Letters to the Editor
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Maybe It Is a Fuckin' "Fairytale." And a Sexy One at That
I am non-partison.
I do not own a functioning TV.
Therefore, Obama-TV has not been something I follow. Nor have I seen his YouTube promotions. (An error I will not repeat.)
I would not vote for HRC simply because the idea of 28-yrs of Bush/Clinton/Bush/Clinton makes a mockery of our democratic system of government. We may as well have princes and emirs and sheiks if we allow 2 families to govern the USA for decades.
Viewing this Obama presentation has so diminished him and his campaign in my mind that he too becomes unsupportable.
An utterly vacuous 3 minutes, of (primarily) attractive females purring pathetic platitudes is as disgraceful an approach to campaigning as anything the Clintons have ever perpetrated upon the public.
As much as I loathe the cynicism embodied in Mark Penn of the Clinton organization ("Small is the new Big), at least her campaign uses Language to make its points. Obama's people apparently have adopted this approach to presidential politics: Pure Form, No Content. Pretty faces. Bedroom eyes.
But those girls sure are sexy. And are gonna get him lotsa male votes.
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Let's hope that "Obama Girl" and her sistren...
....never stray into "Harold, call me" territory (or worse).
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It Seems Shirky and You are....
...limning the world of "Ghost in The Shell," particularly the inaugural season which involves the "Laughing Man" investigation so vividly portrayed [in the States, on Adult Swim] by Shiro Masamune and the guys and gals led by Kenji Kamayama at I.G. animation. Here, you pretty much evoke that part of the world of "Ghost" with these lines:
"...My argument is pretty simple: We are living through the largest expansion in expressive capability in the history of the human race. The effect of new capabilities destabilizing existing behaviors has been very profound for really major communications changes -- as with, say, the printing press and the telephone. Given the enormity of the change we're living through -- the first group-oriented medium in history -- change is now coming to every place where society relies on groups to get work done, which is almost everywhere...."
Your article is fascinating--I'm way older than "25" but I've been on the Net since 94-95 and I've been fascinated, ever since, with the way this technology transforms the way we think and get things done.
It's funny, but in both "Ghost" and something like Spielberg's excellent "Minority Report" there is a place for Newspapers in the world of the mid-twenty-first century. In "Ghost," in an episode entitled "Excavation" in the series's 2nd season, one of the characters, Togusa, is shown on a subway car talking while another person walks by with a newspaper under his arm. In "Minority Report," there is the now famous scene of Tom Cruise escaping his fellow pre-crime cops by boarding a subway car where he sees his name and picture flash on a Time Magazine flimsy, as well as a newspaper. All three, the newspaper in the "Ghost" episode and the Mag and newspaper in "Minority Report" are presumably internet-sensitive and are capable of receiving updates via that medium. The presence of a print medium, if only in a facsimile type, cyber-enhanced format, in "Ghost," is particularly interesting, especially in a place and time where one can have info streamed directly onto cybernectically enhanced eye-balls. So, I guess, with a few tweaks here and there, there may be hope for an old stand-by, yet.
Ps: I'm going out to get the Shirky's book, first thing, tomorrow--where it'll take its place, on my bookshelf, alongside those of Kurzweill and Moravec. Thanks for the article.
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Bernanke
"...Viewing this Obama presentation has so diminished him and his campaign in my mind that he too becomes unsupportable.
An utterly vacuous 3 minutes, of (primarily) attractive females purring pathetic platitudes is as disgraceful an approach to campaigning as anything the Clintons have ever perpetrated upon the public...."
Uh, it's not an "Obama presentation." He had nothing to do with it other than someone gloaming onto his persona. The article makes that plain as well as highlight why he stole a march on the Clinton campaign. A guy who had barely turned 23 when Apple's "1984" campaign came out and who had evolved with the computer and, later, the Net was, along with his campaign guru, Howard Axelrod, in a far better position than a Mark Penn or Hillary Clinton to grasp the potential of the p.c. and the Internet as a vehicle to not only reach millions but get them motivated--an idea, at least in its nascent stage, Howard Dean's campaign manager, Joe Trippi, has to be credited with recognising, even though the old media grabbed his candidate by the voice-box to choke the life out of Dean's candidacy.
So, again, why blame Obama for the machinations, silly or otherwise, of another?
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It's this..
..it's an endorcement entertainment and that's all it is.
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Unclear article type
Perhaps this is just me, but I was half way through reading this before I realized that it's an interview. When I began reading, I thought it was a book review.
The phrase "Author Clay Shirky explains ..." clearly suggested that it was Farhad Manjoo talking at the beginning. That text is bold, of course, as are the questions later. But there's also that picture immediately below it. I thought that the text below was no longer bold because we were now past the first paragraph.
When the first of Manjoo's questions came up, I thought "oh, weird, Farhad is have a Socratic dialogue[1] with himself. Hmm. Okay, fair enough, he's not the first."
It wasn't until I got to "There are a couple things I want to challenge you on" that I realized there were actually two real voices in the article. Then I had to go back and read the whole thing over to get it straight in my head.
Compare with normal Salon interviews, like that one with Cass Sunstein a while back.[2] There was a brief introductory passage in normal text, not bold; the picture used floats off on the right so that it doesn't break the flow of the text. And immediately before shifting into the interview proper, there is a one-line paragraph standing by itself which says "Salon spoke with Sunstein recently by telephone" to indicate that from here on in it's a question-and-answer format.
Given the lack of visual and textual cues that this is an interview, I'm not surprised that I got confused. Particularly since the article has the same formatting as Manjoo's ordinary blog posts. If it looks like Manjoo's blog, it must be Manjoo unless there is some clear, unambiguous signal that there's a quote or that the content is different from an ordinary blog post.
Perhaps it is perfectly obvious to everyone else; perhaps I'm crazy. Who can say? I just think people identify the type of thing they're reading based mostly on contextual cues. Mess with those cues at risk of confusing people.
Sel
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_dialogue
[2] http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/11/07/sunstein/
P.S. When is Salon going to let us put links in our posts? They are THE fundamental feature of the web. No links, no web. Disabling them is seriously irritating.