404 City

OCD: Candy Colored

2009-11-06T19:32:30Z

The view from my hotel room in Seoul is filled with palaces and office buildings. If you minus the palaces, I could be anywhere in Asia. Taxis make a blur on the roadways, people criss cross across the streets, the smell of charcoal and noodles fill the air, I feel at home and I miss home.

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Now to the Lower Level, I take the escalator and I smell it first. A swirling tantalizing cloud of drool inducing smells. Noodles, mochis (sweet rice cakes), sushi, waffles, bread, pastries, barbeque and more. I was in the candy store of my dreams. Food everywhere. There was endless aisles of candy colored foods, I could pick and choose whatever I wanted. I was struck dumb, where to start?

A few miles from where I was standing is the Korean Demilitarized Zone. It is 155 miles long and approximately 2.5 miles and the most armed border in the world. Across that border that cuts Korea in half is a population that can't even imagine what I was looking at. North Korea is a country that has pushed their might behind an army, and taken from the plates of their people to feed that military. North Korea suffered with the changes in Russian (collapse of Soviet Russia)and China (monetary), their farming culture suffered a massive failure in 1995-96, expanding to a wide spread famine by 1996-99. An estimated 600,000 died of starvation (other sources have estimates from 200,000 to 3.5 million).

Here I was standing in a food court 30 miles south of the DMZ, watching people throw uneaten food into the trash. The clatter of food trays followed me as I left the store and looked up and the colors began to fade to match the grey skies outside, the same sky on both sides of the border.

Image: Ophelia Chong / Ice Cream Mochi, Lotte Department Store, Food Level

OCD: Savoring A Moment

2009-10-31T13:22:08Z

All this week, Ophelia Chong will be touring China, all the while recording her observations, thoughts, and insights right here for you. To view more of her online diary entries, click here.

After I climb the chill mountain's steep stone paths,
Deep in the white clouds there are homes of men.
I stop my carriage, and sit to admire the maple-grove at nightfall,
Whose frozen leaves are redder than the flowers of early Spring.

Du Mu (803--852 AD)

Tang Dynasty (June 18, 618 - June 4, 907)

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China in its quiet moments is a beauty to behold. If you stand still at a busy intersection and just watch the world fly by, you can catch a single moment that will astound you - a bird will land at your feet and peck at a fallen crumb from a bun cradled in a child's hand or the scent of fresh soap on the woman that just passed on your right.

I was at the Great Wall, at Mutianyu, it as quiet, no tour buses, no bustling stalls full of plastic miniature replicas of the Great Wall, no wandering flocks of snapping cameras and fanny packs, it was a silent day.

As I climbed a local path to the Wall, I took in the colors of Fall, the leaves dancing across the path, carried by a breeze the leaves swirled and fell like words from a poet's brush. I could smell the smoke from a charcoal stove, I imagined the kettle on the stove heating up water for tea, ready to warm a farmer's hands after a day of cutting wood for the winter. Piles of branches laid neatly along the path, ready to be used in the next few months to warm the houses. This is a silent still China, one that you find everywhere, if you opened your heart.

Images: Ophelia Chong / Mutianyu 10.28.09

OCD: Humor Chinese Style

2009-10-29T11:44:11Z

All this week, Ophelia Chong will be touring China, all the while recording her observations, thoughts, and insights right here for you. To view more of her online diary entries, click here.

You would think by my previous posts that the Chinese (including me) don't have a sense of humor. You have to have one to be a driver or passenger in a car, it's your first line of defense when there's no rule book to go by and if there was one, no one's read it.

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Road Kill

In the last few days that I have been here, and I have been coming to China for over thirty years, I have witnessed the subtle moments of levity. Today I found the motherlode. I went to the art district called 798 or Dashanzi Art District, a sprawling mini-city of galleries. The area was originally set up for factories during the 1950's which were large machine shops that are now massive art galleries, bookstores, cafes, local fashion shops, schools and contemporary theater spaces.

How much is that dead doggie in the window?

As I wandered down alleys, and through galleries I came upon a small shop, The Beijing Happy Sheep Art Area. What grabbed my eye was the stuffed pets, a small lap top dancing on a world globe, a white furry dog reading a book, guinea pigs holding up the Olympic rings to the small black dog playing tennis.

Even though there was a "No Photos" sign, the very sweet salesclerk let me take photos. I was in heaven. Where else could you find a dog playing tennis? What mind could come up with this and not laugh all the way through the taxidermying? Only a local Chinese could. Not that the Chinese have weird taxidermying locked up, a website called CrappyTaxidermy.com requests submissions from readers of their weird sightings from across the globe, but the Chinese has brought it up to a level of high art. This Beijing Happy Sheep Art Area is across from the international gallery Pace.

Pedestrian Rule No.1: Look both ways and run

A few years back in Shanghai, I witnessed an accident, a cyclist was hit by a concrete truck and it was ghastly. And the Chinese did what the Chinese do best, they gathered around and stared at the aftermath. No screaming, no wincing, just the quiet observation of life and death. It's not that they take dying lightly, it just happens more often and in public because of the amount of traffic.

Stat: The total number of cars for civilian use stood at 24.38 million, up by 24.5 percent, of which private-owned cars numbered 19.47 million, up by 28.0 percent. (From the National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2008)

Driving Rule No.1: The First One to Blink Looses

Only in the last five years has the majority of the car drivers been on the road. So if you can imagine a country full of drivers sort of obeying the rules, you have China. Hence the numerous traffic mishaps. Its a country of "oopps". If you can't sit back and just realize that this is the way it's going to be, then you will just drive yourself into an early grave, even if you can't laugh at it, at least roll your eyes and move on.

Rule No.2: Just keep moving, the other guy will get out of your way.

You have to have a sense of humor here. If you didn't you would never experience the daily joy of just being alive. And I think I found out where all the Feral Lap Dog go to Heaven.

Images: Ophelia Chong / 798 Art District 10.29.09

OCD: Gone Feral

2009-10-27T14:40:52Z

All this week, Ophelia Chong will be touring China, all the while recording her observations, thoughts, and insights right here for you. To view more of her online diary entries, click here.

Day 4 / Beijing, China

I rode through a small village on the Fifth Ring Road in Beijing. The entrance to the village is marked by a sign "Pomegranate Cafe. Beer. Coffee.Here"]]>
The village is on the other side of a small creek, the smells from the creek aren't of wild grasses, but of human excrement and trash. I peddled my bike down the dusty road into the main drag, passing a massage parlor and small noodle cafe filled with men watching a television while the chef cooks outside, cutting noodles into a boiling pot fueled by a propane tank.

I dodge a few dogs, and what caught my eye was that they weren't mutts but purebred dogs. A Dachshund was digging through a pile of garbage, a Lhasa Apso scooted across the road chasing a small beagle. They were all filthy and with no collars. They might be homeless or they could have homes where they rest at night in the village, it was hard to tell.

I was riding a bike through a village of feral lap dogs.

A few years back, when China's middle class rose up in prosperity, the item to have was a small dog. They were expensive and a badge of "I am now wealthy enough to have a pet". But the thrill of lugging around a pet faded, and the dogs were let go, dropped off by the side of the road. The ones who were smart enough survived through the bitter winters by finding warm spots to sleep and marked out their favorite spots where the trash was plentiful. This village was paradise to those lost dogs.

The Forgotten Ones

There is a parallel with the feral lap dogs and China's ADHD. The architecture has gone from loud glitz to high end glamour (the architects of the new Beijing, Rem Koolhas et al). What was once the epitome of elegance is now the Bourgeoise's best forgotten shame, like the first crush we had in grade school that has come back to haunt us. China is growing up fast and discarding old loves even faster. What was once hot is now colder than a Gobi Desert winter gust rushing down Tianammen Square.

Do you like me now?

China is like your wallflower friend who has come into her own, discarding the plain brown smock and now sauntering down the avenue in Chanel. She has power and an iron will that will not be told that she cannot do what she wants when she wants. But she leaves in her wake a trail of refuse and waste. The scent she leaves is not sweet but sour.

The Next Chapter

The feral dogs like the discarded will survive and mutate into stronger mutts that will one day form a pack, and that pack will rule the land.

Images: Ophelia Chong/ Beijing 10.2009

OCD: Day 3 of the Locusts

2009-10-25T02:36:10Z

All this week, Ophelia Chong will be touring China, all the while recording her observations, thoughts, and insights right here for you. To view more of her online diary entries, click here.

Homer Simpson: "Oh, Lord, forgive me for harboring such unworthy thoughts, but sometimes I wish I could tear it all down! " - Day of the Locusts by Nathanael West, 1939

I took a 5k walk around Houhai yesterday, a small lake in the 2nd circle of Beijing. I even saw a few hardy swimmers in the lake.

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Walking through the Hutongs (small enclosed neighborhoods of traditional chinese houses, one story multi-family compounds) I got a glimpse of daily life, the smell of charcoal burning to cook their meals, roaming dogs, vendors selling local leek pancakes and snake liquor to one really chubby kid. So far he's the biggest person I've seen here. Everyone has been of normal weight, hard considering KFC is their favorite fast food, most likely their income prescribes their trans fat intake.

The Drum Tower

I bought a 20RMB ticket and climbed up the Drum Tower, the same tower that a crazed migrant worker stabbed Todd Bachman, the CEO of a 123-year-old Minnesota-based home and garden center, father of an US Olympic volleyball player last year. They are still cautious, I had to walk through a scanner and have my bags x-rayed. The view from the tower was minimized by the charcoal smoke and the burning of waste by the locals. And they installed a fence on the balcony, you can no longer see the city from the original landing, but from a fence 8 feet away. The murderer jumped to his death. I imagined his tortured climb up the steep stairs to the top of the tower, each step 14 inches high at an angle of 20˚, a climb that mirrored his life.

The Counter Weight

Later that day I was at China World Hotel and took a photo of the CCTV building designed by Rem Koolhas. Next to it was the burned out hulk of the hotel that was set on fire by an errant firework (who gave the okay to have fireworks at a construction site is up for debate). The fire took place during Chinese New Years, February 2009.

They say it is an indictment of the overwhelming grip that CCTV has on media control in the country, it's black heart is there to see everyday. The hotel serves as a counter weight to the CCTV building and cannot be torn down, they just have to figure a way to re-engineer the building.

The two events, seemingly dissimilar, yet tied together. The Drum Tower announced the time of day during the Imperial reign, CCTV beats the drum of the controlled media of the present government, both suffering a tragedy that is symbolic of the underlying emotions of the people listening to that drumbeat.

Silent Moments

Yet there is joy in small moments throughout China, like the calligraphy, you have to be still and discover the subtly of water colored dioramas.

"Yet, despite his appearance, he was really a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes." - about the main character Tod. The Day of the Locust

Images: Ophelia Chong / Beijing 2009

OCD: The Donkey and I

2009-10-22T23:52:04Z

All this week, Ophelia Chong will be touring China, all the while recording her observations, thoughts, and insights right here for you. To view more of her online diary entries, click below.

OCD: The Road to Incheon

OCD: The Donkey and I

OCD: Day 3 of the Locusts

OCD: Gone Feral

OCD: Day 2 / Beijing

Thirteen hours on a plane rolls by quickly when you time your Ambien intake. Take one half an hour after taking off, and the second the moment you wake up. So in essence you are really only conscious for 45 minutes.

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I landed at 9:40 am Beijing time. The airport is massive, it was built for the Olympics and is the largest airport in the world. I took the monorail from my gate to the baggage claims area, it was just over half a mile. Fast, efficient, the size of a small town.

There are two sites you cannot access here, Facebook and YouTube. Both for reasons that are obvious. Communication. Both are megaphones that can blast out information quickly and to individuals and groups. Before the National Holiday on October 1st, there were 14 million registered Facebook users, the day of the holiday there are now only 14K who can access their Facebook pages. Also in China there are only two mobile phone companies. On the national holiday, all the ring tones were changed to the national anthem, whether you asked for it or not.

China has one foot planted in the past, another in the future, both firmly planted. That leaves the head to turn back and forward at any given time. Comfortable, yet it will eventually strain. Like the donkey standing without fear on the side of the highway, China is comfortable in its embrace of the future and its past.

Image: Ophelia Chong / Donkey vs. Condo

OCD: The Road to Incheon

2009-10-21T21:09:55Z

All this week, Ophelia Chong will be touring China, all the while recording her observations, thoughts, and insights right here for you. To view more of her online diary entries, click below.

OCD: The Road to Incheon

OCD: The Donkey and I

OCD: Day 3 of the Locusts

OCD: Gone Feral

OCD: Ophelia Chong's Diary / Day 1

Oct. 21, 2009: I leave for LAX, my flight is at 12:20 AM. The airport is busy, people traveling to Mexico, France, England, and me, to Beijing China by way of Seoul, Korea. As per my usual obsessive compulsiveness I am there 2 hours early. After checking in and going through security, I had about an hour to fritter away.

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On the plane.

The stewardess asks me if I would like to move to another seat, because the video display is broken. I decide to stay in my seat, there are only so many times you can watch "Wolverine" and not grow back hair.

Free Treats with a BTW

I take Vitamin C religiously, I got my flu shot, I avoid shaking hands unless I really have to. I get my blood panel down once a year. I even send in a sample of my you-know-what to check for colon cancer (my grandmother had it). All to avoid giving other peoples' germs a free ride. I spin at least twice a day. To put it in a few words, I am obsessively healthy.

After a dinner of BimBamBop, the lovely stewardesses hand out Sleepy Eye Patches, tooth brushes and slippers. I did into the bag and place the Eye patch on my eyes. I notice a smell, a very weird chemical smell. However I had just taken my first Ambien and I was not in a very take action mood. About ten minutes into the Eye Patch session, I felt my blood pressure drop and I started to get chills. Then of course I had the 13 hour flight travelers' nightmare; abdominal flip flops. I get to the lavatory and I proceed to wonder what the hell I ate before I got on the plane.

I get back to my seat and I am chilled and shaking, a light sweat covers me. I remember in Girl Scouts that if you feel dizzy, you put your head between your knees. I did this and felt much better. I spent about 4 hours there. The guy next to me must of thought I was his nightmare seat mate, and is probably telling his friends about the woman who spent her flight with her head examining her shoes. So what was the cause? The eye patch. I must have some new allergy. Oh great. something else to obsess about.

Landing in Incheon

Its 5:30am and the airport has a silence about it that is quite comforting for such a large space. The closest I can equate it to is to being in the Duomo di Milano. A 500 year old cathedral with soaring ceilings and a sense of peace about it, even though it is filled with hundreds of silent people much like airports.

I'm Connected

Korea is the country with the fastest broadband in the world, the airport offers Wi-Fi free. Seoul is the only city in the world to offer DMB, a digital mobile TV technology and WiBro, a high speed internet service. Their fiber-optic broadband network runs at 100Mbps and will be upt to 1Gbps by 2012. Compare this to the US the FCC definition of broadband is 768 kbit/s (0.8 Mbit/s). Back home my internet service Road Runner Standard promises speeds 7x faster then 768k DSL.

I will be back in Seoul for 3 days, and one of my highlights besides the spas will be a trip to Yongsan Electronics Market, the largest of it's kind in Asia. I will compare this to Beijing's version (as you can guess which one will have the most pirated items).

Almost time to get onto the next and final leg of my flight to Beijing. I wonder how the internet fares there?

Image: Ophelia Chong / Inchon Airport 2009

The Lessons of Balloon Boy

2009-10-15T20:35:11Z

It's still going on, the saga of Balloon Boy. A six year old boy was reported to have crawled into a compartment on a small hot air balloon and flew away across Colorado. The mystery of Falcon Henne is still to be solved.]]>
Across the Twittersphere people commented on the wild flight of the small helium balloon. Once it landed the authorities did not find the small boy. For two hours the focus was on the careening balloon flying across Colorado fields. Then it shifted.

All eyes then turned to the family. News crews interviewed wandering neighbors of the family. "They are nice" "...a family of storm chasers" "...was on Wife Swap last year"

The force of the internet moved like a rogue wave to keyword searches on the family and their reality television past. More tidbits about the dad popped up. More about the kids slid into view. From one moment they were an obscure trivia question to now a 24 hour news cycle "Breaking News" item. For a moment our thoughts on the Health bill were pushed aside for "Balloon Boy".

Oct. 15/09 Google Search Results 1 - 10 of about 5,210,000 for balloon boy.
Oct. 17/09 Google Search Results 1 - 10 of about 139,000 for heene family hoax.
Oct. 17/09 Google Search Results 1 - 10 of about 4,290,000 for balloon boy hoax.

The internet is a double edged sword, it can inflate and deflate as easily as a balloon. What you will be remembered for is the last keywords used to describe you.

Update: 3:11 pm The young boy has been found alive hiding in the garage attic. Guess who's not getting dessert tonight?

Update: Oct. 17/09 Its a Hoax says 25-year-old researcher Robert Thomas, friend of Heene Dad.

Update: Oct. 17/09 10:30 PM PDTCNN Authorities in Colorado say criminal charges are expected to be filed against Richard Heene

The Other Side of the Story

2009-10-14T23:27:39Z

I will be on the road to Beijing and Seoul next week, and reporting about all the cool stuff we don't get here. And what they don't get there.

]]> knock off phones to experiencing Korea's internet frenzy.

Korea's internet usage jumped from 40% in 2000 to 70.7% in 2008, whereas the US went from 44% in 2000 to 74% by 2008. Both countries are neck to neck in the race to internet usage. China lags behind at Internet users as of Jun/09, 25.3%, one reason being that estimates are that only 45 to 60 million people have computers or instant access to computers (the workplace or school), but 1/10th of the population use IM to communicate through their cellphones; an estimated 680 million mobile phone users in 2009. In China, the cellphone is the computer.

"South Korea dramatically improved the speed, quality and availability of its Internet service in 2009, pushing past Japan, the former worldwide leader, according to a team of business students from the University of Oxford in England and the University of Oviedo in Spain." - CNN Money Oct. 10.09

According to Cisco, in a study of 66 countries and 240 cities, the ranking included the number of homes connected to the internet. South Korea had 97% whereas Hong Kong had 99%, near complete city wide connectivity. South Korea ranks #1 in broadband leadership, and the US is ranked #15.

What does it mean to be 97% connected? And how does that reliance affect their social interactions?

So what applications are they using in China? In Korea? What information is filtered and what not? Throughout my trip I will be posting photos and a diary of my personal observations, from the airports to the street corners.

See on the other side.

Image: Ophelia Chong / Flying Man

Ping

2009-10-07T16:23:29Z

Silence. I love the quiet, no sounds, no pings, no jumping alert icons, nothing but silence.

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Have you ever clicked on a link sent to you by a friend only to have ear shattering noise blast out of your computer speakers? I have. And I expect it to happen at least once a day until I finally leave this mortal world and go into the silent abyss where I will float on cool waves and quiet clouds.

Noise invades our spaces, we can control it by turning off the television, the stereo, the phones, shutting the doors and windows, but the noise coming from our computers are at times needed, to alert us to emails, chats, urgent Yammer messages, whatever we need to be connected to the outside world. But when does it get to the point where you are trained like a drug sniffing dog to perk your ears up when you hear the low decibels of your computer's needs? I can hear a ping from across the house, even when the sound is set on low. My ears filter out sounds of cars and barking dogs, but a low ping can have me running to the laptop.

Silence. As much as I need to be connected there are times I just want to be sitting in the garden staring at a leafy plant. But if it wasn't for that ping, I would not be able to afford to sit and stare. So I have come to an agreement with noise, I let it invade my space as long as it agrees to leave me time to be tone deaf and mute.

Image: Ophelia Chong / Underwater

The Birdshot Effect

2009-10-02T19:24:56Z

Another Facebook rant, yes I know, it's a weekly occurrence, like the swallows returning home to Capistrano or another increase in my waistline. This rant came about after a Skype conversation with Simon Gornick of Spotcher.

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Gripe.

So why does it bug me? Well, it's all about them getting their message out without interaction. All they are doing is clicking options to feed it to all their social networks. There was a study released about the two types of Twitter users by Mor Naaman and Jeffrey Boase, what they found was that 80% of Twitter users were "meformers", breaking it down into an easy bitesize nugget, it's all about "Me". The other 20% are "informers", who tend to share information that is useful to their followers. Women were more apt to post about themselves as opposed to men. This study applies to social network users who post to all their SN sites. Its all about us knowing what they are doing without them really caring about what we are doing. Of course there are a few that do interact on all their networks, but that is a minority.

Rant.

Back to why I hate Twitter on Facebook, its all about "Me", and the birdshot strategy of hitting as many targets as possible fails, because you cannot engage on every platform. After a while the postings become just background noise and eventually hidden from Facebook users' streams.

Snort.

If you want to social network then social network. If you post everywhere the same message it is the equivalent of flying over a city and throwing out a million flyers, its just tomorrow's garbage.

Okay I feel better now. Back next week with another rant.

Today's feelgood palate cleanser: "Follow your dreams because they are stalking you" - me

Image: Ophelia Chong / Birdshot Rant.

It Blew Up

2009-09-28T22:51:24Z

Lately in the news there have been one water main cracking up after another. Some speculate that it is the DWP's water restrictions causing it, by allowing sprinkler use Mondays and Thursdays, the water mains are pushed past their maximum.

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When I first went online, way back in 1994, I had a 2400 baud modem. The sound of the handshake was soothing, after a few bings, pongs, and zzzaps it connects. Don't even think of anything other than text and maybe an image on your screen. You were lucky even to get to a few pages after a minute or three. Hop scotch a decade and a half and I can download music, while sending a 9 mg file, not to mention watching a video of a cat in a tissue box. I had no doubt back in 1994 that we would be leaps and bounds ahead, but I did not realize how much we would depend on the speed of connectivity.

Ever have the misfortune of having your internet access go down? It's like loosing a limb. "I can't get your email, so that's why I am calling". We are forced back into our old ways, the phone call. The hardest part of phone calls are the fact you can only do one at a time, unlike emails where you can get your point across by hitting reply all. When you think of it, we are only saving minutes of time, which we then sit and wonder what to do with ourselves.

The local residents that were affected by the water main break had to do without water, they made do by showering at the gym, buying bottles of water, they were inconvenienced but they had work arounds. When our internet goes down we work around by using the phone or head out to a working network, or even just go offline and taking a break from the constant buzzing. But like all "breaks", we expect it to be fixed and back to normal eventually. We sit patiently tapping our fingers, our mantra "it will be back soon, I just know it."

Water will always travel the same way to our homes, but the internet has the advantage where it will evolve into newer and faster ways to deliver information to us. The only small fissure in the pipeline is the power source that pushes it through to us, and as long as we rely on that singular source of power, our internet pipeline is as fragile as our water mains.

Image: Ophelia Chong / SuperTrain

Pick Up Line 2009

2009-09-23T20:51:31Z

Burn baby burn! Burn baby burn! Burn baby burn! Burn baby burn! Burnin'!

To mass fires, yes! One hundred stories high
People gettin' loose y'all gettin' down on the roof - Do you hear?
(the folks are flaming) Folks were screamin' - out of control
It was so entertainin' - when the boogie started to explode
I heard somebody say...
- The Trammps 1977 "Disco Inferno"
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While the music thumped in the background you held your white wine cooler and leaned on the bar, your wrap dress snug against your Legg's All-in-one Panty and Hose. You saw him from across the room, his Angel's Flight jacket unzipped exposing a manicured hairy chest with an astrological sign nestled safely in the furry crevice of his clavicle.

Your Bonne Bell glossed lips part as he steps up next to you His lips pucker and then he opens his mouth and you hear "What's your sign?"

Ahhh..... that was way back then. Back when the economy was deep in an oil embargo, New York City was teetering on bankruptcy, and everyone had a job. Now you can probably count more friends out of work than you have ever had in recent memory. As an observer of social conversations, I have noticed people asking "What do you do?", which is a polite version of "Do you have a job?" as the replacement of "What's your sign?". We care less about your spiritual life and more about your economic status.

Who are you?

In the last two decades we judged one another by our cars, houses, designer labels but that all got swept away by an economic tsunami of our own making. It is my hope that we replace "What do you do?" with "What's your sign?", not in the same tone as a cheap pick up line, but as in how are you living your life spiritually rather than materially. Who you are is not what you wrap yourself in, but what is under that wrapping. So who are you?

Image: ophelia chong / Decision

It's Too Late Now

2009-09-17T19:37:00Z

The murder of Annie Le at Yale last week has dominated the headlines online, television and in print, her image and life embedded in thousands if not millions of sites.

]]> "He looks guilty"

What hasn't surprised me in this tragedy is the speed that the suspect Raymond Clark III's life has been sprayed across the internet (he was arrested this morning) . Photos from his Facebook today appeared online, on Huffington Post. The Facebook pages have since been taken down, but not before someone connected to him pulled off the images of him and his fiancee and plastered it all over the web, they did not see the collateral damage it was going to do to the people also in the images around Raymond Clark III, and they probably didn't care. (Advice to people on Facebook, it's time to delete those Spring Break photos and the ones of you dressed up as the Devil.)

"Guilty! Oops not Guilty! Our bad."

Also today the five students accused of gang rape of a Hofstra female student were released from custody; their accuser admitted it was a hoax. Yet the last few days mug shots of the young men were again spread across the web, their lives changed forever. Their names and mugshots will float across the internet long after we have forgotten, but will follow these young men forever.

Short Term Memories, Long Term Repercussions

The speed of information has now made us all into a roving posse ready to point fingers at anyone, regardless of their guilt or innocence. We are also able to embed their images into our blogs, Facebook pages, Tweets, Friendfeeds, anywhere we want. If they are found to be guilty, then it was "alright to post it", but what if they are innocent? Do we backtrack and take down those images? Apologize? Do we hang our heads in shame for participating in a mob mentality? I doubt it, those images are way back in page 14 of our blogs or forgotten and replaced by the latest "you've got to see this" images and videos.

Before you jump on the bandwagon, remember it could be you one day and those images posted online of your birthday, vacation, nights out could become internet fodder and dissected for every nuance of guilt or innocence. Take a step back and let the mob go by, you are better than that.

Image: Ophelia Chong / Death in a blink of an eye

404 City

OCD: Candy Colored

OCD: Savoring A Moment

OCD: Humor Chinese Style

OCD: Gone Feral

OCD: Day 3 of the Locusts

OCD: The Donkey and I

OCD: The Road to Incheon

The Lessons of Balloon Boy

The Other Side of the Story

Sponsored by...

Ping

The Birdshot Effect

It Blew Up

Pick Up Line 2009

It's Too Late Now