Edline Chun's Memorial at RIT.

Edline Chun is remembered by colleagues and students.

http://www.democratandchronicle.com/videonetwork/2205672590001/Edline-Chun-An-amazing-woman-who-will-be-missed-by-the-RIT-community

Winter storm photographs added to Flickr.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/maxlent/

These four photos are of my backyard during a snow storm.  I really like the tonality that falling snow adds to a landscape.

Sixteen new Photographs of Webster Beach Park and Lake Ontario added to Flickr.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/maxlent/

These images were shot along the shore of Lake Ontario at Webster Park Beach. 

New Photographs Added to Flickr

I've added 14 new photographs to flickr.com.  These photos are of Pittsford, New York.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/maxlent/.

So far, my photos on Flickr have had 54,923 views.

I like posting photos on Flickr rather than Facebook.  Facebook compresses images and destroys detail and color balance.

Good Bye Facebook

Why I left Facebook

The question that I recently had to answer was whether Facebook was serving the function of an online community or a superficial trivia bulletin board.  What provided the answer was a sad event.  A friend of mine, Edline Chun, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology was robbed and murdered by a killer with a gun.  I posted this information on Facebook and I also added a post requesting that my Facebook "friends" share a link to Even Ensler's Billion Person Demonstration for ending violence against Women.  Out of more than a hundred Facebook "friends" only three responded to my post about Edline Chun's murder and no one shared the link to Eve Ensler's demonstration.  A cousin of my wife's posted a message supporting the second amendment.

What I concluded was that I had three friends on Facebook and a about a hundred or so people who invited me to be their Facebook "friends," but who did not understand that friendship and community was a two way street.

The one way nature of Facebook friending should have been obvious from another observation I made.  Many of my "friends" frequently shared photos they had received from their "friends" with me.  These were usually cute photographs of animals or photographic oddities.  When I posted photographs, mostly scenic landscapes, they were almost never shared with anyone else.  I shared photos from "friends" who posted images that they created and that I thought that my friends would enjoy.  My standards for sharing were obviously lower than those of my Facebook "friends."

My expectations of Facebook were unrealistic.  Many years ago I read Howard Rhinegold's 1993 edition of The Virtual Community.  In his book he described one of the earliest online communities named The Well.  The following is an excerpt from his book.

"People who talk about a shared interest, albeit a deep one such as being a parent, don't often disclose enough about themselves as whole individuals online to inspire real trust in others. In the case of the subcommunity of the Parenting conference, a few dozen of us, scattered across the country, few of whom rarely if ever saw the others face-to-face, had a few years of minor crises to knit us together and prepare us for serious business when it came our way. Another several dozen read the conference regularly but contribute only when they have something important to add. Hundreds more every week read the conference without comment, except when something extraordinary happens."

"Jay Allison and his family live in Massachusetts. He and his wife are public-radio producers. I've never met any of them face-to-face, although I feel I know something powerful and intimate about the Allisons and have strong emotional ties to them. What follows are some of Jay's postings on the WELL:

Woods Hole. Midnight. I am sitting in the dark of my daughter's room. Her monitor lights blink at me. The lights used to blink too brightly so I covered them with bits of bandage adhesive and now they flash faintly underneath, a persistent red and green, Lillie's heart and lungs.

Above the monitor is her portable suction unit. In the glow of the flashlight I'm writing by, it looks like the plastic guts of a science-class human model, the tubes coiled around the power supply, the reservoir, the pump.

Tina is upstairs trying to get some sleep. A baby monitor links our bedroom to Lillie's. It links our sleep to Lillie's too, and because our souls are linked to hers, we do not sleep well.

I am naked. My stomach is full of beer. The flashlight rests on it, and the beam rises and falls with my breath. My daughter breathes through a white plastic tube inserted into a hole in her throat. She's fourteen months old.

Sitting in front of our computers with our hearts racing and tears in our eyes, in Tokyo and Sacramento and Austin, we read about Lillie's croup, her tracheostomy, the days and nights at Massachusetts General Hospital, and now the vigil over Lillie's breathing and the watchful attention to the mechanical apparatus that kept her alive. It went on for days. Weeks. Lillie recovered, and relieved our anxieties about her vocal capabilities after all that time with a hole in her throat by saying the most extraordinary things, duly reported online by Jay.

Later, writing in Whole Earth Review, Jay described the experience:

Before this time, my computer screen had never been a place to go for solace. Far from it. But there it was. Those nights sitting up late with my daughter, I'd go to my computer, dial up the WELL, and ramble. I wrote about what was happening that night or that year. I didn't know anyone I was "talking" to. I had never laid eyes on them. At 3:00 a.m. my "real" friends were asleep, so I turned to this foreign, invisible community for support. The WELL was always awake.

Any difficulty is harder to bear in isolation. There is nothing to measure against, to lean against. Typing out my journal entries into the computer and over the phone lines, I found fellowship and comfort in this unlikely medium."

In the year or two that I participated in Facebook, I never read anything remotely a personal as Jay Allison's story.  My lasting impression of Facebook is that it is terribly superficial and impersonal.  Or, I should say that my Facebook "friends" were this way.   

There were other stories in The Virtual Community that made me cry because they were so personal and courageous.  The book is an excellent read.  Unfortunately, more recent stories about The Well described a community in decline until it ended in 2012.  Will anything take its place?  I don't know.  Where do parents discuss they everyday anguish of caring for a sick child these days.  Is it Google + or are there medical discussion groups on Yahoo or Google that fill the gap?

On my medical Web site Medconsumer.info I publish links to medical discussion groups often run by patients, but these do not resemble The Well.  They are niche sites with few members.  

In the end, all I can say is that I will miss Edline.  She was the first person to hire me as a technical writer and she would sometimes invite me to lecture in her communications class at the Rochester Institute of Technology.  She was kind, gentle, and caring.  Most of her free time was spent volunteering for organizations that helped abused Women and other organizations that helped the disadvantaged.  She was 73 years old stood about five feet tall and weighed less than a hundred pounds.  Her murderer could have had anything they wanted from her for the asking.  Yet, empowered by gun and the freedom it provided them, they found the courage to kill her.  Before Edline's death I was against assault weapons, now I am militantly against all guns.  I sign every petition against guns that come my way and I write to my representatives on this topic at every opportunity. 

There were additional reasons why I left Facebook.  The Department of Homeland Security issued a warning about security vulnerabilities in Java.  I passed this information on the my "friends" on Facebook and not a single one responded.  After a few days I posted another message saying "Really, not one of you is interested in knowing this?"  One person said that they had looked up the message on Snopes.com and didn't see it listed and suggested that it might be true.  Their response left me feeling that as though I had little credibility with my "friends."

Then there was the postings about how one can have a home phone for free or how I have a smart phone and pay $100/year for the service rather than $70/month.  These posts generated no responses.  Either my "friends" weren't interested or they thought I lacked credibility.  It became clear to me that sharing this level of information was not as "likable" as cute baby animal photographs.

Every week or so I posted links to recommended Ted.com Ted Talks.  Not one "friend" commented on any of the Ted Talks.  Is knowing people who do not view Ted Talks worth the effort.  Obviously not.

There also seems to be a myth about the value posting to Facebook.  Many of the progressive organizations that publish online petitions request that recipients share their petitions on Facebook.  One goes so far as to suggest that one like will blossom virally into tens of thousands of new signatures.  In my experience, one in a hundred such shares are shared again.  My "friends" seemed to believe that sharing was some kind of special favor that is rarely given.

Organizations and businesses desire to be "friended" on Facebook.  Again, "friend" is not a good description of this relationship.  A local nature group was shocked when I posted a complimentary response to one of their announcements.  They said that they did not intend for readers to respond and that they were just using Facebook to post announcements.  Most organizations, even those in the arts and education, really do not want to manage replies to their announcements and pitches.  What they want is for their "friends" to share their message with more "friends" and have those "friends" share with even larger collection of "friends."  My experience with my set of "friends" suggests that exponential sharing cycles just do not happen.  When I shared announcements about local performances, art openings, and other events, none of my "friends" shared those announcements or asked if I was attending or if I would like to meet them an event.  Organizations and businesses see Facebook as a one to many push broadcast medium.  They do not want to be your "friend."

Would I have felt differently about Facebook if I had not read about The Well?  I don't know.