Last Day Dream

Twitter isn’t stupid. People are.

Twitter reveals something I have always assumed.

If I were to suddenly gain the power to hear the thoughts of everyone in the world, most of what I would hear would be banal, uninteresting garbage and minutia about life.

But, if I had the power to filter out those thoughts and focus on specific people or topics – it would be amazing.

With Twitter’s search function and the bevy of widgets and Web sites out there parsing the data, you have the ability to do just that.

Here are some links to such:

Twitter search

Twitturly

Twitter visualizations

Hashtags

Twitterlocal

Popular links

Twitter hit critical mass this week, expanding at the rate of 1,382 percent, and it seems like a schism is upon us.

Mainstream news, eager to maintain relevancy, has embraced it, and a bevy of celebrities have made headlines with their Twitter antics.

Either you instantly love and/or understand it, or you instantly hate and/or have no idea why people like it.

Some of the love, and all of the hate is misguided, because people seem to forget one important fact – most people are dumb. Anything that reflects the collective unconscious is bound to reveal that.

That’s why I thought it was strange to see The Daily Show and Current.tv poke fun at the service, both in a way that seems uncharacteristically ignorant.

But, even on Digg, a supposed watering hole for the tech savvy, I’ve seen comments like this:

” ..all twitter users are retarded asshole douchebags.”

“ I cannot fathom why anyone would have even the remotest interest in such a pointless technology.”

“But how will everyone know, that I just ate a turkey sandwich? Open a blank word document write in it, and then save it. Every week delete it and start over!”

“I would say I hate twitter, but I’m still too busy trying to figure out what’s the fucking point of it.”

“More like the Internet toilet for micro-blogging diarrhea”

What these comments seem to assume is the people who use and like Twitter are rubes who can’t tell the difference between signal and noise.

This is an actual conversation between I had last week with my aunt-in-law, who is a professional journalist with decades of experience writing for print newspapers:

“Are you on Twitter?”

“Yeah, I really like it. I think it’s much better and more useful than Facebook can ever hope to be.”

“But, I don’t want to know what other people are doing every minute of the day.”

“That’s not the point of it, really. I mean, yes, there are people talking about cereal and their nipple rings and how much of an asshole their roomate it. But, still, that’s not the point.”

“What is the point?”

She went on to tell me that all the young people at her paper were “madly in love with Twitter,” which drove her crazy because she doesn’t see the value in it.

Like a lot of people, she sees Twitter as just another Internet fad doomed to run out of steam in a few years.

That’s the problem with social media. So far, they follow a predictable pattern – birth, explosion, stagnation, death.

At first, early adopters go crazy, then everyone else joins – including your boss and ex wife. Once there are millions of users, everyone gets bored with the service or uncomfortable, which happens right as the ads start to make the place seem tacky. All at once, something that used to seem like an important part of daily life gets abandoned by early disposers, and the cycle begins again.

Social networks and Web 2.0 toys come and go like hula hoops and slap bracelets, and I think many people are just plain tired of hearing about Twitter, so they see at as a passing thing.

For some reason though, I think Twitter may be different. Unlike Myspace and Facebook and America Online and Six Degrees and Friendster and Compuserve, Twitter isn’t a walled garden. It isn’t a destination. It isn’t a purely social medium.

Twitter is a delivery system for bursts of instantaneous info from anywhere you can carry a cell phone.

Twitter arose not from social networks or blogs, it arose from the evolution of information transfer tools like the telegraph – telephone – email – chatroom – instant message – text message and so on.

As with the tools which came before, the delivery method is not the point – the content it.

Stupid, boring and dysfunctional people use Twitter in stupid, boring and dysfunctional ways, which is what has led to all the fear and loathing. Stupid, boring and dysfunctional people do the same thing with blogs and telephones, but they don’t make the tools stupid and boring.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter is not about reconnecting with old friends and classmates. It isn’t about maintaining a database of contacts. It isn’t about creating a digital persona. It’s simply about trading information, some of it useful, lots of it emphera.

Twitter is searchable, malleable and doesn’t require the user to be near a computer.

This, above all else is what will give Twitter longevity and solidify what it provides as a part of our daily lives.

The idea of human RSS feeds is something that is never going to go away now that it is out there. Not everyone will participate, but enough people will that the society, culture, civilization itself will be affected.

Already, I check the trending topics every day. I search when a breaking story hits the Web. I have friends who participate in makeshift chatrooms during television shows built from hashtags. People use Twitter to share a moment, and then move on.

Just like social networking Web sites, its function may dissolve into part of what we think the Web should provide. Just about every site out there now offers some sort of social interaction between users.

Eventually, the idea of Facebook and others will seem silly as the social aspect of the Web becomes ubiquitous and expected wherever we go online.

Blogs changed the way we looked at our shared human experience. Twitter, or something similar will do the same as just one more supplement to our interaction and communication.

Link to Daily Show clip

Link to Digg debate

Link to Current.tv clip

The Truth

I’ve been meaning to get around and write an essay on the truth about newspapers, but this guy beat me to it, and I don’t think I could improve greatly on his central premise.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

Enjoy.

LINK

Walter Isaacson Demonstrates Why Newspapers are Dying

Last night, Walter Isaacson appeared on “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart.

He’s been making the rounds lately, touting an idea he thinks will save newspapers, an idea that seems to me to be a glorified bong-hit of an epiphany that demonstrates why the old guard of journalism is so damn clueless and doomed to fail.

He wrote an editorial, a cover piece, in the latest issue of TIME titled “How to Save Your Newspaper” in which he suggests newspapers and magazine return to paid subscriptions for their Web sites in the form of micropayments. Users would pay a small fee each time they read an article.

Watch this interview, and marvel at how clueless this guy is.

He actually suggests that if the Internet had come first, people would herald printed newspapers as a superior medium.

Wow. As soon as the interview got rolling, Twitter users started chiming in on how silly he was. Check out the tweets.

The New York Times has responded well:

“Newspaper readers have never paid for the content (words and       photos). What they have paid for is the paper that content is printed on. A week of The Washington Post weighs about eight pounds and costs $1.81 for new subscribers, home-delivered. With newsprint (that’s the paper, not the ink) costing around $750 a metric ton, or 34 cents a pound, Post subscribers are getting almost a dollar’s worth of paper free every week — not to mention the ink, the delivery, etc. The Times is more svelte and more expensive. It might even have a viable business model if it could sell the paper with nothing written on it. A more promising idea is the opposite: give away the content without the paper. In theory, a reader who stops paying for the physical paper but continues to read the content online is doing the publisher a favor.”

Link to NYT article

Isaacson should see this:

I’m so sorry

metastasizing_cancerI am so sorry.

A few years ago, when I was the editor for my college newspaper, I wrote a column about DCA research. If I could I would erase it from the Internet.

I fear it will haunt me forever.

I am the reason why there are hundreds of news stories on the Internet touting a cure for cancer. I am why people claim Big Pharma wants it kept a secret. I created a monster and became part of one the things I hate most about modern journalism – sensationalism.

I realized just how awful things had become while listening to “The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe” – a podcast featuring a panel of skeptics who eviscerate psuedoscience and magical thinking in the media.

As a fan of the podcast, it knocked the wind out of me to hear them discussing my article. I had forgotten about it, and when I went back to read it, I realized how terrible a thing I had created.

At the time, I had to write two columns a week. This instance, I based it off of a New Scientist article I read that morning. I summarized the article and presented it in a more conversational tone.

It was 30 minutes of work. It appeared in our paper once, and then went to our online version. Having written dozens of columns, I never expected it to get any attention beyond our small local university audience.

I was trying to get eyeballs on the paper. I wrote a crazy headline. I wrote in a belligerent, ignorant tone. Soon after it went online, it was picked up by Digg, Fark and about 1,000 bloggers. Who knows why, with so much else out there about the same drug?

I quickly went back and put in a disclaimer at the top of the article, and I provided links to the original source and the research. Still, the hits kept pouring in.

Two years later, this article is still the most visited, commented and emailed article at the newspaper every single month.

If you type “cancer cure” into Google. My article appears on the first page of results.

If you type “scientists cure cancer,” my article appears hundreds of times.

If you type in the title of the column, you will find about 3,000 links.

It appeared on every news aggregator out there.

Glenn Beck used it in an episode of his show.

Bloggers write about it every single week.

I have answered an endless stream of emails since it first appeared. Each time I direct desperate individuals to the source and the latest research. Each time, I tell them I am sorry. I understand they are clamoring for a cure, they are in pain or watching a loved one die, and I have made it harder on them.

I will always regret writing this article. Despite the note at the beginning, which most people disregard, it has given false hope to millions and helped encourage wishful thinking by bloggers who don’t care.

Since my article, hundreds of DCA Web site have appeared online. These places sell it like snake oil. People are taking it without supervision. It is wrong, and I feel some responsibility for the creation of such sites.

I apologize. Let this be a lesson to everyone about the way information is distributed on the Internet. Despite my attempts to quell the buzz, the article lives on beyond me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Here is a sample of the places it has appeared:

Original Article

10,000 Diggs

And here is the vital, real information you should have:

Criticism of DCA

This link will take you to the official site set up by the actual scientists working on the drug.   

This link takes you to the Wikipedia entry on the drug. 
  

I urge you, do not trust anyone who offers to sell this drug. There are many Web sites out there offering this chemical to people who are desperate and yearning for hope. Do not be taken in by these charlatans. The drug is still being researched, and no reputable doctor or scientist would allow humans to use it at this stage.

My Mom’s Buttermilk Drop Biscuits

Der Händedrücke

This is the sequel to a short film I made with a friend a few years ago. It is awesome. Enjoy.

Link to first film.

The Digital Conversion

Again, I do one of these each month. Here’s the latest one:

Little Wings

Forces can often seem to be aligning against you as you grow older and learn to fear, hate and retreat from harm. Life’s antagonists can seem harsh, uncaring and bent on bleeding all the joy from your travels.

But then, sometimes, something so beautiful and monumental leaps into your heart you feel as though you might burst inside from the radiating delight.

This is one of those things:

My Mom’s Cooking

I’ve been slowly filming a video cookbook of my mom’s most Southern recipes. When I switched to this new blog format, they went poof. So, here they all are: