Quotation Of The Day: The Need To Shut Down Edition

From this Ed Morrissey reflection:

The digital age brings with it many blessings, especially in terms of ready information and instantly accessible research, but the most seductive are the instant connections we make on social media. Those who make a living in online media thrive in this environment. We can know about the smallest developments on the most arcane stories and issues in real time, communicate them to our friends and colleagues, and get instant feedback on what the broader community believes it means.

That's surely not all bad, but it's not all good, either. More and more, all of us live under the expectation of constant connection. We barely get time for sleeping, let alone having regular intervals of the quiet solitude needed to process all of this data to find its meaning. Ubiquitous connection rarely goes unused, either by those looking for people who are taking a break, or more so by the break-takers themselves. We feel compelled to post to social media when we should be socializing with family and friends, and tweeting life as observers instead of living it.

It's easy to feel victimized by this, but it's really a self-inflicted conceit. We become the center of our own worlds, with the constant connection a validation of our own importance. The removal of that connection does not disturb anyone else, but the removal of that validation makes it clear that the world spins on without us. And when we return, we discover that not much really changes in the time we spent away from social media, away from the office, and even away from friends and family.

A Minor Musing And Musical Interlude Concerning Signs

Bob Mercer is sign counting. By Mercer's count, Mike Rounds and Gordon Howie are winning the political signage battle in South Dakota's United States Senate race.

@RinoMikeSD seems to have a fixation with signs.

Gordon Howie signs & bumper stickers are showing up across South Dakota. #CCOT http://t.co/5peIUlUVYt #SDSEN pic.twitter.com/zvbNbRNaRY
— RiNO Mike (@RinoMikeSD) July 19, 2014

I wish Wieland and Pressler had more signs up. In politics, out of sight is out of mind. I suspect that the ability to place signs indicates a well-organized, well-staffed campaign.

That said, I have yet to meet anyone who has voted for someone based on signage. In fact, I suspect that the number of signs a candidate has out has about as much to do with the candidate's success as the number of Twitter followers a candidate has. (Democrats better hope that thesis is incorrect. As of this posting, Rick Wieland has 3,490 followers whereas the Mike Rounds campaign account has 1,197 followers.)

Of course, It may be that I have my aversion to caring about signs only because this song was popular during my formative years.

Quotation Of The Day: Colleges Use Prospective Students Twitter Feeds To Determine Acceptance Edition

From The NY Times:

As certain high school seniors work meticulously this month to finish their early applications to colleges, some may not realize that comments they casually make online could negatively affect their prospects. In fact, new research from Kaplan Test Prep, the service owned by the Washington Post Company, suggests that online scrutiny of college hopefuls is growing.

Of 381 college admissions officers who answered a Kaplan telephone questionnaire this year, 31 percent said they had visited an applicant’s Facebook or other personal social media page to learn more about them — a five-percentage-point increase from last year. More crucially for those trying to get into college, 30 percent of the admissions officers said they had discovered information online that had negatively affected an applicant’s prospects.

“Students’ social media and digital footprint can sometimes play a role in the admissions process,” says Christine Brown, the executive director of K-12 and college prep programs at Kaplan Test Prep. “It’s something that is becoming more ubiquitous and less looked down upon.”

Tweet Of The Day: Rep. Stace Nelson Makes A Friend Edition

@RinoMikeSD God bless you, I sure am glad you are for our campaign and not against!
— Rep. Stace Nelson (@RepStaceNelson) October 2, 2013

God Bless you too @RepStaceNelson I am for Faith, Honesty, Integrity & Fairness. You have demonstrated all in abundance!
— RINO Mike (@RinoMikeSD) October 2, 2013

I was under the impression that campaigns weren't supposed to communicate with political operatives who likely worked for some sort of PAC or super-PAC. Pseudonyms truly must change everything.

Using NCAA Tournament To Guess About Politicians' Motives Isn't Limited To South Dakota

Pat Powers posts a NCAA bracket story about Kristi Noem's possible decision to challenge Mike Rounds for the South Dakota Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate.

Another race that has garnered national attention is the Kentucky Senate contest over the seat held by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. His potential challenger is actress Ashley Judd. Judd a fixture in the Kentucky Wildcats cheering section sent a tweet offering support for the Louisville Cardinals, the Wildcats in-state rivals. Politics ensued.

This means she's running. RT @ashleyjudd: Go Cards. I have you winning it all. The rising tide and success lifts all Kentucky!
— Russell Moore (@drmoore) March 23, 2013

Plains Pops: How Teachers Can Approach Tech And The Web

At Lifehacker, Adam Pash advocates a fragmented approach. He notes that Facebook does everything competently, but requires a large investment:

Facebook is a microblogging platform, a blogging platform, a photo-sharing platform, a location-sharing platform, a chat platform, an email client, a pseudo-music-sharing platform, a gaming platform, and so on. It's an incredibly powerful service. For many, Facebook isn't just a site on the internet; it's the internet.

And that's why you're locked into Facebook; that's why it's so hard to leave. You've invested so much, not just in sharing photos or posting links, but in the whole ecosystem.

Facebook does about everything well enough. It's a full-fledged internet operating system. But like most operating systems, the stock applications aren't as good as the apps and services built by companies who are passionate about one thing.

Pash contends fragmentation offers the following advantages:

1. If, say, I decide Instagram has made some bad choices and all of the sudden totally sucks (a completely realistic but not necessarily inevitable possibility now that they've been acquired by Facebook), I can abandon Instagram and start using one of a million other photo-sharing services. If Facebook mucks up their photo sharing, I'm probably going to write a series of short, angry status updates, grit my teeth, and keep using Facebook.

2. You can easily define your communities based on what you're sharing. On Rdio, for example, I specifically follow people whose musical habits I'm interested in. I may be interested in your listening habits but have no interest in the pictures you're sharing. I'll follow you on Rdio and not on Instagram. Handy.

3. People who make just one thing tend to really care about it and have really great ideas about how to make it better. Cf. the discussion above about stock apps.

This whole discussion swings back to something we've talked about a couple times before: The Unix philosophy, the core of which surrounds the virtues of software that does one thing well. It's a fantastic philosophy that has implications well beyond software, and the more experience I have (with software, systems, people, etc.), the truer it rings.

John T. Spencer adds another reason to go piecemeal: one can use the technology in the "wrong" way:

I don't think I've ever known anyone else who uses a spreadsheet as a calendar. For me, it works, though. I have the date, the day, the task or event, the type of task and the location. For recurring events, I simply write "every week" or "every day." Then, I use the sort function to see what I need to do each day or to see the timeline of a particular project (sorting by category).  I like being able to ask, "When is Galileo testing?" and simply sorting it with one click. Calendars don't allow me to do that.

I'm not suggesting everyone should use a spreadsheet for a calendar. I'm odd. I get that. I like every event in one place and I find the calendar to be inefficient. But it has me thinking about technology and customization. It has me thinking that maybe acceptable use should be broadened to also mean, "Use the tools in the way they weren't intended to be used."

Too often, students learn a rigid definition of how a particular technology tool should be used. PowerPoint and Google Presentations are meant for presenting new information. Spreadsheets are for crunching numbers. Twitter is for telling people what you're doing. Blogging is for short writing entries. Google Docs should be used for writing only.

At one level, Pash's desire for the perfect tool and Spencer's urging to use tools in the "wrong" way may seem mutually exclusive, but both writers require and allow for user autonomy and experimentation. Both will get results that a do everything site like Facebook will never provide.

Students, Schools, And Social Media: Chart Of The Day

From this Charlie Osborne post at ZDnet.com,

A few numbers from the article:

• 63 percent of students want online textbooks with communication facilities;
• 40 percent want online texts with collaboration tools.
• 43 percent stated social media is one of the main ways they communicate with friends online.
• 62 percent  of student use the Internet as a new source; whereas 17 percent use it to gain knowledge concerning topics generally difficult to talk about — such as drug use.

Schools Monitor Tweeting Students More Than CIA Monitors Tweeting Employees

The Answer Sheet blog reports that Austin Carrol, a senior at Garret High School in Garrett Indiana, was expelled for using foul language in a tweet.  Garret High School tracks student's tweets.

A high school in Indiana that tracks students’ tweets made through the school’s computer system — even if it is done from a teen’s home — expelled a senior close to graduation for what it said was a message with foul language. . . .

The senior was quoted as saying that he had tweeted a message with a four-letter word from home on his personal Twitter account. The principal of the school was quoted as saying that the school’s computer system can track tweets whenever a student logs into it no matter where the student is working from.

I'm sure I don't have the whole story, but the fact that swearing in a tweet can lead to expulsion frightens me.  So does the fact that a school actively tracks kids' tweets.

The previous story ventures into the bizarre in light of the following, The Daily Beast reports,

The Twitter feed belonging to Lynnae Williams at first glance looks like most Twitter feeds. There are tweets about what she is reading (Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Madame Bovary); tweets about politics (leans toward the Occupy movement); and tweets about food (tuna casserole, carrot-cake muffins).

But on closer inspection, the feed features something rare for Twitter and even the Internet: detailed disclosures about the CIA. On Tuesday for example, Williams tweeted, “The #Farm is #CIA's training center near #Williamsburg, Virginia. I think it's the Kisevalter Center or something.”

In other tweets, Williams, who in 2009 spent nearly four months training to be a CIA spy, details her own experiences with CIA case officers, psychiatrists, and the special security division of the agency that serves as the CIA’s police force. In short, Williams since late February has been disclosing details of her brief CIA career in 140 characters or less.

Apparently the CIA monitors its former employees less than Garret High School monitors its students.  It's unclear what the CIA will do to Williams if she swears in a tweet.

Citing Tweets?

The Modern Language association has established the guidelines for citing tweets.  Apparently, one should

Begin the entry in the works-cited list with the author’s real name and, in parentheses, user name, if both are known and they differ. If only the user name is known, give it alone.

Next provide the entire text of the tweet in quotation marks, without changing the capitalization. Conclude the entry with the date and time of the message and the medium of publication (Tweet). For example:

Athar, Sohaib (ReallyVirtual). “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).” 1 May 2011, 3:58 p.m. Tweet.

The MLA does not explain why one would want to use 140 character exclamations to make substantive academic arguments.

Local Media Is Suffering

I grew up on the North Dakota side of the Bison-Lemmon metroplex.  My family listened to KBJM Radio 1400 and read The Bismarck Tribune along with a local weekly.  In my increasingly unreliable memory, the media covered local issues fairly well.  Apparently, local issues now get short shrift.  According a New York Times article,

An explosion of online news sources in recent years has not produced a corresponding increase in reporting, particularly quality local reporting, a federal study of the media has found.

Coverage of state governments and municipalities has receded at such an alarming pace that it has left government with more power than ever to set the agenda and have assertions unchallenged, concluded the study, which is to be released on Thursday.

Quoting from the study, the Times reports,

“Breathtaking media abundance lives side by side with serious shortages in reporting,” it said. “Communities benefit tremendously from many innovations brought by the Internet and simultaneously suffer from the dislocations caused by the seismic changes in media markets."

I have a few quick observations.  First, I am aware of the irony of quoting the New York Times to discuss local issues.  Second, the report illustrates a need for blogs such as The Madville Times, An Inland Voyage, and  David Lias's blog.  Third, South Dakotans may complain about their local media, but for the most part, the local daily and weekly newspapers seem to cover most of the official government meetings.  They probably don't do as much investigative work as they should, but situations like this example from the NYT article probably don't happen.

In researching the report, he and his staff interviewed scores of journalists to develop a fuller picture of the state of media. What they found was sometimes alarming. At one newspaper Mr. Waldman [author of the study] visited in Tennessee, he recalled, he asked an editor about a list of story ideas that was posted in the newsroom.

“There was one up there that said it was about the regulatory board that dealt with incompetent doctors. And there was a little red X next to it. I said, ‘What does that mean?’ And he said, ‘Well, we’re not doing that one.’ ” The reason the editor offered: the paper used to have two reporters assigned to cover that area, and now it had only one.

Finally, the larger problem may be we media consumers who have lost all sense of place.  Front Porch Republic observes,

Little regard is paid to the necessity for those overlapping local and regional groups, communities, and associations that provide a matrix for human flourishing.

Perhaps, the problem is a little simpler than that.  Little attention is paid to human flourishing. Each of us have started to view everything and everyone as a commodity.  The economy might be terrible, but James Carville's famous maxim should probably be rephrased to state "It's the relationships, stupid."  That personal connection should create demand for increased local coverage.

Social Media Corrupts Everything, . . . .

Even language or phrasing that some with a puritanical bent might find corrupt.

Stolen from Brains on Fire.

Teachers and Students and Texting

The Madville Times ended 2010 with a post that the Brookings School District is considering banning teachers and students texting each other, following each other on Twitter, friending each other on Facebook, or using any social media to communicate with each other.

Apparently, Virgina will see one South Dakota district and raise a whole Southern state.  In addition, they will ban student teacher gaming as well, so my online poker reference my not be legal in Virgina either.

I don't have too many dogs in this fight.  I don't have a Facebook account and am actively working to be the only person in the United States without one.  I have a Twitter account.  I've made 150 posts, none since October.  I text some of my debaters to let them know about practice times or discuss case ideas.  At a tournament a few years ago,  I couldn't find a debater and had to text her to tell her she was in the final round.

I also know that some people hired to teach are wolves in sheep's clothing so schools need to be careful.  That being said, these rules are ludicrous and unenforceable.  They will insure that teachers appear out of touch with the "real world."  Some teachers and students will be punitively punished for innocent communication.  More importantly, the predators will find new ways to exploit kids.

The logic behind limiting teachers' use of social media seems akin to an effort to prevent a teacher in 1901 from using an Underwood No. 5 typewriter because the machine allowed one to write letters quickly and anonymously without revealing one's identity through one's handwriting.  Instead of banning social media or texting, schools need to find ways to teach students how to use these tools as adults not as expensive toys.