Norm Geras remains baffled at the Twitter phenomenon.  Responding to a column by Nicholas Lezard, Norm asks:

(1) Why would I want to record my daily activities for other people to follow? (2) Why would I want to follow the detailed doings of anyone else over the course of a day, and another day, and another day?

You, of course, wouldn’t.

But that’s not what Twitter is to most of us.  Despite the query “What are you doing now?” on the posting window, most people that I follow are posting links and commentary on matters of interest to me.    Here’s a screencap of my TweetDeck screen at the moment:

Now, I’m not saying that every single posting there contributes to my net wisdom.  But I get more than enough interesting information to be worth 30-60 minutes of my day scanning, re-tweeting, and posting my own bits.

Lezard seems to think Twitter is mostly about what people are having for lunch and the like.  And for all I know, perhaps it is.  Then again, so is “blogging.”  But just as I don’t read blogs that are mostly about people’s cats or the mundane daily activities of their lives, neither do I actively follow those sorts of Twitter accounts.

Becks observes, “I suspect many Twitter memes that I find annoying (one letter off movie titles, failed children’s books, etc.) would have been quite hilarious Unfogged threads.”

The post title, “The Medium Is The Message,” is appropriate.  Several Twitter memes  (created by adding a hashtag such as #failedchildrensbooks) of the sort mentioned can be amusing if one is in the mood.  The problem is that one gets a huge stream of them from participating people one is following whether one is in the mood or not.  If the latter, then it becomes clutter — if not spam — impeding one’s efforts to glean the sort of information usually imparted by those one follows.  Conversely, a comment discussion on a one-off blog post can be — and generally is — simply skipped over by those not in the mood and once can easily stop reading once one tires of it.

On a related note, the equivalent phenomenon — the widespread adoption of silly applications — has killed Facebook for me.  Once invitations to participate in zombie wars start to outnumber useful messages from friends and others in my network, it ceases to be worth the time.

“Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.” So begins a column by Jessica Vascellaro in today’s WSJ.

We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don’t need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public “status” on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.

[...]

Years ago, we were frustrated if it took a few days for a letter to arrive. A couple of years ago, we’d complain about a half-hour delay in getting an email. Today, we gripe about it taking an extra few seconds for a text message to go through. In a few months, we may be complaining that our cellphones aren’t automatically able to send messages to friends within a certain distance, letting them know we’re nearby. (A number of services already do this.)

These new services also make communicating more frequent and informal—more like a blog comment or a throwaway aside, rather than a crafted email sent to one person. No need to spend time writing a long email to your half-dozen closest friends about how your vacation went. Now those friends, if they’re interested, can watch it unfold in real time online. Instead of sending a few emails a week to a handful of friends, you can send dozens of messages a day to hundreds of people who know you, or just barely do.

[...]

David Liu, an executive at AOL, calls it replacing the in-box with “a river that continues to flow as you dip into it.”

I’m more “wired” than most, spending an inordinate amount of time blogging, Twittering and the like.   Indeed, I started this blog nearly seven years ago as a substitute for my previous habit of emailing links and clippings, often with brief commentary, back and forth my my friends.  I frequently instant message or direct message people for things that need immediate responses.

But none of it is going to replace email.

A river of information is interesting.  It’s why I finally “stuck” as an active Twitter user after two years of brief flirtations and not “getting” it.  But, even if you’re only following 100 people or so, you’re going to miss most of what’s in the river. And if you’re following 1000 or 2000 people — hardly uncommon — you’re going to miss almost all of it.  Which is perfectly fine if you’re looking for witty commentary, updates on the latest breaking news, which of your acquaintances out and about in Adams Morgan, and the like.

While it can be used that way, email isn’t, at its core, a mass communications platform.  It’s a means of direct communication with another person asynchronously.  If I need to let my wife know I’m running late, send my deputy an attachment for posting on the company website, send my folks the latest pictures of the baby, or any number of things that I actually need another person to read — not just have available to them if they happen to be wading in my river at a given moment — there’s no good substitute for email.

Twitter direct messaging is great if you can say what you need in 160 characters, including spaces, and the person’s following you on Twitter; otherwise, not so much. Texting is rather intrusive and, since it tends to set off audible alarms and cost the recipient money, borderline rude.  Instant messaging is also generally annoying, as it demands a person’s attention NOW rather than when they want to take the time to read messages.  Ditto telephoning, which I now reserve almost exclusively for extended conversations with friends and family a long distance away, quick bursts for when I can’t wait for email, or certain types of business transactions.

I haven’t yet used Google’s Wave, which may streamline the current flow of the river and avoid some of the fallbacks of the email alternatives.  The way we’ll use email will continue to evolve, too, much as I’ll now send someone to a blog post or an online photo album.  But we’ll always need something like email:  a direct, asynchronous means of sending infinitely variable types of information to specific people.

Update (Alex Knapp): Reading the above, I would just note that this is one in a string of articles over the past few years about the death of email, the death of voicemail, the death of the telephone, etc. These pieces tend to have one thing in common: they are written by tech journalists who, in their day to day business, are sifting through the constant stream of information on the Internet. You will note that they are almost never written by people with jobs outside of that industry, because everyone else with an office job gets more email and voicemail and phone calls than they can handle without investing in any one of the number of time management programs like Getting Things Done, etc. Speaking for myself, if email is dead, why do I get 100+ of them a day? And why are they communications that really can’t be handled any other way? If the phone is dead, why do I spend so much time on it getting work done?

Before proclaiming the death of a particular type of communication, it would be nice if journalists of this ilk actually did some, you know, reporting from a regular office and not just their laptop at home.

Matthew Moore marks the 40th anniversary of the Internet with a list of “50 things that are being killed by the internet.” My favorites:

1) The art of polite disagreement
While the inane spats of YouTube commencers may not be representative, the internet has certainly sharpened the tone of debate. The most raucous sections of the blogworld seem incapable of accepting sincerely held differences of opinion; all opponents must have “agendas”.

Because I make a living writing things on the Internet, I’m especially aware of this. There’s no matter sufficiently trivial that it can’t spark a nasty flame war.

2) Fear that you are the only person unmoved by a celebrity’s death
Twitter has become a clearing-house for jokes about dead famous people. Tasteless, but an antidote to the “fans in mourning” mawkishness that otherwise predominates.

Both a good and a bad thing, as Moore suggests. While some respect for the recently departed’s loved ones is nice, the Internet is a welcome alternative to the hagiographies of the weird but famous to which we’re otherwise treated.

3) Listening to an album all the way through
The single is one of the unlikely beneficiaries of the internet – a development which can be looked at in two ways. There’s no longer any need to endure eight tracks of filler for a couple of decent tunes, but will “album albums” like Radiohead’s Amnesiac get the widespread hearing they deserve?

I owned hundreds of cassette tapes and probably still have 300-odd CDs. I rarely listen to them anymore and haven’t bought a new album in perhaps a decade.

17) Watching television together
On-demand television, from the iPlayer in Britain to Hulu in the US, allows relatives and colleagues to watch the same programmes at different times, undermining what had been one of the medium’s most attractive cultural appeals – the shared experience. Appointment-to-view television, if it exists at all, seems confined to sport and live reality shows.

As I’ve noted previously, I tend to watch non-sports and news programming well out of phase, often catching them a year or two after they’ve gotten going and sometimes waiting until the entire run is complete. When I saw the bold headline, though, I thought he was going somewhere else: The fact that having a notebook computer in the living room often means that we’re looking something up and only half paying attention to the television, much less others in the room.

50) Your lunchbreak
Did you leave your desk today? Or snaffle a sandwich while sending a few personal emails and checking the price of a week in Istanbul?

I’m quite guilty of this. Even when I “go out” for lunch, I usually grab something to eat in front of my computer.

Jon Henke thinks it’s time for the Right to throw out the lunatics:

In the 1960’s, William F. Buckley denounced the John Birch Society leadership for being “so far removed from common sense” and later said “We cannot allow the emblem of irresponsibility to attach to the conservative banner.”

The Birthers are the Birchers of our time, and WorldNetDaily is their pamphlet.  The Right has mostly ignored these embarrassing people and organizations, but some people and organizations inexplicably choose to support WND through advertising and email list rental or other collaboration.

Several of us — notably Melissa Clouthier, Doug Mataconis, and Matt Sheffield — bandied this about on Twitter yesterday.  And while I’m still inclined to agree with Jon that the Republican Party and organized conservative movement should distance itself from the yahoos, I’m not sure how much energy it’s worth.  Aren’t we better off, as Melissa suggests, in focusing “on a positive message all can unite around?”

Casting out the infidels will likely not have much benefit and comes with quite a bit of cost.

As Steve Benen notes, the RNC is among those advertising on WND.  And, while I’d love to see them not legitimate the loons by sponsoring their websites, it’s true that loons vote.  And they’re not going to go away just because the RNC doesn’t give them any money.  Indeed, it may well just prove to them that both parties are corrupt.

The more important criticism is that Jerome Corsi, the loon that sparked Jon to say “Enough” is the yahoo who was behind the Swift Boat Veterans slime group that attacked John Kerry so successfully in 2004.  While some of us on the Right denounced them at the time, most sat by and figured the ends justified the means.

At this point, I’d just be happy if the GOP can find leaders who rise above the Birther and Death Panels fray and put forth principled alternatives to the Obama-Reid-Pelosi programs.  Aside from continuing the status quo, what’s the Republican plan for solving the impending financial collapse of our health care system?  What’s the Republican vision of American security policy?  Does it envision continuing nation-building in every country where Islamist terrorists might live?  How do we pay down the national debt and get back on the road to fiscal sanity?

Ultimately, focusing on that might take the spotlight off the crazies.

A discussion that has been going on for a while among the tech bloggers and Twitterati is the idea that RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is dead.

A study published last October found that 78% of U.S. online adults did not use it and only 19% of those who didn’t had any interest in using it in the future.  Then again, as Paul Banas noted, “If I were to survey US consumers right after World War II on whether they think they would use a television, and for those who don’t, do they think they would in the future, I’d probably get roughly the same data back as Forrester got on RSS.” Indeed, recall Ken Olsen’s classic 1977 statement that “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.”

The more recent evolution of the debate is not so much about widespread adoption but that power users find RSS inefficient, preferring instead Twitter or various aggregators like Memeorandum or Techmeme.  Steve Gillmor proclaimed in May that “It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore.”

I haven’t been in Google Reader for months. Google Reader is the dominant RSS reader. I’ve done the math: Twitter 365 Google Reader 0. All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.

Of course, my friends use RSS, or they used to. Pretty much every blog has an RSS feed, and aggregators like TechMeme spider RSS feeds as well as the original pages on the sites. I’ve wired up TCIT, the Gillmor Gang feed, and my YouTube feed on my FriendFeed, but that’s FriendFeed using RSS, not me. I believe FriendFeed outputs RSS, but I don’t use it.

RSS changed the way we processed information, by turning search into push and content into people. Before RSS, I patrolled the Web for news. Information didn’t exist until I found it. RSS let me identify people likely to write interesting things, and soon I stopped looking and switched to receiving. In this world, partial feeds were irritating, taking me out of my new pristine think tank and back to the hunt and peck methodology. Once back on the site, the goal was to keep me there, or link to partner sites.

But, as Dave Winer retorted, it’s rather silly to proclaim the death of RSS while instead using technologies that rely on RSS!

Sam Diaz revived the argument this week saying “Once a big advocate for Google Reader, I have to admit that I haven’t logged in in weeks, maybe months.”

I catch headlines on Yahoo News and Google News. I have a pretty extensive lineup of browser bookmarks to take me to sites that I scan throughout the day. Techmeme is always in one of my browser tabs so I can keep a pulse on what others in my industry are talking about. And then there are Twitter and Facebook. I actually pick up a lot of interesting reading material from people I’m following on Twitter and some friends on Facebook, with some of it becoming fodder for blog posts here.

The truth of the matter is that RSS readers are a Web 1.0 tool, an aggregator of news headlines that never really caught on with the mainstream the way Twitter and Facebook have. According to a Forrester Research study about the reach of social technologies, only nine percent of U.S. online adults said they use an RSS feed monthly, down from 11 percent the year before. By contrast, 50 percent are visiting social networking sites, up from 34 percent last year and 39 percent are reading blogs, up from 37 percent a year ago.

Although, again, YahooNews, GoogleNews, and Techmeme all merely aggregate information pushed through RSS.  Proclaiming RSS dead because you’re using it downstream is rather like proclaiming television dead because you never watch it anymore — you just TiVo everything.

Further, as Patricio Robles observes, “RSS may not be as popular as Twitter or Facebook, but who says it has to be? Twitter and Facebook are great for content discovery; RSS is one of a number of tools that can be used for content aggregation. Comparing them is like comparing apples to oranges.”

Steve Rubel takes that to the next level: “Think RSS is dead? Think it’s too slow for the age of streams? Perhaps that’s true for news. But have you ever considered using Google Reader as a private database? In this screencast I will show you how I do just that.”

Which is pretty much how I’m using Google Reader these days.  There’s a ton of information out there and trying to tab through and skim every post on every blog and newspaper that I want to follow simply takes too much time and energy.   So I rely in various aggregators, aggregate my own content feeds via the Firefox Feedly plugin, keep an eye on Twitter, and use Google Reader as a research tool for fleshing out posts once I’ve come up with ideas.

This morning, Jeff Jarvis passed along Peter Daou’s tweet “CBS Early Show Prioritizes Jon & Kate Over Don Hewitt’s Death,” which linked this Consider This News video, itself prefaced “This speaks volumes about the state of TV news”

My tweeted retort: “Old man dying yesterday not news?”

Steven Taylor has some more detailed thoughts, notably that morning news shows have never been the height of journalism and that TV news as infotainment is something that Hewitt himself ushered in with “60 Minutes.” Quite so.

But my half-baked reply, constrained with the 140 character limits of the medium while re-tweeting the original, is also worth exploring a bit further.

Don Hewitt was a giant in the industry and his death is both notable and as good a time as any to reflect back on his accomplishments.  Which, one presumes, CBS went on to do later in the show.

But his passing did not constitute news by this morning.   I knew about it rather early yesterday morning. Josh Marshall posted about it at 11:33, I got a CNN email alert at 11:41, and I’m rather sure I saw it before that via Twitter.  Anyone who watches television news before the crack of dawn, then, likely already knew of Hewitt’s passing.

Further, Hewitt was 86 years old and had pancreatic cancer.  His passing was hardly the shock of, say, Michael Jackson dropping dead at 50.

As to Jon and Kate and their sordid mess, I couldn’t care less.  But I’m not the target audience for the CBS Early Show, either.

A Vogue cover model of whom I’d never previously heard and does not conform to my preconceptions of what a Vogue cover model looks like has won a lawsuit against Google over an anonymous former blogger who called her names on the Internet.

A Vogue cover girl has won a precedent-setting court battle to unmask an anonymous blogger who called her a “skank” on the internet.

In a case with potentially far-reaching repercussions, Liskula Cohen sought the identity of the blogger who maligned her on the Skanks in NYC blog so that she could sue him or her for defamation.  A Manhattan supreme court judge ruled that she was entitled to the information and ordered Google, which ran the offending blog, to turn it over.

Ms Cohen, a tall, Canadian blonde who has modelled for Giorgio Armani and Versace, went to court after reading the wounding anonymous comments on Google’s Blogger.com.  “I would have to say the first-place award for ‘Skankiest in NYC’ would have to go to Liskula Gentile Cohen,” the blogger “Anonymous” wrote in one posting. The blog, since removed, ridiculed the former Australian Vogue covergirl as a “40-something” who “may have been hot 10 years ago”, when she was actually 36.

Justice Joan Madden rejected the blogger’s claim that the blogs “serve as a modern-day forum for conveying personal opinions, including invective and ranting”, and should not be treated as factual assertions.

The model was looking forward last night to discovering the identity of the alleged acquaintance who insulted her. “Everybody is waiting to see who this coward is,” Steven Wagner, her lawyer, said.

While I absolutely believe that bloggers should be held just as liable as anyone else for defamation — even if that requires forcing the disclousure of their identity to the alleged victim — it’s hard to see how voicing the opinion that someone is the “skankiest in NYC” even comes close to defamation.  There is no factual assertion being made, given that there would seem to be no universal standard of measurement for such condition.

A second report at the NY Post (via Tom Maguire) however, reveals something that might rise to the level of defamation:

A Manhattan judge ruled yesterday that a blogger can’t hide behind a web of anonymity while flinging the ugly words “skank” and “ho” at somebody online.

The sternly worded ruling orders Google to give up the identity of an anonymous blogger-assailant who inexplicably devoted an entire blog — titled “Skanks in NYC” — to maligning beautiful blond model Liskula Cohen.  [Apparently the view of reporter Laura Italiano, who editorializes throughout. - ed]

Once she learns her attacker’s name — possibly as early as today — the model can serve the anonymous blogger with a defamation lawsuit.

The blog, which was posted through Google’s “Blogger.com” subsidiary last year, had included sexy fashion shots of Cohen with captions using the words “skank,” “ho” and “whoring.”

The thrust of the blog is that [Cohen] is a sexually promiscuous woman,” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden wrote in her decision. That included references to Cohen as “whoring” and “ready to engage in oral sexual activity.”  As such, the international cover girl is entitled to insist in a defamation lawsuit that the blogger’s statements are false and damaging — and to get from Google the blogger’s name she needs in order to do so, the judge ruled.

Cohen’s lawyer, Steven Wagner, said he hopes the decision sends a message to bloggers, Twitterers, and whoever else would use the anonymity of the Internet for cowardly defamations. ”The rules for defamation on the Web — for actual reality as well as virtual reality — are the same,” Wagner said. “The Internet is not a free-for-all.”

Well, it pretty much has been for going on two decades now.  But, again, I agree that people should be held liable for their actions on the Web. Indeed, spreading false rumors on the Web is far more damaging than simply stating them in words somewhere, given the much larger audience.

I’m not sure what the rules of discovery are in such cases. Presumably, the blogger isn’t entitled to a fishing expedition through Cohen’s sex life to see whether there is any truth to the descriptors he applied.

One imagines that the burden here is high, though.  The word “whore” has been transformed in the popular culture into a meaning well beyond traditional prostitution.  And I’m not sure that insinuating that an adult engages in oral sex with other adults, especially of the opposite sex, can even still be considered defamatory.

UPDATE:  My wife informs me that the identity of the blogger has already been revealed.  Gawker (Warning: NSFW) has a good roundup, including a link to a new story at NY Post.

The anonymous cyber-bully who harassed and belittled Manhattan model Liskula Cohen with insulting terms like “skank,” “ho” and “old hag” on a mean-spirited blog was a female acquaintance of hers.

[...]

The model said she’s still mystified about why the woman went after her so viciously. “I have no idea. She doesn’t have a lot going on and she’s jealous,” she said. “It’s the only logical explanation.”

[...]

She “was an irrelevant person” whom she’d bump into at events and restaurants around town, Cohen said. “She was always around.”

Cohen said they exchanged pleasantries when she called her on Tuesday night. Then Cohen confronted her when the woman asked, “How are you?” “I’m sure you know exactly how I am right now,” Cohen told her — and then astonished the backstabber by apologizing to her. She told her, “If I’ve ever done anything to you to actually deserve this, then I’m really very sorry.”

The stammering blogger responded, “We shouldn’t be talking . . . We should talk with the lawyers.” Cohen stopped her in her tracks. “I said, ‘No more lawyers. It’s OK. I said I forgive you. It doesn’t matter anymore,’ ” Cohen told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Except that she’s still suing for defamation.

Steve Rubel offers “Three Tips for Managing the Stream Before it Manages You.” Between email, blog feeds, Twitter, Facebook, and various other applications out there, we’ve all got too much information to contend with. Those of us in the information business are even more overwhelmed because we both need to follow more things and figure out how to aggregate it usefully.

The first and last tips — relying on one or two aggregators and reading saved materials on your portable devices while stuck waiting — are things I try to do now, although not all that successfully or consistently. The second, though, is really intriguing:

Don’t Subscribe and Read, Archive, Search and Skim

In the personal productivity world,  some eschew sorting documents and emails in folders in favor of just throwing them into an archive where they can be easily searched later. The same approach works well for managing your stream.

Use a tool like Google Reader to subscribe to lots of content, including say all your friends on Twitter. However, view it as a personal, searchable database rather than another collection bucket you have to read and clear.

I do in fact use Google Reader to search for posts of bloggers I trust when I’m doing a roundup-style post.  And I frequently “mark all as read” to avoid a sense that I have hundreds more posts that I must get through.

At the same time, though, skimming blog posts and reading clicked links is one of the major ways in which I get ideas for posts.   I noted that in Steve’s comments and he responded, “I divide my feeds up. Some I read for that same purpose, others I archive and search.”

I’ve done that with Twitter, creating a group in TweetDeck for the people whose tweets I really want to read to distinguish those whom I merely follow out of courtesy.  I’ve divided most of my blog feeds in Google Reader into folders (Must Read, Europe, Security, Business, Sports, Blogging and Tech, etc.) but haven’t actually gotten into the habit of using them vice just starting with the most recent and skimming down until I get bored.

Image via Zee on TheNextWeb.com

Norm Geras points us to LAT book editor David Ulin’s essay lamenting the “lost art of reading,” specifically the difficulty in concentrating well and long enough to read books.   Norm says it’s easy:  “You get a book. You switch off various things. If it helps, you close the door. Then you sit down and read. In due course, our man tells us, he does get there. But my, the difficulty. ”

Snark aside, however, Ulin has some good points.

Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves. [...]  Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.

When I was in graduate school 15-odd years ago — before the World Wide Web as we know it, much less Web 2.0, existed — my two major IR professors were having one of those internecine debates that happen in academe.  The more senior prof wrote books at a prodigious pace and eschewed articles, especially those which crunched data, as a waste of time.  The younger argued that most books were OBE by the time they came out and that they tended to belabor a point that could be easily made in an article.  The Web/book argument is essentially a continuation of that debate.

I read non-fiction almost exclusively and have gone from being a book person to an article person.  The efficiency of getting 85 percent of the point in eight pages that I would get in 300 pages has made it so that I seldom read books cover-to-cover.  Even very fine books, such as David Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerilla, are hard to finish because my inner editor quickly says “yeah, yeah — you’ve already said that in a slightly different way in the previous chapter.”  To be sure, each new case study reveals additional nuances.  But everything beyond the introductory chapter presents a very high work to reward ratio.

Further, the combination of the Internet and the DVR means that we’ve come to expect the ability to access only the information we want and the quickly skip over that which doesn’t interest us.  It’s hard to do that with books.

This point, later in the piece, is especially salient to me:

For many years, I have read, like E.I. Lonoff in Philip Roth’s “The Ghost Writer,” primarily at night — a few hours every evening once my wife and kids have gone to bed. These days, however, after spending hours reading e-mails and fielding phone calls in the office, tracking stories across countless websites, I find it difficult to quiet down. I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail, drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning to the page. Or I want to do these things but don’t. I force myself to remain still, to follow whatever I’m reading until the inevitable moment I give myself over to the flow. Eventually I get there, but some nights it takes 20 pages to settle down. What I’m struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it’s mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age.

For me, it’s slightly different.  Yes, there is email and Twitter and YahooNews and whatnot to distract.  More importantly, though, is that after spending fourteen hours or so reading, analyzing, and writing in front of a computer screen, reading for pleasure is too much like work.  My bedtime reading now consists of exceedingly light fare like Sports Illustrated or Esquire.

While most people don’t write for a living, the computerization of the office means more than ever spend a large part of their workday reading and writing.  That’s significant to this discussion.  When most toiled on their feet all day, sitting down with a book provided a wonderful change of pace.  Nowadays, it’s same old, same old.

Photo by Flickr user ranoush under Creative Commons license.

Norm Geras (who just celebrated his 6th blogging anniversary) points us to this hilariously annoying SPIEGEL interview with Wired editor Chris Anderson:

SPIEGEL: Mr. Anderson, let’s talk about the future of journalism.

Anderson: This is going to be a very annoying interview. I don’t use the word journalism.

SPIEGEL: Okay, how about newspapers? They are in deep trouble both in the United States and worldwide.

Anderson: Sorry, I don’t use the word media. I don’t use the word news. I don’t think that those words mean anything anymore. They defined publishing in the 20th century. Today, they are a barrier. They are standing in our way, like a horseless carriage.

SPIEGEL: Which other words would you use?

Anderson: There are no other words. We’re in one of those strange eras where the words of the last century don’t have meaning. What does news mean to you, when the vast majority of news is created by amateurs? Is news coming from a newspaper, or a news group or a friend? I just cannot come up with a definition for those words. Here at Wired, we stopped using them.

Anderson compounds his obnoxiousness, as Norm points out, by going on “to use all of the words ‘media’, ‘news’, ‘newspapers’ and ‘journalists.’”  Naturally.

Slightly apropos of the above, it occurred to me recently that the thesis of Anderson’s new book, Free, was stated more than thirty years ago by Ted Nugent:

Well I don’t know where they come from
But they sure do come
I hope they comin’ for me
And I don’t know how they do it
But they sure do it good
I hope they doin’ it for free

I’m guessing Nugent isn’t getting any royalties, however.

Word cloud via Alfred Hermida

David Keene and the American Conservative Union offered to take sides in an NLRB dispute between rivals UPS and FedEx based on who would pay to play. FedEx refused to pay the bribe of $2 to $3 million, so ACU supported UPS. FedEx went public, turning over the letter outlining ACU’s extortion request to POLITICO’s Mike Allen.

Doubters can and should read the letter themselves.  Allen’s summary, though, is fair:

The letter exposes the practice by some political interest groups of taking stands not for reasons of pure principle, as their members and supporters might assume, but also in part because a sponsor is paying big money.

In the three-page letter asking for money on June 30, the conservative group backed FedEx. After FedEx says it rejected the offer, Keene signed onto a two-page July 15 letter backing UPS.

[...]

Just two weeks earlier, ACU had offered its endorsement to FedEx, saying in a letter to the company: “We stand with FedEx in opposition to this legislation.”

But there was a catch — an expensive one. ACU asked FedEx to pay as much as $3.4 million for e-mail and other services for “an aggressive grass-roots campaign to stop the legislation in the Senate.”

“For the activist contact portion of the plan, we will contact over 150,000 people per state multiple times at a cost of $1.39 per name or $2,147,550 to implement the entire program,” the letter says. “If we incorporate the targeted, senator-personalized radio effort into the plan, you can figure an additional $125,000 on average, per state” for an estimated 10 states. The total would be $3,397,550.”

I read this quickly earlier this morning, following a link from Taegan Goddard, but ultimately wasn’t sure what to make of it because I glossed over the nature of the difference in the FedEx and UPS position.

If ACU were simply offering to throw its weight and lobbying effort behind FedEx and asking that FedEx pay the freight, that wouldn’t be a big deal.  That’s how a lot of non-profits work:  Getting major corporations to pay to get their name on something the non-profit wanted to do, anyway.   And FedEx’ position in the dispute is consistent with ACU’s alleged principles:

FedEx currently has one U.S. union contract for its entire express business. Under a change passed by the House and awaiting action in the Senate, FedEx — like UPS — would have to negotiate union contracts for individual locations, which FedEx claims would make it much more difficult to promise worldwide regularity for deliveries.

I elided that part of the article on my initial read but got it figured out after a brief Twitter dialog with Teresa Kopec and Brian Faughnan.

UPS’ position is mere rent-seeking:  Trying to get government to impose a cost it already bears on a competitor.  For ACU to side with UPS would be outrageous enough; to do so after having been rebuffed on a pay-for-play bid is scandalous.  (George Will noted that yesterday in a column written before this scandal broke, but I hadn’t read that until after coming to the conclusion independently.)

It should be noted that ACU is claiming that, despite his use of their logo in the second letter, Keene was acting as an individual.  If so, Keene should be ousted at once if ACU is to retain even a shred of credibility. (Dan Riehl, who’s to my right on most issues, agrees.)

If not, however, ACU’s tax-exempt status should be pulled and conservatives should cease supporting it immediately.

UPDATE: An emailed ACU press release signed by Executive VP Dennis Whitfield is even more vehement:

Mr. David Keene’s name was on a letter prepared by another organization.  This was a personal decision on his part and he was not representing ACU at the time.  No permission was given by ACU, and no logo was provided by ACU, to the organization who issued the letter in question.

ACU’s policy position on this issue has not changed and it will not change.

ACU’s positions on important policy issues have never been for sale.

ACU does not support moving businesses under the jurisdiction of the NLRB or expanding the federal government’s power, reach or authority under the NLRB.

Keene, who has been its chairman since 1984, is the ACU from the standpoint of many.  If he’s not fired, it really doesn’t matter.

About right:

PHD Comics: Great Tweets of Science

Julian Sanchez notes that the rise of Twitter as a hot tool for political communication has killed Twitter the social networking service.

After resisting for a while, I finally signed up for Twitter a little over a year ago because it became clear that it was no longer socially optional: My friends were coordinating via Twitter rather than sending around e-mails about when and where to grab a few drinks or see a movie. In recent months, as Twitter has exploded as a medium for other kinds of communication, I notice that I seem to be using it less for that original coordinating feature. And a moment of reflection suggests why. Even if you protect your feed, and maintain separate social and professional accounts, there are going to be people in your social world from whom you can’t politely refuse a follow request. Now, the first 20 or so people I had following me on Twitter were more or less coextensive with the group of people I most often see socially, and basically all people I’m perfectly happy to have show up if I announce that I’m out for a beer at such-and-such a place. But let’s face it, there are really only so many friends and acquaintances most of us feel that way about, and so as a service like this is more widely adopted, there are invariably more and more people on that follow list who, while you may like them well enough, you don’t necessarily want to implicitly invite along every time you make plans.

Indeed, I’ve seen prominent Twitterati post tweets complaining about people they’re following cluttering their stream with the details of their personal lives.  That this was the whole point of the service seems to have escaped them.

Then again, I signed up for Twitter a couple years ago and quickly got bored with it because it was mostly banal social interaction. I now find it marginally useful as an information gathering and networking source, albeit one with a higher noise to signal ratio than I’d prefer.

Twitter, the social media tool that’s supposed to revolutionize politics, save the Republican Party, and bring freedom to Iran is, yet again, down.

Twitter.com is virtually useless but, because the service is open source, dozens of applications have sprung up to make it practical to actually use Twitter.  But these apps, too, continually fail because of limitations brought on by something called API, which Twitter apparently can’t produce enough of.

If I could only use my phone or check and send email sporadically, I’d be looking for new service providers.  If Twitter can’t solve its problems, I suspect people will flee for a service that can manage to operate.

Of course, since nobody can seem to figure out Twitter’s business model, that may be just as well.