Clipping blog

The Delivery Presents – Girls, Girls, Girls!
Clearing the Browser Tabs – Freezing Monday Edition
Breaking: Academic Writes a Book on Social Media that Doesn’t Reflect the Real World
Chomsky: The Republican Victory Means Our Doom

The Delivery Presents – Girls, Girls, Girls!

Posted: 24 Jan 2011 06:20 AM PST

I don’t quite know how Episode 74 turned in to the girliest episode of The Delivery ever, but it did. I’m not complaining, mind you. A man could do much worse than spend an hour with such lovely and smart women as Teri and Kimberly and we hit on some fun and interesting things.

I’m excited about the new Smart Girl Politics web site and the magazine, which first issue will launch a bit later in the week. The beautiful young lady in the photo on the “Donate” graphic at the site is my friend Ashley, on whose show I will appear later in the week. I’ll have that link as soon as its available, but you can catch part of it on Tuesday night as 9 PM Eastern on From the Right Radio. I say “part” because you’ll want to leave the show a bit early to jump right into the live broadcast, right?

Of course.

On the second half, I will only say three things: 1) The Inception soundtrack is fantastic and you should own it, 2) the movie’s pretty good too and ditto, and 3) I’m glad Kimberly knows fashion because I sure as heck don’t.

The Delivery - Episode 74

Clearing the Browser Tabs – Freezing Monday Edition

Posted: 24 Jan 2011 03:10 AM PST

I thought it was bad when the overnight low Saturday was 18 degrees, but that was balmy compared to the 9 degree low of Sunday night. There are still a couple months left of winter, including the treacherous month of February (T.S. Eliot was wrong), and I’m more than ready to spring to arrive. It’s true we’ve not gotten the brutal snows we did last year (so far, anyhow) but this cold weather is more than enough, thank you.

And to those of you ready to jump in and chide me for whining about the cold when you live in Minnesota or Wisconsin, let me just say phooey. I don’t live in what’s generally considered a cold-weather state. If I wanted to freeze off various appendages, I’d live in Green Bay. Maryland’s a mid-Atlantic state. We shouldn’t be dealing with penguin weather, so brrr!

And now, links!

The President has a fever and the only cure is more spending on stuff that didn’t work the last time he had a fever! (via memeorandum)
Speaking of spending that didn’t work, here’s a great article on where those hundreds of billions of stimulus dolls went. You might be surprised, unless you’re a cynic who’s been watching the way politics works in DC, in which case you won’t be surprised at all.
Gee, Reuters? Ya think? And, by the way, running in the other direction, as the President wants to do on the budget cut issue, is not a “pace”.
Governor Chris Christie, the closest thing to a top-tier rock star the Republicans have in public office right now, turned down the chance to give the rebuttal to the State of the Union Address. (via memeorandum) I don’t blame him. He likely didn’t want to end up with the same staging that hurt Bobby Jindal so badly a few years ago.
Why do I love my conservative blogger friends? Because I can get an E.E. “Doc” Smith and a Dune movie reference in the space of two days to go along with the political commentary.
I have the feeling these words will haunt Barack Obama well into 2012.
I disagree with Stacy McCain. The word “reprehensible” is not nearly strong enough for the narrative Newsweek is pushing in its new issue. Unfortunately, I can’t print the words I want to use because my Mom reads my blog. Don’t think for a second, by the way, that all the left-wing bloggers, politicians, and journalist who have been pushing the “violent rhetoric must be stopped” narrative have been doing so spontaneously. It’s no coincidence that their message has been so focused.

Breaking: Academic Writes a Book on Social Media that Doesn’t Reflect the Real World

Posted: 23 Jan 2011 06:36 PM PST

I suppose we’re overdue for another pronouncement from an “expert” about how the Internet will kill us all.

The way in which people frantically communicate online via Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging can be seen as a form of modern madness, according to a leading American sociologist.
“A behaviour that has become typical may still express the problems that once caused us to see it as pathological,” MIT professor Sherry Turkle writes in her new book, Alone Together, which is leading an attack on the information age.
Turkle’s book, published in the UK next month, has caused a sensation in America, which is usually more obsessed with the merits of social networking…
Turkle’s thesis is simple: technology is threatening to dominate our lives and make us less human. Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, it is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world.

What follows is a rehash of the same old condemnation of the internet I’ve heard from learned academics for going on thirty years. What I find interesting about most of these stories is that they rarely come from an academic who has more than a passing acquaintance with the technology that alarms them so.

I’ll give you one example that tells me Turkle knows almost nothing about how we real humans use Twitter: the Tweetup.

For those of you who don’t have Twitter, a Tweetup is when a bunch of folks who know each other, either through Twitter or “the real world”, use the service to meet face-to-face. They happen every day, for all sorts of reasons (or no better reason than just to get a bunch of folks together for dinner), can be pre-planned or spontaneous, involve anywhere from a few to hundreds of people, and even novice tweeters learn about them pretty quickly.

The best thing about Tweetups is that they are the opposite of “isolating us from real human interactions”. Real people meet other real people and, contrary to Turkle’s thesis, they interact. And guess what? The same things happen through Facebook as well. In fact, my experience with social media (which includes almost seven years as a blogger, over two years on Twitter, as well as LinkedIn, Facebook, Hashable, and plenty others) is that social media platforms make “real human interactions” far more likely than the old days of AOL chatrooms, IRC, and static web pages. That’s just not my experience, either. Glenn Reynolds has seen the same things (though, I note, he’s far less engaged on Twitter. What’s up, Professor?)

But what do I know? I’m just a guy who has been active in social media for a few years, not a sociologist and professor from MIT. Clearly Professor Turkle’s experience is different as you can clearly see from her complete lack of engagement on her Twitter feed. No wonder she thinks so little of social media. She uses Twitter as a platform to advertise herself and crank our fortune cookie-like Tweets as if she were some ancient temple oracle. She doesn’t reply to others, doesn’t involve herself in conversations with her over 1000 followers, and follows only 41 people. Heck, she doesn’t even share links to the quotes she provides. Unlike the hundreds of millions of people who use Twitter as a platform for “real human interaction”, she walls herself off in true ivory tower fashion.

Herein lies my problem with academics. I have no doubt that Professor Turkle is a fine sociologist. I would, no doubt, consult her if I had a question about sociology. I wonder, though, what social media experts she consulted before she wrote her book? Did she actually spent time talking to Twitter of Facebook users? Did she seek out experienced social media folks like Chris Brogan, Gary Vaynerchuk, Scott Stratten, or Darren Rowse before she wrote her book? How about some of the people who have used social media to change the face of politics like David All, Tabitha Hale, Melissa Clouthier, Patrick Ruffini, Jon Henke, or the people who still run Organizing for America? It appears not. Why do you think that is? It’s not as if the folks I’ve named are impossible to reach. Most of them have multiple ways for people to contact them — Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, telephone — and all of them are in the business of talking to other people. So why did the good professor apparently not get their countervailing opinions*?

I suspect it’s because she has developed the same habit as far too many modern academics — develop the theory, find what you need to prove it, and make no real effort to get outside your own cloistered community to see what the people you’re treating like wild animals on a safari tour are actually doing lest you find evidence that cuts your thesis to pieces.

*I’ll allow the possibility that she did contact some folks with social media experience and simply ignored them, which is as good as not asking them in the first place)

Chomsky: The Republican Victory Means Our Doom

Posted: 23 Jan 2011 01:33 PM PST

At some point we will stop thinking of Noam Chomsky as a leading intellectual and start thinking of him as a doddering old fool who has soaked so long in progressive politics that his once-formidable mind has gone soft as a down pillow.

"There's other factors like the anger, and the fear and hostility in the country about everything carries over to this," Chomsky said. "So if you look at polls, everyone hates Congress. They hate the Democrats. They hate the Republicans even more. They hate big business. They hate banks and they distrust scientists. So why should we believe what these pointy-head elitist are telling? We don't trust anything else. We don't trust them."
He explained those feelings led to November's election results, and would have serious repercussions for civilization.
"All of this combines the latest election a couple of days ago," he continued. "You could almost interpret it a kind of a death knell for the species. There was an article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, you know – not a radical rag exactly. They're running through the new Republicans coming to Congress and they're worried about them."

Well, you could interpret it as such, if you were fond of leaping onto a kitchen chair, lifting the hem of your housedress, and shrieking like a cartoon housewife every time the electorate voted in a way you don’t like. On the other hand, you could interpret what happened in November as the inevitable result of the fult-tilt boogie toward a totalitarian government very few Americans actually want to see.

That’s what the voters did. It’s too bad Chomsky is too busy being partisan to spend a few minutes being smart.

UPDATE: Our universe is doomed! DOOOOMED!

UPDATE 2: An exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at Noam Chomsky’s research shop.

UPDATE 3: Ed Driscoll adds the exclamation point.