Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’
Only connect…
The inimitable Robert Crumb predicted the world of Twitter, social media, and the always-on internet over 40 years ago in Zap Comix…
[TotH to the indispensable Dangerous Minds... who may have picked it up from the differently-but-equally-indispensable O'Reilly Community]
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As we try on our Google Glasses, we might spare a (humble) thought for Alfred Adler; he died on this date in 1937. An Austrian doctor and psychotherapist, Adler was an early collaborator with Freud in founding the psychoanalytic movement; after parting ways with The Master, he founded the school of individual psychology. Indeed, we have Adler to thank for the “inferiority complex.”
P-ewww…
Did you know that 33 percent of puppies never get hugged?
Or that the top baby names for 2011 were Edward, Harry, Dylan, Chase and Sealteamsix?
If you do, chances are you are one of the more than 13,800 people following @fakepewresearch, a hilarious new parody Twitter account from the minds behind @fakeapstylebook. The account parodies the Pew Research Center, a think tank established in 2004 as a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts, known for its public opinion polls and social science research.
In the increasingly popular parody-account community, @fakepewresearch and @fakeapstylebook are anomalies. Not only have they amassed more than 260,000 followers combined, they are managed by a 15-person team called the Bureau Chiefs. They are a group of volunteer journalists, advertising writers, and librarians who mull over and edit every tweet before sending it out to the world. (All have other day jobs.)…
Read the full profile at Daily Dot. Check out the feed at #fakepewresearch (from whence, the examples above). And visit The Bureau Chiefs here…
As we distill our results to 140 characters, we might recall that it was on this date in 1948 that Community Antenna Television (CATV)– what grew up to become cable television– was born, when Leroy “Ed” Parsons, who sold electronics and ran a radio station in Astoria, Oregon treated his family to KRSC’s inaugural TV broadcast from 150 miles away in Seattle. He picked up a usable signal with a large antenna on the roof of the John Jacob Astor Hotel, and strung a coaxial cable across the street to his living room. Encouraged, he placed a TV in the hotel lobby and another in a nearby store window. As others in town asked for the same service, Parsons helped them hook into a system using a community antenna on Coxcomb Hill completed Feb 1949. He moved to Alaska in 1953, and by 1967 had installed the state’s first cable system in Barrow. From Parsons’ wire to The Wire in under 60 years…
How to prepare for a *real* emergency…
That readers are perusing this missive suggests that The Rapture did not in fact happen as advertised. But that humankind (well, the sinners among us anyway) dodged a bullet today doesn’t mean that the threat of Apocalypse isn’t real. Indeed, no less an authority than the CDC has weighed in with a Twitter Alert:
Of course, the Law of Unintended Consequences being what it is, this Tweet seems to have created one kind of disaster even as it attempted to ameliorate another: the response to the message– clicks through to the featured URL– immediately crashed the CDC’s servers.
Some semblance of normalcy has been recovered; readers can once more reach “Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse.”
As we reconcile ourselves to the fact that the Zombie craze may well last at least until after the release of Brad Pitt’s upcoming World War Z– and that’s not yet even in production, we might recall that on this date in 1972 Heathen! (an original musical with music and lyrics by Eaton Magoon, and book by Magoon and Sir Robert Helpmann) both opened and closed on Broadway.
Where’s a cop when you need one?…
Canadian IT consultant and author Sean Power had his laptop stolen in New York just before he had to leave for Ottawa. But as Sean uses Prey (a freeware tracker) he was able to locate it remotely. Sean called the cops… who responded that unless he (physically) filed a report, NYC’s Finest were unwilling to take any action… He put out the word on Twitter…
… and a flash-crew of civilian crime-fighters recovered the stolen property. Watch the story unfold in Brandon Ballenger’s recap.
As we appreciate the now-deeper resonance of “neighborhood watch,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1866 that Charles Elmer Hires formulated his eponymous “root beer” Hires was inspired by root tea, but thought that “beer” would be a more attractive name to “the working class”– for whom Hires, a supporter of temperance, saw it as an alternative to alcohol.
Me, me meme…
Jeremy Toeman explains…
And TechCrunch elaborates…
Richard Dawkins’ definition of a meme in The Selfish Gene is “a unit of cultural transmission.” Like genes and diseases, the prevailing characteristic of memes is that they tend to replicate, just add humans.
Anything can be a meme, but there are certain characteristics that make information units more likely to go viral (namely funniness).
The Internet, where replication is as easy as hitting “Like” or “Retweet,” is one big meme pool. Internet hipsters (people who spend a lot of time online – cough) now judge each other by whether they posted it before whatever it is it hit Buzzfeed.
Much like hardy genes confer biological advantage, being aware of memes now confers a feeling of superiority amongst those in the know. Hence the above video, which was basically engineered to propagate itself.
(TotH to Laughing Squid)
As we prepare to go viral, we might recall that it was on this date in 1960 that fishermen in British Columbia ended a labor dispute that had shut down the province’s herring fishery for a full year.
Back at work… (source)
