Tag Archives: Twitter

January 2013 Awards

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Tweet of the month. “Of course I’d be willing to let the Postal Service continue to dope if it would speed up mail delivery.” Nikolas Kristof

Sports stat of the month. Bench Points—Clips 41.7, Lakes 26.5. Bench Rebounds— Clips 20.4, Lakes 13.4. Bench Assists—Clips 8.7, Lakes 5.4. Bench Steals—Clips 3.8, Lakes, 2.0. Bench Blocks—Clips 3.6, Lakes 1.1.

Unanswered question of the month. Did Beyonce lip sync her National Anthem performance?

Sports loose-end of the month. The likelihood that the Sacramento Kings will move 619 miles north before the start of next season.

Bush league sports move of the month. Azarenka’s “injury” timeout against Sloane Stephens in their Australian Open semifinal match.

Worst losses of the month. Gold—Seahawks 28-Falcons 30. Silver—Butler 64-GonZAGa 63.

Gracious loser of the month. Sloane Stephens.

Best basketball quote of the month. “If you have to bounce the ball three times and flip it and twist your arm before a free-throw, it probably means you can’t shoot ’em. Wynton Marsalis’ youth basketball coach.

Anti-swoosh event of the month. The European Tour’s Abu Dhabi golf tournament where Swoosh Senior (Tiger Woods) and Swoosh Junior (Rory Mcllroy) missed the cut.

Multibillionaire quote of the month. “I like today what I liked fifty years ago. . . I was happy when I was in my twenties, and I don’t see a reason to change things.” Warren Buffet

Parenting essay of the month. Coming Home: Returning to parenting after 16 months on the campaign trail. John Dickerson, Slate Magazine.

Book release of the month. Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright

Television shows of the month. Gold, Portlandia Season 3. Silver, Downton Abbey Season 3. Bronze, 30 Rock.

Movie of the month. Tie. Silver Lining Playbook and Zero Dark Thirty.

Word of the month. Tradecraft.

EXPLICIT cold ass honkey music vid of the year month. Thriftshop by Maclemore & Ryan Lewis.

Insight of the month. Michael Apted, documentary filmmaker on 56 Up. “That was a very important lesson I learned throughout the decades on the film, that I can’t project my version of happiness or success or ambition onto other people.”

Unappreciated health danger of the month.

Social Media Scorecard

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Me evaluating social media is like Rosanne Barr evaluating singers of the National Anthem. I’m old and hopelessly behind the curve, a late, late adaptor, better suited to anti-social media. Plus I’m skeptical by nature and my experience with the different sites is limited.

Facebook. Not only am I skeptical, I dig solitude, and I have non-conformist tendencies. So when everyone began telling me I HAD to get a Facebook account, I figured that was good reason not to. Alas, six months or so ago, a close friend from high school dragged me on. I have very few Facebook friends compared to you. I’m not sure why, but until recently, I’ve been checking it a couple of times a day. It’s been nice learning what some old friends are up to and since my blog posts appear on my friends’ pages I’ve seen a slight uptick in readership.

Sorry Zuckerberg, apart from that, the negative side of the ledger is much more substantial. I don’t feel like I’ve really reconnected with any old friends on any meaningful level and the quality of content is weak. Once you friend someone you have no control over how many times they post in a given day and the quality of those posts. Far too few add meaning to my life. Worse than that, they’re a distraction from life writ large. Not that my content is so spectacular. I’m sure some of my friends would prefer not getting a link to every blog post I write. It’s like being on a landline, having wires crossed up, and listening into another conversation. Fun! For two minutes listening to two other peeps. No so much when it’s hundreds of people all day and night. I assume Facebook fanatics, for which there are hundreds of million, learn how to read very selectively. Instantaneously processing value within an incessant content stream is a modern skill I don’t really want to develop.

Conclusion—Facebook has detracted more than it’s added. Allegedly worth $100b, so I’m in the minority. That’s cool, I’m comfortable there. Final grade, D.

LinkedIn. A former student kept asking me to link with her, then a few other people, and I eventually waved the white flag and created an account about the same time I first Facebooked. Again, you have more contacts than me. I suck at networking maybe because I just want to be left alone most of the time. Also, I don’t like the design of the site, too busy and confusing. Maybe if I was 24 and looking for a job I’d think differently about it, but I rarely check it. It’s added little to no value to my life. Yet a passing grade because it hasn’t really detracted either. Final grade, C-.

Twitter. Just when you thought I was a lost cause, a social medium I’m completely down with. There’s a special place in heaven for whomever came up with the 140 character limit. I’ve just started following people and orgs including Bill Simmons, the Lonely Planet, some newspaper reporters, and a UCLA sports website. So nice to learn instantaneously useful tips for driving in Brazil and which UCLA team has lost. Bonus points for the minimalist design and ease of use. It’s a snap to add and remove people, no “defriending” drama. I may just get a tat of the Twitter logo sometime soon. If Facebook is worth 100b, Twitter is a 1t company. Final grade, B. Would have been higher, but I deducted points because too many purveyors (or is it perve-veyors) of porn are slipping through in the form of new followers.

twitter logo bird

Postscript and related link—On a recent morning, while cycling, I watched a documentary about the current status and probable future direction of journalism titled “Inside the New York Times”. David Carr, the Times media writer, played a central role. I now follow him on Twitter. I really liked this blog post from him on the limits of on-line friendship. Highly recommended.

I Promise

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If elected President to give up golf for the length of my term(s). Presidents deserve and need downtime, but symbolism matters, and playing golf is about as bad as it gets. At least for Democratic Presidents. People want leaders that are more like them, than different. Just practice your putting stroke and invite Boehner over to watch the US Open on television.

If elected to Congress to keep my privates private.

If elected Governor of New Jersey, to drive, not helicopter, to my children’s events.

If elected to Congress, not to advocate for abstinence education and then have an affair with one of my staffers.

If given a Nobel Prize and Oscar for my work publicizing the threat of global warming, to keep my monthly electricity bill under $1,200/month.

If running for the Republican nomination for President, not to call for a crackdown on illegal immigration and then use undocumented Guatemalans to tend to my lawn and tennis court.

If elected to Congress, as hard as it may be, to refrain from tickle fights with my male staffers.

If elected to Congress, to refrain from emailing photos of my shirtless self to any women I might meet on Craigslist.

Until then, however, I can’t promise any of those things.

Love and Social Media

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If Jonathan Franzen writes it, I want to read it. In a recent NYT essay he gives voice to what I’ve been thinking, that social media compromise intimacy. An excerpt:

. . . Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me?

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.

This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are.

Usually, when I walk down the classroom hallways of my university, students line the walls, sitting or standing, eyes almost uniformly on their phones. And last week, at the GalPal’s end-of-the-year Spanish language program fiesta, I studied a fifty-something couple as they watched their granddaughter in a skit from adjacent tables. They watched her for a few seconds then quickly turned to their separate smart phones and never looked up for the remainder of the program. Only physically were they in same elementary school lunchroom as the rest of us.

No doubt, texting is usually easier than talking face-to-face, but is it healthier? I’m less convinced than Franzen that arms-length social media forms of interacting are necessarily worse than traditional face-to-face forms. I support the harshest possible penalties for high speed social media usage, but when it comes to stationary texting, talking, and Facebooking, I suspect Franzen is overstating the costs.

Is the obvious decline in eye contact and face-to-face conversation inevitably negative or just different? What indicators might help us answer that question?

If nothing else, at some point, young people will unplug at least long enough to satiate their built-in animal desire for physical intimacy. Unless of course, there’s a new app for that.

Late Adaptor

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Ever goggle yourself? I just did it to see if my new blog would pop up and I was glad that it did. Unfortunately though, a summary of my “Ratemyprofessor.com” entry also popped up and I’m very sorry to report I still score a big zero for “hotness”. Who cares that my other ratings are so complimentary, I want some chili peppers dammit (the symbol used to depict hotness)! My lovely wife was outraged when she first learned about this injustice and has committed to hacking into the system and rectifying things so that’s helped me move on.

A personal technology update. I’m still probably the only person over age twelve that doesn’t own a cell phone or mobile as some Euros refer to them. I also don’t have a Facebook page, could not care less about what Ashton Kutchar, Shaq, or Lance Armstrong are tweeting about, and only have music on my iPod nano (girly music according to my sister).

One of the stranger things about me though is I follow personal tech discussions fairly closely (David Pogue, Walt Mossberg, Farhad Manjoo). I’m addicted to macrumors.com and I’m anxiously awaiting the June 8th Mac Conference. How WEIRD is that, the last guy without a cell phone logging on daily to see the most recent screen shots of the soon to be released, new generation iPhone. You’re thinking off-the-hinges eccentric, but I really prefer “quirky”.

How is this lunacy explained? My interest in personal tech discussions is easier to explain than my non-conformity. I’m a social scientist at heart and I’m intrigued by the ways the technologies are changing how we relate to one another and our culture more generally. On the other side of the equation, one of my hang ups is the slow and steady dimunition of privacy. Another factor probably  is simply not being as social as most other people. Also, the longer I remain untethered (email is a whole ‘nother story), the longer the non-conformist part of me wants to stay untethered. How cool would it be to the the last untethered person (I’m thinking Newsweek cover story). I don’t begrudge anyone their smart phones or hand held computers, I have no illusion of having any impact on the inevitability of increased connectivity, and this post aside (remember Positive Momentum is a secret society), I don’t advertise my cell-less status.

That being said, I am ready to buy Apple’s Kindle killer whenever it comes out (probably first half of 2010 according to macrumors.com). I want an electronic reader and I have to confess to being intrigued by some of the iPhone apps. Maybe I should just buy an iTouch when it’s updated. I was impressed by a recent  iTouch to iTouch via Skype article I read. Maybe I should buy my lovely wife an iTouch too and then we can Skype away. Since she’s the only person who thinks I deserve a chili pepper, she’s the only person I want to talk to.

Should I buy an iPhone, iTouch, hold out for the tablet?

And yes, I own APPL stock; yes, all the references to their products in this post are subliminal; yes, tomorrow you’ll wake up and begin transitioning from that Seattle company’s products to APPL’s.

Is resistance futile and should I just create a Facebook account, start Twittering, join Linkedin, and upgrade the blog with all the social networking doodads? Why or why not? Has your personal tech enriched your life? Have the benefits outweighed the costs?

Care to sell me on digitizing my life?