll stick to enlightening folks on the interesting articles and/or books I’ve encountered recently in my visual travails.
The stories, blog posts and commentary continue to pour out on Gawker’s site invasion and hacker espionage with major Web entities like LinkedIn, Twitter, Yahoo! and more prompting users to change passwords. Even though I breathed a sigh of relief when I did not appear on that list, it still made me take note and change my important passwords to something special, different and long.
Social media, gadgets and video, all are a regular part of all our lives today, particularly to someone who works in technology PR. But sometimes I wonder if we’re not sacrificing something when we comment on a friend’s Facebook post, rather than getting out and going to see that friend. Apparently I’m not alone. This week, NY Times writer Nick Bilton penned “One Step Back From the Digital World” discussing how he and many top media people are finding ways to disconnect from technology and reconnect with the people in their lives face-to-face.
How quickly we forget. With so much news in so many formats coming at us each day, it’s no wonder that in a moment’s time today’s scandal becomes yesterday’s forgotten story. It seems just a few months ago we were all up in arms over the horrific oil catastrophe in the Gulf, aka BP’s royal mess, and yet one has to Google search these days to find out information on something that will take decades to resolve. Until this week that is - the U.S. government finally filed a civil lawsuit against BP and a whole slew of other offenders in the original spill. Hopefully some of the victims along the coast will see a little of the money that eventually comes out of that suit.
I could take up days of your lives with all the articles I come across each day, but rather I’ll end with a bit of literary praise for a classic book I just recently finished by author Pulitzer Prize winning author Pearl Buck, entitled “The Good Earth.” A wonderful book following the trials and tribulations of a Chinese rural family set against the framework of the great social change that occurred in China just before the great 1949 Chinese Civil War. If you like to read about other cultures, enjoy historical fiction and can appreciate a tale that is in one sense the story of a family and the other a story of an entire society, then I highly recommend this book.
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