Since Musk has destroyed twitter, I have been getting most of my social-media fix at Mastodon. I haven't tried BlueSky yet, though I know some people laud it as the revival of the old pre-Musk twitter. The good thing about Mastodon is that it is NOT the revival of the pre-Musk Twitter. It is a federated system, the co-operation of distinct servers in such a way that it would be difficult for a billionaire with a huge ego to buy it and ruin it. One neat development there is a tradition, if you will, called #3GoodThings. Posters regularly exercise this random listing of positivity. Here is an example of a #3GoodThings post. One of several that appeared Sunday. ------------------------------------ 1. I beat #TacticalMystery 2. I spoke to a friend of mine who I do sometimes see on my social feeds, just haven't chatted with them proper in months 3. There is no work today. ------------------------------------- Now, if you have no idea what #TacticalMystery is, t...
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Gabby Petito was murdered by her fiancé, Brian Laundrie, as the two were travelling cross-country in the hopes that Gabby would develop a broad body of followers in the van life community. The precise date is uncertain but Petito died in late August of 2021. Her body would be discovered in Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming on September 19th of that year. The case was a mass media sensation in large part because she seemed to have martyred herself to the cause of social media influence. An 'influencer' is nowadays a sort of job title. I know, I know, I tend to wince when I hear the word used that way, too. But it is. Anyway, if the "van life community" had taken to regular consumption of Petito's posts, she could have sold her services as a social media guru to advertisers, that is, selling her mention in the course of her YouTube videos of products useful for life in a confined and often moving space. As a new Netflix docuseries stresses, Petit...
An odd post is making its way around social media. It purports to be a post from someone calling herself "Ann Lesby, Ph.D.". It reads: "Misgendering a pet can result in serious microsubconscious distress. Pay attention to clues. Your pet will let you know his/her/their/cir identity through things like body language, toy preferences, and reactions to gendered pet clothing." Conservatives in general fall for it and re-post it with expressions of disdain for these insane liberals. But the author is almost certainly ... one of their own. A conservative seeking to parody 'those crazy liberals.' Consider the name. Presumably "Ann Lesby" often ends up signing her name as "Lesby, Ann." That possibility might give us a clue as to the parodic intent. The term "microsubconscious" is evidently targeted at the cultural-leftists' all-too-common use of "microaggressions." This means, My action, X, will be taken as aggres...
There has been a fair amount of chatter in recent days on social media to the effect that a former mayor of New York is about to be arrested for non-compliance with court orders regarding the payments he owes to his ex-wife. The chatter generally comes unaccompanied by links to actual sources, so I just note it here as chatter. I would find that amusing. I am not among the "tragedy" theorists of Giuliani's career. You know, the folks who say "he was once a great and important man, the sheriff of Wall Street in the '80s, when it so badly needed policing, and it is sad to see how far he has sunk." None of that is right. He was never a great man and insofar as he was important in his pre-mayoral days his importance was always lamentable.
The Supreme Court of the United States has vacated a stay by the 5th Circuit in the NETCHOICE case. This is important, but understanding its importance requires some explanation. So bear with me. Netchoice is a trade association that represents major social media platforms. It filed an action against a law that prohibits social media platforms from censoring their users. Suppose Hans tweets out, "There was no Holocaust -- Hitler was a great leader and the world needs more like him." The law means Twitter can not take that down. At some point in the life of this blog I have probably mentioned the shopping-mall cases of the early 1970s. The gist of them is that the Supreme Court does not recognize private corporations, even when they operate public spaces, as state actors. Hans has no right to hand out Nazi leaflets in the food court of a mall. Indeed, the mall's corporate owners (corporations are people) have their own free speech rights which entail the right to...
People worry about the social media -- it is a creator of conformism and deadening consensus, it is a scene of bullying, it is a distraction from productive activity, it is a weapon for spies, both foreign and domestic. And so forth. All of those concerns may have weight. But it has to be said: social media can get great things accomplished. I'll just leave the link below here, after having taken it from the BBC website. Three young men saved by a hashtag. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-53463685
It almost seems quaint, nowadays, the focus of some of us a few years back, at the start of this millennium, on the supposed monopolization of the search engine by Google. Three political scientists coined the term "Googlearchy" in 2003, in this passage: Though no one expected that every page on the Web would receive an exactly equal share of attention, many have assumed that the Web would be dramatically more egalitarian in this regard than traditional media. Our empirical results, however, suggest enormous disparities in the number of links pointing to political sites in a given category. In each of the highly diverse political communities we study, a small number of heavily-linked sites receive more links than the rest of the sites combined, effectively dominating the community they are a part of […] It seems quaint because we've all made our peace with search engines, as part of our normal working life. The action, the controversy, has moved on to social m...
Someone on a social media site recently challenged me to produce a short list of the biggest historical events since 2000. I took her to mean "since 2000 inclusive." And to keep the list respectably short, I've limited myself to one Big Event from each year. After a little thought, I came up with the following, which as you can see I'm reproducing here. I considered invoking an event in the world of baseball for the Big Event of 2004, but thought better of it. (New Englanders will know what I had in mind.) 2000: The world is devastated on January 1st by the consequences of the Y2K bug ... uh, never mind. The refutation "ambulando" of the Y2K doomsayers serves as evidence that the digital world is more resilient than it had been in the fears of some and the (semi-secret) hopes of other. 2001: Al Qaeda attacks US targets in Virginia and New York, kills thousands. 2002: The new “euro” notes and coins are introduced as circulating currency in m...
The current round of protests in Iran now seem to have gone far beyond anyone's original intent, and the demands of the leaders emerging from the movement are inflated compared to the more modest demands that were being put forward in the final days of the old year. I believe this is typical of the dynamics of a revolution. Let's look back on those days for a moment. The sequence of events I have in mind began on December 28 among people angry that factory workers were owed a lot of back pay, and that prices of important commodities were heading up. Within just a day or so, videos available on social media showed protesters chanting "Not Gaza, not Lebanon, my life for Iran." That may sound more like a chant in Farsi than it does in English. It was symptomatic of the way an agenda increases. The focus was still on jobs and prices, BUT the idea was that the country's leaders weren't focusing on jobs or prices because they were focusing instead...
Praying the Gay Away Back in July 2015 I wrote, in my round-up of THAT recently completed SCOTUS term, about the Court's decision to deny cert in KING v. CHRISTIE. This left standing the decision of the 3d Circuit C of A upholding New Jersey's ban on"conversion therapy," that is, on giving the "pray the gay away" stuff the mantle of science. Two years later, there is another denial of cert to report in much the same situation. Again the Court preserved a legislative rebuke to such therapy by denying cert. http://www.reuters.com/article/usa-court-gayconversion-idUSL1N1I31A6 There was a shade of difference. The earlier case was presented as a "free speech" challenge, this one as a "freedom of religion" challenge. Since Hobby Lobby, the freedom-of-religion clause has been very chic in right-of-center circles. Personally, though, I thought that the earlier challenge had some prima facie plausibility, as I said at the time. I can...
It was my twitter feed that first alerted me last weekend to the news that Zambia's President had forced the central bank head in that country out of office and vowed lower interest rates. Good for twitter! this is proof of its value -- the value of net based social media generally -- in tailoring news. In old-fashioned dead-tree newspapers, whence most of my news used to come (until very recently) the goings-on in Zambia would have been tucked into a small item very deep in the paper, if it was deemed fir to print at all by the papers in the "developed" world. But in fact, I deem it an important, perhaps the biggest one coming at us that day, and I'm glad to have received it when I did. One of the significant facts about the story is that it dramatically demonstrates that central banks are only independent of the executive offices of a country when they are allowed to be independent by those executive offices. In other words, they aren't really all th...