Being new to Twitter, I recently decided to spend a few days following some of the right wing tweets, primarily those with the hash tags #gop and #tcot (top conservatives on twitter). As an unapologetic liberal, I thought it might be easier to stomach right wing commentary if it came in snippets of 140 characters or less.
After a week of following conservatives, conspiracy theorists and wingnuts on Twitter, I’ve gotten fed up (and a bit bored) at some of the more obvious bits of misinformation and venom I’ve encountered. So I decided to have a little fun with some of the repetitive and mindless posts to keep myself entertained:
RockwithBeck tweeted: “I remember, no too many years back, everyone said the Democratic Party was doomed. The GOP is getting stronger day by day.“* I changed it slightly to read: “I remember everyone said the Dem Party was doomed. Now they say the GOP is getting stronger day by day.” then re-tweeted. Made more sense to me.
Another bit of scaremongering had to do with an upcoming Islamic conference being held in Chicago. IndyEnigma tweeted: “WHAT IN THE HELL? Islamic Supremacist Group Holds First U.S. Conference“*.
I changed the published link in this tweet to one discussing Pat Buchanan’s ties to a white supremacist movement, then sent it back out. For this, IndyEnigma has now become a follower of Rev. Hugh’s. None of this would be possible were it not for inattention mixed with technology like tinyurl.com that shortens lengthy URLs (thereby masking their origins).
A week ago, there was a dust-up between Sen. Barbara Boxer and a witness from the National Black Chamber of Commerce, Harry Alford. For days after the confrontation, Alford (rightly or wrongly) became something of a right wing media cause célèbre, and the video of their exchange has been promoted repeatedly as “evidence” of Democratic racism.
To be perfectly clear, I have no problem with people taking offense with Boxer on this, but I do find it ironic that a) most of the highly indignant tweets on this story are being spread by – judging by the photos – caucasians and that b) these are the same people who are also attacking President Obama with such vitrol and racial animus. So I re-tweeted MarissaGordon’s message “Don’t let Boxer slide on her racism! No American should be treated like this!“* and added this URL, in which the Southern Poverty Law Center discusses some of the uglier racial attacks against Obama.
To me, it seems that the right wing are scrutinizing every one of Obama’s comments, looking for a way to score political points. Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) recently said as much – that half of the criticism of the health care bill is politically motivated. I personally think the number seems a bit low.
Consider the President’s recent press conference, where he commented briefly on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates in Cambridge. Less than twenty-four hours later, right wing twits are shrieking indignantly, characterizing his mild comments as “anti-Police bigotry on the left”.
“Gates spewing racial hatred at a police officer got him arrested. Obama throwing the race card at it was despicable”* I have no doubt that if the ethnicities of the two groups were reversed, the wingnut reaction would be drastically different.
In defense of Twitter, political tweets can be an effective way of spreading stories or ideas via attached URLs. Tweets can also be, depending on the poster, mindlessly absurd and hopelessly uninformed. (Reminding me of the old saying about someone who knows just enough to make them dangerous).
For example, wingers are shocked, indignantly posting a waterfall of tweets about Obama saying that he wasn’t familiar with a passage in the House healthcare bill (still in committee). Twits hold this up as proof that the President is frighteningly out of touch or that the legislative process is spiraling out of control.
However, why should the President read every rough draft of the House’s thousand-page bill before it’s finalized? It is hardly a damning statement by Obama, an admission that he will never read it, or an acknowledgement that he plans to sign the health care bill into law without knowing what the substance of the it is – unless you’re a paranoid wingnut fearful of encroaching socialism.
One twit, who describes himself as a “Conservative. Capitalist. Always learning, thinking, innovating” was just today asserting that “it should be an eye-opener that China has a better handle on our economy and its well-being than our own president and congress”*. When I asked him to substantiate his tweet, he responded “Even the communists know we need capitalism” and that “even China understands what the ramifications of this socialist agenda will mean for America if it continues.”*
I tried repeatedly to get him to cite even one source that supported his assertions, but he wouldn’t engage on substance. His final tweet was “Unfortunately you don’t have the capacity to absorb and understand all that is happening. I hope you enjoy your “hope & change.”"*
The last refuge of this breed of conservative twit seems to be that their arguments are just sooo advanced that poor liberals simply don’t have the capacity to understand.
Fed a constant diet of right wing spin from FOX, talk radio and conservative websites with no balance or counterpoint, I can’t say I’m surprised. The mingling of spin and half-truths has made the American conservative movement proudly ignorant and intellectually lazy.
What’s Good About Social Media?
Friday, January 8th, 2010(An Unintentional Treatise)
I’ve been working on a few new projects this month which have brought me back into the web world. From time to time I get burnt out on web design, but lately I’ve been enjoying being a code monkey.
In both cases, I’m completely redesigning websites that have suffered from benign neglect. In some ways, it’s like cleaning a dirty house – there is a certain amount of satisfaction one gets from seeing everything put in its place. The text gets dusted off and freshened up, the broken links get swept away like cobwebs.
What’s changed from when I first started designing websites is that now there is such an increased emphasis on integrating social media and distribution channels. Not that Facebook or YouTube even existed when I first started coding HTML, but back in the day, adding links to IMDB for films was a perk, an extra. Today it seems almost mandatory, and I’m thinking that it is not so much that the technology has changed, but rather that the public’s expectations have.
Social media is one of the ways in which users can make sense of the internet’s vast overwhelmingness. Years ago, Wired magazine put out a poster which mapped out most of the websites that existed on the internet. It was about the size of a movie poster when unfolded, and there were actually spaces in between all the listings.
Today, if an editor proposed mapping the web, it would lead to uncontrollable laughter or hysterical tears. There is just too much information out there, which is why search engines have become such an important battleground for tech companies.
Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and widget-based platforms allow users to tag, categorize and customize information and have it delivered to them in a method of their choosing. E-mail alerts, news feeds, and sharing links are not new, but they way that they have been integrated into web-based platforms have increased their prominence.
I used to work in a movie theater, and we had regulars, like most places. With certain people, I knew what they were going to order before they had finished buying their ticket. If they arrived late, I could have a cup of coffee with cream and a small popcorn ready by the time they got inside the lobby. I might be able to tell them about an upcoming film because I had a sense of what kind of movies they liked to see.
Social media at its best can operate in the same way, by anticipating our needs or alerting us to new things that we may want to know about based on our past preferences. It’s not only a time saver, but it gives us a sense of familiarity, of home on the web.
Of course, sometimes social media is poorly understood by its creators, too heavy handed in its execution, and ends up seeming Big Brotherish to the end user. It’s basically the difference between offering the user a bite to eat and force feeding them a sandwich.
So far, I’ve written about ways in which technology allows us to customize what is essentially a passive experience. However, I’m much more interested in the ways in which blogs, news feeds and technologies like Twitter have added an active dimension to web surfing.
When I was in grad school, I was very interested in the dynamics of media distribution. (I know, I’m a hopeless geek.) TV and radio, I learned, were a one-to-many model, with viewers getting their information from a centralized source. According to theorists at the time, the internet was supposed to be a game changer, allowing consumers to “talk back” to their media in a whole new way.
This was hardly my idea of a utopian media environment. I didn’t want the ability to tell the TV networks their programming sucked, I wanted to create my own network and distribute my own content. Unfortunately, having a web page in a sea of web pages is like trying to give a speech in a crowded room where everyone is talking. Only people with bullhorns or microphones get heard, and on the internet, large corporations and media conglomerates were the ones with all the bullhorns.
Blogs have become the technological equivalent of a battering ram, able to break through the artificial barriers that separate the amateur from the professional. It is most apparent in the political sphere, where upstarts from Talking Points Memo or Daily Kos are now given entry to White House briefings along with well-marinated reporters like Helen Thomas.
Recently the New York Times had a hilarious article highlighting the tension between old and new media in the fashion industry. The reporter profiled bloggers -mere kids, for that matter – who had such a following that they were outshining fashion industry luminaries from Vogue and Elle. One blogger from the Philippines (gasp!) was even seated a few seats away from Anna Wintour at a D & G fashion show in Milan. I’m afraid the barbarians are at your velvet-trimmed, Swarovski-encrusted gates, my dear!
What we’re witnessing is the beginning of a media upheaval, a re-balancing of power in which information is not a closely held commodity to be doled out to the masses in pre-digested chunks, and the conversation is not limited by viewpoints favorable to corporate interests.
The technological upstart Twitter was initially derided by old media (“Using Twitter suggests a level of insecurity” said the UK’s Times Online). It was, however, one of the primary ways that dissidents within totalitarian Iran could quickly communicate and coordinate in the days following what many viewed as a deeply flawed election.
Citizen journalists have been some of the harshest critics not only of the banking mismanagement which led to last year’s economic crisis, but also some of the most dogged investigators of the TARP program which was meant to speed economic recovery, but seems to have primarily ensured that many banking executives got their bonuses on time.
Social media has been maligined by the mainstream media as a forum for trivialities and ego-driven babble. And although it can be that as well, the technologies that are all lumped together under the social media umbrella can be powerful tools for activism, journalism and civic participation.
It is about more than sharing pictures of Hannah Montana, or any other artificially manufactured pop tart, it can be about telling truth to power. Ultimately, it depends on what you do with it.
Tags: banking scandal, facebook, iran, social media, TARP, twitter
Posted in Commentary, Complicit enablers, Culture, Media, Obama, Politics, Tech | Comments Off