Loopy online videos have become a hallmark of this midterm election, as candidates desperate for attention open themselves to ridicule with Internet ads.
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Politicians Pitch on YouTube
Generally, most of the major tools on the Internet are ignored, yet, everyone once in a while they write something so incredibly mindless, so half no-witted, so perfidious, that it needs to be exposed. Here’s Kathleen Parker’s bit of complete idiocy: My name is Glenn Beck, and I need help Despite all the words spilled in
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Chatty Kathy Parker Compares Beck’s Restoring Honor Rally To A 12 Step Program
From Emma Silvers, at Slate : On the 2 train uptown during the morning commute the other day, I was in my usual state of sleepwalk — face crammed into a fellow passenger’s armpit — when a young woman standing 3 feet away from me removed an Amazon Kindle from her oversize designer purse and began to read. A surprising wave of disgust overcame me as I stared at the smooth metallic back of the thing, at her manicured fingernails positioned against it, at her face as she read … whatever it was that she was reading. That was part of it, I realized, trying to analyze my own ridiculous, knee-jerk judgment of this stranger. I couldn’t see what she was reading, and it bothered me. I couldn’t peer in that tiny window onto someone’s interior world, or delight in the juxtaposition that a book choice sometimes presents — when you notice a stuffy, 90-something grandma buried in a trashy romance novel, or a would-be gangsta engrossed in “Love in the Time of Cholera.” But at 26, a supposed child of the Internet generation (who, I recently discovered, must henceforth be referred to as “The Millennials,” and discussed in the media mainly in reference to our refusal to get real jobs or move out of our parents’ basements), I’ve begun to feel out of step with this particular aspect of youth culture. I’m starting to understand what my grandmother must feel when she heads to the library once a week to dutifully check the e-mail account my uncle created for her. As I stared at the woman, fully engaged, happily using this very practical and very expensive device that, for all I know, she saved her pennies for a year to buy, I felt something entirely out of proportion with the situation: I felt personally slighted. I never thought my lack of interest in e-readers made me particularly unique — until recently, when Consumer Reports and national headlines started implying I was actually in a freakish minority. Earlier this summer, you could practically hear the collective weeping of small publishers nationwide when Amazon announced that Kindle books were outselling hardcovers by a 180-to-100 margin. Then came the drumbeat for the thinner, cheaper Kindle model forthcoming in September, and the competitors’ accompanying rush to stay in the game. A crop of stories attempted to sort out the so-called e-reader wars: Kindle vs. iPad vs. Nook – which is right for you? More service-oriented articles provided tips for all the people who aren’t me: “Copying Text From Your Kindle to Computer,” or “The Best Way to Highlight Passages on Your Nook” (hint: not with an actual highlighter). These articles all had slightly different aims, but their bottom line was the same: Of course you need to buy an e-reader. What are you, a Mennonite? One recent story in the New York Times went so far as to claim that iPads and Kindles and Nooks are making the very act of reading better by — of course — making it social. As one user explained, “We are in a high-tech era and the sleekness and portability of the iPad erases any negative notions or stigmas associated with reading alone.” Hear that? There’s a stigma about reading alone . (How does everyone else read before bed — in pre-organized groups?) Regardless, it turns out that, for the last two decades, I’ve been Doing It Wrong. And funny enough, up until e-books came along, reading was one of the few things I felt confident I was doing exactly right. More at the link . I haven’t made the leap yet, although I doubt I’m as opposed to e-reading as our essayist here.
When you do a Google search of Sarah Palin, the first three suggested searches are “Sarah Palin twitter,” “Sarah Palin refudiate” and “Sarah Palin breast implants.”I don’t know what this means about our habits on the Internet, but I do know what the next suggested search term should be: “Sarah Palin:. . .
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Does November Depend on Sarah Palin?
Twice in recent days, I've gotten into little back-and-forths with Joe Scarborough on Twitter , and my current argument probably needs more than 140 characters. First, a couple of nice things about Scarborough: He's a nice guy. His show is near-ideal for political junkies, a lot of great inside baseball and much less fluff than a lot of other shows. He is a gracious and well-informed host. Often he's surprisingly blunt about what he thinks about other programs and hosts on MSNBC, and let's face it, we find that awesome . His goal of a more polite and respectful public dialogue is completely worthwhile. Having said that . . . It seems like at least once per day on Twitter, Scarborough expresses some variation of surprise, irritation, and incredulity that he's been criticized by left-wing folks and right-wing folks in the same day. Now, I know where he's coming from. Hate mail used to drive me bonkers. Every once in a while, it still does. But the Internet has changed our culture; when I started in journalism, critics used to have to use a stamp, envelope, pen, or crayons and the occasional bit of DNA evidence to tell you what a terrible job you were doing.* Now you can wish a painful death upon me or any other voice in the public square with the touch of a button. This, we are constantly assured, is progress. I don't like this state of affairs, but it is what it is. The folks who practice this the most are well beyond our ability to change their behavior. Once, after writing an op-ed that mentioned a particularly infamous figure who had sent death threats to a blogger, the figure sent me a note thanking me for helping keep her in the news. Some folks who write harshly are just caught up in the moment, but others actually think and speak this way all the time, and feel no shame, remorse, or regret about how they choose to treat people. If we could somehow undo the technological revolution that enabled these people to communicate beyond earshot, the U.S. postal system, and their cats, our public discourse would probably be nicer, healthier, and more productive and civil. But nobody's turning off the Internet anytime soon, and there doesn't appear to be a way to put the genie back in the bottle. I think ignoring them is probably the best approach, but I'm open to suggestions. The end result is that Scarborough seems perpetually taken aback by vicious denunciations that are now sadly standard in our discourse, and many of his Tweets amount to a plea for us all to be nicer to each other and treat each other with respect. Now, Jesus Christ and Rodney King would agree with that message, but it's hard to see what those pleas accomplish. Those who are already respectful don't need to hear it, and those who aren't respectful don't seem inclined to change their behavior because Joe Scarborough is disappointed in them. (Search for #JoeNBCWisdom on Twitter to find folks parodying the host's well-meaning but obvious and often preachy messages.) Finally, when you're being criticized by both the Right and the Left, sometimes it's because you've found a sweet spot of compromise that irritates the fringes of both sides. Then again, sometimes it just means you're really, really wrong. * “Bah! You call this hate mail? Why, back in the day, cranks used to send bits of dried-up flowers! These kids today, they have no idea what it used to take to tell a writer he stinks. Why, they used to have to take the letter to the mailbox, in the snow, uphill both ways . . .” Jim Geraghty
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Can You Believe I’m Being Harshly Criticized by Both Sides? Unthinkable!
-By Warner Todd Huston Computer software giant Adobe, computer game monster EA Games, and Internet auction king ebay are abandoning California to set up shop in Utah. Why? California’s horrid business climate and high taxes. Adobe Systems, maker of a suite of graphics programs such as Adobe PDF, Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign, have announced that they are
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Ebay, Adobe, EA Games, Many Others Leaving California For Utah Over Confiscatory Tax Rate
The Founding Fathers must be rolling in their graves. In Philadelphia, home of the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, the city government has proposed smacking bloggers — our generation’s pamphleteers — with a $300 business tax. Yes, they are now requiring a license for Internet activists and hobbyists to exercise their free speech. Via Philly City Paper: Even though small-time bloggers aren’t exactly raking in the dough, the city requires privilege licenses for any business engaged in any “activity for profit,” says tax attorney Michael Mandale of Center City law firm Mandale Kaufmann. This applies “whether or not they earned a profit during the preceding year,” he adds. So even if your blog collects a handful of hits a day, as long as there’s the potential for it to be lucrative — and, as Mandale points out, most hosting sites set aside space for bloggers to sell advertising — the city thinks you should cut it a check. According to Andrea Mannino of the Philadelphia Department of Revenue, in fact, simply choosing the option to make money from ads — regardless of how much or little money is actually generated — qualifies a blog as a business. The same rules apply to freelance writers. As former City Paper news editor Doron Taussig once lamented [Slant, "Taxed Out," April 28, 2005], the city considers freelancers — which both Bess and Barry are, in addition to their blog work — “businesses,” and requires them to pay for a license and pay taxes on their profits, on top of their state and federal taxes. The City of Brotherly Love is in dire financial straits, facing a $179 million shortfall for 2011. Same old tired liberal solutions: Tax, tax, tax. The blogger tax comes on top of new hikes on existing taxes, a new tobacco-products tax, a property tax increase and a higher commercial trash fee. Time for overtaxed Philadelphians to go Galt . What are you waiting for?
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Philadelphia tax fever: Bloggers get hit
At Wired : You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s streaming service. You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone. This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen). The fact that it’s easier for companies to make money on these platforms only cements the trend. Producers and consumers agree: The Web is not the culmination of the digital revolution. A decade ago, the ascent of the Web browser as the center of the computing world appeared inevitable. It seemed just a matter of time before the Web replaced PC application software and reduced operating systems to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers,” as Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen famously said. First Java, then Flash, then Ajax, then HTML5 — increasingly interactive online code — promised to put all apps in the cloud and replace the desktop with the webtop. Open, free, and out of control. But there has always been an alternative path, one that saw the Web as a worthy tool but not the whole toolkit. In 1997, Wired published a now-infamous “Push!” cover story, which suggested that it was time to “kiss your browser goodbye.” The argument then was that “push” technologies such as PointCast and Microsoft’s Active Desktop would create a “radical future of media beyond the Web.” “Sure, we’ll always have Web pages. We still have postcards and telegrams, don’t we? But the center of interactive media — increasingly, the center of gravity of all media — is moving to a post-HTML environment,” we promised nearly a decade and half ago. The examples of the time were a bit silly — a “3-D furry-muckers VR space” and “headlines sent to a pager” — but the point was altogether prescient: a glimpse of the machine-to-machine future that would be less about browsing and more about getting. Actually, there’s some debate on this as well.
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‘The Center of Interactive Media — Increasingly, the Center of Gravity of All Media — Is Moving to a Post-HTML Environment’
