shouting loudly

There’s a fun anti-Citizens United video that made the rounds last week (see below).  It features big thinkers explaining problems with the campaign finance system, while goofing around with Internet memes –  keyboard cat, geyser videos, kids being cute, etc.     I like the video.  It’s not going to get a million views or [...]

There was a Republican debate last night.  I only caught part of it (not to worry, there will be dozens more before a single primary vote is cast). This one was remarkable for its sponsors: it was cohosted by CNN and the Tea Party.  Audience questions came from “real tea party activists.”  These, unsurprisingly, were [...]

In many spots along the mediascape, we now have a bunch of genuinely thoughtless criticism of media coverage and politicians, all centered around allegations that these people hyped up and tried to cash in on this natural disaster. Sure, TV news in particular covers hurricanes with too little data, too little understanding of uncertainty and [...]

Allow me to be cranky for a minute. Jeff Jarvis had some fun on twitter this weekend.  After a day spent reading news about the debt limit, and a nice  pinot noir with dinner, he tweeted, ”Hey, Washington assholes, it’s our country, our economy, our money. Stop fucking with it.”  Encouraged by some of his replies [...]

Eli Pariser, the former Executive Director of MoveOn, has a new book out on the social impacts of the internet.  It’s quite good – reminiscent of Cass Sunstein’s Republic.com and Infotopia, in that it is utterly readable, carefully constructed, and critical in tenor.  The important difference between Pariser’s book and Sunstein’s books is temporal in [...]

[Update: read Jay Rosen's account and analysis of how this all turned out.  I agree entirely.] There’s a post I meant to write after the Shirley Sherrod incident this summer.  Instead it became a lecture that I give to my students in my Media, Government, and Politics seminar at Rutgers.  Given ABC’s announcement last night [...]

Politico has a story up today about Liberty.com, the new conservative answer to MoveOn.  The gist of the story is… they’d like to be the right’s answer to MoveOn. …Yaaaaaaawn… I’ve written about the relative lack of conservative online infrastructure in the past, in a conference paper titled “Don’t Think of an Online Elephant” (available [...]

The latest news on the Tea Party is, unsurprisingly, pretty bad.  The National Tea Party Federation expelled Mark Williams, the head of Tea Party Express, on Saturday after the racist screed he’d “satirically” published to his website.  I won’t reward his site with any additional google-juice, so instead I’ll recommend this article by Eugene Robinson [...]

There’s a post up on DailyKos right now with the latest poll data on Obama and the Gulf Spill.  They reference a very nice piece by John Harwood about the political implications (or perhaps the lack thereof) of the spill.  At the risk of piling on, I want to make one small point: This oil [...]

[This is more of a holiday-cheer post than my usual academic blog entries.  'Tis the season...] In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins’s excellent work on the various effects of digital media on media production/culture, “convergence” takes on multiple meanings.  Part of what makes it such a good book is that all of these meanings are true. [...]