The Official Rick Bell Blog

Twitter This!

Quick! What’s the most important issue you are following this week? Obama’s Supreme Court nomination? GM’s impending bankruptcy? Pakistani nukes falling into the hands of the Taliban?

Well if you are a devotee of the rapidly growing social networking and micro-blogging site Twitter, it’s more likely that what tops your list is Star Trek movie reviews, the latest topless photos of Miss California or the most imaginative fake porn star names you can use to spice up your online accounts.

Be brief. Be bright. Be gone. Such is the mantra of Twitter, the service that allows users to instantaneously send and read updates known as ‘tweets.”  With a maximum of 140 characters per tweet, Twitter might even have the Ritalin crowd wondering “is that all?”

The well-funded site is in the midst of a heavy media blitz that has organizations like CNN and The New York Times singing its praises. Where there is smoke there is fire. Where there is hype surrounding a new technology… well, I’ve been an IT consultant for 15 years and unfortunately high tech hype usually means a PR firm just snagged a big retainer.

But not wanting to judge too harshly, I decided to sign up for a free Twitter account (the company has yet to monetize its site) and give it a go. With three email accounts, a cell phone, a Blackberry, a LinkedIn account, a FaceBook account, a Tagged account, a subscription to The Wall Street Journal Online  and monthly subscriptions to Audible and  Jigsaw I was a bit reluctant to sign on for yet another techno-distraction. But sign on I did and I boy was I ever under whelmed.

The gist of the site is that you can follow other Twitter account holders who post short answers to the question of what are they doing right now. I signed on to follow everyone from The New York Times, a handful of celebrities, ESPN, and anyone in my Yahoo contact list that happened to be signed up as well.

Following just 19 accounts, the to do list of tweets demanding my attention filled up quickly. What was I doing? I already have 1116 lower priority work emails dating back months that I have yet to open and another 2119 on Yahoo and 514 on Gmail that will likely never see the light of day. On a good week, I am only four days late on responding to messages on FaceBook--and I haven’t had a good week in some time. I have long since given up monitoring my RSS newsreader that tracks my favorite blogs and news sources.

But I trudged forward. As I scanned through the tweets, ranging from news headlines with imbedded hyperlinks to the full story to the inane “Hi, I just flew in from DC and the flight seemed longer than usual” all I could think of if the was a book I read back in ’92 by Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.

Postman’s contention is that in a Technopoly, technology is god. If it is newer, flashier or faster it’s undoubtedly better. Questioning the techno-god is heresy. The result, Postman contends, is a glut of quickly delivered information that loses its usefulness and becomes “a source of confusion rather than coherence.”

The Twitter press spin is that tweets matter. They allow members pose important questions and track important events. Examples floated in The New York Times, for example, depict Twitterers (“twits” for short?) asking followers if they know of any research related to a particular topic or allowing them to follow the removal of a brain tumor by asking important questions of the surgeon such as “what music are you listening to?” Heady stuff.

In my area of specialization--PeopleSoft HR/Payroll systems--multiple forums, user groups and bulletin boards have existed for years. These resources allow me to solicit feedback from my peers… and allow for responses in full sentences, and, dare I say, paragraphs. A witty micro-blurb might not prove too useful when 15,000 employees are waiting for me to debug their payroll system.

Though I appreciated how easy Twitter made it to follow news sources and blogs, I already have online tools for this. Different isn’t necessarily better.

What’s more, there is the question of whether society benefits from being deluged with yet more information that may or may not do much real informing. The UK’s Daily Mail, for example, recently reported on a study at the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California that indicates that the digital torrent of information from networking sites could have a long-term damaging effect on the emotional development of younger people’s brains.

Dr. Edward M. Hallowell, coauthor of the best selling book on attention deficit disorder (ADD), Delivered from Distraction, also question the impact of such technologies. “Raised on a diet of sound bites and electronic stimulation, children can lose the ability to carry on extended conversations or listen to one,” Hallowell notes. He goes on to raise the concern that the onslaught of new technologies may actually be “training” our children to develop ADD.

Questioning new technology is not all together new. In Plato’s Phaedus, King Thalmus questioned the god Theuth as to whether the invention of writing would create a vast population of readers with declining memory skills. Readers filled with the “conceit of wisdom” instead of real wisdom as they were doing little more than regurgitating someone else’s words.

In hindsight, most of us agree that society has benefited from the written word, especially since the advent of the printing press. This is true even though not all that is written is beneficial. Books, newspapers and websites are awash with written garbage. And, more relevant, much that is published is little more than a form pop culture cotton candy for the brain.

Does it matter that Twitter’s primary use is little more than a delivery source for pop candy? One can not live on steak and potatoes alone. There is nothing wrong with the occasional sweet treat in an otherwise balanced diet. Like the concern over the advent of writing, I’ll leave the final verdict on Twitter for a later date. But on first glimpse, the concern should be raised that the more we use technology to deliver pop candy fixes, the more we risk losing our appetite for more substantive fare and degrading our ability to tackle challenging mental tasks.

Debunking the NY Times Myth of Boy Scouts as Hitler Youth

The Internet is broken… and I don’t know who to call.

It’s not that the whole darn thing is awry. You can still get email, download ITunes, and, I heard from a friend, view rather disturbing porn. But the doohickey that corrects erroneous posts by The New York Times is on the fritz.

What’s frustrating for troubleshooters is that the problem seems to be intermittent.  When NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd ripped on Dick Cheney again using a chunk of copy lifted from Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Point Memo last week the problem was spotted immediately by bloggers—two days later the Times posted a correction acknowledging Dowd’s lack of “attribution.” But when Times’ reporter Jennifer Steinhauer unfairly characterized the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) as morphing into an extremist paramilitary organization the same week, the Internet’s NY Times truth filter crapped out.

Steinhauer’s article set off my personal bullpucky alert system as I have some familiarity with the BSA. My father was a Scoutmaster for 15 years and I participated in the program as a Scout from age 8 to 16, a leader for 3 years and an active participant in Scouting activities with my two stepsons for another 7 years. But while I read the story and cried “bunk,” the collective wisdom of the Internet failed to amend the alarmist “reporting” replete with carefully edited, terribly inflammatory quotes and staged photos designed to elicit a negative, emotional response.

The article was so distorted and slanted that to distinguish it from a National Enquirer piece Steinhauer had to drop in five dollar words like “obstreperous” to let readers know they were getting their information from the venerated New York Times.

Though entitled “Scouts Train to Fight Terrorists, and More” the article reported on the activities of Explorers, not Scouts. Associating Scouts with Explorers is like associating the USC football team with the Phi Beta Kappa weekend softball team just because they happen to be affiliated with the same university—though the latter far more loosely.

Exploring, which comprises about 10% of BSA-affiliated participants, is about career exploration, not the woodworking, Scout-O-Ramas, camping and merit badges the general public pictures when Scouting is mentioned.  Explorers fall under a not-for-profit corporation called Learning for Life that is merely a coeducational affiliate of the BSA. Explorer “posts” are run by sponsoring police departments, fire stations, or private sector organizations in areas such as law, health, engineering, skilled trades  or aviation.

News flash Steinhauer, the fact that some Explorer posts are affiliated with the U.S. Border Patrol does not signal an “intense ratcheting up of one of the group’s longtime missions...” Though I traded Scouting for dating when I turned 16, the age at which most youth begin participating in Exploring, several friends joined the program. Guess what? 30 years ago Explorers were riding along with cops, going through training simulations with SWAT teams and role playing with undercover agents assigned to drug details.

Jennifer, my dear, perhaps you don't like that the Border Patrol arrests your beloved illegal... strike that... "undocumented" immigrants or that it considers marijuana an illicit substance. It may irk you that they don’t coddle terrorists.  But their training simulations are hardly a new aspect of the Exploring program. New to you doesn’t make it is news.

That the Times slanted the story surprises me little. But where is the Internet and blogosphere on all this? My beloved, do-a-good-turn-daily, borderline pyromaniac, Boy Scouts aren’t training to fight terrorist or anything else for that matter. For Pete’s sake, the BSA still includes paintballing and laser tag on their list of unauthorized activities. 

Having gone on many a campout in recent years, I am more than familiar with the Scouting version of don’t ask, don’t tell. When the urge to paintball (or man’s-most-awesome-invention-ever as I like to call it) gets too strong, Scout troops unofficially organize wildly popular ‘This-isn’t-a-Scouting-Activity!” paintballing  excursions.

Oh, and Ms. Jennifer, when boys assume a stance for pictures with their paintball guns, they try to look as menacing as the Explorers in your photos with their air soft plastic pellet guns—it’s what teenagers do. They strike a pose. They scowl. They play the bad-ass role. They act like teenagers.

Working for an organization with a propensity to cherry pick the facts that best conform to its worldview, Steinhauer didn’t just report on a competition held by an obscure group of Explorer posts in Imperial County, California (with advisors suffering, admittedly, from severe foot-in-mouth disease), she made the extra effort to abruptly segue into allegations that police officers are sexually abusing Explorers.

The blogosphere went wild regurgitating her allegations and her reference to an unspecified University of Nebraska (NU) study as proof that Boy Scout leaders were ramping up to give Catholic priests a run for the dubious lead in the ‘No-Child’s-Behind-Left” sweepstakes. Not one of the 23 blogs I visited dug deep enough into her mention of a report to find that it was a study by Samuel Walker and Dawn Irlbeck, entitled: “Police Sexual Abuse of Teenage Girls: A 2003 Update on Driving While Female.”

The NU report, which focused primarily on allegations by teenage females pulled over by cops and prostitutes threatened with arrest by cops, did indicate that there had been some allegations of abusive comments or actions directed towards female Explorers who had gone—unescorted--on ride alongs with male officers. Hmmm, coupling teenage girls with male cops is a bad idea? Who would of thunk?

Unlike the Times or the blogs, the NU study did note that when the problem surfaced over a decade ago, Explorers implemented a requirement that at least two adult, non-police supervisors act as chaperones at all Explorer functions.

Perhaps the blogosphere didn’t dig deeper into the difference between Explorers and Scouts or the facts surrounding old allegations of sexual abuse because they were too busy crafting predictable Hitler Youth analogies. Depending on how the blog leaned politically, headlines portrayed “Scouts” as either ‘Cheney Youth” or “Obama Youth.”

(Cheney, of course, is fun to hate. Obama took a hit because the Times article mentioned that a role played by a “terrorist” in one of the simulations was that of a “disgruntled Iraq war vet,” rekindling outrage on the right over a recent Department of Homeland Security document identifying Second Amendment supporters, pro-life advocates, and returning war veterans as potential terrorists.)

Smart move on the Times’ part. By distracting the right wing bloggers with the war-veteran-turned-terrorist angle, traditional supporters of the BSA got off track in their commentary and “analysis.” Instead, they joined the fray labeling Scouts as “Boy Storm Troopers of America” and “Homeland Gestapo.”

The fact that the commentary quickly degraded into Nazi comparisons may provide an insight into why the Internet didn’t self correct. Early pioneers of the Internet who posted discussions on Usenet forums found that arguments, if carried on long enough, frequently resulted in someone dropping a Nazi or Hitler comparison. This occurred so frequently that an adage known as Goodwin’s Law developed stating that such comparisons were almost inevitable.

A corollary to Godwin’s Law states that once a Nazi analogy is made the debate is over and whoever made the comparison automatically loses the debate. In the case of the Scouting story, commentators bypassed reasoned discourse and immediately played the Nazi card. The discussion terminated and truth lost out.

Is the Media's Love of Obama Killing Objectivity?

Working as an indentured servant for my school newspaper 20 years ago I was awarded the distinction of “Best News Writer of the Year.” What a sham!

No, there wasn’t any Joe Biden-esque plagiarism. It’s just that I never conformed to the role of a true reporter. The practice of gathering and disseminating information while striving for unbiased viewpoints was not a concept I grasped. My opinions have always run deep. I was an editorial-page columnist masquerading as a reporter. Whether covering campus pay phone contracts (hey, this was 20 years ago) or a proposed baseball stadium, my point of view guided how I selected and strung together the facts. Objectivity was for sissies.

Operating under the “it-takes-one-to-know-one” principle, it’s painfully obvious that the majority of the “reporters” working today have that same objectivity-be-damned perception disorder when it comes to covering Barack Obama. During the campaign, the Center for Media and Public Affairs, John McCain and Hillary Clinton all complained that the media fix was in for Obama. Now, a recent study by the respected Pew Research Center gives weight to those allegations.

In reviewing Obama’s first 100 days in office, Pew noted that Obama enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George Bush during the same period of time—42 percent of the Obama stories were positive compared to 27 percent for Clinton and 22 percent for Bush. Another 30 percent were neutral.

Rather than blush, the media scoffed at these findings. “The newscasts reflect reality,” said Rick Kaplan, executive producer of the CBS Evening News. “Everyone, including Republicans, would have to say his first 100 days have been great.”

Apparently Kaplan was too busy polishing his “Change We Can Believe In” buttons to note the Rasmussen Reports daily tracking poll from May 3rd, 2009 that found that 43 percent of voters disapprove somewhat with Obama’s performance and 32 percent of the nation’s voters strongly disapprove.

I’m no right winger, and it’s in my best interest as an American if Obama hits a homerun with his agenda, but when I turn on the news I want fair and balanced—and I ain’t getting it.

In his first 100 days Obama slammed in the single largest government expenditure ever--a nearly $820 billion stimulus package--without the transparency and five day online public review period of all legislation he promised during the campaign. His deficit-laden $3.2 trillion budget--the largest ever—also warrants more than a little scrutiny.

Where was the mainstream media on Obama using the stimulus package to undo Clinton’s Welfare Reforms of 1996, or creating a $5.2 billion pot that the scandal-plagued ACORN operation can tap or slipping in highly controversial controls of doctors in private practice?

Perhaps it would help my objectivity-challenged counterparts in the press to pick up a copy of “A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media.” Written by Bernard Goldberg, the former CBS newsman, the book bemoans the self-induced collapse of his beloved profession.  Less of a slam of Obama than the title implies, Goldberg laments the demise of honest journalism. Even the most strident Obama supporter will wince reading the section in which The Washing Post’s ombudsman Deborah Howell admits to the media bias in her own paper.

But honestly, do you need a book to see that the mainstream media loves Obama to a fault? The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics requires its members to distinguish between advocacy and news reporting. I, for one, can’t keep my opinion out of my writing. I understand first hand how difficult it is to be a true reporter. But is it too much to suggest that journalists who can’t distinguish between fact and commentary bow out of the newsroom and find their rightful place in the editorial department?