Facehooked: How Facebook Affects Our Emo... Suzana E.Flores is a clinical psychologist and she wrote Facehooked published by Reputation Books for trying to let us understand how much social medias in particular Facebook changed our daily life.

All "hooked" by Facebook this one of Flores is a shocking and at traits sad, but always interesting reportage on the mind and behavior altered thanks to Facebook. While I was reading the book I thanked Lord we still have dial-up in our corner of the world. If sometimes I complain, I see now all the positive sides :-) ;-)

Surely Facebook gives addiction. Surely Facebook is able to reduce the connections between real people, like also other social appls as whatsup. Facebook is attractive, and the Big Brother of the world. More than other virtual communities.

Yes because Twitter is for business and for people who wants to spread important messages. In general more adapted for communication and media.

Facebook is a beautiful virtual land where to spend time without anymore...privacy.

It is a strange phenomenon this one: if in real life we wouldn't never, never communicate certain things, from the most common to the most sensitive ones to strangers, once online every kind of inhibition is over, and we are the protagonists of a never ending show where we post this world and the other, where we comment, where we share also sensitive topics sometimes with people we haven't never met and that surely will be incredibly good people but that they can be also potentially dangerous.

Facebook has also created for people passed away the possibility of keeping alive their FB page...

13 millions of people tells the author never changed the privacy of Facebook although it's important to keep Facebook protected under many aspects in particular if we added complete strangers on our community.

The author analyzes then the various behavior people starts to adopt once online. They want to be more beauty, more stunning because comparison with models or actors, or other people and their beautiful estates, children etc, can be cause of frustration.
So they tend to Photoshop their life.

What it means? They alter their life for trying to be more beauty, more attracting, more interesting, more...everything.

The result? In general it's a failure when we project a different ideas of us, but we are online and so who cares?

Facebook and people. It's like if every person is suffering of a sort of schizophrenic problem. In real life they're controlled. Once online they're different ones with maybe sometimes different identities, created for the most diversified purposes, stealing friendship, love, informations. They create a different self for loving maybe themselves more than the real self. Who knows?

It's a dangerous place under many aspects, as also can be potentially, good because you can post pictures of our life for our distant friends, correspondents and connections and where to share your thoughts.

It's not all negative, but it's important to try to prevent the negativity that there is in this powerful social network.

At first it was Myspace. It's in that case a place dedicated mainly at people of the showbiz, where you can find bands, actors, musicians, writers. It's a place for creative people with a different philosophy if compared to Facebook.

Then the arrival of Facebook. Facebook thanks to its scheme, a lot of games, an attractive interface, captured millions of people. People started to share all their thoughts, pictures, publicly, commenting, and sharing their life. There are active users who love to sharing with others their life in a daily base thanks also at the new deviceS like smart phones and tablets and a simplified access to the virtual community.

The risks? Being used by many kind of people that we add with simplicity although we don't know anything of them.

Plus, a powerful part of the book dedicated at the so-called Cyber-Native youngsters born and grown up with the internet, and these instruments and cyberbullysm.

As reported by the psychologist, youngster find less attracting to talk to real people than not playing or using their smart phone.

But same is for adults. There is not anymore peace during lunch or dinner. People, adults and teen-agers use constantly their smart phones.

Why this?

There is not a precise reason. After all in the past we brought a book at the doc's studio and while we were waiting we read. Now, same happens with smart phone but in a much more massive level and with more interactions. We didn't read during lunch or dinner. I did but I guess I was just a sporadic case.

Maybe it's a sort of refusal to speak and interact with people in that place, it can be a bar, it can be a cafe a social place. The smart phone the best instrument for finding refuge in the "other world" in the virtual life, and where to escape and find some peace, if virtual life means that. No stress. Or just, googling also while we lunch or we have dinner time gives us the possibility of searching while we talk with the rest of family of certain informations immediately. A writer, a place, a pic.

For certain people the net is a place where to cause messes of various genres and there are various kind of profiles portrayed by the psychologist and their modality for approaching people, "ruining" their own consideration for a little while.

Most of the people interviewed, some clients of the author focused on their massive problematic derived by the use and abuse of Facebook. Big dependence, great discussions, break up with their real partner, because partner thought that their girlfriends or wives talked with other men online or vice versa.

There was a story of a girl and boy. They chatted for 7 years, she Photoshopped her pics because she didn't like her body and when she met this boy deluded by the encounter.
Virtual life creates myths and different expectations. Maybe because there is not real life to live. Virtual life is more light.
You can send as a gift a virtual heart, a virtual kiss, a virtual dish of pasta, a virtual donuts without hug, without cooking or baking thanks to various game applications. You save time and you think that you are interested in the other human beings. Surely is true but... How much can be true without also a physical interaction?

There are also big misunderstanding.

A man caused a mess, because he saw his girlfriend close to a man. It was in a FB pic. He didn't know who this smiling man was and thinking maybe he could be a new lover of his girlfriend, he broke her PC, was violent with her, till he discovered that the guy was Mitt Romney, a republican candidate the lady was supporting.

Funny and comical isn't it true? Pity that there was violence in this episode.

A virtual community must be a place where we start to wisely interact with other ones and trying to carefully add new people.

It's all up to us, if we want to share thoughts, feelings, with others, or just we want to use e-mail for it.

Surely Facebook gives a stage, a place where to perform who we are or who we are not and this is what, mainly makes the difference. Each of us wants 15 minutes of fame and Facebook can gives us more than 15 minutes. An entire virtual life.

Wonderful book, because you will learn a lot about the big potentialities and damages caused by Facebook and our so-called virtual life.

Thanks to netgalley for this book!

Gay marriage has been one of the defining fights of the gay rights movement, and this book brings honest, insightful commentary about that topic from the people whose opinions on this subject matter the most: The LGBTQ community. It's not so cut and dry, and the opinions are diverse - you may not expect them to be regarding the topic - and each of these writings gives the reader a lot to think about life, marriage, culture, domestic partnership, and what it means to be queer today. This book is an important read, especially in today's political climate, and is a valuable addition to any collection.

Michael was eleven years old that night when, green as he could be about the world , he climbed aboard the first and only ship of his life, the Oronsay, sailing for England from Colombo.

Unbeknownst to him, the twenty-one days at sea would become twenty-one years of schooling, molding him into the adult he would one day be, when he joined the cat's table, the least important place to eat on the ship. 

The lessons he picked up from the adult company filled up several pages of his old school exercise books. He still had time to make those notes, amid the adventures in which he and his friends, Ramadhin and Cassius, engaged in on the ship. They witnessed an adult world filled with thieves, adulterers, gamblers, teachers, authority, natural healers, dreamers and schemers. Oh yes, and a shackled, dangerous prisoner. Each one of them becomes important in their lives through either their words or conduct. The ship had lots to offer for three young boys to keep them occupied. So many people, so many stories, so many intrigue. And then there was the ports of call...

Miss Perinetta Lasqueti was one of the guests around the Cat's Table who would become one of the biggest influences in their lives. Their first impression of her manner was that of being like faded wallpaper, but the more they found out about her, the more convinced they became that 'she was more like a box of small foxes at a country fair'. She would become one of the biggest surprises on their life's journey.

Mr. Mazappa - the boisterous, loud pianist would change their newly acquired perspective on old paintings with his approach to the angelic Madonnas in them, saying: "‘The trouble with all those Madonnas is that there is a child that needs to be fed and the mothers are putting forth breasts that look like panino-shaped bladders. No wonder the babies look like disgruntled adults."(p.213 - kindle edition)

Mr. Larry Daniels, the botanist, would teach them much more about his plants than they would ever need to know in their lifetimes. 

Mr. Fonseka, the teacher, had a "serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live. And this serenity and certainty I have seen only among those who have the armour of books close by." 

I wanted to read this book for such a long time now. There was just something about it that told me it would roll me over and tie me down in its prose. It did. I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered its popularity on Goodreads. Some books just put themselves where it can be read because it is really that good. It is multifaceted. It is thought-provoking. It is excellent. It is one of those books you cannot walk away from easily. It has all the elements to promise that it will become a classic in time. I want to reread it. I just have to. Period.

If you are looking for a hippy-dippy, mystical dog training book, then look no further! This book is all about understanding the dog at an emotional and - yes - spiritual level. Clothier is a disciple of Linda Tellington-Jones, the pioneer in "bodywork" with horses and dogs aka therapeutic massage that treats animals' behavioural and emotional imbalances. Clothier's basic thesis is that dogs have rich emotional lives and that without respecting that enough to build a high-quality, equal, respectful and loving partnership with them, as you would with any being you loved, things will go awry.

Writing in 2001, this book came before the current synthesization of ethological-behavioural-cognitive approaches and the debunking of a lot of the alpha-wolf pack nonsense. Clothier states openly and upfront (and somewhat defensively) that her theories are not founded on that-there school book learnin' or any recognized academic credentials, but come from her own experience and rather eclectic reading which ranges from Lorenz's classic work in ethology through to Persig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Buscaglia's Love.

Like I said, hippy-dippy.

But I didn't dismiss it outright, as is my wont with bullshit mystic fruitcakes these types of authors, because she issued a challenge, and dammit, she is right. Just what do we have to lose by thinking of and treating animals in a loving, whole and respectful way - and shouldn't the results and the relationship that develops speak for itself? Where's the resistance?

So I let her take me along for the ride, and you know what? There's some great things in here, which - albeit accidentally - reconcile the hardcore, scientific behaviourist data with the more whispery kinda animal training that talks about balance, quality, soul, authenticity.

Among other things to read this for is the clarity of her discussion of alpha/dominance/submission - she dismisses all the terminology as misunderstood and misapplied, and wipes the slate clean to take it back to status-seeking behaviour which expresses itself differently depending on context and is ONLY expressed in relation to another being. She does as good if not a better job on this than even Patricia McConnell in The Other End of the Leash.

Following from this, she discusses "aggression" at length, and provides some beautiful examples and analogies that make it clear how: 1) we miss the early warning signs of aggression; 2) what we call 'aggressive' acts are often anything but; 3) true aggression is a serious issue that is an animal trying to tell us something is very very wrong - don't underestimate or ignore it.

She does a great job with the necessity to exert leadership with animals, much like with children - and takes the entire concept up a notch to avoid the whole "pack leader" mess and instead, nest leadership in the context of setting boundaries, providing structure, having the animal's (or child's) best interests at heart, taking ownership for any bad behaviour as a failure of the leader and not the fault of the dog/child.

She does a beautiful, if hard to read, dismantling of dog training by so-called experts who in fact propose and practice inhumane, cruel and outright sociopathic approaches. She shows these as the end result of a philosophy that starts with alpha and ends in confusion, frustration, pain, harm and even death. She names names. This section will make you angry, angry, angry as it should. There are still practitioners out there - Brad Pattison comes to mind; Milan might also be in this camp - who strenuously defend their practices. She says (I'm paraphrasing): you never have to defend methods that are kind, respectful, compassionate. You only have to defend methods that could be perceived as other than this. If you have to defend your practices, you need to question what you're doing and why you're doing it.

She is steadfast and fully committed to her own philosophy of kindness, respect, empathy and love to build healthy relationships. She is uber-authentic and attentive to her own theories and behaviour being 100 per cent aligned with her underlying philosophy.

At the same time - and this is part of her authenticity - she is open about her past acts that have *not* always been congruent with a loving, respectful, humane approach. She recognizes the baggage she brings and has brought into her relationships with humans and with animals, and she encourages us to do the same if what we seek and value are healthy, happy, loving and genuine relationships. And she delves into the murky, grey area that exists in any relationship where there is a power imbalance, and where one individual must act as leader to ensure the safety of the other. She explores the sometimes-uncomfortable mantle of leadership, the need for a leader to not just persuade but sometimes coerce ... and the thin line between coercion and what might be classed in a different context as cruelty.

She goes on a bit and keeps selling after the sale is made; she sprinkles quotations like confetti seeking to be profound by proxy; her metaphors are sometimes hackneyed; she occasionally strains to make a joke; and she veers into sexist (or at least, stereotyped) analogies a bit too frequently for my own comfort. But, BUT. She redeems herself, she really does.

She writes with an underlying logic and authority that overcomes (despite her own lack of confidence) our doubts and allows us (well, me anyway) to forgive her for her woo-woo metaphysics. She ends up taking you to interesting places and will open your mind and heart to new thoughts and feelings - I had many a-ha moments here. And she is truly funny and also forgiving of herself and others (a lesson she's learned from the doggies).

She may get some of the details wrong (she repeatedly calls "if ... then" scenarios doggy math instead of the more accurate doggy logic; and she muddles up classical and operant conditioning leading her into dangerous baby-bathwater territory), but by the time she's done, she's presented an absolutely coherent philosophy/theory that one can acknowledge as practical, usable, sensible ... and really quite lovely.

The last five or six chapters take you right into the heart of the end of a relationship - i.e., the death of several of her own and others' pets - and will have you weeping and blubbering along with her or at least it did me. And then, she goes out on a couple of chapters that rest on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's "we are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience," which she extends to the doggies.

Well, hell. Why not, huh?