Missing the Twitter Mark

This comic is hilarious. It’s also entirely wrong.

No no. I really do get it. No one cares about your dog, your girlfriend’s favorite muffin, or which character you slept with in Mass Effect 2. I understand that that’s INCREDIBLY banal information. It’s boring and mundane and no single piece is useful in, really, any way.

But see, that’s the point. Twitter is not a blog. It has a 140 character limit. You -can’t- hash over the mysteries of the universe in that space. So can we all stop pretending like we expect to? Twitter is a social networking tool. It’s a nice way to announce things. It’s a better way to smirk and share experience. It’s not a journal.

Transparency: An Introduction to Panopticism

Before we can begin to understand transparency (or even really define it), we first need to understand disciplinary systems. I know, that connection makes no sense from the outset, but I promise it is crucially important. It will become abundantly clear in a moment, but why it’s a big deal to become transparent—to volunteer our privacy away—has a whole lot to do with how we are watched.

California Supreme Court Overturns Gay Marriage Ban

Usually I try to provide information, analysis and criticism whenever I post, but I think this one’s worth posting all on its own:

“The California Supreme Court overturned a voter-approved ban on gay marriage,” ruling that “domestic partnerships are not a good enough substitute for marriage.”

It’s no mission accomplished, but it’s a strong step forward for social progress and queer rights.

The Shelf-Life of Marriage

The good news: the divorce rate in America is falling. From its peak at 5.8 divorces per 1000 people in 1983, the divorce rate has gradually fallen to its most recent recorded statistic at 3.6 per 1000 in 2005.

The bad news: 66% of marriages don’t survive to see their 25th anniversary. You might think that statistic has to do with the mortality rate, but no: given that the American median marriage age is 26, a couple celebrating their 25th anniversary is likely to be in their early fifties — young enough that death hasn’t caught up yet.

With people likely to live dramatically longer this century, the way we think of marriage will have to change. No more “’til death do us part.” Soon enough, we’ll have to face the truth: that nothing — not even marriage — lasts forever.

Harold and Kumar: the 21st Century Grail

“Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle was great.”

You heard it a lot when it came out in 2004. You’ve heard it a lot recently, since the sequel came out last Friday. You’ve probably thought it a few times yourself — like, “Harold and Kumar was great.”

Not to step on your toes, but what you probably meant was that Harold and Kumar was awesome. And it was! Not only did it do everything right, like Freakshow and the cheetah scene, it went above and beyond the call of duty to include Neil Patrick Harris. There’s almost nothing to improve on. It was just that good.

Great, though — that’s saying something else. The Godfather (part 1) was great. Catcher in the Rye was great. Hell, Great Expectations was great. Great works of fiction are timeless classics, and they aren’t easy to spot when they’ve just come out. Mostly, history decides what’s great and isn’t.

Not this time, though. I’m calling it early: Harold and Kumar, like Arthur and Lancelot before them, will be remembered as truly great.

Digital distribution: ready or not…!

Apple, Steam and Radiohead: what do they have in common? In the last few years, they’ve proved that digital distribution can be profitable for artists and publishers. The iTunes Store, for example, sells more music than anywhere else in America, including Wal-Mart, that parasitic vine of the retail tree.

What caught my attention about that Apple press release (above) is its language. Take a look at the first paragraph:

“Apple today announced that the iTunes Store surpassed Wal-Mart to become the number one music retailer in the US [...] With over 50 million customers, iTunes has sold over four billion songs and features the world’s largest music catalog.”

What Apple isn’t mentioning — or hasn’t realized — is that it hasn’t sold anything. In fact, the iTunes Store isn’t really a store at all — not in the traditional sense. Neither is Steam or Amazon MP3. Nothing is purchased, because nothing changes hands. What you’re paying for is access to their content library; what Apple and Amazon and Steam are providing is a service.

What that means is — for the first time in a long time — we’re paying to access recorded music, not to own it.

Work Hard, Play Never

From a Center for Economic and Policy Research report:

“In the absence of government standards, almost one in four Americans have no paid vacation and no paid holidays. According to government survey data, the average worker in the private sector in the United States receives only about nine days of paid vacation and about six paid holidays per year.”

That paragraph alone is chock-full of reasons to be angry at how America treats its working folks. To get the full effect, check out this chart of how industrialized nations stack up in terms of vacation time. We all know that France gives its workers a lot more time off than we do, but how about Brazil? South Africa? Hell, even Vietnam mandates ten days’ vacation pay for full-time workers.

Now, the big question: how many days off does America require companies to provide?

With friends like these…

This entry is written as a response to Rebecca Traister’s “Hey, Obama boys: Back off already!”¹ Before you read my response, I highly suggest you go and read Traister’s entire Salon.com article: it is well-written and reasonably argued. I take issue with only a small portion of it, and wish to clarify other bits

That out of the way, Traister makes an argument that the extremely enthusiastic (some would say bombastic) support of Senator Obama among young male Democrats marginalizes women who follow Senator Clinton. In order to avoid seeming to vote for Hillary “just because she’s a woman,” young female Dems are rhetorically coerced into (at least publicly) singing the praises of Barack Obama.

Scrabble Was Enough

Unless you often browse online for kids’ games, you’re unlikely to know about Bananagram, a Scrabble knock-off my mother bought the family for Christmas. She buys a new game every year, and usually it’s a card-game — something easy to learn, easy to play, and low-stress. This year, we didn’t get a card-game. We got Bananagram.

I’ll say this for Bananagram: it’s worth posting about. Not because it’s good, though. Bananagram earned a post because it’s a perfect example of what can go wrong when developers don’t think games through.

Gary Vaynerchuk and Identity Narratives

As my last entry makes clear, I’m a huge fan of Gary Vaynerchuk. Over at his vlog, a recent episode focuses on pigeonholing and identity—in G.V.’s case, how strange people find it that he is a Wine Guy as well as a Tech Guy. Gary says that we, as a society, feel that people “need to be one dimensional, [. . .] one trick ponies.” I take issue with this idea. We proceed as though most people have one specialty, because that’s what most interactions call for.

The better people know each other, the more robust their understanding of each other becomes—but it is never complete. So while people who only know Gary V. as an internet wine celebrity will be surprised by his active role in the web world, his friends (and even attentive fans) will expect it. This isn’t a fault on the part of those who have only a casual knowledge of Gary. It’s how identity works.