Just look what it’s doing to otherwise sober economists:
What have you done, Henry?
1. “Read”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/07/11/trying-not-to-lose-face/ Henry’s post on Facebook. Signed up out of curiosity and masochistic desire to have smallness of social network confirmed.
2. Joined the University of Arizona network. Noodling around, saw the profile for Joe Grad Student from my department. Looked at his list of friends.
3. Noticed that one of Joe Grad Student’s friends looked familiar. Realized I knew him. He had been a year ahead of me in Secondary School in Ireland in the late 1980s. Jaysus.
Like, it seems, umpteen others, I set up a Facebook profile for myself a couple of weeks ago. When I did, I found that plenty of friends from widely scattered parts of my social network had done the same thing, mostly around the same time. This does seem to me to be a genuine tipping phenomenon. I’ve been feeling a little guilty about not knowing more about Facebook and MySpace, given that I teach classes on how the Internet is changing politics and society. But I didn’t feel ready to actually set myself up, partly because I wasn’t sure what the point was, and partly because I was worried that I’d end up without any friends, exposed to the scorn and pity of the multitude. As my sister Maria said (before joining up herself and finding that she had lots of friends), Facebook is an opportunity to play the social game again – and lose. If other people shared our apprehension, it’s perhaps not surprising that lots of them have decided to join at the same time, when everybody knew that there were enough other people who they knew doing the same thing that the risk of public embarrassment was relatively slight.
Via “Rebecca MacKinnon”:http://rconversation.blogs.com/rconversation/2007/07/finally-joined-.html, this “post”:http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/07/facebook_risingsocial_media_ru.html by Mark Glaser has additional speculation on why so many lemmings plunged over the cliff at the same time, and why they plunged into Facebook in particular. I’d be interested to know why CT readers have or haven’t joined Facebook or other social networking type sites; I should also let people know that there is now a Crooked Timber group on Facebook (content currently consisting of a few photos of CTers mugging at the camera; more surely to follow).
Pejman Yousefzadeh isn’t taking the internet mockery of his anti-FDR agitation well.
Apparently–and this is the latest pronouncement from the Reality-Based Community–we are not supposed to study things that happened 74 years ago, or perhaps longer.
That seems like a reasonable way to characterize the point that one wouldn’t usually get worked up reading a squib entitled “70 years ago this week in monetary policy.” Anyhoo, [click to continue…]
For those in the Bay Area, I thought I’d mention that I’ll be giving a talk at Wiki Wednesday this evening at 6pm. The topic is digital media use by youth. Feel free to come by. Also, feel free to join the group at other times in the future, these meetings are held every month.
Writing about the LaRouche Youth Movement finally allowed me to use some of the research material piling up for a novel that’s never quite come together.
Maybe it was the anxiety of influence. Lyndon LaRouche always seemed like a character right out of Thomas Pynchon.
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The other day David Brooks “wrote a column”:http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/opinion/10brooks.html?_r=1&hp&oref=login which appeared to be a stock piece of standard conservative anxiety about what he called “hard-boiled, foul-mouthed, fedup, emotionally self-sufficient and unforgiving” young women. “Matt Yglesias picks up on”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/07/why_i_read_david_brooks.php on the piece today, salvaging the key insight of Brooks’ piece from the muddled pop-culture framing. As Brooks says,
bq. Now young people face a social frontier of their own. They hit puberty around 13 and many don’t get married until they’re past 30. That’s two decades of coupling, uncoupling, hooking up, relationships and shopping around. This period isn’t a transition anymore. It’s a sprawling life stage, and nobody knows the rules.
Matt comments:
bq. The reality is that technological and economic change has raised the age at which people — particularly more upscale people — do things like get married and have children. But biology stays the same. Consequently, people in their teens and early twenties engage in a lot of courtship-related program activities that don’t really entail a good-faith search for a spouse.
This point is basically correct. And for the past two months, a book exploring just this issue has been sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read properly, instead of skimmed. It’s Michael Rosenfeld’s The Age of Independence: Interracial Unions, Same-Sex Unions, and the Changing American Family.
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After a quasi-hiatus, Cosma Shalizi is back blogging regularly again. “This post”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/502.html
But I don’t know how else to feel, when dubiously legal and definitely undemocratic programs of spying on domestic political dissenters get shopped to private companies through a profoundly corrupt contracting process, and records conveniently disappear without causing any official comment. (Via Laura Rozen, who has been following this story from the beginning.) — The really depressing thing is that even if, inshallah, the GOP loses the House, the Senate and the White House in 2008, it’s not clear how much of this will change. If the last sixty years of the military-industrial complex is anything to go by, the rapidly-growing espionage-industrial complex of spooks and contractors will be very hard indeed to uproot. Wasting money on jets and battle-ships for never-going-to-happen wars is one thing, and might even be excused as Keynesianism-that-dare-not-speak-its-name, but making money out of classifying peaceful political opponents of the current administration as enemies of the state seems, not put too fine a point on it, like a danger to the republic.
seems to me to dovetail with Debbi Avant’s arguments1 about the risks of contracting out military services to private agencies (gated version here). [click to continue…]
Redstate, focusing on the issues of the day:
Franklin Delano Roosevelt chose the price of gold using the same methods with which you or I would choose PowerBall ticket numbers. If that doesn’t frighten and outrage you, I don’t know what will.
The author also reports that the George F. Will column in question, “made me spring out of my chair and pace around in abject disbelief and not a little anger.”
Thank goodness there’s no policy flippancy in the White House these days, otherwise urgent, perambulatory scowling at the olds, as we might call them, might look like aversion of one’s gaze from the news.
I wouldn’t make fun, except he put in that bit about springing and pacing.
UPDATE: And the author responds – to Kevin Drum, not to me. If you hate FDRblogging so much, “why don’t you write a post telling Democrats to stop raising the specter of Herbert Hoover at the drop of a hat?”
Just wanted to take note of a felicitous typo from Andrew Sullivan:
But it could give the neocons a new leash on life, a way to invigorate their exhausted ideological engines.
Quite unrelatedly, I was amused to read:
It is debatable whether paganism is a religion, per say.
I’m not sure whether he misspelled ‘per se’ or was, rather, reaching for ‘so to speak’, as one might grope for the bottle.
The piece reminded me of Kieran’s post about how ‘atheism’ was, originally, a charge lodged against Christians. It’s interesting to find predicates that have wandered so comprehensively.
A little while ago, when “Harry discussed the latest addition to the Real Utopias Project on basic income and stakeholding”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/28/redesigning-distribution/, some commentators raised the issue of the gender effects. I promised at that time that I would write a post about it. Well, finallly the time has come — thanks to a workshop on this topic that the “Heinrich Boell Foundation”:http://www.boell.de/ organised last Thursday in Berlin. They are the think-thank of the Green German Party, which is currently seriously debating whether they should advocate a basic income as (part of) a welfare state reform strategy. The workshop addressed the question whether a basic income would have different implications for women and men, and whether, all things considered, it would be a policy reform that feminists may want to support. [click to continue…]
!http://www.henryfarrell.net/wank2.jpg!
Christopher Caldwell on Michael Moore:
Mr Moore’s enemy … is the complexity of it. He rejects subtleties. His goal is not to break through to those who do not agree with him but to drown out the doubts of those who do. Those who sit down to watch Sicko without a broad knowledge of the US healthcare system will leave the theatre with a shallower understanding of the crisis than the one they arrived with. One should face up to the fact that this is the way Americans increasingly choose to get their information on all sorts of issues, not just healthcare policy. The appetite for slanted ideological dramas grows. Mr Moore is not alone in satisfying it. His anti-Bush documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, was met with the anti-Kerry adverts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Perhaps the internet has made this kind of journalism easier. Mr Moore has been described as a “tireless researcher”, but you do not have to be, nowadays. He notes in his film that an online appeal for healthcare horror stories yielded 25,000 of them within a week. In a country of 300m people, any such appeal will provide enough anecdotal evidence to edit into a plausible and even rollicking case for pretty much anything – and to liberate a grateful populace from the heavy burden of level-headedness.
Doesn’t this prissiness about simple-minded propagandistic cherrypickers sit a little oddly when it comes from one of two senior editors at the _Weekly Standard_, the gutter-trawling publication that perhaps did more than any of the others of its ilk to “propagandize”:http://theweeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/768lyuyh.asp for the “Iraq war”:http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_11_21/article.html, to relentlessly “simplify”:http://www.soulstrut.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=365971&page=0&fpart=7&vc=1 and “smooth away “:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/360lggnc.asp the reasons why the occupation would fail, and to “demonize”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/920ygass.asp those who argued against it? And so it continues. Kieran has already “mentioned”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/07/04/operation/ last week’s “everything’s dandy with the surge”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/818pmqsq.asp number from the Kagans, who, as he says, “get to author policy and neutrally report on it at the same time.” This week’s “The soldiers think they can win. Some Senators lose their nerve” “version”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/849nkdmm.asp of the same theme from Caldwell’s boss, William Kristol isn’t exactly what you’d call a level-headed assessment of the facts either. And that’s not even getting into the Weekly Standard‘s list of associate editors, which includes such notable flinty-eyed pursuers of truth as Charles Krauthammer, Tucker Carlson and John Podhoretz. Slanted ideological dramas, how are ya.
I had to stop at the local Wild Oats this morning to pick up my monthly supply of liberal condescension. Some of the fruit was labeled “Organic.” The non-organic stuff was labeled “Conventional.” I found this a little odd, because when I see “Conventional” used as a label, I expect its opposite to be “Nuclear.”
The term “phishing” refers to the malicious practice of trying to extract sensitive information (such as passwords) from users. Compared to numerous other Internet-related terms, “phishing” is one of the least understood ones among users. I have found this in my work as have others in theirs. Of course, it may be that people understand the concept of phishing without knowing it is called as such. It is difficult to do large-scale data collection using more elaborate methods, but I implemented some related questions on a survey recently taken by over one hundred students who were randomly sampled from a diverse group. (See the end of this post for details about the data set.)
In the context of a larger study, I showed participants three hypothetical emails and offered several options for how they might proceed (respondents could check off several actions such as “delete it”, “ignore it”, “forward to tech support with a question”, etc.). When shown an email that looked very much like the one that comes from the IT department of the university (one that would not be hard to replicate by someone with malicious intent) over half of respondents said they would “follow the instructions outlined in the email”, which included going to a Web site and entering their username and password. Even more students said that they would “click on the links in the message and follow the instructions on those pages”. Less than 15 percent checked off the option of contacting tech support with a question or reporting the email as abuse. And in the open-ended field where respondents could explain what else they might do, only one student described actions that suggested the potential problem with the email. This among the generation that is supposedly savvy about digital media. See my forthcoming paper on The Role of Expertise in Navigating Links of Influence for more on this (especially pp. 12-19.).
When I talk to my students (at a different school than where the above study was conducted) about online privacy and security issues, and ask them about the potential implications, the usual response is about financial concerns: credit card numbers stolen, money lost. However, as I try to remind them several times throughout the course, financial issues are not the only ones at stake when managing one’s identity and actions online. For example, in the realm of health and politics one can easily come up with examples of cases where third parties should not have access to our information.
And then there is reputation. I have noticed some troubling incidents on Flickr recently and wanted to write a post about these experiences to remind people about the importance of being vigilant. Don’t stop reading just because you are not a Flickr user, by the way. These same issues could occur on lots of other sites as well.