Bill Cammack’s Neighborhood

THERE is a scene in the movie “He’s Just Not That Into You” in which Mary, played by Drew Barrymore, laments the numerous technological ways she is being rebuffed by a potential beau. E-mail. Text messages. MySpace. “It’s exhausting,” she complains.

The census form for 2010 features a word more often heard in 1966: Negro. For many New York blacks, the word conjures visions of Jim Crow and segregation – even if the Census Bureau says it’s included to ensure an accurate count of the nation’s minority residents.

Halfway between the decaying slave forts of West Africa and the overgrown plantations of the New World, on the tiny island of St Helena, archaeologists have uncovered one of the largest slave graveyards anywhere in the world.

The Australian arm of the fast-food chain KFC has been accused of racial insensitivity over a television commercial showing an outnumbered white cricket fan handing out pieces of fried chicken to appease a dancing, drumming and singing group of black West Indian supporters.

Click to enlarge 1 of 1 Eunice Johnson, the widow of Ebony Magazine founder John H. Johnson and the longtime producer and director of the Ebony Fashion Fair, has died. CBS Related Slideshows The Tattooed Ladies of Hollywood Real Or Fake? Hottest Female Athletes Hollywood's Hottest New Starlets Supermodel Disasters Related Stories Chicago-Based Ebony Magazine May Be Up For Sale (9/28/2009) Mourners Remember Publisher John H. Johnson (8/16/2005) Hundreds Pay Respect To Publisher Johnson (8/16/2005) Clinton Among Mourners At Publisher's Funeral (8/15/2005) Ebony, Jet Founder Lives On In His Magazines (8/13/2005) Eunice Johnson, the widow of Ebony Magazine founder John H. Johnson and an icon in the world of fashion, has died, according to a published report.

Want to wipe your online slate completely clean for 2010 and eliminate most traces of your social-media indiscretions? Now, there's an app for that. As highlighted by TechCrunch, the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine will do the dirty work for you: Just give it your passwords and watch it totally purge your social-media accounts at Facebook, LinkedIn and other such sites. This splash page that greets visitors to the Netherlands-based site tells it all. We want to say a big Thank You to all our 2.0 suiciders in 2009. With your strength we managed to unfriend about 50.000 friends and remove more than 150.000 tweets! We are looking forward to 2010. Indeed, the social-media blowback has begun in earnest as more and more media outlets publish tales of Web 2.0 woe, detailing how sites like Facebook have eaten the lives, grades and productivity of legions unable to take their eyes off the glowing feeds detailing the tiniest minutiae of the lives of everyone they've ever known. The New York Times published a lengthy article this month on teens who have either limited their use of Facebook or completely rejected it. The conclusion of these nonconformists, swimming against a tide of 350 million Facebook users: Life is actually richer, more productive and better without the social-networking tools. And in the U.K., businesses are banning Twitter in the workplace after finding that employees were twittering away too many hours and frittering away productivity to the tune of nearly $2 billlion, according to the U.K. research and IT services firm Morse. Unready to Quit Cold Turkey ... But How About a Twitter Hiatus? Even dedicated users of social-media applications are admitting that too much can be way too much. Writes respected nonprofit technology expert and consultant Beth Kanter in a blog post titled My New Year's Resolution: Use Social Media Effciently, "a Twitter hiatus can be good for resetting your goals or understanding any bad habits." To take this line of thought a step ...