http://www.informationweek.comInformationWeeken-usCopyright 2012, UBM LLC.2012-11-27T09:00:00ZOne major belch from the sun can destroy our ability to connect to the grid and leave us in the dark for months. So says science journalist Lawrence Joseph in his new book, <em>Solar Cataclysm: How the Sun Shaped the Past and What We Can Do to Save Our Future</em>, reviewed by BYTE columnist Bob Guccione Jr.http://www.informationweek.com/byte/personal-tech/science-technology/apocalypse-now-here-comes-the-sun/240142352?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors<p><b><i>Update: Two dates have been changed in the column below. Thanks to reader Lawrence Joseph for the correction.</i></b></p> <P> <p>I miss the old sandwich board men from my distant past in England, who would walk around the streets with handwritten signs on their front and back proclaiming that the end of the world was nigh. They were low-tech prophets of doom in a then-low-tech world, for whom even the quaintness of cars and buses and air travel and public telephones was too great a violation of God's preferred simplicity. Every new day mocked them and stretched the generosity of the word "nigh". They have, so far, been wrong, although by now I suppose each of them has ultimately turned out to be correct in his own case. </p> <P> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/commentary/2012-Aug/NASA_sun1.jpg" /> <P> <p>Perhaps they were the last unsettled ghosts of World War II, trying to impart a message before they migrated to eternity. For a while they were fixtures on big city main streets and on the edge of parks where strolling crowds would congregate to hear speakers standing on overturned boxes. Eventually they became extinct, the only remaining trace their comical likeness in cartoons, symbolizing madness and futility. </p> <P> <p>But the Apocalypse never really goes away does it? It's the ultimate monster under the bed. Science journalist Lawrence Joseph is a latter-day sandwich board man who recently released his new book <em>Solar Cataclysm: How the Sun Shaped the Past and What We Can Do to Save Our Future</em> [Harper One, 2012], about how one particularly nasty belch from the sun could plunge most of the Northern Hemisphere into mass, death-causing, darkness. </p> <P> <p>You might think a writer whose last book was titled <em>Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation Into Civilization's End</em> had exhausted his reservoir of doomsday scenarios. But no, he hasn't. His new book makes the previous one look like a prose poem on flower arranging. Joseph has a theory he calls The Moody Sun Hypothesis, which in his words states that "fluctuations in the Sun's behavior shape our history, our daily life and future in ways that most of us have never imagined." Solar cycles rise and fall evenly, for a period of about 11 years, and the climax of the cycle causes "increased geomagnetic activity here on earth." Sometimes the sun gets "into a mood" and those troughs of time away from their normal pattern can last decades or centuries, precipitating Ice Ages and periods of great global warming. And every once in a while the sun gets almighty indigestion and literally passes gas -- billion-ton clouds of it. Destructive solar blasts wallop the Earth, profoundly changing the climate and human life built around an expectation of basically unchanging weather. According to Joseph, we're due for one of those any day now. </p> <P> <p>In his book, which is hugely enjoyable and well-written, he reports that three recorded extraordinary solar explosions hit the Earth in 1859, 1909 and <SPAN STYLE="text-decoration: line-through;">1929</SPAN> 1921. "The countdown to the end of civilization as we know it," he writes, "began on August 28, 1859, when Earth was engulfed by the first of two mammoth plasma fireballs." Jules Verne couldn't have started a book better than that! The second, bigger fireball hit five days later. Collectively this is known as the Carrington Event, after the British astronomer who observed and defined it. It disrupted the Earth's crude infrastructure of telegraph lines and sea navigation, sending boats off course, and started fires around the globe. Today, posits Joseph, our modern, sophisticated, interconnected and fragile electrical grid and technological infrastructure would be destroyed by the electromagnetic pulse from an equivalent blast and be out of commission for months, maybe a year. This would go beyond the conventional inconvenience and spoilage of a power outing. This would set off a chain reaction whereby every system and service we depend on would collapse and people would die of exposure and nuclear power plants would melt down.</p> <P> <p>All of which, I know, sounds mad. One hopes it is. But it's grounded in fact and serious scientists have come to the same conclusion. (See <em>Severe Space Weather Events: Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts</em>, written by the National Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with NASA. I mean, if you have it lying around.) </p> <P> <p>There is meaningful disagreement, particularly about whether such an immense solar blast could overwhelm the mighty protective shield of the Earth's atmosphere, with a senior Goddard scientist for one on record as saying it couldn't, and Joseph countering that it has several times before. </p> <P> <p>Joseph's wider, more diffuse and less sensational point is that scientists and ordinary people underestimate the effect the sun has on our planet. We take it for granted as our ultimate power source, but don't think about what the consequences must be when the Sun's delivery drastically fluctuates. We're oddly in denial of the correlation between solar activity and our climate. </p> <P> <p>Joseph told me about attending a solar physics conference in Colorado in the late summer of 2005, which, ironically, coincided with the second wildest weather week in recorded history -- Katrina had just hit and hurricanes Wilma and Rita were on their way. None of the presenters brought this up. At a coffee break Joseph asked a German physicist why. A), answered the scientist, everyone was only interested in talking about his own work, and b) it was politically incorrect. He told Joseph to read the handbook they'd been given, which concluded that the Sun was responsible for 30% of global warming for the last 150 years. Flabbergasted, Joseph asked why this wasn't generally acknowledged. "Scientists are afraid that polluters would seize on this and continue polluting," the German said, to which Joseph replied: "You're supposed to provide truth, not make policy decisions."</p> <P> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/commentary/2012-Aug/NASA_sun.jpg" /> <P> <p><em>Solar Cataclysm</em> cites a number of near hits in recent years -- a geomagnetic storm knocked out the electric grid powered by Hydro-Quebec in Canada in March 1989, and in October <SPAN STYLE="text-decoration: line-through;">2008</SPAN> 2003 a solar storm hit 14 transformers in South Africa, damaging the country's infrastructure for years. In this country we still apparently have not taken any steps to guard against the possibility of a really massive solar hit. </p> <P> <p>So there is Joseph, the lone prophet on the street, shouting that the end is nigh and everyone is just walking by. Why, I ask him? </p> <P> <p>"People are concerned with bread and butter issues, red and blue states," he reflected. "When you find something of awesome significance, you tilt. It renders one intellectually impotent. It's just too large."</p>2012-08-13T15:30:00Z<em>BYTE</em> columnist Bob Guccione Jr. discusses the implications of driving smart cars. No one wants to say this, but a technology that has to alert you that the car in front of you is moving is made for people who are texting. Or making a sandwich.http://www.informationweek.com/byte/news/240005326?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors<p>Recently I was at lunch in Boston in a restaurant where the floor-to-ceiling windows were opened onto the parking strip in front. A car was backing out of its spot and a mechanical voice, like the sort of emergency voice you hear in a hospital when it's on fire, boomed across most of Southern Massachusetts, "BE CAREFUL! YOU ARE BACKING UP! BE CAREFUL! YOU ARE BACKING UP!"</p> <P> <p>This was true and it was going to be a while yet before it was no longer true. Indeed the car <em>was</em> inching its way out of a spot, with enough room on either side to have built a small home, and nothing behind it for 20 yards. Eventually the car extricated itself, still reversing at the dizzying speed of three miles per week, and began to straighten out. But the otherworldly herald had not relaxed its vigilance and for as long as that car was going backward, be it until the end of time, and that looked possible, it was going to solemnly intone, "BE CAREFUL! YOU ARE BACKING UP!"</p> <P> <p>And I wondered, in that moment, what kind of mental marshmallow needs to be told a) that they are backing up, or that b) they should be careful? At what point, in the nano instant between deciding to leave the parking space, turning on the engine, engaging the reverse gear and <em>actually reversing</em>, does a person forget what they set out to do?</p> <P> <p>What happened to us? When did we become this pathetic?</p> <P> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/news/2012_June/Subaru_eyesight.png" /> <P> <p>Next year it will be standard on most new cars to have a rear view video display so that you can look forward while reversing--which I think by definition is wrong-minded. What, I ask, obvious ingrate for the ceaseless marvels of automobile technology that I am, is wrong with turning around and looking out the back window?</p> <P> <p>The idea is that a rear-view video camera will prevent harried soccer moms or uber executives from backing over their offspring, or neighbors. This is supposed to make cars safer, and perhaps if they drove themselves rather than being piloted by increasingly lazier human beings, it might. In reality it will achieve the opposite effect. I predict it will lead to not infrequent slaughter, as suburbanites crush pre-schoolers and pets they should easily have seen, by first taking inventory and secondly looking out for them. </p> <P> <p>I drove a car with the rear-view video screen once. It's unnecessarily disorienting. The resolution is that of a closed circuit television camera at an ATM. I suppose, with experience, you learn to make out objects, and the street, and possibly human beings and animals, in the rust-colored monotone of the discombobulating, tunnel-visioned picture rolling toward you, so I can't be too critical. And probably I'm just old fashioned to think that the best way to see where you are going is to look in that direction, and that if you can't for any reason, you shouldn't be driving. </p> <P> <p>But that's nothing compared to what's coming! Subaru is putting its mind-boggling EyeSight system into its mid-range vehicles in 2013. I'm afraid I don't mean mind boggling as a compliment.</p> <P> <p>Eyesight primarily has three components: Lane Departure and Sway Warning; Adaptive Cruise Control; and the ominously titled Pre-Collision Braking Control and Collision Mitigation. </p> <P> <p>Irritatingly, the lane departure thing sounds an alarm every time the car crosses a lane without signaling. Now, you are supposed to signal when you change lanes, and I of course always do, but not doing so does not quite rise to an act of terrorism, and is not really a threat to humanity in the sense that, say, nuclear war is. I believe lane crossing is something we have evolved to being able to cope with. There are cases where people fall asleep at the wheel, but they shouldn't have gotten into a car to begin with, and unless the dashboard can scream, "WAKE THE @%?! UP! YOU'RE DRIVING INTO TRAFFIC!," I don't think a little chirp-chirp will help.</p> <P> <p>Pre-Collision Control and Adaptive Cruise Control are intended to stop you from driving into the back of a car that has slowed or stopped in front of you. Admirable idea! But not novel. For instance, it has no doubt occurred to every driver who has ever gotten behind a steering wheel. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that it is so fundamental a concept not to drive into a vehicle in front of you, that it is probably not even taught in driving school. </p> <P> <p><b><hr style="color: #f00; background-color: #f00; height: 5px;"><blockquote>BYTE recently tested the iOnRoad app which performs many of these functions. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/byte/video/personal-tech/mobile-apps/240000419">Click here for that story, with video</a>.</b></blockquote><hr style="color: #f00; background-color: #f00; height: 5px;"></p> <P> <p>The system, according to the press release, "maintains a safe distance from the vehicle in front, braking and accelerating the car as needed and can fully stop the vehicle if it 'locks on' to another vehicle in front." Which, in <a target="_blank" href="http://news.consumerreports.org/cars/2012/08/the-subaru-eyesight-safety-system-makes-an-impact-at-the-track.html">testing by Consumer Reports</a>, and other reviewers, it apparently does with great and regular enthusiasm. That's right, it <em>stops</em> the car when it feels it should, even when the car did not need to stop. Oddly, no one has addressed the likely multi-car pile up, and the inevitable carnage, that will happen behind the suddenly arrested Subaru. </p> <P> <p>Putting aside the many perils of a car overruling its driver, what happened to the notion of a driver paying attention? Why, as a society, do we prize finding ever more layers to insulate ourselves from responsibilities? This unnecessary, busybody technology is going to kill more people than it could ever hope to save, by allowing them to think they are now somehow immune from the unpredictability of the road.</p> <P> <p>Eyesight also offers something called Lead Vehicle Start Alert, whereby when a stopped car in front of your car moves again, you are notified. My question is, why would you need to be notified? One might reasonably expect drivers to be aware of cars in front of them. Traditionally, that's been a given. </p> <P> <p>No one wants to say this, but a technology that has to alert you that the car in front of you is moving, is there, unintentionally or not, to accommodate people who are texting. Or making a sandwich. </p> <P> <p>One reviewer, in what I suppose was a positive review of EyeSight, wrote, without any hint of irony: "As a bonus, the system is also capable of pedestrian detection."</p> <P> <p>I think that says it all.</p>2012-06-13T08:00:00ZBob Guccione Jr. writes in his third column BYTE ME about Ray Bradbury, the renowned author who passed away last week. Fahrenheit 451, Martian chronicles, The Illustrated Man, The October Country, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Cat's Pajamas, I Sing the Body Electric!http://www.informationweek.com/byte/news/240001966?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors<p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.raybradbury.com/">Ray Bradbury</a> died last week. It was neither expected nor, given his age,91, a surprise. It was as if a light just went out in a house across the street. The world paused to consider the completion of a remarkable, genuinely original and particularly American life, but it did not stop, it moved on as it always does. Some people lit virtual candles at tributes.com, which seems like an even emptier version of the simulated grief of leaving bouquets of limp flowers and creased newspaper sheets against the chain link fences and doorsteps of the recently departed famous. </p> <P> <p>He was born less than a year after the first World War ended, the last great war to be fought mostly hand to hand, with rudimentary technology. He preceded radio and TV, in a time where there were parts of the world and indigenous peoples not yet known. One of his ancestors was burnt at the stake in Salem, as a witch. An exaggeration, discovered, it turns out, too late for her. </p> <P> <p>Bradbury claimed he'd rather be thought of as a magician than a science fiction writer, and that is definitely how he saw himself, and how he approached his story telling, with the child's wide-eyed sense of wonder and the adult's keen awareness of risk, but his science was LITERALLY fiction, written without even much attempt to be accurate or plausible. His Mars in "<a target="_blank" href="http://www.raybradbury.com/books/martianchronicles-hc.html">The Martin Chronicles</a>" is as habitable as San Diego. Rockets just went places, like buses, unfussed by things like space radiation.</p> <P> <p>Despite his further protestations, he was also a philosopher, a grand one in the sweeping way of Mark Twain and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, spinning primal tales suspended in impossible air. For most science fiction writers it has always been essential to create authentic worlds. Bradbury dispensed with that tedious obligation and instead borrowed the real one we live in and simply relocated it to unreal ones. He burrowed in the most fertile and elastic, and perhaps scariest, of all ground, the human condition, where time, place and scale can be twisted to suit any narrative. His stories are beautiful in their strangeness. </p> <P> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/commentary/2012-June/ray_bradbury_allbooks.jpg" /> <P> <p>Once, trying to make an important distinction about his work, he said:"I've written only one book of science fiction [<a target="_blank" href="http://www.raybradbury.com/books/fahrenheit451.html">Fahrenheit 451</a>]. All the others are fantasy. Fantasies are things that can't happen, and science fiction is about things that CAN happen." Like his best peers, such as Philip K Dick and Aldous Huxley, he was both anxious and optimistic about the future. Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian masterpiece about a time when books are illegal, does not need invading aliens to be terrifying, because the aliens are us, when our worst instincts have escaped. </p> <P> <p>His writing was meticulous. Not crisp, writing is not meant to be crisp like lettuce, and potentially flavorless. Bradbury was the opposite of flavorless, his stories were rich with the fat of ordinary human behavior. But there was never a wasted word in his prose, never one not working, as if his vocabulary shared his Puritan heritage. </p> <P> <p>My favorite short story of his was one I read in a long-forgotten anthology, about a businessman who, on his way home on a train late at night, suddenly, irrationally, decides to get off at a stop in the middle of nowhere, a station used only to drop off light cargo. On the deserted platform he meets an old, skinny man who strikes up a peculiar conversation with him, not friendly or unfriendly, and follows him to town. The old man tells the newcomer that he's been waiting for years for someone to get off at that stop, so that he can kill him. At first the businessman thinks the old codger is just mad, but he comes to realize that he's serious, and tries, unsuccessfully, to get away from him. The old man's mission is clear and inexorable, ordained in some distant insanity. Finally, the younger man turns around, puts his hand in his pocket and says "What makes you think I don't have a weapon in here and didn't come to this town to find someone to kill myself?" The old man certainly hadn't considered that and says "So that's the way it's going to be is it?" and the other man, sensing his ploy is working, says "That's the way it's going to be." The old man thinks about this, and, defeated, walks away. </p> <P> <p>There's no science in that story and no more advanced technology than a street lamp. There's no view of the future and there's really no past either. Just darkness, a void, an unexhaled breath of menace. It's a tiny story, as wide as the Universe. </p> <P> <p>I knew Ray Bradbury briefly in the late 1970s. We met through OMNI magazine and struck up a friendship. He was passionate about everything, but particularly space travel and how important it was to revive the recently stopped manned missions to the Moon, and go as soon as possible to Mars. Once I was at dinner with both him and Isaac Asimov, two sweet, grandfatherly, unprepossessing men talking fervently of an amazing world that didn't exist then but does now, yet neither of them had ever flown on a plane or driven a car, and to the end Bradbury didn't use a computer. </p> <P> <p>One day, I called him up and asked him if I could come over to see him and discuss writing. In one word he gave me the most valuable lesson a young, aspiring writer could ever receive. He said "No." </p> <P> <p>Nothing followed. After a few seconds of silence I stammered something about not wishing to have been presumptuous and he, sensing I was crushed, said, in a kind voice: "You can't talk about writing, you have to just write." </p>2012-06-04T16:30:00ZSocial media is not a passing fad, but neither is it engraved in stone. Already the latest article of faith--that the ultimate marketing message is the one a person shares with his circle--is shattering because more users are being paid to "Like." Social media is more a sandstorm of passing fads, individually ephemeral but collectively an inexorable force. So observes Bob Guccione Jr. in his second BYTE Me column.http://www.informationweek.com/byte/news/240001416?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors<p>Last summer, a friend of mine, the head of the media department at a large, global investment bank, invited me to his house for dinner with some of his top clients. At one point he asked me to say a few words, which I took to mean--perhaps, in retrospect, incorrectly--as "please deliver a seemingly endless address on the future of media." Which I did. <P> <p>The first thing I said is, social media isn't social. It's the exact opposite--it's anti-social. It's human beings <em>not</em> engaging each other, hiding behind the pretense of engagement. And then I said no one can sustain making money going against the grain of human nature. <P> <p>Don't get me wrong. I realize that some of the most successful new companies of the last several years are, in one form or another, from Facebook to Zygna, social media ones. But the biggest mistake we seem to make regarding new media is to invariably believe that whatever snapshot we see in front of us is engraved in granite and will never change. So when a trend spawns, especially one marketers can quickly define and articulate and therefore feel they understand how to monetize forever, people want to believe they've reached the top of the mountain, and the view is set, and belongs exclusively to those who are there. </p> <P> <center><div style="font-size:.8em;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jack/status/209064966500786176" border="0" target="_blank"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/news/2012_June/bird.jpg" hspace="0" vspace="0" border="0" style="margin-bottom:7px;" /></a><br />Photo By: <a href="https://twitter.com/jack/status/209064966500786176">Jack Dorsey</a></div></center></p> <P> <p>The latest article of such faith, for instance, is the conviction that the ultimate marketing message is the one a person shares with their circle. But this is already disintegrating, as it becomes obvious that since people are getting <em>paid</em> to "like" Coke, or GM, or whatever is squeezed through to them, they discover they like it very much and improbably often. They like the check, that's not in doubt.</p> <P> <p>Unlike all media to date, which has evolved slowly, steadily, from word-of-mouth to hand-created books tightly controlled by churches and kings, to the Guttenberg press, to mass-printed media and broadcasting, new media accelerates too fast to either properly comprehend or master. It's gloriously unpredictable and unknowable. In our attempt to hide the fact we don't know where media is going, we mistakenly try to assure everyone that the latest iteration is the finished product we must commit all our attention to. Ironically, that's the opposite of the forward thinking it postures to be. It's as if, having climbed the mountain from the base of Neanderthal grunts and cave paintings to the pinnacle of human expression, we're now tumbling head over heels down the other side, grabbing at anything we can.</p> <P> <p>Trends, by definition, change. Human nature really doesn't. We love novelty--while it's novel. Technology has exponentially sped up the gestation period of what's new and surprising, so, in a business sense, the novelty of something is not to be relied on. </p> <P> <p>What is important is the aspect of each perpetually morphing medium that is timelessly connected to human instinct. Facebook is more or less your fridge door digitalized, pictures of people important to you--comforting like the lights of bouys on a dark sea--and baby shower notices and shared affirmations like fortune cookie notes. Facebook's strength, when it's all boiled down, is not so spectacular; it's merely the virtual recreation of a town square where friends, who actually know each other and have a real intimacy, gather. It's not, in the end, the phony assumption that cajoling those friends to hand each other product samples will work.</p> <P> <p>We keep waiting for the paint of new media to dry. It never will. The Internet is too limitless to map future borders of communication. We feel pressured to <em>say</em> we understand where media is settling, and so give undue and false importance to companies and platforms that are just momentary reflections of a moving light. We want to aggrandize photo sharing as a cultural revolution, when really it's just people doing what they used to do on a smaller scale, through the mail. We want to believe that Twitter created the Arab Spring, but it didn't, any more than cell phones did, and not as much as--old school though it is--angry, determined, brave people talking to and inspiring each other. </p> <P> <p>Social media is not a passing fad; it's more a sandstorm of passing fads, individually ephemeral but collectively an inexorable force. I believe what we know as social media today is going to shatter, like a giant crystal bowl falling on the ground, into millions of much more defined micro and nano groups, which will coagulate around specific interests--a football team, a book club, an ideology, a type of wine--and, within an interest, be built around a single, instigating individual who pulls in friends who share the common enthusiasm. Those social media cells will be engaged and purposeful and very alive, constantly evolving and re-energizing. Those will be worth advertising to.</p> <P> <p>And I predict the biggest revelation in the advertising industry in the near future is going to be that ads work best when <em>not</em> embedded in material a person is trying to absorb or enjoy, but when kept separate from the content. Attached, yes, but not bred into it like a gene-splicing experiment. Unintrusive and undistracting, the right advertising will blend in seamlessly and organically, and be more retained by the viewer. </p> <P> <p>Well, anyway, you heard it here first.</p>2012-05-22T10:34:00ZFacebook, ads, stock markethttp://www.informationweek.com/byte/news/240000777?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors<p> I'm going to miss this column. It's been glorious writing it and time has, incredibly, passed in a flash. But all things must come to an end and no matter how much you prepare yourself, you're never quite prepared for the bittersweet emotions.</p> <P> <p> If you're a little confused, don't be --- this is, it is true, my FIRST column too, it's just that I am sure by the end of it, it will be my last, because my editor will fire me for embarrassing her. I wanted to say goodbye now in case I didn't get the chance later. </p> <P> <p> First I'm going to do some Sacred Cow tipping. I think the people who invested and will invest in Facebook's public offering are going to lose their money. </p> <P> <p> Lost amid the pageantry and intoxicating religious ecstasy of Facebook coming to market, necessary to inflate the stock price beyond any relationship to reality, are some sobering facts. </p> <P> <p> For one, their revenues slowed in 2012, despite a customer base ballooning to 901 million users. That is a bit of peeled gold leaf on the supposedly solid gold throne. And there are more and more public whisperings of skepticism at the value of advertising delivered. David Eastman, worldwide head of digital advertising for JWT, told the NY Times last week that although most brands want to be on Facebook, they don't fully understand who gets their messages and are unconvinced it translates into better business for them. "Right now the value of Facebook advertising is largely unknown," he said. </p> <P> <p> The stock price at the end of its first day of public trading was 106 times earnings. That's totally out of whack with business principles. If you owned a bakery, or a taxi service, or a magazine, you would not be able to sell it for 106 times what the business makes. And if the underwriting banks hadn't bought huge chunks of the stock to prop it up, it would have fallen beneath the opening price, which would have been embarrassing but more importantly given people pause as to the real value of the company. </p> <P> <p> More than half of the people who access Facebook do so on mobile devices that the company ADMITS it makes little or no money on, and has no certainty its mobile strategies will work. The likelihood is they won't. A fundamental problem is the difficulty of delivering ads on small screens crowded with the content people are checking. We may one day have the technology to deliver ads on the head of a pin, but at a certain point you shrink a message beyond purposefulness. That is a flaw in the company's potential. </p> <P> <p>But I think Facebook has already peaked. If you look away from the blinding magnesium-burning glow of the hype of how many users it has, you can see that a lot of people once obsessed with Facebook now use it less. To many it has receded to a service, useful for mass inquiries for recommendations, or learning about something you would have learned about some other way anyway, if it was important. </p> <P> <p> The once giddy sense that you have more friends than you really do dissolves. It gets, ultimately, exhausting feeding the beast. The luster wears off of posting every photograph you ever took, or memorializing every movement or observation. There are only so many times a person can exclaim LOL or WTF before his or her soul just gives up and disintegrates to ash. </p> <P> <p> I have never wanted a Facebook page. I like --- treasure --- the fact that I have lost contact with people I didn't like much in high school, or the first office I worked in, or I met once on a bus thirty years ago. It would frighten me to be suddenly invaded by those people. They are mixed memories, the way God planned them to be. And I am to them. Why drag around the emotional corpses of a lifetime? </p> <P> <p> I actually DO have a Facebook page. I didn't put it there, no-one knows who did or why. It is unvisited, like an anonymous and unattended grave, unadorned, gray and stale. But as unwanted as it is by all 901 million Facebook users and me, it won't go away. It cannot be removed. When I was told about it years ago by people annoyed I wouldn't friend them, I asked my assistant to deal with it and get the imposter page taken down. She's a friggin' tech genius and she couldn't. It even got into the press about her futile attempts. </p> <P> <p> Which brings me to the reason I will be fired --- that assistant is now my editor here. One day she asked if she could borrow my iPhone, the first version. I had used it for about a week, didn't particularly like it, gave it to her and more or less forgot about it. But years later I remembered she had it and asked for it back, but it was gone. She knew not where, she said. And looked at me like I had two heads and asked why I would even want a phone that was several generations out of date?</p> <P> <p> I hadn't thought of that but that's not the point, is it? </p> <P>