The Starbucks of Pot: Flipboard, Pocket and The Randomly Intentional

Finding a new app can be some serious junky fun. Right now, I'm in that joy of new discovery phase with Flipboard.

I'm not a regular web-surfer. I have friends who do that for me, and send me links to funny cat videos, interesting articles, or the latest game or app for my iPhone. So, for me, Flipboard is sort of a revelation. I am now an official web-surfer.

Flipboard has done a few things for me. First, I am now more overtly aware of the endless nature of the www. It is a black hole through which all of Earth's sentient beings have fallen. Second, as ridiculous as this sounds in 2013, it is so much fun to surf the internet!

Each Flipboard square o' internet site spills out crumbs into a forest of topic. It is guiltless permission to indulge your short attention span. To gorge on dopamine. To excise all boredom from existence.

And then! Full stop. You find cake. You want to eat the cake. Only one tap away is the cake. The nibbhana. The source wherefrom the crumbs did fall.

I realize I've mixed up fairytales, cautionary tales and metaphors, but that's sort of what web surfing is all about, isn't it? It is both completely random and completely intentional.

This morning, I was flipping along and got caught by a hook on Slate. I almost missed it, there, stuffed under a full upper-fold size photo of a McDonald's Big Mac (CEO claiming to eat at McDonald's everyday. right.).

However, the story was right up my alley, combining an inherent commentary on capitilism and marijuana. It was called, "The Starbucks of Pot." I had to read this one so I tapped the link, and there it was, a full article on slate.com discussing Jamen Shively's "...plans to open chain stores offering a uniform, high-end product that satisfies America's craving for a mild buzz...'Yes, we are Big Marijuana,' Shively, 45, brazenly told reporters..."

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2013/05/jamen_shively_and_the_starbucks_of_pot_obama_should_let_big_business_marijuana.html

Shively actually told reporters that he is going to establish "...an industry that does not exist yet." (Id.)  OMGLMFAO!  Where the hell has he been for the last 50 years? Anyway, I digress.

Mind you, there is a long list in the "Content" section of Flipboard and it is easy to get carried away and just add and add sites until the pages of square-inched websites turns into a vast field of grids that you can flip through with no hope of ever focusing on anything whatsoever.

And, this is where anxiety starts to settle into the back of your mind.

You start to realize that you are not actually floating in a stream of soothing soundbites of information. In fact, your biological mother-board of a brain over-heats in its vain attempts to synthesize and categorize everything you see, hear and read on the www. Like it could!

Couldn't it? Shouldn't it?

No! But don't you worry, don't you fret! "Pocket" is here! Ahhh....Pocket. My savior. My redeemer. Hit the little weird symbol for share (which reminds me of one of those wooden chemistry sets) and voila! Anxiety abated.

On the other hand, Pocket is just another layer of Flipboard. Inside my Pocket is a growing grid of square-inched articles and photographs and videos -- these square-inched items may scroll instead of flip, but here comes that sneaky whir of anxiety again...

The black hole issue is a bit more personal. There are hundreds and thousands of internet sites and bloggers out there who are sharing information, insight and commentary. This is the marketplace of ideas that I spoke of in my prior blog post (May 24, 2013, Response to Alon Shalev and the Detractors of the Melting Pot).

Turkey explodes in a tornado of demonstrations - over a park? Huh? There are any number of first-hand accounts coming out live over the internet. You can get your answers immediately. For eg., my friend Alon again:
http://leftcoastvoices.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/turkey-what-is-happening/

I want to be a part of all that is good about the internet. I want to dive into the melting pot soup that is the WORLD. All sentient beings on Earth obstensibly have access to the internet - or will at some point in the future. If there is a future for humanity (not cynical, just realistic at this point - see myriad internet commentary, book reviews and articles related to over-population and capitalism's unique ability to morph with the needs of the times, i.e. how to deal with too many humans with too few resources).

Half of what I save into my Pocket are reference items:  movies, restaurants, cultural events to check out. The other half are brainy and stimulate a very primal need inside of me to investigate the state of humanity as it relates to humanity.

I mean to use "relates" as a transitive verb - what humanity is or will become as a result of creating a world-wide melting pot, or marketplace, of ideas and cultures. The idea that woke me up in elementary school and told me to join in the frey - to maintain my absurdly curious mind and apply it tenaciously to every being and everything. This marketplace of ides that is the very foundation of this grand democratic experiment commonly referred to as the United States of America (whether or not that experiment is failing is not a topic of discussion in this blog post).

I also mean to use "relates" as an instranstive verb - the relationship that is being established between humanity and itself - as it starts speaking to itself, looking at itself. The unique opportunity that is the www for each of us to know the world not just through our own unique aperture and perspective, but also through anyone else's unique aperture and perspective.

This seeking of mine on the internet - starting with email in the early 1990's (that's when I started on Hotmail) to the moment and modality in which I currently reside -- Flipboard, Pocket, Blogspot -- has been random. You know, you get lost trying to find Havaianas flip-flops on-line but it leads to an article about Castro which teaches you something about revolution.

This time, a friend points me in the direction of a cool new app like Flipboard - an internet surfing tool - and my natural and abundant curiosity (just ask my friends how many times I say "why" per day) gets to flipping and tapping and Pocketing and reading and watching what is happening all over the world in billions of minds everywhere.

Curiosity is said to kill the cat - but what if the cat needs to be killed (I'm not suggesting cats should be killed - I have two as the name of my blog and the photo avitar clearly shows). Perhaps curiosity can kill ignorance, complacency, lethargy and stagnation? What if that is true?

I am, in a random manner, leading myself through a maze of facts and perspectives that lead me to a point of critical mass inside my mind--an "aha" moment where I know what I want to share with you - you being humanity and me being humanity when we are all part of a world wide web.

Alas, there usually comes a point when the 100% absorption rate of a new app bottoms out, and then disappears. Almost as fast as it appeared. The Velveteen app icon will get thrown into the woods of lost memory to make room for another app.

Maybe Flipboard and Pocket will go that way, but I will have learned something new - not just new facts or ideas - but about what makes me groove in this world. And, that is ireplaceable.

Reply to Alon and the Detractors of the Melting Pot

Here is a comment I wrote in response to a post by my friend Alon Shalev at www.leftcoastvoices.wordpress.com - I highly recommend his blog, and his books - one of which just won an award in YA category of the 2013 Eric Hoffer Book Award - see www.elfwriter.com

When I was in grade school, I was taught this idea that democracy was actually a great marketplace – full of different types of people with voracious appetites for ideas and conversation. I was taught that the melting pot that is our American citizenry was just the thing needed to set up the marketplace – to make it hum. I just wrote a blog piece at http://www.onecattwocats.blogspot.com (blatant self-endorsement) about the way the internet and particularly “social” media have manipulated an amazing opportunity to expand the democratic marketplace worldwide into a means of using us for financial gain. Although I realize that the internet has, in certain circumstances become a deafening marketplace for democratic ideals, all in all, I am disappointed in the way things are going here on-line. That idea of a marketplace of ideas coming from the melting pot of our grand American experiment was what impelled me to study journalism in college, and ultimately to practice of law. As the years passed, I became more and more convinced that no one really cared anymore about that marketplace – about the different ideas and experiences that flow from the rich diversity that flavors our American melting pot – flavors that stand out one from the other – that tell us something about our neighbors – that give us an opportunity for exchange of ideas and cultures. How sad it is to read that the concepts of racism and zenophobia, etc. are being boiled about in an effort to melt the pot away.

I just described what blogging is to a friend of a friend on Facebook. I just made it up, of course. I don't really know what blogging is - to others. I just know that I blog, and I know that my blog contains what may be considered "diary" entries, but really is an attempt to relate my experience to the greater human reality that we all experience.

Wikipedia says that "blog" is a contraction of "web log." Blogs proliferated when techies created web-publishing tools so that non-techies could add content to the www. Other than those two back story items, my definition was similar to that on Wikipedia, i.e. blogs can be personal or political; content can be art, photography, writing, poetry.

What I didn't note either to my friend's friend on FB, nor to myself, was that blogging is usually an interactive tool, i.e. a social media tool. People write blogs. Others comment. Others comment on those comments. Etc.

Also, blogging has become a societal news stream due to larger media, think tanks, organizations, etc. creating blogs where posts are written by different authors on difference subjects. 

There is a way to traverse the blogging world in order to get "traffic," i.e. not just people viewing your blog from your own advertising (say on FB), but also from web searches, or friends of friends, or other bloggers looking for interaction. Sometimes, blogs can become so famous and widely accessed that they decide they don't want any more interactive tools (i.e. no comments, etc.). How exclusionary.

I have not yet figured out how the marketing of a blog happens. I suppose I'd like to spread the news of onecattwocats - but I'm not of the techie generation. For me to figure out these systems takes a long time.

For instance, I've been struggling through the morass that is tumblr now for about a year, and still only have about 200 followers (combined from several different tumblr sites). See www.fairchildwrites.tumblr.com or www.amateurallisaurus.tumblr.com or www.mypageforsparkle.tumblr.com.

I know there is a large writing community on tumblr, but I have no idea how to tap into the community except in a vary random way. There is no central command, so to speak, where you can find all the tumblr blog pages to go to where you can submit your writing for posting, or review, or comments...they are diffuse and once you find one site, the information they give you is also diffuse - so that I have no idea what's being offered or how to get involved. I end up sending messages to the "editors" - the bigwigs on tumblr who choose what poems or writing to publish on the main writing or poetry "features" news feed. They send me back (sometimes) vague replies about looking through the main poetry and writing hash tags for my answers. Which is what I had already done which led me to them.

Lost? Yeah. Me too.

Twitter is another social media tool that is lost to me. I don't have many friends who tweet. Most of my larger social friend group on this planet use FB. And, I'm not famous, or infamous (at least outside of my own milieu). So, how do you get followers? It seems that Twitter, for me, is just a place where others can market their thoughts, fame, products, etc. In other words, I follow them, but they don't follow me.

I am starting to get the feeling that social media is becoming just another marketing/advertising tool for the new breed of robber barons. The fact that we can all send messages to each other, and post funny memes (yeah, ok, what is a meme? do you know? this took me a long time to really figure out), or photos of your vacation. But, in reality, I'm thinking that 90% of its use doesn't involve us - it uses us and our information in order to sell us something. It's obvious in the advertising that is showing up more and more, not just in the right side feed, but in our main news feeds. Also, there is just a feeling I get when I use FB or Twitter that I'm just a rat in a cage talking to other rats in their cages.

The whole blogging phenom - whether it's here at blogspot, or on tumblr - that's simply a popularity contest. How do you get yourself noticed out of the hundreds of thousands of others doing the same thing? How do you get famous? Or, infamous.

Of course, once you get famous as a result of your blogging or tumbling, then you get to start making money off the rest of us - product placement can be invisible when someone is placing the product in a stream of writing or posts that appear to be, well, a stream of writing or posts.

And quality is really not the foundation of fame, or infamy. Of course. We all know that already, yes? What shocks? What awes? Or, who is better at becoming popular on the www.

Regardless, I realize I'm most likely writing to maybe a dozen friends on FB, or their friends. I've gotten one comment in the last few weeks of writing (from Connie Usry - who I adore and should write her own blog because she's so fucking funny).

But, I'm happy about the dozen or so people who click on my onecattwocats FB post and read up on my current life circumstances, my musings on any old thing (like today's blog), and my deeply personal journey through a major life transition (marriage ending; abandonment of a 17 year career that I hated). It's nice that anyone cares, or is amused enough to read. Frankly.

Although, I am ambitious by nature. I would LOVE to get hundreds of followers and starting long threads of comments where a true marketplace of ideas and information could emerge, and separate itself from the hype of the capitalist marketplace otherwise known as the www.