It's not big and it's not clever
It is sly, knowing and often downright nasty. Politicians and celebrities are its prey. And it attacks, under the guise of wit, without proof or reason. David Denby goes on the hunt for snark, which is invading all modern discourse from gossip sites to newspapers
Timely article given the state of political discourse in the US.
here are two sides to the military’s foray into the freewheeling world of the interactive Web. At the highest echelons of the Pentagon, civilian officials and four-star generals are newly hailing the power of social networking to make members of the American military more empathetic, entice recruits and shape public opinion on the war.
Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of American forces in Iraq, is on Facebook. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, has a YouTube channel and posts Twitter updates almost daily.
The Army is encouraging personnel of all ranks to go online and collaboratively rewrite seven of its field manuals. And on Aug. 17, the Department of Defense unveiled a Web site promoting links to its blogs and its Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube sites.
The Web, however, is a big place. And the many thousands of troops who use blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites to communicate with the outside world are not always in tune with the Pentagon’s official voice. Policing their daily flood of posts, videos and photographs is virtually impossible — but that has not stopped some in the military from trying.
On balance, I find this article cause for optimism. Yes, the Marines are out-and-out "blockers" of social media, and I don't doubt many older officers view social media just as many senior managers view it: a waste of time at best, a threat to the organization at worst.
Yet, the students (officers) of the Command and General Staff College are required to publish blogs in which they debate policy. Nice!
How much carbon dioxide do computers emit?
AVIATION has long been blamed for its share of anthropogenic global warming. Indeed, some travellers now ask themselves whether their flight is strictly necessary and, if they decide it is, salve their consciences by paying for the planting of trees. These, so they hope, will absorb the equivalent of their sinful emissions. But you, dear reader, are indulging right now in activity that is equally as polluting as air travel: using a computer.
And while I cannot find the link any more, a Swedish research group found that reading newspapers online is actually worse for the environment than reading the dead-tree version.
During the Middle Ages, our town of Stege was a center of herring fishing, which financed the development of the town.
Next Friday, we celebrate that with the Stege Herring Festival -- a celebration of boats, fishing and, of course, the humble herring (one of my favorites)!
For the most part, the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours, according to a new computer analysis of news articles and commentary on the Web during the last three months of the 2008 presidential campaign.
Skip to next paragraphMultimedia
The finding was one of several in a study that Internet experts say is the first time the Web has been used to track — and try to measure — the news cycle, the process by which information becomes news, competes for attention and fades.
Researchers at Cornell, using powerful computers and clever algorithms, studied the news cycle by looking for repeated phrases and tracking their appearances on 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs. Some 90 million articles and blog posts, which appeared from August through October, were scrutinized with their phrase-finding software.
Frequently repeated short phrases, according to the researchers, are the equivalent of “genetic signatures” for ideas, or memes, and story lines. The biggest text-snippet surge in the study was generated by “lipstick on a pig.” That originated in Barack Obama’s colorful put-down of the claim by Senator John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin that they were the genuine voices for change in the campaign. Associates of Mr. McCain suggested that the remark was meant as an insult to Ms. Palin.
The researchers’ data points to an evolving model of news media. While most news flowed from the traditional media to the blogs, the study found that 3.5 percent of story lines originated in the blogs and later made their way to traditional media. For example, when Mr. Obama said that the question of when life begins after conception was “above my pay grade,” the remark was first reported extensively in blogs.
And though the blogosphere as a whole lags behind, a relative handful of blog sites are the quickest to pick up on things that later gain wide attention on the Web, led by Hot Air and Talking Points Memo.
The Cornell research, like so much of the data mining on the Web, does raise the issue of whether something is necessarily significant just because it can be measured by a computer — especially when mouse clicks are assumed to represent broad patterns of human behavior.
“You can see this kind of research as further elevating the role of sound bites,” said Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell and a co-author of a paper on the research that was presented two weeks ago at a conference in Paris. “But what we’re doing is more using them as the approximation for ideas and story lines.”
“We don’t view quotes as the most important object, but algorithms can capture quotes,” Mr. Kleinberg said. “And we see this research as using a rich data set as a step toward understanding why certain points of view and story lines win out, and others don’t.”
The paper, “Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle,” was also written by Jure Leskovec, a postgraduate researcher at Cornell, who this summer will become an assistant professor at Stanford, and Lars Backstrom, a Ph.D. student at Cornell, who is going to work for Facebook. The team has set up interactive displays of their findings at memetracker.org.
Social scientists and media analysts have long examined news cycles, though focusing mainly on case studies instead of working with large Web data sets. And computer scientists have developed tools for clustering and tracking articles and blog posts, typically by subject or political leaning.
But the Cornell research, experts say, goes further in trying to track the phenomenon of news ideas rising and falling. “This is a landmark piece of work on the flow of news through the world,” said Eric Horvitz, a researcher at Microsoft and president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. “And the study shows how Web-scale analytics can serve as powerful sociological laboratories.”
Sreenath Sreenivasan, a professor specializing in new media at the Columbia Journalism School, said the research was an ambitious effort to measure a social phenomenon that is not easily quantified. “To the extent this kind of approach could open the door to a new understanding of the news cycle, that is very interesting,” he said.
A challenge in this kind of research, Mr. Sreenivasan said, will be to account for and model how quickly online news sources and distribution networks are changing. Mr. Sreenivasan pointed to social media, especially the rapidly rising Twitter, as an informal but highly influential news recommendation and distribution network.
“Even from last fall to today, the dynamics of the news cycle are very different, because of Twitter,” he said.
Sign in to Recommend More Articles in Technology » A version of this article appeared in print on July 13, 2009, on page B1 of the New York edition.
Some bloggers won't like this, but mainstream media still breaks stories before bloggers most of the time.
Many observing these [healthcare reform] debates from abroad have probably concluded that we, as a nation, have finally gone completely mad. And it's hard to argue otherwise.
How sane could be a polity that sits by with relative complacence when its leaders launch devastating and groundless invasions of foreign lands but approach a full-on rebellion when those leaders make some modest moves to deliver decent health care at a price people can afford?
And how could these people be so divorced from the dynamics of their own health care that they don't appear to understand that the Medicare they value so highly is very much a government-run health care program?
One answer is that the people who orchestrate Teabaggers are skilled, cynical communicators who realize many red-state conservatives are scared gutless of the world around them. (And these communicators need not be erudite or even literate -- witness Palin and Hannity). Cater to their natural xenophobia, lack of curiosity and assumption that, in all things, "'Murrica's nummer one" and you have your debate pretty much over.
Can Progressives ever hope to reach effectively to undecideds? If they want to, they need to be far more vocal and informative.
