1198 Days Later

I, like a lot of people, have some misgivings about Elon Musk taking over Twitter. To be fair, I haven’t personally experienced much unpleasantness or inconvenience as a result of his changes to the service. The worst it’s done for me is bring back bad memories what happens when my fellow nerds and I start thinking we can fix everything in the world.

To be honest, I’d mostly stopped using Twitter even before the Muskopalypse. And contrary to most experiences I’d heard of, I wasn’t warn down by toxic disagreement from political enemies. Rather, I was getting stressed by people with similar politics pointing out every injustice and outrage. I can understand the motivation: people feel an obligation on social media to amplify the signal of things that are important to them. But it was stressing me out, so I started to drift away.

By the way, I haven’t seen many people bring this up, but Elon Musk is still the reigning Time Person of the Year. At the time of announcement, that title struck me as at least five years late: He used to be the only guy trying to make electric cars and private space programs a reality, but by last year, both had become cliché. And Musk himself had devolved from intriguing intellectual, to, well, a nerd who thinks he can fix everything in the world.

So I followed many people over to Mastodon, the open source alternative to Twitter. So far it’s been okay, and in terms of the basic usage, not that different. But like a lot of open source software, it does seem more complex than it has to be.

If you’re not familiar with it, the idea of Mastodon is that it’s not one entity that stores all the posts and information about all the users. Instead, it’s a bunch of servers that operate independently, but can still interact with one another. And anyone can set up their own server (at their own expense) and set up their own rules.

(Fun fact: Donald Trump’s social network, Truth Social is just a modified version of Mastodon.)

So Mastodon is a bit of a throwback to harder-to-use, do-it-yourself Internet from before social media. That throwback feeling was underlined recently when famed blogger/tweeter/author John Scalzi promoted the idea that we go back to blogs as a sort of pseudo social network. I thought that sounded appealing, and I’d thought of reviving this blog recently, so I took the plunge and dusted off my old blog. Maybe it will lead to a new age of intriguing long-form commentary, and intelligent discourse and interaction. But I notice that the new Blogger interface makes it easier to add emojis than links and that does not fill me with confidence.

Towers With The Latest Trends

There's a common joke/completely-accurate-observation that when you see that a celebrity is trending on social media for the first time in a while, it gives an instant sense of dread. This is because there are only two likely reasons for the trending: the celebrity has died, or some despicable past behaviour has come to light. So you find yourself in the weird situation of being relieved to find that the beloved star is dead.

A large part of Canada went through a variation on this process earlier this week, when — without warning — the CN Tower was trending on Twitter.

(Shame on my phone's Amero-centric autocomplete for suggesting CNN but not CN, and then not suggesting "tower" as the next word after CN. At least it didn't change "Amero-centric" to "Amero-centeric".)

Assuming the tower doesn't have some skeletons in its closet, people jumped to the “death” possibility, which would be rather alarming, as the demise of the tower would take a number of people with it. Personality, I didn't worry, as there are a lot of less-scary reasons the tower could be tending. A change in ownership, a really great practical joke on the EdgeWalk, or the return of the Tour of the Universe ride (fingers crossed.)

But here's the weird thing: as far as anyone can tell, it was nothing. There was just a random swell of people mentioning the tower on Twitter, and that got it on to the list of tending topics on a slow news day. Toronto being Toronto, this was more than enough encouragement to get them Tweeting about their city. And the Rest of the World being the Rest of the World, people said, hey, I haven't thought about Toronto in years, let's post that picture from our visit eight years ago. Then add in Drake fans finally understanding the Views album cover. That pushed it further up the trending charts, which lead to all the people tweeting about how worried they were that it was trending, and it was trending even more. And Bam!: Twitter inception.

So it wasn't really anything important, but it was a good example of the fickleness of the automated systems that bring things to our attention in the modern world.

Tweet Dreams Are Made Of This

You've probably seen Apple's current ad campaign where they show people holding up oversized tweets.  The narrator then tells them how their problems will be solved by getting an iPad. Some of them are kind of entertaining, though they're no "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" or "1984".

But I noticed that the tweets they hold up have actual Twitter handles on them.  So I thought I'd look them up. I figured they would be too smart to just use random names that might belong to real people.  They'd probably create Twitter accounts for each of the characters in the ads, to make sure no one else takes those names. And Apple is an inventive enough company that they might do something fun with the concept,  like have fake Twitter feeds for each of these characters.

What I found was quite surprising:

• These are all real people, and the Tweets are real.  But...
• The people in the ads are not just actors, but in most cases they're totally different from the actual people. For instance, the gothy teenager who hates everything is actually an African-American woman who doesn't seem particularly nihilistic. 

So I'm wondering what exactly the point of this campaign is.  I can understand you might want to involve real people, that will get you viral guerilla marketing tactics to access key influencers and other buzzwords. But if you're not going to use the actual people, why not just make up the Tweets as well.  Instead of trying to associate your product with some random kvetch, why not give yourself a nice convenient set up. @who_needs_MSOffice says, "I wish my tablet weighed 0.17 grams less." "You're in luck..."

So really, using real Tweets is just a creativity exercise for the ad creators. They say sometimes you need to give yourself arbitrary constraints to get the creative juices flowing; taking a bunch of Tweets as the starting point is just their way of seeking inspiration. 

I Am Jack's Disappointment With Social Media

Watching the Playstation Fiesta Bowl, Ohio State got off to a slow start when their kicker missed his first two field goal attempts. That's not a big deal, unless you're a fan of The Ohio State University, which I'm not. But during the awkward let's-show-close-ups-of-the-guy-who-screwed-up shots, they mentioned that the kicker's name is Tyler Durbin. Of course, that's quite similar to Tyler Durden, the character from Fight Club played in the movie by Brad Pitt. So when I saw that "Tyler Durbin" was trending on Twitter, I had to check it out, assuming I'd see creative humour based on the movie.

But I was disappointed. All I saw was angry, mindless condemnation of Durbin. In a few cases, it even escalated to idle threats against him, should he ever return to campus. Okay, there were a very few that made Fight Club-related jokes of the form, "The first rule of Missed Field Goal Club is..." But mainly, I was just overwhelmed with the unrepentant anger expressed. Certainly, I've been frustrated when a team does poorly in the big game, but I've never felt that much anger at a single player. Oh, and by the way guys, if your team's first-half offense consists entirely of two missed 40+ yard field goals, then the kicker is not the main problem.

This brings to mind a complaint I have about how people portray Twitter. I've heard voices in the media describe Twitter as dominated by celebrities. That's always news to me, as I find that it's dominated by writers, comedians, scientists and activists. But that's because Twitter (and the Internet in general) is what you make it.

What's depressing is that this isn't a new point. Back in the nineties when it was first going mainstream, we reached a point where most people had heard of the Internet, but only a few had any significant experience with it. So you'd sometimes see reports in the media (the old media, I mean) where they'd get people's impression of their first experiences with the new medium. And their thoughts usually included, wow, there sure is a lot of porn out there.

That angle was great for the media to demonize the Net as a chaotic underworld. But it also betrayed something about the people being interviewed. Then, as now, porn rarely just appeared on your computer for no reason. If you found pornography on the Internet, it was probably because you were looking for it. So although most people seeing these stories didn't realize it, the interviewees were essentiallly admitting that they had been given a chance to use this amazing new communications technology, and used it to look for porn.

Really, nothing has changed. The Internet is still what you make of it. If anything, it has become more personalized; with social media, you can surround yourself with people of whatever type you want. While that often means that you insulate yourself from the realities of the world, it also means that you can ignore hateful sportsfans with limited movie experience. Just remember that even if you're ignoring them, they're still out there, only a hashtag away.

Voices Carry

I was just reading a transcript of a speech by President Obama, and realized I was reading it in his voice.  I'm sure in not the only person who does this, especially for people with distinctive voices.  I first became conscious of the phenomena when I read something written by Stephen Hawking, and just couldn't get through it without hearing it in his computer synthesized voice.

In some cases, reading in another's voice is inevitable, if they have a distinctive way of putting words together. It's easier to read Donald Trump's words in his voice, because that's the way we're used to hearing those meandering parades of sentence fragments.

Surprisingly,  I don't often read tweets in other's voices,  though that's because of the strange fact that I have heard little if any spoken words from the folks I follow.  So many of them are people I've found on twitter or elsewhere on the Internet.  The one exception is sportscaster Vic Rauter who tweets in the same spurts of phrases that he talks in, so I find it impossible to read them any other way.

I've tried to think back to remember if I did this reading quotes in the past, but I don't think I did.  But it occurs to me that we didn't really read the words of others very often.  Books and newspaper articles were written by people we'd never heard the voices of. Famous people spoke on TV,  but we didn't really have the chance to read anything they wrote. The most was perhaps reading a quote,  say in a newspaper. But they were often edited for grammar, and weren't very long.  Actually reading things written by famous people is a unique feature of our age.

All In All

You probably saw that this weekend, a young man murdered several people in Santa Barbara, California, apparently motivated by anger over his failure with women. That lead to a lot of events on the internet. If you're confused, here's how it happened:

• Violence against women is an obviously emotional issue to begin with, but it's a particularly raw nerve on the Internet, where a number of women have received rape threats as part of online discussions.
• At the same time, there's been a number of men taking up the mantle of Men's Rights Activists (MRA). That's quite a vaguely-defined cause, but it's mostly been men who see their interests as opposed to women's rights, that their rights suffer from the actions of feminists. So there's been a great deal of animosity between women online and MRAs.
• A number of women in online discussions have grown tired of the "not all men" phenomena. That's the situation where they write about some bad experience they've had with men (such as the aforementioned online threats) only to be inundated with men trying to point out that not all men do the thing being complained about. Of course, not many women do believe all men perpetrate violence against women, but it's annoying when that's the first reaction people have to your difficult revelations of personal hardship.
• So in the aftermath of the events in Santa Barbara, there were plenty of women talking about violence against women, which lead to plenty of "not all men" replies. A popular response to the not-all-men response was to point out that not all men mistreat women, but all women are affected by it.
• At some point, someone, somewhere must have said, "surely not all women." And thus was born a hashtag on Twitter, #YesAllWomen. This was full of heart-rending personal examples from women of ways they've suffered from sexism or sexual violence (or its threat.) It also lead to some beyond-tasteless jokes, which provided perhaps the most obvious ever example of Lewis's Law.

I just looked at the tweets with that hashtag, and the bad news is that after four days there are still tweets coming in. But the good news is that they seem to have outlasted the trolls.

So I - like a lot of men - am left wondering, what can I do?  Obviously, don't participate in violence and threats.  But not being part of the problem seems a little weak now.

I've read from some men who have put forward the idea that all men are indeed part of the problem.  The explanation being that no one is perfect, we all - possibly accidentally - perpetuate stereotypes and roles and the status quo.  But I don't buy that.  Although I have a standard of behaviour that some have considered unreasonably high, even I wouldn't claim that a person contributes to rape culture by forgetting to say "salesperson" instead of "salesman."  I suspect this self-blame is done out of the frustration of being powerless over the true perpetrators.

So what can men do? The best points that I have seen are to listen to women's experiences.  Incorporate this perspective into your world view; that is, be conscious that these frustrations and fears are part of the world you live in.  And don't be complacent: Challenge men who disrespect women instead of letting it slide.  Remember women's concerns, and stand up for them when you get the opportunity.  I'll also add the words of Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer:

Thou shall not be a perpetrator; thou shall not be a victim; and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander.

Ba-Da Ba Ba Baaa, I'm Hijackin' It

Today, McDonald's promoted the Twitter hashtag, #CheersToSochi. The idea was to have people send well wishes to athletes and organizers of the upcoming Winter Olympics.  Not surprisingly, the hashtag was quickly taken over by people protesting Russia's anti-gay laws.

This isn't the first time tweeters have turned a company's hashtag against itself. I'm left wondering how these corporations don't see it coming. It's easy to say that these companies are hopping wildly in to the social media bandwagon before they understand it. We've seen organizations misuse new technology trends throughout the Internet era.  And JPMorgan had a similar problem when they apparently forgot that some people hate banks.

But banks are kind of out-of-touch with public opinion; this is McDonald's we're talking about here. They're the masters of marketing.  If they're that clueless, what hope is there for everyone else?  They do understand that Twitter is a participation medium, not a broadcast medium.  They just don't seem to realize how varied the general public's opinions are.  So have they always believed that everyone loves them?

Fans Of Denial

An odd thing happened in one of the NFL playoff games today.  The San Francisco 49'ers managed to sack Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton.  The 49'ers were then flagged for Roughing The Passer.  The commentators expressed surprise, since it had looked like a fairly ordinary sack.  But on seeing the play again from a different angle, the reason for the flag became obvious: the defender had hit Newton helmet-to-helmet, which is a no-no in the modern NFL.

What was odd was that I seemed to be the only person who noticed that.  The commentators continued to rant about how that was a terrible call.  Wondering if I had missed something, I checked the tweets on the game.  But they were just the same generic comments about how that was the Worst Call Ever.

Obviously, the crackdown on head-shots is not popular with everyone, so I don't expect it to be a popular call.  But no one was saying, "I hate that rule." rather, they seemed oblivious to the rule.  And no one seemed to remember that this has been illegal for several years now.  I was starting to wonder if I was the one suffering the head injuries.

The incident brings up an issue I've been meaning to mention for a while:  The accusations that the NFL has not been doing enough to protect players from head injuries.  Particularly, the accusations have come from the recent book, League of Denial, which claims the league has been ignoring the science on concussions for years now.  I don't know much about the evidence that the NFL has covered up the sport's dangers in the past, so I can't really comment on that. 

But many people extend the criticism to the present, and claim that the league is continuing to drag it's heels on the issue.  That, I do have to disagree with.  I see incidents like the one above as evidence that the NFL is willing to anger its fan base in the course of fixing the sport.  It relates back to what I was saying earlier this week about how all sports have fans that want to push the sport towards more violence and physicality. It's hard for a league to turn its back on such a large constituency, and it's tempting to compromise with them, or roll-back changes when the complaints start.  I'm impressed that the NFL has remained steadfast through the howls of protest.

Advanced Tweetology

It's always weird when people I follow on Twitter turn out to be following, or at least know about, each other. Really, Ohio-based sci-fi author John Scalzi, you follow Nigerian-American author Teju Cole? It got to strange levels today when the only other country accounts I follow - Ireland and Sweden - started conversing. What were the odds of that? There has to be some weird aspect of the human psyche that brings people of eclectic backgrounds together, people that seemingly don’t have anything in common, yet are drawn to one another.

I’m thinking you could study this if you mapped out all the people on Twitter. You know, people who follow each other are placed close to each other on the graph, so you could find people nearby who are most similar.  We could use this to introduce ourselves. Tell me about yourself. I'm in sector E-27-5.3, and yourself?

And surely it would be easier to meet people this way. Currently there are meet-up groups for a variety of interests, even meet-ups for Twitter itself. But instead people could get together with others who follow the same people.

Coach Is Cornered

As I've mentioned in the past, I use Twitter to alert me to pop-cultural happenings that I would otherwise miss.  Another good example was last night, when the Canadian Tweeters I follow were all, um, atwitter, with talk of Don Cherry having said something controversial.

If you're not Canadian, I'm not sure I can explain Don Cherry to you.  I can tell you he's a former hockey coach who has become phenomenally popular doing analysis during the first intermission of national hockey telecasts.  But that hardly describes him.  I'd sum him up as the exact opposite of every stereotype the world has about Canadians, except of course, love of hockey.

(As an aside, every time I type "Don Cherry" the auto correct changes it to "Don't Cherry")

Anyway, most of the Tweets were non-specific comments of amusement or anger, so it took me a while to find out what he actually said.  And yet, in order to write this post, it doesn't really matter.  Heck, I could just reuse this post the next time he says something controversial - and there will be a next time - because we all know the Don Cherry Controversy cycle: (Americans, you may find it easier to follow this if you substitute in the name "Rush Limbaugh")

• Cherry says something controversial
• Everyone condemns him, calls for his firing
• Cherry lays low for a while, doesn't say anything that would call attention to himself.
• Everyone forgets why they were angry at him and go back to thinking of him as a beloved but slightly annoying uncle.
• Goto step one

Look, I'm not defending him, or saying you have to accept what he says - I hate him as much as anyone.  I'm just sick of Canada's hypocrisy towards him; lots of people will get angry now, then go back to treating him like the god of hockey three months from now.  

Rogue Points

The 100th Grey Cup was today.  As the old joke goes, it was a nice game, too bad the Stampeders weren't there for it.  Actually, it wasn't that great of a game: the Argos dominated the first half, then played it conservative for the second half. Overall we saw one team play one good half.

I skipped over the half-time show.  It was a controversial choice of Justin Bieber, Carly Rae Jepsen, Marianas Trench, and Gordon Lightfoot.  Even if you accept the blatant pandering to young audiences that wouldn't normally watch football, you have to admit that's an odd group.  The league could have been a little more subtle in their tweens-and-token-old-guy strategy; say throw in Buble as a bridge between generations.

But it wasn't all fun, games, and demographics.  I followed the game on twitter, and I was disappointed at how negative people were.  Obviously there were complaints about the officiating, criticisms of underperforming players, and a bit of discussion of the half-time performers.  Also, I hope Eric Tillman - the former Edmonton General Manager who traded Ricky Ray to Toronto - got all his stuff out of the city after being fired, because he should really never show his face there again.

What disappointed me about the Grey Cup tweets was how dismissive everyone was of the game and the entire league.  Certainly, football - or the Canadian rules - are not for everyone.  But at least criticize it for what it is instead of making up reasons.  I found the first see-how-boring-the-CFL-is tweet ten minutes into the game.  This was after two scores, two turnovers, and as much action as you would expect at that point in an NFL game.  I wish people would finally realize that every sport is boring if you don't know what's going on.

And of course there were the usual outdated criticisms, no one's watching, the league is about to go bankrupt, there are two teams named "roughriders."  In a way, the twitter negativity is proof that the league is doing well.  Most of the topics I follow on Twitter are small enough that they don't attract that huge underbelly of Internet bullying.  Congratulations, CFL, you've made the big time.

Falling for Stunts

I'm surprised by how much attention Felix Baumgartner's extreme skydive has gotten.  I checked Twitter today and found that it was dominating discussion.  Normally the motley band of semi-intellectuals I follow on Twitter are at most only ironically interested in the touchstones of popular culture.

I kind of saw this as another guy-with-too-much-time-on-his-hands stunt.  For a long time these always seemed to be dull long-distance-ballooning record attempts.  They'd get far more media attention than they deserved, and no one seemed to care.  But I guess this is quite a bit more difficult and death-defying, so perhaps the uncynical adulation for Baumgartner is deserved.

However, I'm saddened by the number of people somehow tying this in to the achievements of space exploration.  It further convinces me that for many, the space program has been just a big publicity stunt.  But then, with this going on at the same time NASA is making headlines primarily in Los Angeles it's hard to blame them for that point of view.

But if we can just keep this stunt in perspective, it should be good for humanity: it's raised the bar for public stunts tremendously.  Just think how far David Blaine will have to go to get people's attention now.

Optweetmum

Definition:A person on Twitter with just the right amount of twitter activity.  Some people have twitter accounts they rarely use (what, why are you looking at me?) so it's hardly worth following them.  On the other hand, people who are too involved in Twitter are hard to follow for a couple of reasons: they tweet everything they do and clog your twitter feed, or they spend most of their time communicating with other twitterers, and their tweets are unintelligible sequences of twitter handles, hash tags, initials, and fragments of conversations you're not involved in.  But a person who is Optweetmum posts regularly, but still types in complete sentences, and understands that e-mail may not be cool, but it's still better for private conversations.

Sweet Tweet-Back Backwards News

I'm on Twitter, but I've never been a big participant in it.  I've posted the occasional tweet, or retweeted some, but mostly I've just lurked, reading what others write.  Part of the problem is that it's so immediate.  People don't tweet about what they did today, they tweet about what they're doing right now.  If you wait a few hours to catch up, you'll be reading after the moment has passed, like hearing people talk about a great party that you missed.

But sometimes going back and reading tweets from hours past can be useful, because you can treat it as a way of condensing reality.  A great example was just last night.  I didn't watch the final night of the Republican convention, but by scanning through tweets, I can get a nice summary.  So without sitting through all the speeches and ceremonies, I know that all I need to know about the night is: Eastwood talked to a chair.  Now I know enough about the event to understand the next week's worth of late night talk show monologues.

How Not to Look Foolish on the Internet

Lately I've found a guilty pleasure in Literally Unbelievable, a website that shows people on Facebook who have posted Onion "news stories" without realising they are fake.  Of course, I shouldn't be telling you about it, because the more people know about the site, the more people will know what the Onion is and that they could look foolish if they take it seriously.  And the more people know that, the harder it will be for Literally Unbelievable to find its content.  But even if it disappears, there are still more sites making fun of people being stupid on the Internet.  It's all part of nerds taking over the world:  Remember only a few years ago when the most ridiculed person on the Internet was The Star Wars Kid?  Now you get targeted for lack of knowledge, not lack of cool.

I recently saw this article reporting on, but also criticising the Internet's attacks on ignorant people.  Assuming you didn't click on the link and read the article, I'll summarise that it focuses on the many people on Twitter who were left dumbfounded by Dick Clark's death, apparently not knowing who he was.

Here's what the writer doesn't get:  I have no problem with anyone not knowing who Dick Clark was.  Well, anyone under, say, thirty.  After all, such a person would not have seen American Bandstand, that blooper show from the eighties, or the $X Pyramid.  And since these people are young, they presumably had something to do on New Year's Eve, so they wouldn't have come across him there either.

So why am I angry at these people?  Well, if you're Tweeting, you're on the Internet, and if you're on the Internet, you can learn anything you want instantly.  Instead of Tweeting, "Who is Dick Clark?" you could have gone to Wikipedia and typed in, "Dick Clark," and then you'd know.  That's what the Internet is like: it actually takes fewer keystrokes to cure your ignorance than it does to display it.