Friday, May 18, 2007
— Vol. 30, No. 2
Student Life Centre, Room 1116University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1P: 519.888.4048 F: 519.884.7800imprint.uwaterloo.ca
Editor-in-chief, Adam McGuireeditor@imprint.uwaterloo.ca Advertising & Production Manager,Laurie Tigert-Dumasads@imprint.uwaterloo.caGeneral Manager, Catherine Bolgercbolger@imprint.uwaterloo.ca
Editorial Staff
Assistant Editor, Ashley Csanady Cover Editor, vacantNews Editor, vacantNews Assistant, Adrienne Raw Opinion Editor, Mohammad JangdaFeatures Editor, Scott Houston Arts Editor, Andrew AbelaScience Editor, Brendan PintoSports Editor, vacantPhoto Editor, vacantGraphics Co-editor, Peter TrinhGraphics Co-editor, Christine Ogley Web Editor, vacantSystems Administrator, Dan AgarSys. Admin. Assistant, vacantLead Proofreader, Kinga Jakab
Production Staff
Amanda Henhoeffer, Emma Tarswell, Angelo Florendo, Steve R. McEvoy, Tim Foster,Cindy Ward, Peter Sutherland, Shivaun Hoad, Judy Wu,Sylvia Przychodzki, Paul Collier, Erica Ramcharitar,Rob Blom, Kirill Levin, Suzanne Gardner,Dinh Nguyen, Konrad E. Mohring, Shawn Bell,Kristen Marincic, Véronique Lecat, Phil Isard
Board of Directors
board@imprint.uwaterloo.caPresident, Adam Gardinerpresident@imprint.uwaterloo.ca Vice-president, Jacqueline McKoy vp@imprint.uwaterloo.ca Treasurer, vacantSecretary, Rob Blomsecretary@imprint.uwaterloo.caStaff liaison, vacant
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Next staff meeting:
Tuesday, May 22, 200712:30 p.m.
Next board meeting:
Tuesday, June 5, 20074:00 p.m.
My name is Adam, and no, I will nothelp you win $7,000 from 102.1 The Edge. As soon as the popular Toronto-based radio station announcedtheir newest contest, the inunda-tions began. Suddenly, your mom’sfriend’s dogwalker’s sister-in-law wassoliciting you for help in winning thebig prize. Welcome to Facebook Nation. The Edge contest — whereinthe biggest and best Facebook group wins — is hardly the reasonbehind the website’s explosion. Infact, it’s just the latest excuse forschmucks like you and I to log in and check our wall postingsevery seven seconds.But the reality of Facebook is actually scary as hell. It’s TheBeast; the closest incarnationof the visions of 1960’s horror writers everywhere. Registering forFacebook is like signing up to sellyour soul (do I see an eBay cross-promotion there?). The main problem with the ’book isthat everyone has it. You have it, I have it,my girlfriend’s 50-year-old mother has it. Twenty-one of the 22 people sitting
in this ofce right now have it. And
if you have it, you
will
be found.Facebook allows all the peopleyou’ve worked so hard to completely erase from your memory to pop up witha “
hey, how ru!!! long time no c!!!”
posting on
your wall. Facebook proles spreadmore efciently than peanut butter. It
is a guarantee that you will stumbleacross everyone you never liked andeveryone you were giddy tonever see again. And just because your friend requests are plen-tiful, don’t think you’re more popular now thanyou were as an awkward eleventh-grader. Because The Beast is rabid and contagious, you will likely fall victim to friend collectors. Facebook is a statusthing; friend counts are the young adult equivalentof kindergarten birthday party invites. Take, for example, a case I just encounteredon my ’book recently. I indifferently added anacquaintance that I see maybe a half-dozen timesa year. All of a sudden, I receive a request fromher best friend — a woman I’ve met once, at a
bar, for ve minutes. The Beast strikes again. I
proudly denied the request and then pouted overmy rather modest friend count.But the Beast can’t be defeated by stringentfriend denials or ignoring the ignorant — as funas that may be. No, even those you
want
on thatfriends list will still misuse Facebook. There are theevent postings for simple trips to the pub, statusupdates that say no more than “Mike is sleepy,”and the biggest Facebook news-breaking tool of them all — relationship status. True story: My own brother telephoned me mere minutes afterbecoming engaged just so I could hear the goodnews from him rather than read it on his relation-ship status update. Kind of makes you miss therelative privacy of MySpace, doesn’t it?So if Facebook is The Beast, then why do wedo it? It’s just a bloody website, yet it makes usmore of an addict than Robert Downey Jr. But for
all the privacy lost and all the jerks that nd you,
Facebook still boils down to the fact that it’s fun. And I’m still one of the schmucks that will signon and check his wall four thousand times a day.
I guess my status ought to reect that.
do@mp.uwaoo.ca
Not so keen on the green revolution
Every magazine from
Cosmo
to
Vogue
has beenjumping on the ultra-fashionable environmentalbandwagon. Promoting everything from jeans washed in eco-friendly dyes to organic cotton T-shirts, they are pumping the little things thatcould go a long way — but how many people canafford $300 jeans washed in organic dyes?I just love picking up the glossy 300-page
Vanity Fair
, and have it claim to be a “greenissue,” while the paper it’s printed on lookslike it could have killed an entire forest. I justlove seeing Hummer ads next to the articletelling me to buy shampoo that costs threetimes more and smells like dirt.I’m not saying that these articles are a badthing. The fact that environmental issues areso trendy
is
fantastic — creating discourse inany forum only helps the cause.However, pumping solutions that only afew can afford accomplishes little more thancreating upper-middle class liberal guilt. If these “small things everyone can do” arereally so great, why do they have to come ata premium?Hydrogen technology may cost more, butthe government has made little headway intomaking them more affordable. Everything from toilet paper made from recycled ma-terials to eco-friendly shampoos to organicfoods come at a higher cost than their lessenvironmentally-friendly counterparts.So, are the technologies really costing that much more, or is “corporate America”capitalizing on a new marketing trend andsqueezing those extra pennies from yourenvironmentally conscious pockets?In the past few years, it seems there’sbeen a steady increase of seemingly greenproducts appearing on the market, such aspens made from “recycled” material, when“recycled” can mean scraps from making the much cheaper pens right beside it as op-posed to the post-consumer materials thelabel suggests.If the premium pricing
is
a result of ahigher cost in production — in organic food,for example — then the government shouldmake it a priority to make these sustainabletechnologies accessible. The “little things” that everyone can doare all well and good, but only if everyonecan follow them.
acaad@mp.uwaoo.ca
Christine Ogley
The fact that environmental issues are sotrendy
is
fantastic ... however, pumpingsolutions that only a few can affordaccomplishes little more than creatingupper-middle class liberal guilt.
Opinion
Imprint, Friday, May 18, 2007opinion@imprint.uwaterloo.ca
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