Debt Management Smart Guide

1. Good debt, bad debt!

What you’ll learn in this step: tread carefully when taking on debt.
If you’ve borrowed money then you’re in debt. However, debt isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We go into debt to buy things we can’t swallow in one “gulp”, such as a home, and some people use debt with the aim of boosting their investment returns.

As long as you remain in control of your debt – that is, you stay on top of your repayments – debt isn’t a problem. But if debt starts to control you, rather than the other way round, you need to take action.

Debt checklist
Rather than trying to dig yourself out of a debt hole, it’s a much better idea to follow some simple rules when talking to lenders so you don’t get into trouble in the first place.

Before taking out a loan check:

The term of the loan.
The interest rate that will be charged and how often the payments must be made.
The way the rate is determined – is it variable (the lender can move the rate up and down) or fixed?
Fees over and above the interest payments, such as monthly “service” fees.
The actual amount, in dollar terms, that will be paid over the life of the loan. On a house, over 25 years, this will be several times the actual price.
The type of security required – for example, a mortgage on a house may involve the lender having title over the property.
Can you repay the loan early? Is there a penalty for early repayment?
What happens if you experience short-term financial difficulties or are unable to repay the loan?
Is the contract covered by the Consumer Credit Code?
Prioritise your debt
If you can, make extra repayments on your debts so you build a buffer in case of a rainy day. In doing this, some debts deserve more attention than others.

Make it a priority to pay off “bad debt” first – that is, your borrowings for consumption (clothes, holidays) rather than investment (property, shares). That’s because interest on debt such as personal loans and credit card debt isn’t tax deductible, whereas the interest on loans for investment purposes can be claimed as an expense.

Pay off this “non-deductible” debt first, starting with the debt that has the highest interest rate.

For most people that means the credit card debt should go first, then the car loan, followed by the mortgage (which is exempt from capital gains tax, though you can’t claim your interest payments). Your investment loans come last on the list.

2. Do you need a card?

What you’ll learn in this step: like it or not, it’s hard to live without plastic.

For most people, credit cards are a way of buying now, paying later – they’re bringing forward purchases of goods and services such as clothing and holidays rather than waiting until they’ve got the cash in the weeks or months ahead.

Those with good habits will pay off their credit card balance each month – or at least a good portion of it. They use their credit card to “smooth” out their spending over the course of the year.

Unfortunately, for a minority of people plastic isn’t so fantastic. They’re using their cards to buy things they want but can’t really afford – now or later. They can’t pay their card off in full at the end of the month, and their debt seems never-ending.

That said, in this day and age it’s a big step to live without a credit card. Have you ever tried buying something by phone or on the internet without a card at hand? How many times have you handed over a credit card, complete with signature, as identification? How much harder is it to pay your bills in person as banks and businesses close physical branches?

Like it or not, credit cards are a part of life for most people. That’s why it pays to be familiar with the different characteristics of the various types of card, so you can choose the right mix of interest rate, fees and features for you. Once you’ve got a card, handle it with care.

Budget Planner

Use this website to  Plan your budget

http://www.moneymanager.com.au/planning/calculators/budget-planner.html

Using Depreciation to maximise your cash flow

Depreciation can be claimed to compensate for the decline in value of the building and assets over the period in which the property is used to produce an income.

There are two distinct depreciation allowances available for investment properties:

1. Division 40 – Depreciable Assets (Plant and Equipment Allowance) e.g. carpets, cook top, ovens, air conditioner, window blinds or curtains, dishwasher, dryer and hot water system.

2. Division 43 – Capital Works Allowance (Building Write-off Allowance).

Regardless of age, all properties contain some form of claimable depreciation such as Depreciable Assets, which is re-valued and given a new effective life from the date of settlement.  In addition, Capital Works Allowance is available for all residential investment properties with a construction start date from 18 July 1985.

To use an analogy, if you purchase a vehicle for the sole purpose of earning a living then under income tax law you are allowed to claim the depreciation of the vehicle against your current income.

The value (its net worth) gradually reduces over time as it wears out and gets old. In recognition of this fact, the Government has allowed the cost of the vehicle to be written off over a period of time (depreciation).

If a vehicle cost $1,000 and it was to last five years (its effective life) with 10% residual, that means after five years it is written down to $100 (its residual value).

Therefore the depreciation would be 18% per year. i.e. 100% – 10% = 90% / 5 years = 18% which equates to $180 depreciation per year (straight line analysis)�

Therefore if your tax rate was 33c in the dollar you would receive $180 x 0.33 = $59.40 benefit assuming your business was making a profit.

A residential property purchased for an investment can be regarded as business expense and therefore the same rules apply. When preparing your tax return, you should claim the maximum allowable depreciation on your investment property to ensure your cash flow is maximised.� You may also be able to claim the cost of demolition and improvements made to the property.

The best way to do this is to have a depreciation schedule prepared by qualified professionals.� The schedule will list all allowable buildings, plant and equipment, their value and the depreciation allowance that can be claimed. Armed with this information your accountant or tax agent can ensure you are getting the most out of your investment property.

You Are Not Paranoid, Wall Street Really is Out to Get You!

I want to talk to you today about developing mental flexibility.

Part of what I’m posting here I learned in my ETF Master Trader classes  which say’s “has to do with first identifying the type of market that you are in”, and then applying the relevant trading strategy to that particular type of market.  A big mistake many investors make is using the same investment approach regardless of the type of market they are in.

The biggest victims of this type of investment bias are buy and hold investors, and boy have they been ravaged over the last ten years.

The buy and hold method is a terrific approach to use during a secular bull market, and that is exactly what we saw from 1982 through 2000.

But during a secular bear market (which is what we are in right now), that same investment approach will destroy your wealth.

The whole idea of adjusting one’s trading strategies and methods of operation to the market that you are in is an idea that is almost universally rejected at the retail investor level.

Indeed, retail level Wall Street firms refuse even to acknowledge the absolute failure of the buy and hold approach over the last 10 years.

While the prop desks of the big Wall Street firms have been growing rich by trading structured financial products and commodities, the retail investor has been left out in the cold.

Everything Wall Street tells you is designed to do two things:

1. Get your money, and …

2. To do so without violating securities laws (if possible).

Their goal, frankly, is not to make you money … it’s to warehouse your money and generate fees off it.

As a result, you cannot rely on Wall Street to give you straight, unbiased advice on anything.  Most of these guys at the retail level don’t even have a net worth to speak of.

My favorite Warren Buffet quote is “Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.”

Ain’t that the truth!

So what is this week’s article about?  It’s about letting you know one of Wall Street’s dirtiest little secrets.

And that is this:  99 out of 100 so-called Wall Street “experts” that you talk to have no legitimate idea about how to make money in the financial markets.

What they are is sales people — very, very good sales people.  Their entire professional life is about talking you out of your money, and you know what?

These guys are damn good at it!

They are the Olympic athletes of client wallet removal.  They know exactly what to say, and how to say it.

And these financial assassins operate at every socioeconomic level.  Whether it was selling you on Enron at $90, Juniper networks at $200, flogging junk bonds to the S&L’s in the 80′s, or CDO’s in the 00′s.

At the end of the day, most of this so-called wealth has proven to be illusory.  Just take a look at the big banks: their books are a fantasy.  They hold opaque structured financial vehicles that cannot be easily valued, and we are forced to believe whatever value they tell us.

But this is the insanity of markets, and we can either profit from it or declare it insane and refuse to participate.

My suggestion?

Recognize the insanity, learn to profit from the insanity of others, but do not accept the insanity of others as sane behavior.  If a mad man chooses to give you money, you would be mad not to take it.

The ignorance and downright stupidity and greed of others is what creates many of the most profitable opportunistic trades.

Learning how to break away from the herd is easy to say, but hard to do.  It requires having your own ideas as to what is real and what is false.  You can profit from a false idea that the world believes is real, and lose money on a real idea that the world believes to be false.

So having an understanding of technical analysis is a skill worth acquiring, because it can help you make money from others peoples’ madness and help you avoid losing money on your own rational yet non price validated view of the world.

Remember: your opinion is meaningless unless it is validated by the market’s action.

Having an understanding of how to confirm your trading ideas and views through the use of technical analysis, matched with good money management skills, is an edge that every successful investor that I know possesses.

Is it easy?

No it is not easy.  It’s hard work to get good at anything, but I’ll tell you this: it is absolutely worth it.

You must take back the reins of your own financial future. You cannot rely on Wall Street to watch your back … you just might be better off spending your money on fast cars and strong liquor than to give your hard earned money over to those bozos on Wall Street.

What the heck happened yesterday?

It looked like everything was rosy (for bulls).  If you look at where I highlighted in green, below, we were about to see a battle ram-like smash straight up through:

1. The intermediate down trend line (blue line)

2. A very key horizontal support/resistance level (purple horizontal line) that has more points of resistance or support earlier than shown on the chart

3. The most popular long-term moving average, the 200-day EMA (orange squiggly)

… and a whole bunch of other important things would have happened if we had gotten a higher close instead of the slightly lower close.  If you were a TycoonU member with access to Morning GPS (our daily 9:00am audio cast) you heard EXACTLY how it should have been played, and you wouldn’t be wondering if you fell for a bull trap!

This does look like a bearish reversal at an incredibly important technical level, but the reversal pattern the market created yesterday can still be negated today if today’s action is bullish.  I know lots of technicians out there are talking about a “failed breakout,” but they are forgetting one important thing: The market still broke above the down trend line (blue) and still closed ABOVE that down trend line.

The daily Japanese candlestick pattern it created (red circle on the right, above) is something guys like me are trained to look at and mentally have big red flashing lights blinking.  That is throwing off many traders right now, but don’t let it cloud your thinking.

This pattern, called an inverted hammer, is a key reversal pattern that, when found after a strong advance, usually either stalls the up trend or turns it into a bearish one.

It’s a common mistake for traders to forget that the term “reversalpattern” is somewhat misleading, because a reversal pattern doesn’t have to change a trend from bullish to bearish or vise versa.  It can also change the trend to sideways.

The key is to trade when the odds weigh heavily in your favor.  Not just when you think something’s probably going to happen (up, down or sideways).  That’s not enough.  You want the odds to beoverwhelmingly biased if you’re going to put your hard earned money at risk.

The Old Down Trend Line Ignored!

I also see a lot of analysts ignoring the original down trend line.  Look above at the thin black dotted line.  If I extended it out a bit lower, you’d see that yesterday’s action was mainly above the (newer) blue and below the (original) black down trend line.  So there is possible resistance there, and don’t lose sight of that.

First, I thought I’d point out a few pieces to the puzzle that “the majority” is overlooking (above).  That’s how we make money in the market.

But now let’s dig a bit deeper …

There are many clues that we’ve been talking about at The Trend Riderthat suggest it’s not necessarily the bull’s ball yet (or the bear’s for that matter — remember, odds should be overwhelmingly biased).  I’m addressing the bull side because they seem to be the ones that are more confused right now.

Volume = Validity

Every time the market appears to try to push higher, I’m sitting here seeing the opposite.  The bulls aren’t “pushing” very hard at all.  It’s just that the bears have merely been allowing the bulls to move prices up, much like when my almost 4-year old daughter is having a crying temper tantrum meltdown and trying to push her bedroom door closed on me.  I’m in control.  I can hold the door open by 1, 2, 3 or 4 feet as she pushes.  But if I want to allow the door to be almost closed with 6 inches left, I’ll just ease up on the pressure on the door.  It’s not because her strength overwhelmed me.

Why do bears do that?  To get better prices to sell in to.  Look below and you’ll see the green arrows show the market up as the red arrows show volume declining on those advances.  That shows bears allowing the “door” to move to where they prefer it to be.

Now look below as we zoom in to the inverted hammer pattern.  An inverted hammer happens when there is little difference between the opening and closing price, but the intraday trading range brought prices much higher mid day, only to fail and move lower near the opening price.  It’s slightly more bearish when the close is lower.

it’s incredibly important to wait for follow through before acting on a signal when you are playing a breakout (what the market TRIED to do yesterday), or when you are playing a potential reversal pattern (what many will look for today).  Yesterday we were looking for a confirmation of the breakout and we didn’t see it.  But don’t forget we want to see follow through of the bearish reversal, potentially in the making, before we take bearish positions there as well.

I’ll tell you like I told an old buddy of mine yesterday in an email: “When you get the BEST POSSIBLE PRICE is when you know you didn’t do the right thing.  (If you get in too early at too good of a price it means you took too much risk — in my book anyway).

“But if I see bearish confirmation tomorrow [meaning today] — follow through, depending on the exact situation of course, I’m a bear. Short term.”

We don’t have the odds stacked heavily in our favor on either side.  But it’s an interesting situation because a move in today’s closing prices, in either direction (significantly higher or lower), will really change the odds big time, where they will lean heavy in one direction or another at today’s close.  If you’re a TycoonU member who has access to Morning GPS, definitely stay plugged in daily.

Otherwise, the Tycoon Report writers are always talking together and crunching data before delivering articles to you, and we’ll be translating and delivering it to you RIGHT HERE — daily.  Any comments or opinions below are welcome!

The ‘me’ in team, and what it means

Motivation is a primary factor in whether goals are missed, met or exceeded. Motivation determines whether people can’t wait for their feet to hit the floor in the morning to get to work – or hit the snooze button and spend another five minutes dreaming of a better life.

And it is motivation that decides whether a team is high-performing or barely meeting goals.

“There is no ‘I’ in team” is one of the common phrases in team-building seminars. There is a “me” in team, however, and if you’re going to build a motivated team that delivers results, you need to focus on the “me.”

Anyone who has taken a basic management course has heard of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

According to Maslow, people are motivated by five needs, which range from biological, such as eating, to higher, self-actualization needs, such as being creative. Each of these needs is focused on the self.

People are not motivated by esoteric ideas, such as increasing shareholder value or building a world-class organization. They are motivated to meet their basic needs – to pay the bills, be happy, be valued.

The key to motivating a team is to translate business goals into personal value. A motivating leader understands this and makes sure the team knows what’s in it for them if they meet the goals.

You may find “it’s about me” to be a very selfish view. But in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Here’s an example of how it can be about me and remain unselfish:

Let’s say I have been assigned a project to implement a new system that will increase productivity and save the company $2.5 million. That’s a good corporate goal, but it means increased workload and extended leaves from my family. So what’s in it for me?

If the project is successful, I will get a bonus, my merit raise will increase, my career path and job security will be enhanced, and I could get a promotion. Now I’m getting motivated.

To motivate my team, I need to apply the same strategy and tell them what’s in it for them. They will be exposed to new technology, a new network with new equipment will be needed, there will be opportunities for training, they will get a bonus and potential salary increase if the project is successful, and they will be able to move into more senior positions. Now they are motivated.

My “me” is motivated, their “me” is motivated and we are a motivated team ready to do whatever is needed to make the project successful – which will ultimately satisfy senior management’s “me,” as it will be able to meet its goals.

There is no “I” in team, but there is a “me” – a bunch of them, to be precise. A motivated and successful team is made up of individuals who understand what’s in it for them.

FOREX Software Review

I don’t believe that anyone should directly tell you what to do, especially when you are reading a review like this. I neither believe that you should be told everything, especially all the good things about a certain product just so you would buy it. You are the only person to make up your mind. In this article, I’d tell you enough about something– Forex Invincible– then, it’d be up to you if you want to try it out.

Forex Invincible is a kind of signaling software used in foreign currency exchange. It can work 24/7 in your behalf and can do trades any time-even while you are at work or asleep. It is quicker, and to some extent, more efficient, since it does not have emotions to deal with like you have. Admit it, there are just times when you can’t trade well because other things preoccupy you!

There are quite a number of trading programs available in the market these days. One thing I appreciate about Forex Invincible is its affordability. Aside from falling within my price range, it is quite user-friendly. Also, you don’t need to be an expert to operate it. Do not be lulled by dealers and brokers persuading you to hire them because you can’t do things on your own. Actually, with the help of signaling software, you can! As long as you have a computer and a good Internet connection, you can perfectly do business without the help of others. Working with Forex Invincible will also let you work from home. When you are making enough money already, you can even quit your job.

I have tried a number of forex robots and trading software packages throughout my Forex career. Having lost substantial amount of money along the way, I have learned how to know a worthy trading tool. Forex Invincible is such and I can honestly say it works. It makes every trader’s business more profitable.

For Further Details About The Software  Click on this Link http://www.megadroid-forex.org/

Connectivity Within Wall 2 Wall, Changing Patten of Life, Privacy in the hand of Mark Zuckerberg

MY COMPUTER  died recently. Like many illnesses, it started with a fever. There were unexplained noises and it became progressively slower at getting up in the morning until one night it slipped away peacefully in its sleep. Happily, though, the next day I took it to the computer doctor to be resurrected. The prognosis was good – a one-week wait while its worn-out internal organs were replaced – but little did I know that without it, I would be the one given a new lease of life. Morning walks replaced robotic email checks, books replaced inane YouTube links, and deeper conversations with those around me replaced pithy one-line exchanges with ”friends” whose names, faces, occupations and passions would be largely foreign to me were they not accessible through the very social-networking site that let us ”connect and share”. At the end of his 1910 novel, Howards End, British novelist E. M. Forster famously espoused the belief that we should all ”only connect!” – yet one suspects he had in mind something more substantial than Facebook. I have known more than one person who has deliberately not befrieMY COMPUTER died recently. Like many illnesses, it started with a fever. There were unexplained noises and it became progressively slower at getting up in the morning until one night it slipped away peacefully in its sleep. Happily, though, the next day I took it to the computer doctor to be resurrected. The prognosis was good – a one-week wait while its worn-out internal organs were replaced – but little did I know that without it, I would be the one given a new lease of life. Morning walks replaced robotic email checks, books replaced inane YouTube links, and deeper conversations with those around me replaced pithy one-line exchanges with ”friends” whose names, faces, occupations and passions would be largely foreign to me were they not accessible through the very social-networking site that let us ”connect and share”. At the end of his 1910 novel, Howards End, British novelist E. M. Forster famously espoused the belief that we should all ”only connect!” – yet one suspects he had in mind something more substantial than Facebook. I have known more than one person who has deliberately not befriended their partner online, instead choosing estrangement in the virtual world to preserve trust and love in the real one. And with good reason: an English law firm recently claimed Facebook was implicated in one-in-five of the firm’s divorce petitions. In the fascinating BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution, American clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle suggested we could be witnessing the emergence of a new personality type, based on a terrifying shift away from emotions and experience as we know them: ”It moves from ‘I have a feeling, I want to make a call’ to ‘I want to have a feeling, I need to make a call’.” The Germans have one word, Erlebnis (”experience”) to describe what we stand to lose and it is not insubstantial. Philosopher Walter Benjamin described it as ”the peak achievement of the intellect … turning an incident into a moment that has been lived”. This is not to mention the privacy implications that accompany these new forms of communication. Victorian Privacy Commissioner Helen Versey has recently welcomed a campaign to alert teenagers to the dangers of ”sexting”: the practice of sending intimate pictures of oneself to a partner, despite the risk of these being forwarded on to third parties without the subject’s consent. As we become the directors of our own celebrity image, we also risk feeling the same sense of violation that Lara Bingle and Rihanna must have felt recently when nude photos taken within an intimate relationship went ”viral”. The term is apt. Facebook’s own commitment to privacy was thrown into doubt recently when its creator, Mark Zuckerberg, ironically had an online conversation of his own from 2004 leaked, in which he refers to 4000 Harvard students as ”dumb f—s” for trusting him with their personal data. Today that number stands at more than 400 million ”dumb f—s”. It’s not that we should fear this technology, which permits such wonderful interconnectedness, but rather we shouldn’t allow it to replace what is so wonderful about being interconnected in the first place. In the 2009 movie Up in the Air – about an isolated frequent flyer – George Clooney’s character asks us to consider ”your favourite memories, the most important moments in your life … were you alone?” Social media give us the sensation that all 513 of our ”friends” are there with us when we trek to Machu Picchu, or get a promotion at work, or even when we simply can’t get to sleep at night. But we lose part of what’s sweetest about our lives when we put these moments on hold to rush online, rather than focusing on living it with those special few who were actually there. As Walter Benjamin wrote, ”it is experience that accompanies one to the far reaches of time, that fills and divides time” – and to truly share those experiences with our nearest and dearest might just be what makes life worth living.MY COMPUTER died recently. Like many illnesses, it started with a fever. There were unexplained noises and it became progressively slower at getting up in the morning until one night it slipped away peacefully in its sleep. Happily, though, the next day I took it to the computer doctor to be resurrected. The prognosis was good – a one-week wait while its worn-out internal organs were replaced – but little did I know that without it, I would be the one given a new lease of life. Morning walks replaced robotic email checks, books replaced inane YouTube links, and deeper conversations with those around me replaced pithy one-line exchanges with ”friends” whose names, faces, occupations and passions would be largely foreign to me were they not accessible through the very social-networking site that let us ”connect and share”. At the end of his 1910 novel, Howards End, British novelist E. M. Forster famously espoused the belief that we should all ”only connect!” – yet one suspects he had in mind something more substantial than Facebook. I have known more than one person who has deliberately not befriended their partner online, instead choosing estrangement in the virtual world to preserve trust and love in the real one. And with good reason: an English law firm recently claimed Facebook was implicated in one-in-five of the firm’s divorce petitions. In the fascinating BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution, American clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle suggested we could be witnessing the emergence of a new personality type, based on a terrifying shift away from emotions and experience as we know them: ”It moves from ‘I have a feeling, I want to make a call’ to ‘I want to have a feeling, I need to make a call’.” The Germans have one word, Erlebnis (”experience”) to describe what we stand to lose and it is not insubstantial. Philosopher Walter Benjamin described it as ”the peak achievement of the intellect … turning an incident into a moment that has been lived”. This is not to mention the privacy implications that accompany these new forms of communication. Victorian Privacy Commissioner Helen Versey has recently welcomed a campaign to alert teenagers to the dangers of ”sexting”: the practice of sending intimate pictures of oneself to a partner, despite the risk of these being forwarded on to third parties without the subject’s consent. As we become the directors of our own celebrity image, we also risk feeling the same sense of violation that Lara Bingle and Rihanna must have felt recently when nude photos taken within an intimate relationship went ”viral”. The term is apt. Facebook’s own commitment to privacy was thrown into doubt recently when its creator, Mark Zuckerberg, ironically had an online conversation of his own from 2004 leaked, in which he refers to 4000 Harvard students as ”dumb f—s” for trusting him with their personal data. Today that number stands at more than 400 million ”dumb f—s”. It’s not that we should fear this technology, which permits such wonderful interconnectedness, but rather we shouldn’t allow it to replace what is so wonderful about being interconnected in the first place. In the 2009 movie Up in the Air – about an isolated frequent flyer – George Clooney’s character asks us to consider ”your favourite memories, the most important moments in your life … were you alone?” Social media give us the sensation that all 513 of our ”friends” are there with us when we trek to Machu Picchu, or get a promotion at work, or even when we simply can’t get to sleep at night. But we lose part of what’s sweetest about our lives when we put these moments on hold to rush online, rather than focusing on living it with those special few who were actually there. As Walter Benjamin wrote, ”it is experience that accompanies one to the far reaches of time, that fills and divides time” – and to truly share those experiences with our nearest and dearest might just be what makes life worth living.MY COMPUTER died recently. Like many illnesses, it started with a fever. There were unexplained noises and it became progressively slower at getting up in the morning until one night it slipped away peacefully in its sleep. Happily, though, the next day I took it to the computer doctor to be resurrected. The prognosis was good – a one-week wait while its worn-out internal organs were replaced – but little did I know that without it, I would be the one given a new lease of life. Morning walks replaced robotic email checks, books replaced inane YouTube links, and deeper conversations with those around me replaced pithy one-line exchanges with ”friends” whose names, faces, occupations and passions would be largely foreign to me were they not accessible through the very social-networking site that let us ”connect and share”. At the end of his 1910 novel, Howards End, British novelist E. M. Forster famously espoused the belief that we should all ”only connect!” – yet one suspects he had in mind something more substantial than Facebook. I have known more than one person who has deliberately not befriended their partner online, instead choosing estrangement in the virtual world to preserve trust and love in the real one. And with good reason: an English law firm recently claimed Facebook was implicated in one-in-five of the firm’s divorce petitions. In the fascinating BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution, American clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle suggested we could be witnessing the emergence of a new personality type, based on a terrifying shift away from emotions and experience as we know them: ”It moves from ‘I have a feeling, I want to make a call’ to ‘I want to have a feeling, I need to make a call’.” The Germans have one word, Erlebnis (”experience”) to describe what we stand to lose and it is not insubstantial. Philosopher Walter Benjamin described it as ”the peak achievement of the intellect … turning an incident into a moment that has been lived”. This is not to mention the privacy implications that accompany these new forms of communication. Victorian Privacy Commissioner Helen Versey has recently welcomed a campaign to alert teenagers to the dangers of ”sexting”: the practice of sending intimate pictures of oneself to a partner, despite the risk of these being forwarded on to third parties without the subject’s consent. As we become the directors of our own celebrity image, we also risk feeling the same sense of violation that Lara Bingle and Rihanna must have felt recently when nude photos taken within an intimate relationship went ”viral”. The term is apt. Facebook’s own commitment to privacy was thrown into doubt recently when its creator, Mark Zuckerberg, ironically had an online conversation of his own from 2004 leaked, in which he refers to 4000 Harvard students as ”dumb f—s” for trusting him with their personal data. Today that number stands at more than 400 million ”dumb f—s”. It’s not that we should fear this technology, which permits such wonderful interconnectedness, but rather we shouldn’t allow it to replace what is so wonderful about being interconnected in the first place. In the 2009 movie Up in the Air – about an isolated frequent flyer – George Clooney’s character asks us to consider ”your favourite memories, the most important moments in your life … were you alone?” Social media give us the sensation that all 513 of our ”friends” are there with us when we trek to Machu Picchu, or get a promotion at work, or even when we simply can’t get to sleep at night. But we lose part of what’s sweetest about our lives when we put these moments on hold to rush online, rather than focusing on living it with those special few who were actually there. As Walter Benjamin wrote, ”it is experience that accompanies one to the far reaches of time, that fills and divides time” – and to truly share those experiences with our nearest and dearest might just be what makes life worth living.MY COMPUTER died recently. Like many illnesses, it started with a fever. There were unexplained noises and it became progressively slower at getting up in the morning until one night it slipped away peacefully in its sleep. Happily, though, the next day I took it to the computer doctor to be resurrected. The prognosis was good – a one-week wait while its worn-out internal organs were replaced – but little did I know that without it, I would be the one given a new lease of life. Morning walks replaced robotic email checks, books replaced inane YouTube links, and deeper conversations with those around me replaced pithy one-line exchanges with ”friends” whose names, faces, occupations and passions would be largely foreign to me were they not accessible through the very social-networking site that let us ”connect and share”. At the end of his 1910 novel, Howards End, British novelist E. M. Forster famously espoused the belief that we should all ”only connect!” – yet one suspects he had in mind something more substantial than Facebook. I have known more than one person who has deliberately not befriended their partner online, instead choosing estrangement in the virtual world to preserve trust and love in the real one. And with good reason: an English law firm recently claimed Facebook was implicated in one-in-five of the firm’s divorce petitions. In the fascinating BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution, American clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle suggested we could be witnessing the emergence of a new personality type, based on a terrifying shift away from emotions and experience as we know them: ”It moves from ‘I have a feeling, I want to make a call’ to ‘I want to have a feeling, I need to make a call’.” The Germans have one word, Erlebnis (”experience”) to describe what we stand to lose and it is not insubstantial. Philosopher Walter Benjamin described it as ”the peak achievement of the intellect … turning an incident into a moment that has been lived”. This is not to mention the privacy implications that accompany these new forms of communication. Victorian Privacy Commissioner Helen Versey has recently welcomed a campaign to alert teenagers to the dangers of ”sexting”: the practice of sending intimate pictures of oneself to a partner, despite the risk of these being forwarded on to third parties without the subject’s consent. As we become the directors of our own celebrity image, we also risk feeling the same sense of violation that Lara Bingle and Rihanna must have felt recently when nude photos taken within an intimate relationship went ”viral”. The term is apt. Facebook’s own commitment to privacy was thrown into doubt recently when its creator, Mark Zuckerberg, ironically had an online conversation of his own from 2004 leaked, in which he refers to 4000 Harvard students as ”dumb f—s” for trusting him with their personal data. Today that number stands at more than 400 million ”dumb f—s”. It’s not that we should fear this technology, which permits such wonderful interconnectedness, but rather we shouldn’t allow it to replace what is so wonderful about being interconnected in the first place. In the 2009 movie Up in the Air – about an isolated frequent flyer – George Clooney’s character asks us to consider ”your favourite memories, the most important moments in your life … were you alone?” Social media give us the sensation that all 513 of our ”friends” are there with us when we trek to Machu Picchu, or get a promotion at work, or even when we simply can’t get to sleep at night. But we lose part of what’s sweetest about our lives when we put these moments on hold to rush online, rather than focusing on living it with those special few who were actually there. As Walter Benjamin wrote, ”it is experience that accompanies one to the far reaches of time, that fills and divides time” – and to truly share those experiences with our nearest and dearest might just be what makes life worth living.nded their partner online, instead choosing estrangement in the virtual world to preserve trust and love in the real one. And with good reason: an English law firm recently claimed Facebook was implicated in one-in-five of the firm’s divorce petitions. In the fascinating BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution, American clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle suggested we could be witnessing the emergence of a new personality type, based on a terrifying shift away from emotions and experience as we know them: ”It moves from ‘I have a feeling, I want to make a call’ to ‘I want to have a feeling, I need to make a call’.” The Germans have one word, Erlebnis (”experience”) to describe what we stand to lose and it is not insubstantial. Philosopher Walter Benjamin described it as ”the peak achievement of the intellect … turning an incident into a moment that has been lived”. This is not to mention the privacy implications that accompany these new forms of communication. Victorian Privacy Commissioner Helen Versey has recently welcomed a campaign to alert teenagers to the dangers of ”sexting”: the practice of sending intimate pictures of oneself to a partner, despite the risk of these being forwarded on to third parties without the subject’s consent. As we become the directors of our own celebrity image, we also risk feeling the same sense of violation that Lara Bingle and Rihanna must have felt recently when nude photos taken within an intimate relationship went ”viral”. The term is apt. Facebook’s own commitment to privacy was thrown into doubt recently when its creator, Mark Zuckerberg, ironically had an online conversation of his own from 2004 leaked, in which he refers to 4000 Harvard students as ”dumb f—s” for trusting him with their personal data. Today that number stands at more than 400 million ”dumb f—s”. It’s not that we should fear this technology, which permits such wonderful interconnectedness, but rather we shouldn’t allow it to replace what is so wonderful about being interconnected in the first place. In the 2009 movie Up in the Air – about an isolated frequent flyer – George Clooney’s character asks us to consider ”your favourite memories, the most important moments in your life … were you alone?” Social media give us the sensation that all 513 of our ”friends” are there with us when we trek to Machu Picchu, or get a promotion at work, or even when we simply can’t get to sleep at night. But we lose part of what’s sweetest about our lives when we put these moments on hold to rush online, rather than focusing on living it with those special few who were actually there. As Walter Benjamin wrote, ”it is experience that accompanies one to the far reaches of time, that fills and divides time” – and to truly share those experiences with our nearest and dearest might just be what makes life worth living.MY COMPUTER died recently. Like many illnesses, it started with a fever. There were unexplained noises and it became progressively slower at getting up in the morning until one night it slipped away peacefully in its sleep. Happily, though, the next day I took it to the computer doctor to be resurrected. The prognosis was good – a one-week wait while its worn-out internal organs were replaced – but little did I know that without it, I would be the one given a new lease of life. Morning walks replaced robotic email checks, books replaced inane YouTube links, and deeper conversations with those around me replaced pithy one-line exchanges with ”friends” whose names, faces, occupations and passions would be largely foreign to me were they not accessible through the very social-networking site that let us ”connect and share”. At the end of his 1910 novel, Howards End, British novelist E. M. Forster famously espoused the belief that we should all ”only connect!” – yet one suspects he had in mind something more substantial than Facebook. I have known more than one person who has deliberately not befriended their partner online, instead choosing estrangement in the virtual world to preserve trust and love in the real one. And with good reason: an English law firm recently claimed Facebook was implicated in one-in-five of the firm’s divorce petitions. In the fascinating BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution, American clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle suggested we could be witnessing the emergence of a new personality type, based on a terrifying shift away from emotions and experience as we know them: ”It moves from ‘I have a feeling, I want to make a call’ to ‘I want to have a feeling, I need to make a call’.” The Germans have one word, Erlebnis (”experience”) to describe what we stand to lose and it is not insubstantial. Philosopher Walter Benjamin described it as ”the peak achievement of the intellect … turning an incident into a moment that has been lived”. This is not to mention the privacy implications that accompany these new forms of communication. Victorian Privacy Commissioner Helen Versey has recently welcomed a campaign to alert teenagers to the dangers of ”sexting”: the practice of sending intimate pictures of oneself to a partner, despite the risk of these being forwarded on to third parties without the subject’s consent. As we become the directors of our own celebrity image, we also risk feeling the same sense of violation that Lara Bingle and Rihanna must have felt recently when nude photos taken within an intimate relationship went ”viral”. The term is apt. Facebook’s own commitment to privacy was thrown into doubt recently when its creator, Mark Zuckerberg, ironically had an online conversation of his own from 2004 leaked, in which he refers to 4000 Harvard students as ”dumb f—s” for trusting him with their personal data. Today that number stands at more than 400 million ”dumb f—s”. It’s not that we should fear this technology, which permits such wonderful interconnectedness, but rather we shouldn’t allow it to replace what is so wonderful about being interconnected in the first place. In the 2009 movie Up in the Air – about an isolated frequent flyer – George Clooney’s character asks us to consider ”your favourite memories, the most important moments in your life … were you alone?” Social media give us the sensation that all 513 of our ”friends” are there with us when we trek to Machu Picchu, or get a promotion at work, or even when we simply can’t get to sleep at night. But we lose part of what’s sweetest about our lives when we put these moments on hold to rush online, rather than focusing on living it with those special few who were actually there. As Walter Benjamin wrote, ”it is experience that accompanies one to the far reaches of time, that fills and divides time” – and to truly share those experiences with our nearest and dearest might just be what makes life worth living.ed recently. Like many illnesses, it started with a fever. There were unexplained noises and it became progressively slower at getting up in the morning until one night it slipped away peacefully in its sleep. Happily, though, the next day I took it to the computer doctor to be resurrected. The prognosis was good – a one-week wait while its worn-out internal organs were replaced – but little did I know that without it, I would be the one given a new lease of life. Morning walks replaced robotic email checks, books replaced inane YouTube links, and deeper conversations with those around me replaced pithy one-line exchanges with ”friends” whose names, faces, occupations and passions would be largely foreign to me were they not accessible through the very social-networking site that let us ”connect and share”. At the end of his 1910 novel, Howards End, British novelist E. M. Forster famously espoused the belief that we should all ”only connect!” – yet one suspects he had in mind something more substantial than Facebook. I have known more than one person who has deliberately not befriended their partner online, instead choosing estrangement in the virtual world to preserve trust and love in the real one. And with good reason: an English law firm recently claimed Facebook was implicated in one-in-five of the firm’s divorce petitions. In the fascinating BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution, American clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle suggested we could be witnessing the emergence of a new personality type, based on a terrifying shift away from emotions and experience as we know them: ”It moves from ‘I have a feeling, I want to make a call’ to ‘I want to have a feeling, I need to make a call’.” The Germans have one word, Erlebnis (”experience”) to describe what we stand to lose and it is not insubstantial. Philosopher Walter Benjamin described it as ”the peak achievement of the intellect … turning an incident into a moment that has been lived”. This is not to mention the privacy implications that accompany these new forms of communication. Victorian Privacy Commissioner Helen Versey has recently welcomed a campaign to alert teenagers to the dangers of ”sexting”: the practice of sending intimate pictures of oneself to a partner, despite the risk of these being forwarded on to third parties without the subject’s consent. As we become the directors of our own celebrity image, we also risk feeling the same sense of violation that Lara Bingle and Rihanna must have felt recently when nude MY COMPUTER died recently. Like many illnesses, it started with a fever. There were unexplained noises and it became progressively slower at getting up in the morning until one night it slipped away peacefully in its sleep. Happily, though, the next day I took it to the computer doctor to be resurrected. The prognosis was good – a one-week wait while its worn-out internal organs were replaced – but little did I know that without it, I would be the one given a new lease of life. Morning walks replaced robotic email checks, books replaced inane YouTube links, and deeper conversations with those around me replaced pithy one-line exchanges with ”friends” whose names, faces, occupations and passions would be largely foreign to me were they not accessible through the very social-networking site that let us ”connect and share”. At the end of his 1910 novel, Howards End, British novelist E. M. Forster famously espoused the belief that we should all ”only connect!” – yet one suspects he had in mind something more substantial than Facebook. I have known more than one person who has deliberately not befriended their partner online, instead choosing estrangement in the virtual world to preserve trust and love in the real one. And with good reason: an English law firm recently claimed Facebook was implicated in one-in-five of the firm’s divorce petitions. In the fascinating BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution, American clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle suggested we could be witnessing the emergence of a new personality type, based on a terrifying shift away from emotions and experience as we know them: ”It moves from ‘I have a feeling, I want to make a call’ to ‘I want to have a feeling, I need to make a call’.” The Germans have one word, Erlebnis (”experience”) to describe what we stand to lose and it is not insubstantial. Philosopher Walter Benjamin described it as ”the peak achievement of the intellect … turning an incident into a moment that has been lived”. This is not to mention the privacy implications that accompany these new forms of communication. Victorian Privacy Commissioner Helen Versey has recently welcomed a campaign to alert teenagers to the dangers of ”sexting”: the practice of sending intimate pictures of oneself to a partner, despite the risk of these being forwarded on to third parties without the subject’s consent. As we become the directors of our own celebrity image, we also risk feeling the same sense of violation that Lara Bingle and Rihanna must have felt recently when nude photos taken within an intimate relationship went ”viral”. The term is apt. Facebook’s own commitment to privacy was thrown into doubt recently when its creator, Mark Zuckerberg, ironically had an online conversation of his own from 2004 leaked, in which he refers to 4000 Harvard students as ”dumb f—s” for trusting him with their personal data. Today that number stands at more than 400 million ”dumb f—s”. It’s not that we should fear this technology, which permits such wonderful interconnectedness, but rather we shouldn’t allow it to replace what is so wonderful about being interconnected in the first place. In the 2009 movie Up in the Air – about an isolated frequent flyer – George Clooney’s character asks us to consider ”your favourite memories, the most important moments in your life … were you alone?” Social media give us the sensation that all 513 of our ”friends” are there with us when we trek to Machu Picchu, or get a promotion at work, or even when we simply can’t get to sleep at night. But we lose part of what’s sweetest about our lives when we put these moments on hold to rush online, rather than focusing on living it with those special few who were actually there. As Walter Benjamin wrote, ”it is experience that accompanies one to the far reaches of time, that fills and divides time” – and to truly share those experiences with our nearest and dearest might just be what makes life worth living.MY COMPUTER died recently. Like many illnesses, it started with a fever. There were unexplained noises and it became progressively slower at getting up in the morning until one night it slipped away peacefully in its sleep. Happily, though, the next day I took it to the computer doctor to be resurrected. The prognosis was good – a one-week wait while its worn-out internal organs were replaced – but little did I know that without it, I would be the one given a new lease of life. Morning walks replaced robotic email checks, books replaced inane YouTube links, and deeper conversations with those around me replaced pithy one-line exchanges with ”friends” whose names, faces, occupations and passions would be largely foreign to me were they not accessible through the very social-networking site that let us ”connect and share”. At the end of his 1910 novel, Howards End, British novelist E. M. Forster famously espoused the belief that we should all ”only connect!” – yet one suspects he had in mind something more substantial than Facebook. I have known more than one person who has deliberately not befriended their partner online, instead choosing estrangement in the virtual world to preserve trust and love in the real one. And with good reason: an English law firm recently claimed Facebook was implicated in one-in-five of the firm’s divorce petitions. In the fascinating BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution, American clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle suggested we could be witnessing the emergence of a new personality type, based on a terrifying shift away from emotions and experience as we know them: ”It moves from ‘I have a feeling, I want to make a call’ to ‘I want to have a feeling, I need to make a call’.” The Germans have one word, Erlebnis (”experience”) to describe what we stand to lose and it is not insubstantial. Philosopher Walter Benjamin described it as ”the peak achievement of the intellect … turning an incident into a moment that has been lived”. This is not to mention the privacy implications that accompany these new forms of communication. Victorian Privacy Commissioner Helen Versey has recently welcomed a campaign to alert teenagers to the dangers of ”sexting”: the practice of sending intimate pictures of oneself to a partner, despite the risk of these being forwarded on to third parties without the subject’s consent. As we become the directors of our own celebrity image, we also risk feeling the same sense of violation that Lara Bingle and Rihanna must have felt recently when nude photos taken within an intimate relationship went ”viral”. The term is apt. Facebook’s own commitment to privacy was thrown into doubt recently when its creator, Mark Zuckerberg, ironically had an online conversation of his own from 2004 leaked, in which he refers to 4000 Harvard students as ”dumb f—s” for trusting him with their personal data. Today that number stands at more than 400 million ”dumb f—s”. It’s not that we should fear this technology, which permits such wonderful interconnectedness, but rather we shouldn’t allow it to replace what is so wonderful about being interconnected in the first place. In the 2009 movie Up in the Air – about an isolated frequent flyer – George Clooney’s character asks us to consider ”your favourite memories, the most important moments in your life … were you alone?” Social media give us the sensation that all 513 of our ”friends” are there with us when we trek to Machu Picchu, or get a promotion at work, or even when we simply can’t get to sleep at night. But we lose part of what’s sweetest about our lives when we put these moments on hold to rush online, rather than focusing on living it with those special few who were actually there. As Walter Benjamin wrote, ”it is experience that accompanies one to the far reaches of time, that fills and divides time” – and to truly share those experiences with our nearest and dearest might just be what makes life worth living.MY COMPUTER died recently. Like many illnesses, it started with a fever. There were unexplained noises and it became progressively slower at getting up in the morning until one night it slipped away peacefully in its sleep. Happily, though, the next day I took it to the computer doctor to be resurrected. The prognosis was good – a one-week wait while its worn-out internal organs were replaced – but little did I know that without it, I would be the one given a new lease of life. Morning walks replaced robotic email checks, books replaced inane YouTube links, and deeper conversations with those around me replaced pithy one-line exchanges with ”friends” whose names, faces, occupations and passions would be largely foreign to me were they not accessible through the very social-networking site that let us ”connect and share”. At the end of his 1910 novel, Howards End, British novelist E. M. Forster famously espoused the belief that we should all ”only connect!” – yet one suspects he had in mind something more substantial than Facebook. I have known more than one person who has deliberately not befriended their partner online, instead choosing estrangement in the virtual world to preserve trust and love in the real one. And with good reason: an English law firm recently claimed Facebook was implicated in one-in-five of the firm’s divorce petitions. In the fascinating BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution, American clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle suggested we could be witnessing the emergence of a new personality type, based on a terrifying shift away from emotions and experience as we know them: ”It moves from ‘I have a feeling, I want to make a call’ to ‘I want to have a feeling, I need to make a call’.” The Germans have one word, Erlebnis (”experience”) to describe what we stand to lose and it is not insubstantial. Philosopher Walter Benjamin described it as ”the peak achievement of the intellect … turning an incident into a moment that has been lived”. This is not to mention the privacy implications that accompany these new forms of communication. Victorian Privacy Commissioner Helen Versey has recently welcomed a campaign to alert teenagers to the dangers of ”sexting”: the practice of sending intimate pictures of oneself to a partner, despite the risk of these being forwarded on to third parties without the subject’s consent. As we become the directors of our own celebrity image, we also risk feeling the same sense of violation that Lara Bingle and Rihanna must have felt recently when nude photos taken within an intimate relationship went ”viral”. The term is apt. Facebook’s own commitment to privacy was thrown into doubt recently when its creator, Mark Zuckerberg, ironically had an online conversation of his own from 2004 leaked, in which he refers to 4000 Harvard students as ”dumb f—s” for trusting him with their personal data. Today that number stands at more than 400 million ”dumb f—s”. It’s not that we should fear this technology, which permits such wonderful interconnectedness, but rather we shouldn’t allow it to replace what is so wonderful about being interconnected in the first place. In the 2009 movie Up in the Air – about an isolated frequent flyer – George Clooney’s character asks us to consider ”your favourite memories, the most important moments in your life … were you alone?” Social media give us the sensation that all 513 of our ”friends” are there with us when we trek to Machu Picchu, or get a promotion at work, or even when we simply can’t get to sleep at night. But we lose part of what’s sweetest about our lives when we put these moments on hold to rush online, rather than focusing on living it with those special few who were actually there. As Walter Benjamin wrote, ”it is experience that accompanies one to the far reaches of time, that fills and divides time” – and to truly share those experiences with our nearest and dearest might just be what makes life worth living.MY COMPUTER died recently. Like many illnesses, it started with a fever. There were unexplained noises and it became progressively slower at getting up in the morning until one night it slipped away peacefully in its sleep. Happily, though, the next day I took it to the computer doctor to be resurrected. The prognosis was good – a one-week wait while its worn-out internal organs were replaced – but little did I know that without it, I would be the one given a new lease of life. Morning walks replaced robotic email checks, books replaced inane YouTube links, and deeper conversations with those around me replaced pithy one-line exchanges with ”friends” whose names, faces, occupations and passions would be largely foreign to me were they not accessible through the very social-networking site that let us ”connect and share”. At the end of his 1910 novel, Howards End, British novelist E. M. Forster famously espoused the belief that we should all ”only connect!” – yet one suspects he had in mind something more substantial than Facebook. I have known more than one person who has deliberately not befriended their partner online, instead choosing estrangement in the virtual world to preserve trust and love in the real one. And with good reason: an English law firm recently claimed Facebook was implicated in one-in-five of the firm’s divorce petitions. In the fascinating BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution, American clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle suggested we could be witnessing the emergence of a new personality type, based on a terrifying shift away from emotions and experience as we know them: ”It moves from ‘I have a feeling, I want to make a call’ to ‘I want to have a feeling, I need to make a call’.” The Germans have one word, Erlebnis (”experience”) to describe what we stand to lose and it is not insubstantial. Philosopher Walter Benjamin described it as ”the peak achievement of the intellect … turning an incident into a moment that has been lived”. This is not to mention the privacy implications that accompany these new forms of communication. Victorian Privacy Commissioner Helen Versey has recently welcomed a campaign to alert teenagers to the dangers of ”sexting”: the practice of sending intimate pictures of oneself to a partner, despite the risk of these being forwarded on to third parties without the subject’s consent. As we become the directors of our own celebrity image, we also risk feeling the same sense of violation that Lara Bingle and Rihanna must have felt recently when nude photos taken within an intimate relationship went ”viral”. The term is apt. Facebook’s own commitment to privacy was thrown into doubt recently when its creator, Mark Zuckerberg, ironically had an online conversation of his own from 2004 leaked, in which he refers to 4000 Harvard students as ”dumb f—s” for trusting him with their personal data. Today that number stands at more than 400 million ”dumb f—s”. It’s not that we should fear this technology, which permits such wonderful interconnectedness, but rather we shouldn’t allow it to replace what is so wonderful about being interconnected in the first place. In the 2009 movie Up in the Air – about an isolated frequent flyer – George Clooney’s character asks us to consider ”your favourite memories, the most important moments in your life … were you alone?” Social media give us the sensation that all 513 of our ”friends” are there with us when we trek to Machu Picchu, or get a promotion at work, or even when we simply can’t get to sleep at night. But we lose part of what’s sweetest about our lives when we put these moments on hold to rush online, rather than focusing on living it with those special few who were actually there. As Walter Benjamin wrote, ”it is experience that accompanies one to the far reaches of time, that fills and divides time” – and to truly share those experiences with our nearest and dearest might just be what makes life worth living.MY COMPUTER died recently. Like many illnesses, it started with a fever. There were unexplained noises and it became progressively slower at getting up in the morning until one night it slipped away peacefully in its sleep. Happily, though, the next day I took it to the computer doctor to be resurrected. The prognosis was good – a one-week wait while its worn-out internal organs were replaced – but little did I know that without it, I would be the one given a new lease of life. Morning walks replaced robotic email checks, books replaced inane YouTube links, and deeper conversations with those around me replaced pithy one-line exchanges with ”friends” whose names, faces, occupations and passions would be largely foreign to me were they not accessible through the very social-networking site that let us ”connect and share”. At the end of his 1910 novel, Howards End, British novelist E. M. Forster famously espoused the belief that we should all ”only connect!” – yet one suspects he had in mind something more substantial than Facebook. I have known more than one person who has deliberately not befriended their partner online, instead choosing estrangement in the virtual world to preserve trust and love in the real one. And with good reason: an English law firm recently claimed Facebook was implicated in one-in-five of the firm’s divorce petitions. In the fascinating BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution, American clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle suggested we could be witnessing the emergence of a new personality type, based on a terrifying shift away from emotions and experience as we know them: ”It moves from ‘I have a feeling, I want to make a call’ to ‘I want to have a feeling, I need to make a call’.” The Germans have one word, Erlebnis (”experience”) to describe what we stand to lose and it is not insubstantial. Philosopher Walter Benjamin described it as ”the peak achievement of the intellect … turning an incident into a moment that has been lived”. This is not to mention the privacy implications that accompany these new forms of communication. Victorian Privacy Commissioner Helen Versey has recently welcomed a campaign to alert teenagers to the dangers of ”sexting”: the practice of sending intimate pictures of oneself to a partner, despite the risk of these being forwarded on to third parties without the subject’s consent. As we become the directors of our own celebrity image, we also risk feeling the same sense of violation that Lara Bingle and Rihanna must have felt recently when nude photos taken within an intimate relationship went ”viral”. The term is apt. Facebook’s own commitment to privacy was thrown into doubt recently when its creator, Mark Zuckerberg, ironically had an online conversation of his own from 2004 leaked, in which he refers to 4000 Harvard students as ”dumb f—s” for trusting him with their personal data. Today that number stands at more than 400 million ”dumb f—s”. It’s not that we should fear this technology, which permits such wonderful interconnectedness, but rather we shouldn’t allow it to replace what is so wonderful about being interconnected in the first place. In the 2009 movie Up in the Air – about an isolated frequent flyer – George Clooney’s character asks us to consider ”your favourite memories, the most important moments in your life … were you alone?” Social media give us the sensation that all 513 of our ”friends” are there with us when we trek to Machu Picchu, or get a promotion at work, or even when we simply can’t get to sleep at night. But we lose part of what’s sweetest about our lives when we put these moments on hold to rush online, rather than focusing on living it with those special few who were actually there. As Walter Benjamin wrote, ”it is experience that accompanies one to the far reaches of time, that fills and divides time” – and to truly share those experiences with our nearest and dearest might juMY COMPUTER died recently. Like many illnesses, it started with a fever. There were unexplained noises and it became progressively slower at getting up in the morning until one night it slipped away peacefully in its sleep. Happily, though, the next day I took it to the computer doctor to be resurrected. The prognosis was good – a one-week wait while its worn-out internal organs were replaced – but little did I know that without it, I would be the one given a new lease of life. Morning walks replaced robotic email checks, books replaced inane YouTube links, and deeper conversations with those around me replaced pithy one-line exchanges with ”friends” whose names, faces, occupations and passions would be largely foreign to me were they not accessible through the very social-networking site that let us ”connect and share”. At the end of his 1910 novel, Howards End, British novelist E. M. Forster famously espoused the belief that we should all ”only connect!” – yet one suspects he had in mind something more substantial than Facebook. I have known more than one person who has deliberately not befriended their partner online, instead choosing estrangement in the virtual world to preserve trust and love in the real one. And with good reason: an English law firm recently claimed Facebook was implicated in one-in-five of the firm’s divorce petitions. In the fascinating BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution, American clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle suggested we could be witnessing the emergence of a new personality type, based on a terrifying shift away from emotions and experience as we know them: ”It moves from ‘I have a feeling, I want to make a call’ to ‘I want to have a feeling, I need to make a call’.” The Germans have one word, Erlebnis (”experience”) to describe what we stand to lose and it is not insubstantial. Philosopher Walter Benjamin described it as ”the peak achievement of the intellect … turning an incident into a moment that has been lived”. This is not to mention the privacy implications that accompany these new forms of communication. Victorian Privacy Commissioner Helen Versey has recently welcomed a campaign to alert teenagers to the dangers of ”sexting”: the practice of sending intimate pictures of oneself to a partner, despite the risk of these being forwarded on to third parties without the subject’s consent. As we become the directors of our own celebrity image, we also risk feeling the same sense of violation that Lara Bingle and Rihanna must have felt recently when nude photos taken within an intimate relationship went ”viral”. The term is apt. Facebook’s own commitment to privacy was thrown into doubt recently when its creator, Mark Zuckerberg, ironically had an online conversation of his own from 2004 leaked, in which he refers to 4000 Harvard students as ”dumb f—s” for trusting him with their personal data. Today that number stands at more than 400 million ”dumb f—s”. It’s not that we should fear this technology, which permits such wonderful interconnectedness, but rather we shouldn’t allow it to replace what is so wonderful about being interconnected in the first place. In the 2009 movie Up in the Air – about an isolated frequent flyer – George Clooney’s character asks us to consider ”your favourite memories, the most important moments in your life … were you alone?” Social media give us the sensation that all 513 of our ”friends” are there with us when we trek to Machu Picchu, or get a promotion at work, or even when we simply can’t get to sleep at night. But we lose part of what’s sweetest about our lives when we put these moments on hold to rush online, rather than focusing on living it with those special few who were actually there. As Walter Benjamin wrote, ”it is experience that accompanies one to the far reaches of time, that fills and divides time” – and to truly share those experiences with our nearest and dearest might just be what makes life worth living.MY COMPUTER died recently. Like many illnesses, it started with a fever. There were unexplained noises and it became progressively slower at getting up in the morning until one night it slipped away peacefully in its sleep. Happily, though, the next day I took it to the computer doctor to be resurrected. The prognosis was good – a one-week wait while its worn-out internal organs were replaced – but little did I know that without it, I would be the one given a new lease of life. Morning walks replaced robotic email checks, books replaced inane YouTube links, and deeper conversations with those around me replaced pithy one-line exchanges with ”friends” whose names, faces, occupations and passions would be largely foreign to me were they not accessible through the very social-networking site that let us ”connect and share”. At the end of his 1910 novel, Howards End, British novelist E. M. Forster famously espoused the belief that we should all ”only connect!” – yet one suspects he had in mind something more substantial than Facebook. I have known more than one person who has deliberately not befriended their partner online, instead choosing estrangement in the virtual world to preserve trust and love in the real one. And with good reason: an English law firm recently claimed Facebook was implicated in one-in-five of the firm’s divorce petitions. In the fascinating BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution, American clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle suggested we could be witnessing the emergence of a new personality type, based on a terrifying shift away from emotions and experience as we know them: ”It moves from ‘I have a feeling, I want to make a call’ to ‘I want to have a feeling, I need to make a call’.” The Germans have one word, Erlebnis (”experience”) to describe what we stand to lose and it is not insubstantial. Philosopher Walter Benjamin described it as ”the peak achievement of the intellect … turning an incident into a moment that has been lived”. This is not to mention the privacy implications that accompany these new forms of communication. Victorian Privacy Commissioner Helen Versey has recently welcomed a campaign to alert teenagers to the dangers of ”sexting”: the practice of sending intimate pictures of oneself to a partner, despite the risk of these being forwarded on to third parties without the subject’s consent. As we become the directors of our own celebrity image, we also risk feeling the same sense of violation that Lara Bingle and Rihanna must have felt recently when nude photos taken within an intimate relationship went ”viral”. The term is apt. Facebook’s own commitment to privacy was thrown into doubt recently when its creator, Mark Zuckerberg, ironically had an online conversation of his own from 2004 leaked, in which he refers to 4000 Harvard students as ”dumb f—s” for trusting him with their personal data. Today that number stands at more than 400 million ”dumb f—s”. It’s not that we should fear this technology, which permits such wonderful interconnectedness, but rather we shouldn’t allow it to replace what is so wonderful about being interconnected in the first place. In the 2009 movie Up in the Air – about an isolated frequent flyer – George Clooney’s character asks us to consider ”your favourite memories, the most important moments in your life … were you alone?” Social media give us the sensation that all 513 of our ”friends” are there with us when we trek to Machu Picchu, or get a promotion at work, or even when we simply can’t get to sleep at night. But we lose part of what’s sweetest about our lives when we put these moments on hold to rush online, rather than focusing on living it with those special few who were actually there. As Walter Benjamin wrote, ”it is experience that accompanies one to the far reaches of time, that fills and divides time” – and to truly share those experiences with ourMY COMPUTER died recently. Like many illnesses, it started with a fever. There were unexplained noises and it became progressively slower at getting up in the morning until one night it slipped away peacefully in its sleep. Happily, though, the next day I took it to the computer doctor to be resurrected. The prognosis was good – a one-week wait while its worn-out internal organs were replaced – but little did I know that without it, I would be the one given a new lease of life. Morning walks replaced robotic email checks, books replaced inane YouTube links, and deeper conversations with those around me replaced pithy one-line exchanges with ”friends” whose names, faces, occupations and passions would be largely foreign to me were they not accessible through the very social-networking site that let us ”connect and share”. At the end of his 1910 novel, Howards End, British novelist E. M. Forster famously espoused the belief that we should all ”only connect!” – yet one suspects he had in mind something more substantial than Facebook. I have known more than one person who has deliberately not befriended their partner online, instead choosing estrangement in the virtual world to preserve trust and love in the real one. And with good reason: an English law firm recently claimed Facebook was implicated in one-in-five of the firm’s divorce petitions. In the fascinating BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution, American clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle suggested we could be witnessing the emergence of a new personality type, based on a terrifying shift away from emotions and experience as we know them: ”It moves from ‘I have a feeling, I want to make a call’ to ‘I want to have a feeling, I need to make a call’.” The Germans have one word, Erlebnis (”experience”) to describe what we stand to lose and it is not insubstantial. Philosopher Walter Benjamin described it as ”the peak achievement of the intellect … turning an incident into a moment that has been lived”. This is not to mention the privacy implications that accompany these new forms of communication. Victorian Privacy Commissioner Helen Versey has recently welcomed a campaign to alert teenagers to the dangers of ”sexting”: the practice of sending intimate pictures of oneself to a partner, despite the risk of these being forwarded on to third parties without the subject’s consent. As we become the directors of our own celebrity image, we also risk feeling the same sense of violation that Lara Bingle and Rihanna must have felt recently when nude photos taken within an intimate relationship went ”viral”. The term is apt. Facebook’s own commitment to privacy was thrown into doubt recently when its creator, Mark Zuckerberg, ironically had an online conversation of his own from 2004 leaked, in which he refers to 4000 Harvard students as ”dumb f—s” for trusting him with their personal data. Today that number stands at more than 400 million ”dumb f—s”. It’s not that we should fear this technology, which permits such wonderful interconnectedness, but rather we shouldn’t allow it to replace what is so wonderful about being interconnected in the first place. In the 2009 movie Up in the Air – about an isolated frequent flyer – George Clooney’s character asks us to consider ”your favourite memories, the most important moments in your life … were you alone?” Social media give us the sensation that all 513 of our ”friends” are there with us when we trek to Machu Picchu, or get a promotion at work, or even when we simply can’t get to sleep at night. But we lose part of what’s sweetest about our lives when we put these moments on hold to rush online, rather than focusing on living it with those special few who were actually there. As Walter Benjamin wrote, ”it is experience that accompanies one to the far reaches of time, that fills and divides time” – and to truly share those experiences with ouMY COMPUTER died recently. Like many illnesses, it started with a fever. There were unexplained noises and it became progressively slower at getting up in the morning until one night it slipped away peacefully in its sleep. Happily, though, the next day I took it to the computer doctor to be resurrected. The prognosis was good – a one-week wait while its worn-out internal organs were replaced – but little did I know that without it, I would be the one given a new lease of life. Morning walks replaced robotic email checks, books replaced inane YouTube links, and deeper conversations with those around me replaced pithy one-line exchanges with ”friends” whose names, faces, occupations and passions would be largely foreign to me were they not accessible through the very social-networking site that let us ”connect and share”. At the end of his 1910 novel, Howards End, British novelist E. M. Forster famously espoused the belief that we should all ”only connect!” – yet one suspects he had in mind something more substantial than Facebook. I have known more than one person who has deliberately not befriended their partner online, instead choosing estrangement in the virtual world to preserve trust and love in the real one. And with good reason: an English law firm recently claimed Facebook was implicated in one-in-five of the firm’s divorce petitions. In the fascinating BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution, American clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle suggested we could be witnessing the emergence of a new personality type, based on a terrifying shift away from emotions and experience as we know them: ”It moves from ‘I have a feeling, I want to make a call’ to ‘I want to have a feeling, I need to make a call’.” The Germans have one word, Erlebnis (”experience”) to describe what we stand to lose and it is not insubstantial. Philosopher Walter Benjamin described it as ”the peak achievement of the intellect … turning an incident into a moment that has been lived”. This is not to mention the privacy implications that accompany these new forms of communication. Victorian Privacy Commissioner Helen Versey has recently welcomed a campaign to alert teenagers to the dangers of ”sexting”: the practice of sending intimate pictures of oneself to a partner, despite the risk of these being forwarded on to third parties without the subject’s consent. As we become the directors of our own celebrity image, we also risk feeling the same sense of violation that Lara Bingle and Rihanna must have felt recently when nude photos taken within an intimate relationship went ”viral”. The term is apt. Facebook’s own commitment to privacy was thrown into doubt recently when its creator, Mark Zuckerberg, ironically had an online conversation of his own from 2004 leaked, in which he refers to 4000 Harvard students as ”dumb f—s” for trusting him with their personal data. Today that number stands at more than 400 million ”dumb f—s”. It’s not that we should fear this technology, which permits such wonderful interconnectedness, but rather we shouldn’t allow it to replace what is so wonderful about being interconnected in the first place. In the 2009 movie Up in the Air – about an isolated frequent flyer – George Clooney’s character asks us to consider ”your favourite memories, the most important moments in your life … were you alone?” Social media give us the sensation that all 513 of our ”friends” are there with us when we trek to Machu Picchu, or get a promotion at work, or even when we simply can’t get to sleep at night. But we lose part of what’s sweetest about our lives when we put these moments on hold to rush online, rather than focusing on living it with those special few who were actually there. As Walter Benjamin wrote, ”it is experience that accompanies one to the far reaches of time, that fills and divides time” – and to truly share those experiences with our nearest and dearest might just be what makes life worth living.MY COMPUTER died recently. Like many illnesses, it started with a fever. There were unexplained noises and it became progressively slower at getting up in the morning until one night it slipped away peacefully in its sleep. Happily, though, the next day I took it to the computer doctor to be resurrected. The prognosis was good – a one-week wait while its worn-out internal organs were replaced – but little did I know that without it, I would be the one given a new lease of life. Morning walks replaced robotic email checks, books replaced inane YouTube links, and deeper conversations with those around me replaced pithy one-line exchanges with ”friends” whose names, faces, occupations and passions would be largely foreign to me were they not accessible through the very social-networking site that let us ”connect and share”. At the end of his 1910 novel, Howards End, British novelist E. M. Forster famously espoused the belief that we should all ”only connect!” – yet one suspects he had in mind something more substantial than Facebook. I have known more than one person who has deliberately not befriended their partner online, instead choosing estrangement in the virtual world to preserve trust and love in the real one. And with good reason: an English law firm recently claimed Facebook was implicated in one-in-five of the firm’s divorce petitions. In the fascinating BBC documentary The Virtual Revolution, American clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle suggested we could be witnessing the emergence of a new personality type, based on a terrifying shift away from emotions and experience as we know them: ”It moves from ‘I have a feeling, I want to make a call’ to ‘I want to have a feeling, I need to make a call’.” The Germans have one word, Erlebnis (”experience”) to describe what we stand to lose and it is not insubstantial. Philosopher Walter Benjamin described it as ”the peak achievement of the intellect … turning an incident into a moment that has been lived”. This is not to mention the privacy implications that accompany these new forms of communication. Victorian Privacy Commissioner Helen Versey has recently welcomed a campaign to alert teenagers to the dangers of ”sexting”: the practice of sending intimate pictures of oneself to a partner, despite the risk of these being forwarded on to third parties without the subject’s consent. As we become the directors of our own celebrity image, we also risk feeling the same sense of violation that Lara Bingle and Rihanna must have felt recently when nude photos taken within an intimate relationship went ”viral”. The term is apt. Facebook’s own commitment to privacy was thrown into doubt recently when its creator, Mark Zuckerberg, ironically had an online conversation of his own from 2004 leaked, in which he refers to 4000 Harvard students as ”dumb f—s” for trusting him with their personal data. Today that number stands at more t May 23, 2010