NOTE: I wrote this post last week and it’s been sitting here all this time. At first I didn’t know if I was actually going to post it because I don’t normally post rants. But something happened yesterday that just got me going all over again.

Here are a couple of things that perplex me.

Everybody’s an Author!
I read several blogs where the person is (supposedly) in the midst of writing a novel. We all know that just about anyone can self-publish a book these days and it doesn’t have to be good. The one woman who started out blogging about the same time I did, just posted a new blog entry a few days ago after a lapse of a month. She went on and on describing her “dinning” room in great detail. Frankly, it was boring. Not only was the writing not engaging but she used “dinning” instead of dining at least 12 times. Once she used it three times in a single paragraph. After the 12th “dinning” I stopped reading. Enough.

The other woman has published several self-help books for tweens but didn’t really write them herself. (More like she collected stories that other people had written and put them all together.) She has faked rave reviews of all her “books” on Amazon and someone even called her out on them. Now she claims to be writing a novel which is not an easy feat. She also has lots of typos and misuses of words on her blog which are annoying. Like describing a book she was reading and saying the heroine of the book was “abroad the Titanic.” Hmmm. I think you could be a broad (a not so nice word for a woman) on the Titanic, or you could be aboard the Titanic, but probably not abroad it.

I may not be a writer but at least I have the sense to turn on spell-checker! And you certainly won’t catch me abroad the Titanic in the dinning room. There you go.

Social Media
Maybe I am getting old, but I don’t get social media. I really don’t. I do have a Facebook account but I never post anything. I do read several other people (mostly old dog show friends) but that’s about it. I realize it’s a nice way for people to connect to other people they haven’t otherwise kept in touch with, but ... I don’t get it and I don’t like it.

And, as far as I am concerned Twitter and Tweet are what birds do. Not people. Do people really believe that all these celebrities sit around all day tweeting? If they have that much spare time to engage in such petty activities then they are obviously over paid.

And speaking of social media, who cares if some football player is heartbroken because he learned that he had an online “affair” with a girlfriend who didn’t really exist? I mean, talk about dumb. Yet we’ve heard about this every night on the news.

Or YouTube videos going viral? Isn’t that a word that is normally associated with disease? oops, again showing my age because now “viral” has a whole new meaning in an online dictionary. Pretty sad. Also sad is all those teens doing dumb things that could kill them just to get their videos to go viral.

Teens are bullied online. Photos have been posted that have caused suicides.

Social Media is contagious (for most people) and therefore could be considered a viral disease eating away at the fabric of our society.

{snip}

That was what I wrote last week. Yesterday my friend Carolyn called me to chat. She happened to mention that she had seen what she thought was the exact same photo of Hailey and her dam Diva that appeared on my blog last week on a site called Dog Lover on FaceBook. This one. She wondered if I had taken the photo or someone else did. No, I told her, it was my original photo and thought she must be mistaken.

But there was my photo, on this “Dog Lover” site for all to see and “share”. When I asked them to remove the photo since it was copyrighted on my site (I have to assume this is how they got it?) they replied that “many people have this photo now because we all share on FB, so I won’t take it down.” What? Share? There is no “sharing” when something is not yours to share! I was fuming. Still am since I had some back and forth with this person just a few minutes ago. They are still refusing to remove it. What is wrong with people?

I tried to look up how to report it and just got pages and pages of stuff. To report copyright infringement you have to file a claim, blah, blah, blah. I’m pissed but I’m not sure I want to go through all that. It’s not like I am some great photographer whose photos make them money. But it’s the principal of the whole thing.

The best I could do was click “this is harassing me” regarding the photo which I am sure they will not see anything harassing about a cute little dog and its mother. Sigh. Before I clicked the button “report to FaceBook” a little thing popped up that requested I first ask the person to take the photo down. Been there; done that. I clicked the button. My last comment to the person was that I had reported them. I also told them that I didn’t have access to all those sites that now supposedly had my photo on it, but if they would remove it from theirs at least it would stem the flow of “sharing” to even more sites.

Did I say I hate FaceBook? Am I alone in this?

I was also going to talk about cell phone usage but maybe I’ll just save that for another day.

I am still not certain how my photo ended up on FaceBook anyway. Just a reminder to anyone that reads this blog, there is a copyright notice under my “About” in regards to usage of photos. Please do not use any photos on my blog without my permission. Please ask before “sharing”. I guess I am going to be looking into putting copyrights on my photos themselves.

P. S. This just in from the person on FB after I said I had reported them. (misspellings are theirs, not mine!)

dog lover wrote: “Everrything on the internet is not secure state public.If you have dogs ,you may be proud of. I wish you many fun by Dog lover. greetings”

And now I have steam coming out of my ears!!!

UPDATE: I have figured out (thanks to Rick B.) how to report this person, so now I have a copyright infringement filed with FaceBook against this person. We’ll see how it goes!

(photos: Alone on Thin Ice) Green Turtle Pond

Hi Lynne,
boy, you are preaching to the choir with your comments about facebook, twitter, social media, etc.  I just wish I could express myself as well as you did.  I am sure many of your readers may love facebook, etc. but I just don’t get the point.  I’d rather email or talk on the phone with the friends and family I want to stay in touch with…  I don’t like being on my computer that much (and my cell phone can take and receive calls and that is it).

So very sorry about the picture thief—tho I can see why she liked it so much.  It really is a sweet, sweet picture…  I don’t see why she couldn’t have at least said where she found it and that it was not hers…  what ARE the boundaries with facebook?! (okay, so I am an old curmudgeon)
Elizabeth

Elizabeth, if people commenting (or not) are anything to go by you and I are pretty much the only ones who don’t get it! I’m an old curmudgeon too! The boundaries of FaceBook are hard to pin down ...

What?  No bewildered??  Is that a chair out in the middle of Turtle Pond?  Makes you wonder what happened to the person who put it there!  Guess I belong to the Old Curmudgeon Club too.  I Facebook but that’s it - no twitter, no tweet.  I like to put things up and make comments on the political and social situation - usually things that are not pertinent to my blog, although I do post and ‘share’ cool nature pics too.  That’s about it.

C, haha! Bewildered, yes but certainly not bewitched. Good call! Yes, it is a chair in the middle of Green Turtle. Left by some bewildered ice fisherman no doubt.  We Old Curmudgeons need to stick together! Thanks for telling me about the photo but on the other hand it opened up a whole can of worms!

Curmudgeons Unite!!!  You can even call me an old lady, I don’t care.

The theft of your photo is such a violation and a personal hurt!

This was extremely well written and you said exactly what I think each and every day about ‘social media!’ Why everyone has to tweet and twitter and post on facebook (can’t even capitalize it) is a wonder to me. I like to live under the radar, even tho a lot of my friends have facebook accounts. I can call or email them.  I have a ‘stupid phone’ that makes and receives calls and maybe takes a pic or two, if I can remember how to do it. I still have a land line, but that’s because we don’t get adequate cell phone reception in our cul-de-sac.

So many people are worried about what everybody else is doing as the rest of their lives go by. Is it worth it???

As for those so-called ‘authors’...totally pathetic.

By the way, love your pic of the lone stranded chair. Reminds me of the poor shopping cart….

Bigsis, Yep, Curmudgeons United!  Thanks for the support, old lady!

Glad you liked the pic. Lots of stranded items around here lately. But you’ll be glad to know as the ice was melting on the pond today I did not see the chair there. I am thinking someone rescued it. I hope.

I’m catching up during my lunch hour so I’m a day late seeing this….INCREDIBLE!  I’m of the same mindset…hate FB.  I’m on it because of a class reunion but, really, most of what is posted is garbage.  I’m also there following several photogs and photo sites but, if I post anything, it’s maybe once a month.  Also had a photo stolen on FB around 9/11.  I had some really dated photos of the WTC and about a day following my post, a cropped version appeared as a page’s profile pic.  It was easilly identifiable because of certain watercraft.  I was pissed to say the least!  And I rarely if ever post photos of my grandsons and family in general on the blog.    As far as thos ‘authors’ go…hmmmm, yea, right…and the woman with the ‘dinning’ room - I’m still laughing over that one.    Gee, hope I spelled everything correctly!  LOL!!!

Helene, was your photo stolen while on FB or your blog? Mine were taken directly from the blog; not once but twice within days. I figure if I post something on FB it’s pretty much going to be used somewhere, but not from my personal bog! And LOL as I was writing this post I was hoping that I had not made any errors either!

Lynne, wow, have I missed a lot here or what? I thought I was keeping up but apparently not!

I had a similar situation arise when someone took one of my photos from Flickr and posted it to Facebook with no attribution. Another person pointed it out to me (which is the only reason I even knew about it), and rather than report it, I simply posted a comment beneath the picture that said the photo was mine and linked back to my Flickr account. I figured that would at least give me some publicity! Making lemonade out of lemons, so to speak.

I’ve found that it’s simply impossible to control the flow of photos on the internet. People will always post, share and repost stuff—especially younger people, who do not seem to have the same sense of ownership and copyright control that many older people have. Some web services, like Tumblr, are even created specifically to foster reposting.

Until a few years ago, I used to post and share full-size versions of my photos on Flickr. When I began trying to make money from them, I put controls on my Flickr account so people can’t download the full size images. That way, at least they can’t publish them on paper or make posters from them or that sort of thing.

However, my blog is public and lower-res versions of my photos are available there and on Flickr and Tumblr. I state on Flickr that my photos may be freely used for non-commercial purposes, with appropriate credit, and if anyone wants a high-res version to ask me and let me know what it’s for. To date, I’ve only had a few people ask, and I usually give them the photo. (One woman made a poster for her apartment wall. Which was flattering!)

Anyway, sorry for the long comment. I guess, in a nutshell, I would say that sharing is just the way of the world these days. I’m trying to be flexible about it, but it weirds me out sometimes too.

I think the offense in your case is that the person just TOOK the photo without contacting you, and then gave no credit. No one likes to be surprised by that sort of thing. Oh yeah, and I am not a Twitterer either.

Also (and then I promise to shut up)—I can’t resist pointing out how ironic it is that this happened so quickly after you made your blog public. Unbelievable!

One more thought: You could watermark your photos so that they can’t be reposted without being identified as yours. Know what I mean? You could add an identifying name or symbol across a portion of the picture. A lot of photogs do that. (Unfortunately it also harms the image somewhat.)

And finally, on the “novelists”—this is EXACTLY what I meant when I wrote the other day about everyone creating content these days via the Internet. Unfortunately what you get is a definite decline in overall quality!

Steve, yes it was more of the way it was done that the actual photo being used. They refused to take it down; then came and got two more photos just to spite me after FB made them take the first pic down. From Flickr I can understand it, but from my blog it’s harder to take. I have thought of watermarking them but like you said, it pretty much ruins the image and you don’t see the image but the copyright! I felt downright violated with what he did. Thanks for your long and thoughtful comment!

Steve, and oh yes, very ironic that it happened right after my blog went public again!