Original Writings

According to a friendly film reviewer who I spoke with in the SXSW press suite,  I am the only blogger at SXSW with press credentials. Now, on the one hand, that  means absolutely nothing other than I got a free badge, and have access to the press room. However, on the other hand, I know that nothing is truly free in this world. If I am in fact the only credentialed blogger at the conference, then I feel it’s my responsibility (for better, or for worse) to leave the SXSW people with the impression that bloggers are a legitimate and valuable part of the press.

 

Thus, the mission I seem to have accepted is to ensure that more bloggers get press credentials next year. Now, this means I will have to ::shudder:: produce something that will be considered legit journalism. And by Journalism, I don’t mean reporting what happened; rather, I see journalism as an institution dedicated to enriching the public’s understanding of events which they are unable to see with their own eyes. If I was only interested in reporting who/what/when/where/why, I’d simply cut and paste some press releases. That said, there are a few big problems…

 

What valuable, and unique function can I serve when nearly 60 percent of conference goers are going to blog it anyway? Taking detailed notes of the sessions at the conference simply doesn’t seem to cut it. The conference sessions already produce more than one set of detailed notes. Pretending to be a reporter for wired might get me a good grade in a journalism class, however the reporters for wired, and the multitude of other tech publications present already fill that niche… and clearly they will do it better than I.

Bill O’ Reilly: Bias, propaganda, and the kitten eating, anti-American, Jesus haters of the radical-left: that is the subject of this evening’s talking points memo.

Over the past 48 hours, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society has once again come under fire for providing asylum to numerous anti-American kitten eaters. As usual, the mainstream left-wing media, including CNN and the New York Times, are refusing to cover the scandal. However, unlike the liberal media, Talking Points believes that all Americans have a right to know what really happened behind the blood stained closed doors of the Berkman Center.

The typical criticism of deficit spending is as follows: Deficits let current generations off the hook for paying the bills. Thus, consumption rises while rate of savings and investment declines. This leads to there being less capital per worker, and therefore lower growth in productivity. Since capital is scarce, the rate of return rises, which leads to a rise in interest rates. These high interest rates attract foreign investors which, by definition, cause our trade deficit to widen. However, there has been almost no correlation between the budget deficit and the interest rate, productivity growth rate, or the savings and investment rate. Some economists, such as Robert Barro of Harvard see this as absolute proof that deficits don't matter. To them, the typical criticism of deficit spending is nothing more than a scary story to tell in the dark. If only it were just a "story". Like economists Robert Eisner and Michael Boskin (chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers under George H. W. Bush), I believe that correlation between the deficit and other economic variables is so low because the deficit has been defined incorrectly. The official debt is only a measure of our government's liabilities; it completely ignores our assets. In layman's terms, its akin to calling the owner of a $1 million property a debtor, by mere account of his large mortgage. There are fierce arguments amongst academia and government officials on how to measure our debt. Those are beyond the scope of this post, but we can conclude: The deficit is not a well-defined economic concept The real problems with deficit spending are not measured by our current federal deficit figure. Most notably, we should be worrying about transfers of wealth between generations (or maybe just me, since I'm 22).

The GOP message machine’s first priority is to prevent information from getting out to the public. For the them, “getting out the message” is a secondary priority; they understand that the majority of Americans would rather watch Donald Trump fire contestants than listen to a commentator explain the finer points of their reactionary agenda. Progressives would be wise to take the average American’s attention span into consideration when developing a media strategy.

The GOP views the mediascape as a battlefield. The Progressives view the mediascape as a debate competition. Whenever we send out an effective attack against the GOP's agenda, within 12 hours an army of pro-GOP radio hosts, television pundits, and columnists will respond with a unified and succinct counter-attack and rebuttle. In the eyes of Americans who are uneducated about how our media works, the unified, coordinated message will always win over any insurgent “alternative” views, no matter how well researched and argued. Its considerations such as those that has allowed the GOP to shift our country’s political views to favor them.

The GOP have a list of every “friendly” media personality in America. They maintain this list down to every rural small time talk radio personality. As hard as it is to believe, such a directory does not exist for the progressives. All we have is a few disconnected “alternative” outlets. We must change this… but we cannot wait for others to do it, and I cannot do it by myself....

Thus I propose we launch a national website called “the little blue book” (the name is up for debate). This website is intended to be built and maintained by an army of grass-roots media activists from around the country. Its goal is simple: to collect names, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers of every pro-blue media personality in the country. Eventually, this network could be used to bring forth a unified message that resonates better with the channel surfing nascar dad. The website would merely be a first step to building a network that will truly take on the GOP’s message machine. So I ask, who’s with me? Who will help me get it started? What other functions could such a network take on?

The reader might be wondering, "why is the man on the left smiling"? Well, the smiling man is named Michael McManus. He writes a syndicated column titled (ironically, as we shall soon find out) "Ethics & Religion" for over 50 national news-papers. He has also just gotten zapped by Salon for being on President Bush's payroll. He wrote several columns supporting Bush's queer-fearin' agenda without disclosing to readers that he was under Department of Health and Human Services payroll.... Or wait, let me put that better: he did not disclose that he was a spinless sellout that was willing to masquarade as an authority when he was little more than an advertisment -- a brand name to be bought out by the highest bidder. So to the hypothetical reader's opening question, I respond, "good use of the rhetorical question, dear reader".

Those of you who, like me, have been reading news (I got bored of minesweeper too) might know that Mcmanus is not alone. The Bush Administration also payed $240,000 to Armstrong Williams, a conservative African-American pundit, to help promote the "no child left behind" gizmo-act-word-thingy; and $21,000 to syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher. McManus, is the third -- and his smile is a charm, isn't it?

So why am I making a fuss? Simple: they didn't reveal their conflicts of interest. Did they act in accordance with the law? Of course, and that is why I named them "douche-bags of liberty". Here is a neat tidbit: President Bush has spent over 250 million on PR. Which, to put it in perspective, is double that of Clinton's PR bill during the great BJ affair of the late ninties. I've always wondered how Bush survived; I guess I know.

I've just returned from the Progressive Democrats of America summit in Washington D.C. First off, I wanted to thank the 3 other PBA members that helped lead the blogging workshop, Roxanne from Rox Populi, Terrence Heath from Republic of T; and of course the man who made it all possible, Aldon Hynes of Orient-Lodge. It’s become clear that the PBA has come of age; to put it into perspective, the

The media hath spoken: 2004 was the “year of the blog.” As we all know, whenever a broadcast and print media come to a consensus, a truth is born. Thus, we can relax. There is no need to put any further thought into the matter. Unfortunately, I have a bad habit of thinking. And as a result of my nasty habit, I believe the media has completely misunderstood what the blog represents: the first significant manifestation of much larger trend.

This powerful trend is two-fold:

• the rise of the network as a form of social organization.
• the freeing information from the constraints and limitations of the physical world.

In the first post of this series, we will explore the rise of the network through the lenses of history, and the social sciences.

Here is the dirty truth: I have no idea what that 'Zephergate' thing was all about. I tried to make it through several blogposts that explained the contraversy; but I just couldn't get past the first few paragraphs. I'm simply not interested in such matters; and I make it a point to avoid the world of people that are. That said, I wanted to share some 'thoughts'(1) about the debate on blogging, ethics, and journalism.

The blog is a piece of software (a.k.a. a tool). Without a human being, a blog decays into a dead rotting lump ones and zeros ( a point well demonstrated by the millions of abandoned blogs). I feel that I'm restating the obvious here, however, I've yet to read my next point among the threads of comments in these debates. Questions about ethics in blogging can only be understood if posed in human-centered languge, and terms (2). Here's one way to think of it: every time you encounter a question related to blogs, replace the word "blog" with "hammer", and "blogosphere" with "pile of hammers". I've found the trick to be quite useful in helping me think about the questions in a clearer sense. For example:

We'd gaze at our sky in awe as the doomsday asteroid began burning its way through our atmosphere; the silent yet blindingly bright fireball would fly across the sky above, and eventually settling over the horizon like a time lapse sunset. Impact.