Facebook is becoming an important tool in institutes of higher learning. It isn’t particularly enriching or enlightening – but it does that social networking thing really well. Once you have “friended” some other people you can see their interests and activities. You can join groups, play quizzes, list your favorite things, document your travels, and announce events, among other things. If you are a student trying to suss out the culture of your college, including the mysterious world of faculty and staff personal interests, Facebook can help you feel at home surprisingly quickly. Still, I wish the interface was more appealing and that the widgets weren’t seemingly all geared to high schoolers. Or, maybe I’m just too old? Eh.

Today is April Fool’s Day, and once again, I’ve been fooled by Google. Bless them for making me laugh! Today’s home page joke is an invitation to join “Virgle” on its quest to Mars, and on Gmail, it’s a chance to change all your emails to a prior date and even show them marked as read, so you can claim you never forgot that birthday, anniversary, meeting or whatever.

The joke was terrific, but I use email to cover my ass so regularly that I’d be pretty worried if this was ever to become real. People claim I never told them X instead of Y or that I never explained Z to them all the time, and I am often able to pull up records from my email account to prove that I did.

Weird to realize how defensive a posture I’ve been required to assume. Technology is threatening to so many people, but even more threatening is the problem of trying to keep up with all the information we get each day and to be caught not keeping up.