Author: Amy Vernon

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Face Off: Jessica Jones vs. The Man in the High Castle

Netflix is trying to kill me. Releasing an entire season of TV all at once sounds great on paper. You don’t have to wait week after week for the next episode. You can see it all in a row, as a long story, rather than be tortured by trying to figure out what’s going to happen next. Fact is, I’ve caught up on many shows doing the binge watch – Alias, Supernatural, Game of Thrones. If you didn’t get on board in the first season, you can still catch up to everyone else and be part of the cultural conversation. I’ve also binge-watched some old favorites. I re-watched the entire Battlestar Galactica series one winter, staying up until the wee hours and getting annoyed at Netflix when it would ask me if I was still watching. “OF COURSE I’M STILL WATCHING; IT’S BATTLESTAR!” I’d exclaim at the TV. If TVs could be startled, mine would have been. It all came crumbling down around me on November 20th when Netflix dropped season one of Jessica Jones …

Hiding In Plain Sight: Why Obscurity Matters More Than Privacy

By Amy Vernon

Is it possible for anything to be private in the Social Age? The Information Age brought us 24-hour news sources, online forums, the Information Superhighway, Web 2.0 and more social media sites than we could even begin to remember. We were told we could now access more info than we would ever want or need. It was out there in pixels and bytes, ours for the searching. The start of this age is sort of a moving target, but was sparked by the Digital Revolution of the late 1950s to late 1970s. Now we’ve entered into the Social Age — and since I’m sort of making that up, I’m going to peg the start to 1997-2001, with the rise of Six Degrees and Friendster. Information is still out there, but there’s gobs of it. There’s so much of it that sometimes it’s hard to tell if what we’re reading is even true. We depend heavily on our social networks — both online and off — to help us make sense of all of that information. …

My Quick and Quirky Vegas Wedding

By Amy Vernon

(Photo courtesy Adrianna Dufay) Wife. Even at a relatively young age, I knew I was never going to be a wife. In the books I read, the wife stayed at home while the husband went out and did “things.” The wife took care of the children, cooked, cleaned house and all that sort of stuff, but I hated cleaning, didn’t much care for cooking and I was never going to have children. So why would I need to be a wife? I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, a card-carrying member of Generation X. I was a latchkey kid, during a time when it felt strange if your parents were still together. Divorce was the norm. In my 20s, I attended friends’ weddings, big affairs with white dresses and bridesmaids and tuxedos and catering halls. I was incredibly happy for my friends. But each wedding cemented the idea that all this frou-frou was not for me. I knew I was going to be a lone wolf. A drama teacher once told me that he saw …

The Etiquette of Social Media Sharing (i.e. How Not to Be a Content-Stealing Jerk)

By Amy Vernon

(Graphic: Kat Borosky/TueNight) These days, we live to share. With the click of a button we’re instantly sharing posts, tweets, photos, videos and screenshots. But often when we share, we’re not following good social media etiquette. For example, some platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) enable us to easily credit the originator of the content we’re sharing; others not so much. As a result — and often unintentionally — proper attribution of the shared content becomes entirely lost or worse, incorrectly ascribed. I’ve seen some cases where people intentionally pass other people’s work off as their own, and other cases where a sharer doesn’t mean to steal, but just doesn’t know how to properly credit the content. So instead, he or she does nothing. There are a few simple things you can do when sharing other people’s content that not only will show you’re practicing good #SMEtiquette, but will endear you to the people whose content you’re sharing. All it takes is a little extra time and attention. And if you give credit where credit’s due, you …

Women Who Inspire: Reshma Saujani

By Amy Vernon

(Photo Credit: Facebook) NAME: Reshma Saujani AGE: Almost 38 OCCUPATION: Founder, Girls Who Code WHO SHE IS: Saujani is the daughter of Indian immigrants who were expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin. A lawyer by education and training, she worked for various Wall Street firms and hedge funds before launching a political career. She became the first Indian-American woman to run for Congress in 2010 (losing the primary to incumbent Carolyn Mahoney). It was during this race that Saujani was first inspired to found the nonprofit Girls Who Code, which launched in 2012. GWC teaches young women the technical skills they need to survive in our new tech-centric society; skills that include web design, algorithms, and robotics. She was inspired to do this, she told TechRepublic, because she found fewer girls in technology education at every level, no matter their socioeconomic status. Saujani became New York City’s deputy public advocate and ran last year to become the city’s public advocate, losing the race to Letitia James. She has continued to advocate for women in tech …