If you've been wonder what palliative-care-minded bloggers are writing about, here's your chance to find out ...
Next month, PCGR will be hosted by Death Club for Cuties (gotta love that name!).
Showing posts with label Online Communication. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Online Communication. Show all posts
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Palliative Care Grand Rounds
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Fran Johns has a new blog
A sign of how out of the loop I've been lately (due to a cross-country move), Fran Johns has a new blog, and it's taken me a month to notice.
But enough about me: The blog is excellent.
Fran focuses on issues facing the elderly, and Baby Boomers who have elderly parents. The current post shares the thoughts of a retired California physician on Death with Dignity now that he is facing his own mortality. It's amazing!
Other posts address housing options for seniors and palliative care.
The site doesn't load real well format-wise on my Mac computer, but it looks like the site is still in beta testing, and it's worth bearing with any format issues to get to the content. Fran is one of my favorite writers in the blogosphere, and I try to read every word she posts. Trust me; she's that good.
Friday, June 12, 2009
What happens to your MySpace when you die?
Seen on the brilliant Fail blog: a questions from Yahoo Answers—very sincerely, I think—asking what happens to your MySpace account when you die. The best answer reads: "It deletes itself. You see when you die a little microchip goes off in your brain and instantly deactivates any accounts you may have. They are inserted a few months after birth, everyone has them." It is indeed a Yahoo Answers Fail.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Blog from a Hospice Patient
One of my favorite discoveries from this month's Palliative Care Grand Rounds is this blog: Life as a Hospice Patient.
It's a near-daily account of one woman's experiences going through hospice care. Her pain. Her treatment. Her embarassments. Her visitors.
Entries like "Getting harder to breathe," are not for the faint of hear, but it's a great window into the world of hospice, and I think a personal perspective that maybe only blogging could give us.
Friday, June 5, 2009
PCGR Volume 1, Round 5
This month's Palliative Care Grand Rounds is up at the blog of Angela Morrow.
PCGR is a survey of sorts of what's been happening in the blogosphere regarding death, dying, end-of-life issues, etc. Hopefully, once it's been going on long enough, we'll all start to get the sense that us palliative-care focused bloggers and blog-readers are part of some type of community. In fact, I can see it happening already.
Check out the entry, and check out Angela's blog.
Previous entries of PCGR can be found here. And thanks again to Christian Sinclair for initiating the project!
Sunday, May 17, 2009
What Would Jesus Twitter?
Christian Sinclair alerted me to this site, which he called a good taste fail. I couldn't have said it better myself.
The site is called Tweeji and is like Twitter, except all the tweets are from dead celebrities—Bettie Page, Shakespeare, and yes, even Jesus Christ himself.
Today, Jesus tweeted, "My day is about to end and I never got to go Jew fishing!?!? I need to buy a planner."
Are you kidding me? Is it just me or is this incredibly tacky?
Other tweets seem more like actual quotes from the famous figures, just abbreviated into tweet-like spelling.
Walt Disney tweeted today, "I believe that entertainment usually fulfills sm vital & normal curiosity 4 every man, woman & child who seeks it."
Would this site be funny if the application was better, or is the whole concept a fail from the start? It's definitely sensationalistic and interesting on that level, but once you get beyond the shock-value of the concept, most of the tweets are either completely straightforward and a little boring or so shocking that they can't help but be offensive.
Check it out. Let me know what you think.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Cybertime—Repost
Reposting my post on Cybertime from earlier in the year that Dr. Sinclair called a "must read," in his Palliative Grand Rounds so that anyone looking for it doesn't have to search through the archives ...
My mom just opened up a Gmail account that she rarely uses. Actually, rarely is an understatement. She set it up, but really hasn't opened it up since then. So, it has sat idle for a couple of years. But fed up with hotmail spam, she finally decided to switch to the account.
My mom just opened up a Gmail account that she rarely uses. Actually, rarely is an understatement. She set it up, but really hasn't opened it up since then. So, it has sat idle for a couple of years. But fed up with hotmail spam, she finally decided to switch to the account.
When she logged in, she found 177 emails from my grandfather, her father, who died 14 months ago.
Email provides us with some odd timing situations ... and they can be especially odd when the sender has passed on. Susan Barnes writes about the nature of time as it relates to email: "Email messages are sent and received in asynchronous time." Barnes continues, "Cybertime blurs the distinctions between past, present, and future because when reading email we have the sense of simultaneously conversing with the author in cyberspace."
The author sends the email in the present, and it sits in our inbox for a given amount of time ... could be seconds, could be years. However, whenever it is that we get around to reading it, we perceive that moment to be the present for the email.
In cases where the author has since passed on in real-time, the reader is left in a strange, emotional limbo in which the author still exists in cybertime.
Most of my grandfather's emails were silly forwards about safety at the gas pump, not forgetting 9-11, etc., so it probably wasn't as jarring as receiving 177 new, personally crafted emails ... but still, it had to be a disquieting experience for my mother.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Monster Truck Death
On Friday, a six-year-old boy was killed at a Tacoma monster truck rally. (The below video is not graphic. The opening photograph is the most intense shot.)
Four more rallies were scheduled at the Tacoma Dome throughout the weekend. All events took place as scheduled. None were canceled or delayed for extra safety checks or out of deference to the family of the deceased boy. And according to The Associated Press, the very next show after the death was sold out, and prospective ticket buyers had to be turned away.
Before the opening of the following show, a moment of silence was held in the boy's honor. But is this enough? It seems the show just went on as the big money-making machine that it was without real thought of the death it caused or new safety measures it might need to enact.
Something else I've noticed about this situation: The Seattle PI allows comments after their online article on this event. And many of the comments point to the fault of the parents for taking their child to the monster truck rally, saying they got what they deserved (a dead child) for taking their child to a risky event. (Update: Having trouble linking to the PI, but a similar thing is going on at the Times, so I will link to their discussion.)
Now, the PI article, which presumably these commentators have just read, cites statistics that state monster truck accidents have killed five people and injured more than 40 between 1992 and 2007. Those aren't large numbers. It's still probably something you can go to with the expectation of safety. I'd have to look up statistics, but the zoo might be more dangerous than that. Certainly, driving your child in the car is more dangerous. And would you throw blame at a parent who just tragically lost their child in a car accident that clearly wasn't their fault?
I know it's an overarching trend, but I'm frequently shocked by the tenor of some people's comments online. It reminds me of Marshall McLuhan's theory of Discarnate Man. What will we say and do when separated from our physical selves. (McLuhan meant it in relation to the telephone, but it perhaps applies even better to newer technologies.) I doubt someone would face-to-face accuse a grieving parent of being responsible for their child's death because they took them to a monster truck rally.
Four more rallies were scheduled at the Tacoma Dome throughout the weekend. All events took place as scheduled. None were canceled or delayed for extra safety checks or out of deference to the family of the deceased boy. And according to The Associated Press, the very next show after the death was sold out, and prospective ticket buyers had to be turned away.
Before the opening of the following show, a moment of silence was held in the boy's honor. But is this enough? It seems the show just went on as the big money-making machine that it was without real thought of the death it caused or new safety measures it might need to enact.
Something else I've noticed about this situation: The Seattle PI allows comments after their online article on this event. And many of the comments point to the fault of the parents for taking their child to the monster truck rally, saying they got what they deserved (a dead child) for taking their child to a risky event. (Update: Having trouble linking to the PI, but a similar thing is going on at the Times, so I will link to their discussion.)
Now, the PI article, which presumably these commentators have just read, cites statistics that state monster truck accidents have killed five people and injured more than 40 between 1992 and 2007. Those aren't large numbers. It's still probably something you can go to with the expectation of safety. I'd have to look up statistics, but the zoo might be more dangerous than that. Certainly, driving your child in the car is more dangerous. And would you throw blame at a parent who just tragically lost their child in a car accident that clearly wasn't their fault?
I know it's an overarching trend, but I'm frequently shocked by the tenor of some people's comments online. It reminds me of Marshall McLuhan's theory of Discarnate Man. What will we say and do when separated from our physical selves. (McLuhan meant it in relation to the telephone, but it perhaps applies even better to newer technologies.) I doubt someone would face-to-face accuse a grieving parent of being responsible for their child's death because they took them to a monster truck rally.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Remember savetoby.com?
Poster Jackie Lynn brought this up in my previous post about suburban/rural rabbit hunting. Do you all remember the website Save Toby? The site was notorious in 2005 because its author threatened to kill a cute little bunny named Toby if visitors to the site didn't donate $50,000 to his paypal account. (You could give to the cause by simply leaving a donation or by buying merchandise that said "Save Toby.") Had the money not come in by June 30, 2005, he said he would take Toby to the butcher's to be slaughtered for food.
If you go to the site now, you'll see a notice that Toby is safe; enough money was raised. ... But remnants of its controversial days remain. There is a picture of Toby in a pot, presumably one which he would have been boiled in. There are recipes for different ways to prepare Toby.
Here's an article from MSNBC about the controversy—I don't think it will surprise anyone that animal rights activists didn't like savetoby.com.
I guess I thought the site's owner was joking all along, and it got blown out of proportion. I never took it seriously. But maybe he really would have killed Toby. If that had been the case, maybe it makes it a little better that he planned to eat the rabbit, but it still smacks of extortion if it all was real.
If you go to the site now, you'll see a notice that Toby is safe; enough money was raised. ... But remnants of its controversial days remain. There is a picture of Toby in a pot, presumably one which he would have been boiled in. There are recipes for different ways to prepare Toby.
Here's an article from MSNBC about the controversy—I don't think it will surprise anyone that animal rights activists didn't like savetoby.com.
I guess I thought the site's owner was joking all along, and it got blown out of proportion. I never took it seriously. But maybe he really would have killed Toby. If that had been the case, maybe it makes it a little better that he planned to eat the rabbit, but it still smacks of extortion if it all was real.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Nicholas Francisco Investigated by Amateur Web Detectives
I missed this article when it was published late last month, but it's about my coworker Nicholas Francisco who went missing on February 13, 2008. Nicholas has apparently become a subject of fascination for amateur investigators online. There are several websites dedicated to trying to uncover exactly what happened to him.
For those who don't know, Nicholas left work around 6 p.m. on February 13 and never made it home. He never showed up to work the next day. About a week later, police found his car in a condo parking lot that seemingly has no connection to Nicholas. (You can read my initial reactions from February here and here.)
Anyway, back to the cyber PIs: On the surface, I guess this seems harmless enough. Just collecting facts, passing some theories back and forth. It's nice that they're interested, and who knows, maybe someone will turn up something police and friends and family will miss.
But here's what bugs me about the entire online dialogue over Nicholas' disappearance—it's been bugging me since this situation began, and I at first resisted writing about it for fear that being too personally focused into the drama was giving me a lack of perspective. But I feel more confident in my ability to analyze now. Some of the people who are not directly involved are just not sensitive enough to the stakes here. When he first went missing, an entry was posted on the blog for The Stranger, a local Seattle paper. And someone commented that they knew where he was, they saw him sucking them off behind the nearest 7-11. Many other commenters asked why he deserved to have all of this attention drawn to him in the first place. And especially at those early stages, friends and family were reading these types of postings to see if anyone commented with information or helpful tips. It was really hurtful to read things like that.
Now these casual investigators aren't really doing anything wrong. But they are posting rumors. They're asking questions about whether Nicholas, a married father of two, was secretly gay with a boyfriend on the side. They are saying he had rumored connections to the Wet Spot, a whips-and-chains sex club. Without evidence. Even on a blog, you don't post that kind of stuff about an individual person unless you have something to back it up.
For those who don't know, Nicholas left work around 6 p.m. on February 13 and never made it home. He never showed up to work the next day. About a week later, police found his car in a condo parking lot that seemingly has no connection to Nicholas. (You can read my initial reactions from February here and here.)
Anyway, back to the cyber PIs: On the surface, I guess this seems harmless enough. Just collecting facts, passing some theories back and forth. It's nice that they're interested, and who knows, maybe someone will turn up something police and friends and family will miss.
But here's what bugs me about the entire online dialogue over Nicholas' disappearance—it's been bugging me since this situation began, and I at first resisted writing about it for fear that being too personally focused into the drama was giving me a lack of perspective. But I feel more confident in my ability to analyze now. Some of the people who are not directly involved are just not sensitive enough to the stakes here. When he first went missing, an entry was posted on the blog for The Stranger, a local Seattle paper. And someone commented that they knew where he was, they saw him sucking them off behind the nearest 7-11. Many other commenters asked why he deserved to have all of this attention drawn to him in the first place. And especially at those early stages, friends and family were reading these types of postings to see if anyone commented with information or helpful tips. It was really hurtful to read things like that.
Now these casual investigators aren't really doing anything wrong. But they are posting rumors. They're asking questions about whether Nicholas, a married father of two, was secretly gay with a boyfriend on the side. They are saying he had rumored connections to the Wet Spot, a whips-and-chains sex club. Without evidence. Even on a blog, you don't post that kind of stuff about an individual person unless you have something to back it up.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Posting and then Killing
The 25-year-old man who killed 7 people in the crowded Akihabara district of Tokyo on Sunday posted a thread on an online bulletin board that was titled "I will kill people in Akihabara." The final post to the thread was at 12:10 p.m., and his attack began around 12:30 p.m. According to the NY Times, the final post read, "It's time."
Today's article in the Times says that in other posts, "Mr. Kato [the attacker] described leaving his home just west of Tokyo, heading to the capital and worrying that rain could hamper his plans. He wrote about arriving in Akihabara at 11:45 a.m."
How do we handle criminals who are willing to blog or post or text about their crimes in advance of them happening? Could the police have done more? Did they have enough information to do anything? And why would he post? Is he trying to become famous? Or taunting the authorities?
Whatever the reasons, it's a sad and senseless crime. And it must be all the more shocking to a country that is not accustomed to random, mass violence. All my best to my friends and family in Tokyo.
Today's article in the Times says that in other posts, "Mr. Kato [the attacker] described leaving his home just west of Tokyo, heading to the capital and worrying that rain could hamper his plans. He wrote about arriving in Akihabara at 11:45 a.m."
How do we handle criminals who are willing to blog or post or text about their crimes in advance of them happening? Could the police have done more? Did they have enough information to do anything? And why would he post? Is he trying to become famous? Or taunting the authorities?
Whatever the reasons, it's a sad and senseless crime. And it must be all the more shocking to a country that is not accustomed to random, mass violence. All my best to my friends and family in Tokyo.
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