For years now we've seen people entrenched in, married to, paid by or validated by old media attack new media, "those bloggers," Twitter, Facebook … the Internet in general. It's been fading lately as publishers especially have started to embrace and integrate new media into their publishing strategies. But there are still holdouts, many of whom seem not just ignorant but willfully ignorant.

Malcolm Gladwell's weak dismissal of "weak ties"

Gladwell's New Yorker article was the buzz on Twitter. One excerpt:

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.

…proving that old media journalists are as adept as anyone in the straw-man rhetorical technique.

Gladwell's main argument seems to cling to the notion that things like the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s could not have happened in new media. The thing is he seems to think that this is a notion that all of us "evangelists of social media" cling to. His is a rant against ghosts and phantoms to make a point, not an investigative exercise.

I love Gladwell's books, especially Blink. But this column is more an expression of his attitude towards social media rather than an insight into social media. It's a tract for dismissal, not a lesson towards understanding.

In a Guardian article on Gladwell's thoughts, journalist Tim Adams, who, by the way, describes us all as "insects":

The twitterers have responded to his provocation by swarming on to blogs and websites to protect their uniting belief: that the future belongs to them.

…does end up revealing a truth behind Gladwell's views:

The New Yorker, for which Gladwell is a stellar correspondent, sees itself as the spiritual home of a kind of reading and writing and engagement that could seem threatened by the attention overload and surface concerns of online skimming. I spoke to Gladwell a while back about his use of computers: he never spent much time on the internet, he said: "I run out of things to look up really quickly."

So Gladwell in fact doesn't even know much about social media, doesn't have a use for them, and doesn't even find the internet of much use. Obviously he's not interested in what other people might have to say. Why would he? He has his saying machines (The New Yorker, his books, his occasional appearances on television). What could anyone possibly offer to a man on top of the literary heap?

So why would Gladwell even bother to take on a subject of which, he admits, he knows little? Because he's a writer for The New Yorker, and that in itself makes his views relevant? I not only like Gladwell, I love The New Yorker (as a subscriber for years). But his taking on social media strikes me as hubris at best, enabled by the blindness of privilege.

Real Time Privilege with Bill Maher

On Real Time with Bill Maher [warning: heavy Flash site] this past Friday, we were treated to the entertainment of Professor Cornell West, journalist and former political flack Joe Klein, and Bill Maher ruminating over why people would want to "share" — i.e., blog or use Twitter or participate on Facebook — as if that were some great mystery.

And mystery it is to these privileged gentlemen.

At one point, Arianna Huffington, who, along with comic actor David Cross rounded out this evening's panel, makes the point that social media can be used for good or ill. She runs through several examples of people using social media for good:

Maher: But most of it is bullshit.
Huffington: Not at all!
Maher: Oh come on! See, this is my problem with Facebook, is this kind of stuff, to me, makes sure no one will ever read a book again, because they just don't have time, because it's so easy to spend all your time, [mimics texting on a handheld] "I took a shit and ate a banana." And that's posting on Facebook and 8 people go "I like that" and "I did, too" and it's — Betty White, I mean I love Betty White said it right when she said, "Now that I know what it is, it sounds like a huge waste of time!"
…
Huffington: But the same people, the same people who are doing that now would probably have spent seven hours sitting on the couch watching bad television and you would not be complaining about it. Self-expression is the new entertainment. Some self-expression is trivial and some self-expression is great. But it's no different than watching bad tv.
…
West: But it's still narcissism on the one hand. You got narcissism on the one hand, all the forms of narcissism, [gestures with other hand] you got the courage to be empathetic, sympathetic, concerned about the plight of others, sensitive to the pain of others.
Maher: Why is it that this generation, though, wants to share everything?...
Cross: Because you can get famous….
Maher: You mean like Tia Tequila?
…
Klein: …The difference now is that, because of these technologies, it's in everybody's face….

—transcribed from second video embedded on http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-tv/arianna-maher-elections-2010-tea-party-big-tent_b_747795.html

Maher is a pig-headed, but entertaining, boob. Klein is a Washington insider. But I expected West to know better. At one point in the same episode, he observes:

Rahm Emanuel exemplifies contemporary cynicism and old-fashioned arrogance in American politics.

And yet, in his broad-brush dismissal of all of us who don't get to appear on talk shows, he expresses his own brand of cynicsm and old-fashioned arrogance towards people who express themselves online. He, Klein and Maher all seem blind to their own privilege as media celebrities. Their privilege is that old media have granted them camera time and space in print.

What these men did not ask is why they themselves feel the need to share. And why their motivations would be any different than the motivations of the unwashed masses who are not privileged by old media but are newly empowered by publication technologies that bypass the old media scarcity controls.

And yet, when there's blame to go around….

It seemed this past several days that everywhere on the old media we were presented with talking heads wringing their hands over the tragic Rutgers student suicide after being outed and mocked by his roommate and dorm neighbor … and how Facebook is the problem. The best response I've seen on this is from Anil Dash:

It's important to note that blaming technology for horrendous, violent displays of homophobia or racism or simple meanness lets adults like parents and teachers absolve themselves of the responsibility to raise kids free from these evils. By creating language like "cyberbullying", they abdicate their own role in the hateful actions, and blame the (presumably mysterious and unknowable) new technologies that their kids use for these awful situations. Somehow, when I was frequently cross-dressing or wearing makeup or identifying as queer as a high schooler, I was still able to be threatened with violence, even though my tormentors had no mobile phones or laptop computers. (I will point out, for nerd cred, that I was the first person in my school to bring a mobile phone or laptop to class.)

I was thinking of this obliquely when Jose Antonio Vargas asked me a bit about my perspective on Hollywood's take on social media as exemplified by the new Facebook film. Despite my own misgivings about many of Facebook's social impacts, I still think old media as exemplified by the Associated Press and the film industry has a concerted agenda to demonize new media and social media [emphasis added –LS], and Facebook and its creators bear the brunt of that in The Social Network. There's also the ugly reality that coining bullshit words like "cyberbullying" will sell papers or page views. I put it more broadly in the Huffington Post piece:

The movie is written in the abstract, based on what they feel Facebook, and the social Web, represent. It's exoticism. It's the 1940s, when you had a white actor in yellow-face play a Chinese character, you know? Those foreigners talk like this, and it's why they're inscrutable and evil.

And for my own straw-man argument….

These denigrators of new media and defenders of old media would say to tall this, But we are trained professionals! We have the special insights to determine what's important! Who wants to hear about what you had for breakfast?

While there are many people in journalism and media who understand what the new media are about, it does seem that all to often these attitudes are held and expressed and get a ton of exposure … not because their views are particularly insightful, but rather by the simple fact they have the privilege of mass publication via the old media. They are still louder than the rest of us, and need to keep reminding us of this, as if that were validation in and of itself. Why being louder somehow makes them better than the hoi polloi is not clear. Why do they feel the need to keep doing this? Maybe Cornell West had it right: narcissism.

Or maybe it's something more generally shared by all of us: wanting our voices of hope/concern/anger/fear/despair/delight to be heard in an increasingly bustling, insecure, unstable, chaotic world.

--
Photo credit: David Cosand, Creative Commons

Warning: Spoilers!

If you've been like me, wondering where the hell Battlestar Galactica has been going, the return of the show this weekend has (will) probably answer(ed), and with some excitement and a few huge revelations.

Yes, I'm going to talk about them here. That's why the spoiler warning above.

Revelation 1:

The planet (presumably Earth, though we have seen no real objective proof -- no half-buried Statue of Liberty....

..."Earth" was nuked some 2,000 years ago.

Personally, I think the show would have been better served if they had left us on the cliffhanger last year just arriving at Earth. Then there would have been a lot of anticipation.

--Then, with this revelation of the nuked planet, we would have been rocked and in more emotional tune with the characters (which turns out to be very important with the suicide-themed plot points in the episode).

Still, this starts to fill in the metastory about what happened to put into motion the events we've been following in this series.

Revelation 2:

They find Cylon Centurions.

But they aren't any model known by any of the Cylons we know. Similar, but different.

That's huge in itself, but then we learn....

Revelation 3:

All of the human remains they find all over the planet are in fact not human: they are Cylon.

Whoa!

I'm still trying to digest just what that might mean. How are Cylons and humans different? (That's been a running question throughout the show.) Are the current seven Cylons of the Cylon civilization (if you could call it that) really from this "Earth" and not developed by the Colonial Cylons themselves?

How does this fit with the first Colony-Cylon war, when young Adama found the proto-hybrid project?

Revelation 4:

The other Four Cylons are from this "Earth".

Chief flashes back to before. He's walking through a kind of farmers' market when there's a bright flash – a nuke. As the blast wave hits, we flash back to present. Chief is rocked. On the wall next to him is a charred silhouette (which will resonate with any dedicated Ray Bradbury fans): his own remains.

They ask the question themselves: How did they die 2,000 years ago and find themselves living light-years away in the Colonies? Why don't they remember? What does this mean?

But this isn't even the topper.

Revelation 5:

Starbuck finds her crashed Viper ... with her charred corpse. Dog tags seem to confirm it's her.

And it totally freaks out Leoben, who throughout the series has seemed pretty un-freak-out-able. Why does Leoben run away?

It was a bit too easy how Starbuck ends up not telling Apollo what happened. It might have worked had the series left us hanging with hope in Earth's orbit, and then kicked off this half-season with the then-would-be-truly-shocking revelation that Earth was a charred wasteland. Then Duella's suicide and Adama's near-attempt would fit; we would feel the acute disappointment along with the characters.

But as it is, we had months to digest the wasted Earth, and that left us fairly removed emotionally from that shock.

But overall this episode was jam-packed with revelations. And it left us with even more questions.

Only a handful of episodes left. I eagerly await them.

I can hardly wait. Hence this tweet-length post.

I can't say I'm a Ron Paul supporter, but this New York Times "analysis" by Julie Bosman of a Ron Paul television ad caught my eye as being a bit off the mark. Consider this:

The advertisement has a low-budget, unpolished feel, but that is unlikely to bother many of Mr. Paul’s supporters, who tend to be extremely devoted.

Let's pause right there. Ms. Bosman's assumption that only "devoted" supporters would appreciate a low-budget television ad strikes me as nuts, or at least naïve. I don't know anybody who likes the premasticated schmaltz sausages that pass for political commercials these days. They tell us nothing, really -- and are, in fact, some of the most tedious and boring crap (excuse me) on televison. If prescription drugs and iPods were sold like this, Pfizer and Apple would be out of business.

The advertisement accomplishes what the Paul campaign said was its modest goal: to introduce Mr. Paul to voters in that state, where he is emerging as a potential spoiler in the Republican primary.

Hmmm. Is he a "spoiler"? Considering that Paul raised $4 million online in 24 hours, he's already looking more viable than some of the other "contenders" out there, like -- what's his name? That actor guy that all the talk shows were buzzing about. The guy with the hang-dog expression. Oh yeah, he was too boring to remember.

For those of us paying attention, Clayton Christensen introduced the idea of the "disruptive" technology. Transistor radios, for example, hit the market by storm in 1965. Nobody saw it coming, except the Japanese. They were "competing against non-competition." Nobody was selling radios to teenagers -- or portable radios to anybody. Suddenly the Japanese were market players in consumer technology.

Disruptively financed Ron Paul is certainly starting to disrupt the political dialogue:

The war on terror and the growth of big government have had a dangerous side effect: the loss of privacy rights for the American people. Both parties have put their pet schemes ahead of our rights. Not me. As president, I won’t stand for it. No national ID card, no invasion of privacy.

This guy is running for president? Nobody else anywhere in the presidential race is "selling" this. He's competing against non-competition. That makes his increasing numbers ... disruptive ... to the status quo.

Hat tip to Seth, who's not endorsing Paul, but merely notes:

When you're trying to sell something new, particularly in a business to business setting, there are always people like Julie Bosman. They are the defenders of the status quo.

They have an important job to do: to point out to everyone the risks of change. To identify potential spoilers.

In the 1990s, Ross Perot competed against non-competition, and totally disrupted the presidential election. Call him a spoiler, but I don't think it's an accident that Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress took up his message and balanced the budget. Four years ago, Howard Dean was the disruptive candidate with online power.

In the end, Perot and Dean couldn't hold it together in the context of mainstream media message making. A lot has changed since then. The web is not on the margins anymore -- it's the new reality that all the mainstream media are focusing on. Just check the hot topics on Romanesko.

Is Ron Paul a "spoiler"? My feeling is that you won't learn much asking the pundits.

[Photo credit: Vince Brown]