Was reading the newspaper this morning at Pacific Coffee and had to say the editorial quality dropped to a new low. C’s story, “Change tack on Korea, experts urge Beijing”, was a hodgepodge of weak judgment, excessive repetition and even a spelling mistake that was forced to the front page.

Look at the intro: “China yesterday urged close ally North Korea to follow though on its offer to allow UN nuclear inspectors to return …” — that’s equivalent to Mum urges her boy to do homework after school and what’s anything significant about that? Then the second paragraph, which should have been the intro — which would not have salvaged the article but could have at least made it not as a spectacular failure as the existing one — started to cite experts as saying Beijing’s N-Korean policy had fallen off the rails. And then came, very jarringly, our dear spokesperson friend from the FM.

Aaron Sorkin was on BBC “Arts and Ideas” program and made a compelling statement on the Facebook phenomenon. While Zuckerberg may have the best of intentions when creating the website,  what it has done was exactly the opposite, Sorkin argued.

“What socializing on the net is to socializing is what reality TV to reality.”

FB users are constantly re-inventing themselves to what the world would love them to be — and there’s an insincerity to it, and it is, to essence, a performance when you put on a status update saying “oops, got up too late coz I went to a fabulous party last night”. We don’t show our flaws on FB, or we only show those cute ones.

“It’s an insincere form of communication.”