emptyage

The First I Followed

As I've been sorting through the accounts I follow (see this), I've noticed that as I get close to the beginning, I take fewer and fewer people off per page. This is pretty natural, I guess, as those who I've followed the longest continuously have made it through many previous rounds of culling.

Only Ev, Dakota, and George have lower user numbers than I do. Jeff's--not only one of my oldest friends, but also the person with whom I have the longest Twitter relationship--user number (11,155) is just a little over 40 digits away from my own (11,113) so I'd guess we joined the same day.  I think this means that for a little while, maybe less than 24 hours, I wasn't following anybody. 

These are *almost* all people I know very, very well. Some are the closest friends and oldest friends of my life. I went to middle school with one person on this list, high school with another and college with a third .  Two were in my wedding. I've worked at failed startups with three others. Two were frequent visitors when my wife was confined to bed for a year with a debilitating injury. Three I've never met. One is secretly an assassin.

Okay, the assassin part is bullshit. But you were totally thinking it was Andy Baio, right? Me too.

Twitter & Iran: Yes, Let's Be Real

As always happens, first came the hype, followed by the backlash.

After spending a few days talking about the Twitter revolution, reporters began (rightly) calling shenanigans. The tipping point seemed to be this smart post from Joshua Kucera a few days ago. Twitter as a source of disinformation? Tell me about it, bitches. By today there's a full-on backlash. You can tell the tide has turned because Jack Schafer just rowed his boat out past the break and dropped anchor. 

Okay, so yes, let's be real: Do you really think hundreds of thousands of Iranian protesters have configured proxy servers and other tech-savvy hacks to circumvent the government's blocks on SMS and Websites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube in order to organize themselves online? Because that seems about as likely to me as Santa.

On the other hand, Schafer and the new backlash miss an important point: Virtually all of the photos and videos coming out of Iran are surfacing and being disseminated via social media sites.  Whether or not Iranians themselves are using these technologies en masse, the rest of the world is staying informed about what's going on there via citizen journalists, because some people have managed to circumvent the blocks.  Even as the professional class of cameramen have been confined to their hotel rooms, new photographs and videos are emerging on the Internet hourly. And what's more, this information does seem to be spreading internally in Iran as well, perhaps merely printout to printout--but it's getting out.

Several people have pointed out that Iran has had massive demonstrations in the past, notably 1999. This is meant to cast doubt on Twitter's usefulness as an organizing tool. But you know what else Iran had in 1999? A brutal government crackdown.  Ten years later, the Iranian (or any other) government can't pull that off in the dark anymore. It may yet happen, but if it does everyone both inside and outside of the country will know about it. And so while we'll never know, it's certainly possible that Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook--and all the rest of the social media tools that journos have such a love/hate relationship with--may very well be the bulwarks keeping the Evil Men With Guns at bay.

Writing in Mother Jones, Kevin Drum argues that "And if we westerners had to rely on only a single news source to tell us what what going on, I'd still choose the dwindling band of serious outlets that provide real reporting from dangerous (and expensive) places." Word. If I had to choose one or the other, I'd go with a crack squad of BBC reporters over citizen journalists. But what if I don't get to choose? What happens when a nation kicks all those reporters from serious outlets out? Or locks them in hotel rooms? Or simply prevents them from bringing cameras into the street?

I mean, did you watch the news yesterday? Have you read the goddamn paper lately? Those serious outlets are relying largely on footage from amateurs.

Look, I don't know about you, but I have no illusions that changing my icon green or my time zone to Tehran time is going to directly help anyone on the ground in Iran at all. I don't think it's going to confuse Iranian authorities, or bring down the wall, or any other such nonsense. What I do think it accomplishes is to help force a meme, so to speak. It keeps people talking about what's happening in Iran. It's an insignificant act taken alone that in aggregate has quite a bit of power. That's how Twitter works.

So, again, let's be real. Let's have some fucking perspective instead of simply rushing to pimp or tear down the latest conventional wisdom. Get over the organizing tool distraction. (though even if it helps a handful of key people organize, that in itself is something.) But it isn't just about organization.

Thanks to their ability to spread images, videos, and first-person accounts of events on the ground, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, and other social media platforms are both keeping us aware of what's happening and perhaps just as if not more importantly stimulating global conversations in ways that articles in the New York Times or Slate don't have the power to do. And the Iranian government is well aware of that.

The Shorty Awards are a Sham

If you're a Twitter user, you've almost certainly noticed something about the Shorty Awards in the last few days. Like all awards, they're dubious at best. In this case probably even moreso, as the "awards" or at least the nominations for them, pretty much come down to who has the most followers or best bots. But it at least holds out the promise of a democratic contest, noting that "The five people with the most nominations in each category will go on to the final voting round, held January 5th to 14th."

Nonetheless, some people do take them seriously. One of those people, apparently, is former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki, who seemed at least, to be trying to encourage people to vote for him. Enter Cap'n Smackers. After making a brief run for the humor category himself, Mike Monteiro asked a few friends to start promoting his fake dead dog to the top of the #business rankings.

The very quick back story: Mike has a somewhat curmudgeonly persona  on Twitter. He went through a happy phase, during which he started talking about his fake Bichon Frise, Cap'n Smackers. Somebody else subsequently registered the Twitter username Capnsmackers, and began updating. It was hilarious. So then Mike killed his fake dog.

Anyway. By mid-day yesterday CapnSmackers was shooting up the rankings, not just in business, but overall. By late in the day, he actually overtook Kawasaki, and was leading in business. And this evidently made the Shorty Awards people unhappy, or uncomfortable, or maybe it led them to realize the utter inanity of their sham awards. Likely it wasn't the latter.

And so they changed people's votes.

They changed 83 votes cast by Twitter users, from #business to #funnybusiness. In other words, they rigged the election so Kawasaki can win.

Now, I know somebody out there is going to argue that CapnSmackers isn't eligible because the contest is restricted to the five "people"with the most votes, and Capn Smackers is a dog. To which I say: When was the last time you saw a dog quote Heidegger? Behind that fuzzy avatar, there is a person. But even if there was not, if you open up a vote to the people, you have to accept the will of the people, even if you disagree with that. Just ask Mr. Splashypants.

You may be saying to yourself that this is a lot to get worked up over. That it's just a joke. That I should let it go. But that's beside the point, it doesn't matter that it was just a joke. What matters is that they asked for and received our participation and opinion, are actively using that participation and opinion to promote their awards, and yet rigged the process so that our votes are not counted.  Nobody cast a ballot for CapnSmackers in #funnybusiness; I certainly did not, nor would I have. The shorties changed votes. They attrbuted an untrue statement to at least 83 users who believed in their process. And that's really, really uncool.