Dan's Tuesday links, etc. (3.7)

IN TODAY'S STUFF: Here's a new approach to the daily links format -- headlines on the front, items after the jump.

1. Does blogging make you sexy?
2. STDs, drugs ... and blogging?
3. The campaign against Wikipedia
4. Brooklyn News from 1907
5. Down the rabbit hole after Pat Tillman
6. Did India get Chubby Rain?
7. "Thank You For Smoking"
8. Pentagon: O'Reilly, Limbaugh, OK; Franken, Wonkette, BANNED

1. Does blogging make you sexy?
In a word, no -- but Simon Dumenco's Monday Media Guy column is an interesting read about why people chase trends, online and otherwise.

Dumenco opens by citing an article by Bill Wasik in the March issue of Harpers:

Wasik, as he reveals for the first time, was the creator of the “flash mob.” In May 2003 he forwarded an e-mail he’d composed using an anonymous Web-mail account (to cloak his identity) to friends and acquaintances inviting them (and their forwardees) to briefly descend, all at once, on a specific Manhattan location at a specific time -- then disperse just as suddenly, mere minutes later. In an early flash mob, 200 people suddenly flooded the Macy’s rug department, setting off a media storm and copycat flash-mobbing around the world...

“Not only was the flash mob a vacuous fad,” he writes, but it was “intended as a metaphor for the hollow hipster culture that spawned it.” Wasik’s quasi-art project was born of his contempt for “mercurial” hipsters who, pack-like, made media darlings of Franz Ferdinand, McSweeney’s and the like.

He also cites a Clive Thompson article at New York Magazine that connects the distribution of blog readers to the concept of "power-law distribution," bascially stating that popularity breeds popularity. Combined, the two citations paint a picture of shallow, insecure people addicted to chasing trends and the ever-fleeting mantle of hipness. But Domenco sees a larger picture.

Here’s what I believe: that I, and millions of others, read Gawker and lots of other popular blogs not only because they’re popular, but because they’re consistently provocative and hugely entertaining...  That it is human nature to cheerfully seek diversions -- to be optimistic in seeking out “content” that might provide a transcendent experience -- and that it’s also human nature to become bored and move on.

And that, most of all, people want to get laid. Therein lies the real problem with Wasik’s and Thompson’s analyses: They’re very smart but rather sexless...

Ultimately, I think flash-mobbing died because of Wasik’s insistence on rapid dispersal, which curtailed hooking-up opportunities.

That said, at least the hipsters who flash-mobbed scored a talking point. Having the experience and the story to tell afterward briefly made them conversationally more interesting, more attractive. Which, come to think of it, is why people read the best, most popular blogs.

There, I said it: Reading Gawker makes you more f***able.

Gee, I guess that explains all the strange I've been getting since Xark went public...

2. STDs, drugs ... and blogging?
Last night's activity was speaking to a group of high school students who write for our weekly youth section. My report: Even among this self-selecting group of young writers, I still haven't found support for the Pew Internet and American Life Center study that concluded 38 percent of online teens are content creators. Only four of the 14 even had a MySpace account. No podcasters. No filmmakers.

Most said they read blogs, but the blogs they're reading are friends' blogs, and their definition of blogging pretty much begins and ends with this social-networking/private journal idea.

But the thing that really got my attention was when one of the kids -- he attends a private high school -- spoke about how the school requires students to attend a series of assemblies on perceived threats to young people, and how blogging has now joined veneral disease and drug abuse on the list of Scary Stuff We Have To Warn The Kids About.

According to the student, presenters warned that sexual predators prowl MySpace searching for unsuspecting prey. They also talked about how future employers will search online archives for evidence that could prevent them from getting good jobs. From my perspective, both of these concerns are real, but overblown.

The students impressed me by demonstrating much more realistic concerns about how their online writings could be used against them -- by teachers, administrators, nosey parents and law enforcement. And when one kid suggested anonymous MySpace accounts as a remedy, another guy immediately pointed out that the identity would still by traceable by links from friends' MySpace accounts.

Pretty smart.

3. The campaign against Wikipedia
I really noticed this back on Feb. 23, when I spoke to a Public Relations/Business Communications class at the College of Charleston: When it came to Wikipedia, the students who spoke all reported being told not to use it. Some spoke of professors who had basically threatened to punish anyone who was caught using it. And even my host allowed that her attitude toward the online encyclopedia was less than charitable.

I got the same response when I asked last night's group about Wikipedia.

We're in the midst of an anti-Wikipedia backlash, and it's time for us to do some serious thinking about what Wikipedia is, how we use it, and what it could become. For starters, I think it's time we started looking at Wikipedia as a form of curated search. For more, go to my media blog.

4. Brooklyn news from 1907
Every now and then, serendipity deposits me on a foreign web shore and -- when I shake the sand off and take a look around -- all I can do is stare in slack-jawed wonder at what I've found .

Here's a text-only site that gives you the news from the Brooklyn Standard Union, circa 1907. It's a time-traveler's quick dip into the past.

5. Down the rabbit hole after Pat Tillman
I haven't paid the attention I should to the Pat Tillman story. It's been clear for some time now that the Defense Department knowingly lied to the media about the details of the former NFL player's death, creating a propaganda cloud that didn't dissipate until weeks after his highly publicized funeral. But what more was there to be said?

In the past week came word that the Tillman case would be re-opened, this time focusing on evidence of a cover-up and possible criminal negligence. And when I finally got around to scratching just below the surface yesterday, the maggots came spilling out.

The government turned Tillman into the poster boy for its war efforts, but Tillman made a lousy two-dimensional cardboard cutout. Though he joined the Army through a sense of patriotic obligation and supported the Afghanistan operation, he was no fan of the subsequent invasion of Iraq. According to his  family, friends and former comrades, he was vocal in his support of John Kerry in 2004, planned to meet with anti-war intellectual Noam Chomsky upon returning to the United States, and considered the war in Iraq "so fucking illegal."

Was Tillman's death by friendly fire just an accident? I can't say. In fact, the only thing anyone can say with any certainty right now is that the Army's handling the incident has been unusual, contradictory and downright dishonest. It's easy to imagine the shadowy hand of Spookworld touching this case, and we should watch with great interest as this probe goes forward.

Because here's a thing about the Army: The Army don't like getting pushed around by Spooks.

6. Did India get Chubby Rain?
Remember the plot of Chubby Rain, the movie-within-a-movie from the under-rated 1999 Steve Martin/Eddie Murphy flick Bowfinger? Aliens come to earth in raindrops (which is, you see, why the rain is chubby) and only Murphy can stop them.

This just in: According to a new study, this is exactly (well, sorta) what happened in India in 2001 -- except the rain was not only chubby, it was red. Scientists think the carbon-rich material found in samples of the red rain is biological and extraterrestrial. If so, it would be the first confirmation of the theory of panspermia.

In a word: Eeeeeew...

7. "Thank you for Smoking"

A great movie trailer.

8. Pentagon: O'Reilly, Limbaugh, OK; Franken, Wonkette, BANNED

From Tuesday's The News Dissector:

As for Media, here’s an interesting list. Alex at Wonkette writes today about web sites that are being blocked by military computers in Iraq, as opposed to those that are deemed "acceptable:"

Wonkette - blocked
    O'Reilly -- OK
    Air America -- blocked
    Limbaugh -- OK
    ABC News "The Note" -- OK
    Al Franken Show -- blocked
    G. Gordon Liddy Show -- OK

And despite this 72% of US troops want out of Iraq within the year. You have to wonder what those numbers would look like if they weren't being blocked from alternative news sources."

A later post on Wonkette says they have now been unblocked and if you use Firefox instead of IE, you can access the sites the military is blocking.

Oh, well, that makes it all OK, then. I'm sure it was just a random oversight.

Right?

 

Comments

[DeweyS]

I like the table of contents format