The Buie Knife

On Father's Day, Together While Apart

If you know anyone who's divorced and not in close contact with their kids, pass along this video to them of my experience as a "virtual dad." Fathers and mothers who don't live with their kids can still be closely connected to them.

To watch this video on YouTube.com, click.

For details, see TogetherWhileApart.com.

Virtual Worlds Help People Cope, Recover from Diseases

Washington Post: "An increasing number of sick, disabled and troubled people say virtual worlds are helping them fight their diseases, live with their disabilities and sometimes even begin to recover. Researchers say they are only starting to appreciate the impact of this phenomenon."

"In addition to helping individual patients, virtual worlds are being used for a host of other health-related purposes. Medical schools are using them to train doctors. Health departments are using them to test first responders. Researchers are using them to gain insights into how epidemics spread. Health groups are using them to educate the public and raise money."

Drill Deeper:

• Real Hope in Virtual Worlds: Online Identities Leave Limitations Behind (Washington Post)
• Virtual Operating Room (Washington Post)
• Photo Essay (Washington Post)

Does Too Much Social Networking Reward Shallowness, Immodesty, Narcissism?

Michael Gerson in The Washington Post: "Social networking, taken in small doses, is hardly toxic, and sometimes useful. But there are some things about the Internet culture -- its attack on modesty, its complication of true intimacy, its reward for shallowness -- that should be unsettling to any conservative. Or anyone who wants their children to know an undiluted friendship."

Gerson quotes Christine Rosen's article, "Virtual Friendships and the New Narcissism," in New Atlantis, a journal of technology and society. With new technological tools, she writes, six degrees of separation between any two individuals on earth is rapidly shrinking to three degrees of separation. She notes that access to online communities like Facebook and MySpace is earned by "the revelation of personal information." The sites have settings to protect privacy, but they reward self-exposure. As a result, Rosen says, "you know more about a potential acquaintance in a moment than you might have learned about a flesh-and-blood friend in a month."

Ties on social networks, she writes, are far weaker than flesh-and-blood ties, promoting "rumor-mongering, gossip, finding people, and tracking the ever-shifting movements of popular culture and fad." Real friendship "depends on mutual revelations that are concealed from the rest of the world," sje writes. "It can only flourish within the boundaries of privacy; the idea of public friendship is an oxymoron."

Videoblogging a Vacation: Traversing the West, Encountering Wild Animals (Including Bears), Participating in a Rodeo, Sleeping in a Teepee, Whitewater Rafting

For larger version, click.

To prove the point I made in a previous post about how new digital tools make it easier than ever to quickly produce evocative movies that can be easily shared, I'm video-blogging my vacation. I put this two-minute clip together with my laptop on the airplane returning from Montana. I used a pocket Sony Cybershot 6.0 mexapixil camera, Windows Moviemaker, and inserted the theme music from the 1960s Western, "Bonanza."

Here's a clip from our visit to Yellowstone National Park, illustrating tourists' obsession and fascination with a certain furry, but dangerous animal:

To demonstrate just how easy video-editing can now be, my 10-year-old son Alex helped edit this (admittedly amateurish) clip on the Cody, Wyoming rodeo, with an excerpt from the goofy music, "Cotton-Eyed Joe."

OK, when looking at the blurry camera angles, remember that the camera is cheap and fits in your pocket, and this was a spontaneous moment. With the proliferation of online video, and the huge popularity of YouTube.com, we're seeing a blurring of the lines between amateur and professionall quality video. Sometimes, blurry imagery and shaky camera angles from average people are considered to be more "authentic" than too-slick, canned, predictable, corporate and mainstream media videos. An amateur video by a vacationer, for example, may be more compelling than a professional marketing video.

Here's our amateur video on the Blackfoot Indian Village.

And here's a brief clip on our whitewater rafting adventure.

Maybe Alex will share these videos with his fifth-grade classmates as a new way of producing the usually obligatory report, "What I Did On My Summer Vacation."

Not to get carried away with "the cult of the amateur," there's still a lot to be said for professionally-produced videos that place a premium on professsional-quality equipment, good lighting, good angles, and message development.

New Life for Old Photos, Home Movies. Deceased Friends and Relatives Achieve Digital Immortality

My family no longer maintains bound family photo albums -- that stopped when we bought digital cameras. We rarely looked at them anyway, and we NEVER watched home movies on outmoded formats (8 mm and Super 8 film, beta videotape) that were gathering dust in the attic. But thanks to recent innovations in digital technology, we now peruse and enjoy family images more than ever.

Stored on my laptop, on a 300 gig portable hard drive that's part of my home network or on the web, they are so easy to access, edit, share, copy, set to music, and turn into new movies or new stories. Not only do they provide a record of family history, they enhance memory and help us to view our own histories in a new light and new perspectives. With the click of a button, I can peruse photos or videos from pick a year, say, 1968 or 1984. More recently, images from digital cameras are so plentiful they provide not just a record of special occasions (as film cameras did) but a kind of diary of our lives.

With an LCD projector or widescreen TV, deceased family members and friends walk across the big screen, full of life, laughing and telling stories, so that their descendants who barely remember or never knew them can now get to know them at least a little. It's easy to think of them as spirits with a continuing presence in our lives. They have achieved a kind of digital immortality.

It's almost as if the science-fiction thriller, The Final Cut starring Robin Williams, has come true: a person's entire life can be recorded; when the person dies, the video is edited and shown at the funeral. The tension in the movie comes from the job of the video editor -- what to keep in and edit out -- especially when he finds disturbing footage in the archive.

Fortunately, I haven't yet had to grapple with such dilemmas. I mainly create multi-media presentations for celebrations. For a wedding anniversary, I selected favorite images of my wife and played them in Windows "My Pictures" slideshow format to music we both love. When we watched it together, our hearts melted. 

For my uncle's 80th birthday party, I created a slide show of pictures from his life to the tune of Frank Sinatra's "I Did It My Way." At the end, his friends and family members gave him an ovation.

Home movies have taken on new life with pocket-size cameras that hold an hour or more of good-quality video, and digitizing and editing tools such as Windows Moviemaker, Premiere, and Pinnacle digital video transfer. I used Pinnacle to digitize old analog beta and VHS videotapes. And we can now share home movies online through such services as Videoegg or YouTube.com that can also be posted on personal blogs.

With a unobtrusive pocket video camera, my son and I recorded the memorial service of my 86-year-old mother for those who could not attend and posted it online on a blog I had created for her. Friends reported that shortly after my mother's death, they googled her name and found themselves spending hours on her blog, getting a fuller measure of her life. As a retired teacher and one-time North Carolina English Teacher of the Year, she left a huge archive of really interesting personal writing -- social history, family history and her philosophy of teaching -- which I edited and shaped into a book, Teacher of Our Town. I used the print-on-demand service Lulu.com. So far the book has sold nearly 200 copies. 

To resurrect old home movies, first I had to

Dinner Time for Virtual Families

Accenture Technology researcher Dadong Wan is developing "virtual family dinnertime," the Associated Press reports. “We are trying to really bring back the kind of family interactions we used to take for granted,” Wan says.

Psychology Behind Online Diaries

"On the Web, Dear Diary Becomes Dear World," Washington Post: "A review of major blogging and social-networking Web sites shows that online diaries remain popular for teenagers, and interviews with experts and young diarists...help explain the psychology behind going public with what used to be private thoughts."

Videoblogging Senior Citizen Attracts 30,000+ Fans

Here's a glimpse of the future -- how widowed senior citizens will combat loneliness and connect to a community. Videoblogging on YouTube.com isn't just for young folks. Remarkably, the most subscribed video-blogger, using a simple webcam and Windows Moviemaker for video-editing, in 2006 was Peter Oakley, aka Geriatric1927, a nearly 80-year-old pensioner from England, who in a series of videos is simply telling his life story in an informal way. By November, he had 30,000 subscribers. Here's a Wikipedia profile of him. His Youtube page is here. His web site is www.askgeriatric.com. What's also remarkable are the heart-felt video responses to Peter's commentaries. Frank Ahrens of The Washington Post calls Oakley "a welcome voice of inexperience."

15 Seconds of Fame: Quoted in The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor

Caption: Jim Buie wires himself for a chat with his son, Matthew. The father and son began experimenting with video visits in 1999. They continue them now, even though Matthew is 22.

"Divorced Families Remain Close With 'Virtual Visits," is a big piece from in The New York Times Fashion and Style section now circulating in papers across the country about the trend in virtual visiting, and the movement to get the right to webcam communication codified into family law statutes. Reporter Lynette Clemetson did a thorough job, quoting more than a dozen sources, including me. In the print edition (not online), there's a huge picture of me putting on a headset as I prepare to teleconference with my son Matthew, 22, as he takes a break from his job working on a cruise ship, at a cafe in Aruba. I'm quoted as saying: "This way of communicating has become something special that we share. Of course it's not as good as seeing him in person. But at least I can see him. It has kept us close." The reporter calls video visits "a cherished link between father and son." True. Read the piece.

Additionally, I'm quoted in a front page piece in The Christian Science Monitor. "Jim Buie, an early pioneer of virtual visitation who's now working on a book about it, tracks legal cases on his website, www.virtualfamiliesandfriends.com. In one Massachusetts case, a judge allowed a mother to move and awarded the father twice-weekly virtual visits. But when a Florida mother wanted to move to Ohio, and argued for virtual visits for the father, the judge gave the father custody and made the mother the virtual parent."

More on this topic: www.virtualfamiliesandfriends.com blog and www.internetvisitation.org.

A Movement is Born: North Carolina, 10 Other States, Join Campaign to Give Parents Right to Virtually Visit

Evidence that one or two people can make a difference, start a movement, and with the right attitude turn lemons into lemonade.