Branding the man: why men are the next frontier in fashion retail

Not long ago, I did not know if my oldest brother and his wife were alive or dead.

The Haiti Earthquake devastated a country, a people, and very nearly a culture. It is a country of rubble, and in that rubble lay my brother. But where was he? Images on television along with early reports were not good.

Like many I tried to get answers from the U.S. Embassy in Haiti and the U.S. State Department, for whom my sister-in-law worked. I posted pictures and queries on all the news sites: the New York Times, CNN, and the start-up survivor search sites that were quickly assembled by worried citizens, friends, and families.

In an era of incredible technology, a myriad of means to connect, connect, and connect — there was nothing. The earthquake had severed Haiti from the rest of the world, a country so incredibly poor that it had long been hanging by a thread anyway.

I will admit I have often been a cynic about social networking sites. More often than not, it seems people post their tweets and status updates on Facebook with the assumption that I really want to know what they ate for lunch. Their earnest attempts to appear current and wise becomes so much junk mail, information overload, garbage-in-garbage-out, and all those other clichés. Case in point, it took days before even close friends on Facebook had even noticed my posts about my brother. No fault of theirs; with all the hundreds of other updates by their 227 “friends”, why would mine be noticed? Alas, Twitter, Facebook, and yes, even blogs,  sometimes can’t help but become self-indulgent; exclamations and diatribes we display for ourselves rather than for other people [Full disclosure: until now I have rarely written about myself on this blog --other than my obsession with a pair of shoes. See "Ode to Jonny".]

I pored over my brother’s Facebook page for clues to where he was, perhaps even at the moment of the quake. On the day before, he had put his status as simply: “Nutmeg Candy.” Fairly typical of my brother’s predilection for the obscure.

I also discovered that he had apparently updated his Amazon.com wishlist on New Year’s Eve and again on New Year’s Day (was it because he didn’t get what he wanted for Christmas?). Those wishes included some Traffic albums, a Samsung Netbook, and a pair of Jockey 3D Boxer Briefs.  Proof that our lives remain online long after we are gone — or in the case of my brother: missing. Like everyone else in Haiti, his virtual pulse had come to a full stop. Silence.

But my brother’s friends, many of whom I did not know, began to talk, posting questions and comments on his wall. In interacting with them I was able to get all the information that was lacking from a fragmented and admittedly complicated family relationship. His friends were able to help me find his address, his last remarks and future plans, and even recent photos, of which I had not a single one.

One friend who had a Skype call with my brother sent me a screen shot; a fuzzy image of a man with a great big beard — not the brother I remembered. Someone else sent me another picture, one that was less of a mug shot and more useful for the survivor search sites.

And then a message came to my phone. My friend texted me to say that he had seen on Facebook that my brother was alive, airlifted to a Florida hospital after lying injured with his wife for eighteen hours.

A site like Facebook did not connect me to my brother — that’s our job, the work we must do as a family, as brothers, to keep one another safe, for better or for worse. Real connection does not happen online but face-to-face. However Facebook did connect me to the people who knew him even better than I and without whom, I would have never known the truth.

Click here to read The Portland Oregonian’s report on Blaise Pellegrin and Kathey-Lee Galvin in Haiti.

---