In the few short months that I've been active on Twitter I've seen some momentous Trending Topics like the Iran Election and Michael Jackson's death. Everyone had something to say and the system was often too crowded to get on to say it. Yet we persisted, feeling empowered to see ourselves as part of the bigger picture as history plays out before our eyes 24/7.
Ice Cream and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin"For at least a day,
"Ben & Jerry's" and "Hubby Hubby" made it onto Twitter's Trending Topics as the ice cream formerly known as "Chubby Hubby" was renamed in support of marriage equality. LGBT/Equality rights enthusiasts ate up the positive message. A few short days later,
"a new and not-so-subtle bit of gay bashing came in the form of the hashtag #uknowhowiknowurgay which immediately hit the top Trending Topic spot with commentary that ranged from the bizarre to the truly homophobic."- from "Twitter and Censorship"
Quickly, the LGBT community and its supporters countered with numerous Tweets of #Yaygay. That was until Twitter removed both hashtags from the Trending Topics as a type of censorship to keep the peace. All Tweets are still in cyberspace, but Twitter just isn't broadcasting their popularity.
There are many, many opportunities to be offended while using Twitter. It could just as easily be a Trending Topic on Blacks, Jews, Latinos, Catholics... Recently I caught
Whoopie Goldberg on BBC's "Hardtalk" talking about use of the "n" word. Her opinion was "it's a word." Use it if you want, whether you're white or black, but "be prepared to face the consequences." Twitter, of all the forms of social media, is not for the faint of heart, but it begs the question of what, where, when, how and why we censor things.
Political Death to the CzarsLet me begin this by saying that I am not a political pundit, nor do I think most of the political pundits out there are qualified to spin life to suit their agendas. We're all human. We're all bombarded with facts, half-truths, lies and fantastical gibberish and have to make some sort of personal sense out of it. That's why G-d gave us brains and chutzpah. When we can get them to work in tandem, we're unstoppable. Otherwise...
It appears that the Left and Right have been cyber-slugging it out a lot lately about health care reform and President Obama's speech to our country's children. Both sides have been getting down to grass-roots campaigns to flood Washington with their political objectives. What I found most interesting was the allegation that one-by-one the Right wants to scrutinize each and every Czar appointed by President Obama, as in the case of
Van Jones, and work towards supplying the muck needed to force them to resign or worse. At first look I was completely flabbergasted. If someone gets through the President's selection process, let the man or woman do their job without the constant backlash of disgruntled opponents who are working to slow down progress.
But there's never just a first look for me.
In
Adam's last article "Understanding the Networking Revolution" he enumerates disciplines that are important to the understanding of social networking. Thanks to a recent Google alert, I came across Andrew Lehman's blog: The Evolving Now and I've been following his thoughts on physics and biology and how they apply to social media. Here are two quotes from
"Speed""a powerful feature of this identity shift is one where the commons becomes highly valued and contribution to the community is revered... The communities of our youth are far more than the few people in a local tribe. Hundreds, if not thousands, of self-selected individuals, folks connected to massive self-selected networks of their own, are coming together."
“As the speed of information increases, the tendency is for politics to move away from representation and delegation of constituents toward immediate involvement of the entire community in the central acts of decision.” (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964, p. 152)
Can McLuhan's Tetrad apply to how we view democracy?
- Enhancement: What the medium amplifies or intensifies.
- Obsolescence: What the medium drives out of prominence.
- Retrieval: What the medium recovers which was previously lost.
- Reversal: What the medium does when pushed to its limits.
What if technology is really making it possible for every voice to count? On every decision? Could we as a people be moving that much closer to a true
democracy where the sheer numbers define the course of the country at every given juncture? Is that empowering or terrifying? Maybe a little of both? What are your thoughts?
Thanks for stopping by,
Wendy Kovitzhttp://www.Twitter.com/wlkovitzhttp://BookOfAra.blogspot.com
But wait! There's More...
This article is from InsideTech.com and talks about how job loss can affect any of us, and how one woman got around the subsequent loss of address to become a success story.
“Homeless people don’t use the Internet, they don’t write blogs, they’re not webmasters and they don’t use Twitter. They are alcoholics, they are substance abusers, they are illiterate. They don’t work. They sure as hell don’t have the right to fall in love. Do they?” - Matthew Barnes in "Homeless Blogger Scores a Job with Elle Magazine."
Sleuthing Time!Another article from InsideTech.com gives us "non-creepy, legal" ways to "
Stalk Your Way to a New Job" by familiarizing yourself with the man or woman you'll face in the interview using all of the social media at your disposal. Trust me, they're doing more than Googling you.
- Until next time!
Networking Fun for the Introverted
