So enjoy this video as much as I did. And if you like basketball, you’ll probably also enjoy this one.

Welcome to the end of another decade in American history. That’s right. With all of this “change” stuff sweeping the country this year, perhaps you forgot that the 2010s will be sweeping in in just a few months’ time. Looking back at the 2000s, the “golden millennial decade” (I actually just made that term up), it’s painstakingly obvious that a whole lot has changed in this country in the past ten years. But probably nothing else has changed as dramatically as the media.

Think about it. When the 2000 presidential election came down to a great big mess in Florida, or when the 9/11 attacks happened, how did those stories spread across the country? You most likely heard about those on the TV news, or if you were a bit on the slower side, you read about them in the newspaper. Nouns such as “blogs,” “podcasts,” or “tweets” weren’t even a part of our consciousness yet. Now fast forward to this year. The January 2009 plane landing in the Hudson River first broke on Twitter. This summer, journalists who were barred from covering the controversy and protests following the Iranian elections turned to the internet and social networks to find news postings and online videos from people who were on the ground in Iran. Newspapers across the country are shutting down every week or converting into online-only reporting. People get their news not just from television, radio, and newspapers, but now they also get their news from blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, aggregated news sources via Google, and a whole host of other sources. Not only can they get their news whenever they want from wherever they are, but they now have the power to choose the news they’ll use, and even make it themselves.

“Traditional” news media has realized this, and has attempted to catch up to the trend by trying to get “hip” to this new social media realm, with CNN arguably leading the charge. In 2006, they introduced their “iReport” feature, inviting anyone to submit videos, photos, or just text that they considered newsworthy. CNN would then identify certain iReports that they deemed newsworthy (and claimed to have “vetted” for factual accuracy) to air on their network. Late in the 2008 presidential campaign, CNN also took the lead in broadening out to incorporating existing social networks as well, most notably Twitter, and to a lesser extent, YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace. These moves have definitely been popular, as CNN’s competitors have also hopped on board with their own iReport-equivalents, along with their own use of blogs and social networks. Many people, especially in the tech world (like in this article from Mashable) have praised the networks for adopting and pushing social media forward. But is this big move to social media really pushing journalism and freedom of speech forward? Or is it just using Web 2.0 as a fad to add entertainment value to the news? Or furthermore, is it trading actual, experienced, vetted journalism for cheap crowd-sourced anecdotes?

Now I’m certainly not one to criticize social media: I use it every day. I’ve been using Twitter since the beginning of 2007–back when it was still a thing when most people hadn’t even heard of before. Okay, I’m not as avid of a social networking user as some people are: I don’t spend hours poking friends of Facebook, I don’t make videos of myself on YouTube, I only follow 22 people on Twitter (because who’s crazy enough to be able to follow thousands of other people?), and I’ve never touched MySpace. But in the grander scheme of things, social media has exploded with the unintended side effect of revolutionizing what the First Amendment is all about.

Why do I say unintended? Well, look at the face that social networking put forth when it got started. Facebook was developed by a couple of college students who wanted a way to stay connected to their friends; but now, campaigns and organizations are using it to directly connect with their grassroots supporters. Twitter still presents you with the rhetorical question “What are you doing?” when it prompts you to right those famous tweets of 140 characters or fewer (THAT’S the grammatically correct way to say it), even though the tweeting community has come up with all kinds of uses for it, from marketing, to research, to back-and-forth messaging, to spurting random thoughts from your brain (my specialty), to actually sharing what you’re doing right now. In one of the most interesting examples, New York Times Tech Columnist David Pogue has published a book, The World According to Twitter, exclusively featuring responses to random questions that Pogue issued to his half million followers. Despite many of its obvious shortcomings, it’s clear that social networking has revolutionized and democratized the way we communicate.

But there is a major caveat to consider with social media: it is not a journalistic medium, but rather, a collection of people’s opinions. Journalism, on the other hand, is a profession with a number of core values, arguably the key value being the principle of objectivity. It is this principle which states that the journalist has a responsibility to the public to fairly and accurately present all sides of the story, and to set his personal biases aside. Journalism is about digging beneath the surface, verifying statements by one source with other sources, and questioning the authority. There’s a reason that American University still has an active School of Communication, and why it’s not going away anytime soon. Practically anyone can write a blog, make a podcast, or film a video these days; we don’t need to go to school to learn how to communicate anymore because the tools are right at our fingertips. But there are still core values to journalism that have to be learned, and that’s why journalists get paid the big bucks.

At least, that’s a very idealistic view of journalism, which in recent years, particularly on cable news channels, has largely sacrificed journalism for entertainment value, and introduced a significant amount of widely perceived bias, which has now become quite stereotypical for the networks. Fox News Channel is generally regarded as an extremely right-wing channel, and MSNBC is generally regarded as an increasingly left-wing channel. CNN remains generally regarded as being “in between,” but they’ve been adding so many gimmicks recently–from awkwardly-titled segments like “Just Sayin’” to magic touchscreens to holograms–that it seems that they’re more interested in entertaining special effects than reporting the news. And the way that they have embedded social networking into their news shows isn’t much better.

Let’s take a look at an example scenario from last June, after the murder of George Tiller (the abortion doctor). After covering the story, CNN anchor Don Lemon headed over to Twitter to see what the viewers were saying. Julia1970 said, “I think this is just awful. I don’t understand why people think its ok to kill grownups but not babies. I just don’t get it.” bugsact said, “Fighting for the life of children should not include killing a doctor. This kind of logic is crazy thinking.”
Okay, that’s great, and I’m sure that it’s a big ego boost for those tweeters who get to see their weird username on TV, and may get a few more followers in the process. But how does that really enhance the value of the news that I’m watching? Or as Jon Stewart pointed out on The Daily Show, “Whenever I’m troubled with the difficult moral question of abortion, I think to myself, ‘What would bugsact say?’”

Now I’m sure that some people will question my disapproval of the traditional media’s obsession with social networking. After all, isn’t this a way to give a voice to the general public? Doesn’t this break the barrier of having to have a whole bunch of equipment, people to work that equipment, and an FCC license in order to make your voice heard through the traditional media of television or radio? Don’t the declining ratings of television and radio, and the consistently-predicted death of newspapers mean that the internet is only going to grow as the means through which we get our news? Isn’t citizen journalism, as it’s commonly called, the future of journalism?

Maybe that is what the distant future holds. No one can really tell. But as for the immediate future, I reject this view. “Crowd-sourced journalism” would be better than “citizen journalism” as a means to describe how traditional media companies are currently using social networks. Individuals may be producing tweets or iReports on their own, but it’s still the media company that decides which of them hit the airwaves and which of them don’t. The media is still chief in establishing the national news agenda, reporting on the stories they want in the manner that they always have, and then cherry-picking comments from viewers via these social networks in order to get a sampling of public opinion, which often (particularly on the more niche issues) reflects the conclusion that the news story already made. The main difference is that in place of paying reporters to go to places to cover the news and get opinion from members of the public, they can now pull up an iReport and do the same thing for free.

But what about the future growth of social media? It’s true that the growth of Web 2.0 has definitely introduced some serious competition to traditional media, and has stolen a bit of “market share,” if you will, away from them. But contrary to what one would expect, making it so much easier for people to have instant access to information, and to just as easily be able to post information, actually does not lead us to a clearer understanding of our shared reality. We have actually seen the internet be used to help spread misinformation. In Farhad Manjoo’s book, True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, which I read this summer as assigned reading for AU (it was a great book though, in my opinion), he identifies a number of examples in which the net has been able to spread false facts. A clear example is the Swift Boat Veterans ad campaign that took place in 2004, planting what was later found to be completely false claims concerning John Kerry’s military conduct in Vietnam. There was no factual basis for their claims, yet they spread from a small internet site into a national TV ad campaign to the mainstream media to the national consciousness, and may have been a key component in costing John Kerry the presidency in 2004. He even shows the same fallacies on the left side of the aisle, identifying a number of people who posted “findings” on how the 2004 election was stolen from John Kerry within hours after the polls closed, and were even accepted by journalists such as then-New York Times columnist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Yet within a few months, nationally acclaimed scholars from major universities in the area of studying election procedures subsequently published studies proving that despite any possible misconduct in Florida or Ohio, any votes that could have been gained by Kerry would not at all have been enough for him to win the election. Therefore, it seems to me that if the future of journalism lies in social media, journalistic integrity will diminish, not expand.

But why does any of this matter? So what if the news media misrepresents the intent of social networking to add to the entertainment value of the news? It matters because, whether we realize it or not, the media affects all of us, either directly or indirectly. Even if we barely acknowledge the established media, what’s going on in our world still affects the conversations that we have with friends, right? It establishes the national conversation, and therefore direct impacts our country’s national policy. Unless you make the pilgrimage to your state capitol or to Congress every single day, then your view of our national politics, world events, or basically anything outside of the neighborhood where you live and work, is based on looking through the spectacles of the media. And when the media doesn’t do its job and uphold its journalistic integrity, it can lead our entire country astray. We saw this during the run-up to the war in Iraq, when the media failed to question the lies about there being weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Thousands of people would still be alive today had the media done their job then.

Now the media, like so many other parts of our lives and our world, is in a stage of significant and constant flux. It is critical for us to keep a very close eye on how the media operates and where it heads in the future so that we can protect not just our First Amendment right to freedom of speech, but the integrity of that freedom of speech as well.

What do a German campaign billboard ad, Russian dogs, flying chanting rabbis, a ram’s horn, and a jug band of Catholic priests have to do with each other? Well they’re all part of this “Tip of the Hat/Wag of the Finger” segment from last night’s The Colbert Report. Throw in the fact that Colbert messes up on more than one occasion, which is always hilarious.

This is a very cute and funny video made by students in South Pasadena, California. A play on a Woody Guthrie song, it’s a very great way to send the message about the proposed devastating cuts to public education here in California. Awesome job to whatever students put this together.

The thirty articles of the UDHR describe the following fights that each of us, as human beings, have. Here is an abridged summary:

1. We are all free and equal. We are all born free. We all have our own thoughts and ideas. We should all be treated in the same way.
2. Don’t discriminate. These rights belong to everybody, whatever our differences.
3. The right to life. We all have the right to life, and to live in freedom and safety.
4. Slavery – past and present. Nobody has any right to make us a slave. We cannot make anyone our slave.
5. Torture. Nobody has any right to hurt us or to torture us.
6. We all have the same right to use the law. I am a person just like you!
7. We are all protected by the law. The law is the same for everyone. It must treat us all fairly.
8. Fair treatment by fair courts. We can all ask for the law to help us when we are not treated fairly.
9. Unfair detainment. Nobody has the right to put us in prison without a good reason and keep us there, or to send us away from our country.
10. The right to trial. If we are put on trial this should be in public. The people who try us should not let anyone tell them what to do.
11. Innocent until proven guilty. Nobody should be blamed for doing something until it is proven. When people say we did a bad thing we have the right to show it is not true.
12. The right to privacy. Nobody should try to harm our good name. Nobody has the right to come into our home, open our letters or bother us or our family without a good reason.
13. Freedom to move. We all have the right to go where we want in our own country and to travel as we wish.
14. The right to asylum. If we are frightened of being badly treated in our own country, we all have the right to run away to another country to be safe.
15. The right to a nationality. We all have the right to belong to a country.
16. Marriage and family. Every grown-up has the right to marry and have a family if they want to. Men and women have the same rights when they are married, and when they are separated.
17. Your own things. Everyone has the right to own things or share them. Nobody should take our things from us without a good reason.
18. Freedom of thought. We all have the right to believe in what we want to believe, to have a religion, or to change it if we want.
19. Free to say what you want. We all have the right to make up our own minds, to think what we like, to say what we think, and to share our ideas with other people.
20. Meet where you like. We all have the right to meet our friends and to work together in peace to defend our rights. Nobody can make us join a group if we don’t want to.
21. The right to democracy. We all have the right to take part in the government of our country. Every grown-up should be allowed to choose their own leaders.
22. The right to social security. We all have the right to affordable housing, medicine, education, and child care, enough money to live on and medical help if we are ill or old.
23. Workers’ rights. Every grown-up has the right to do a job, to a fair wage for their work, and to join a trade union.
24. The right to play. We all have the right to rest from work and to relax.
25. A bed and some food. We all have the right to a good life. Mothers and children, people who are old, unemployed or disabled, and all people have the right to be cared for.
26. The right to education. Education is a right. Primary school should be free. We should learn about the United Nations and how to get on with others. Our parents can choose what we learn.
27. Culture and copyright. Copyright is a special law that protects one’s own artistic creations and writings; others cannot make copies without permission. We all have the right to our own way of life and to enjoy the good things that “art,” science and learning bring.
28. A free and fair world. There must be proper order so we can all enjoy rights and freedoms in our own country and all over the world.
29. Our responsibilities. We have a duty to other people, and we should protect their rights and freedoms.
30. Nobody can take away these rights and freedoms from us.

As we commemorate this anniversary, let us take the time to think about our rights, and about something that we can each do to help others attain these rights that we each deserve.

More info on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Wikipedia Article
Text of the Rights
Public Service Ads About Each Human Right

A worker died after being trampled and a woman miscarried when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart Friday morning, witnesses said.

The unidentified worker, employed as an overnight stock clerk, tried to hold back the unruly crowds just after the Valley Stream store opened at 5 a.m.

Witnesses said the surging throngs of shoppers knocked the man down. He fell and was stepped on. As he gasped for air, shoppers ran over and around him.

“He was bum-rushed by 200 people,” said Jimmy Overby, 43, a co-worker. “They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down too…I literally had to fight people off my back.”

Read the Full Article

How has our consumerist society gotten to the point where people go to stores at 5 AM to save a little bit of money on Chinese-imported goods and literally run on top of people, breaking down store doors and jumping over barricades to do so? Not only was this worker killed, but fellow officers and employees to tried to give him CPR were stepped on, and even when police tried to evacuate the store afterwards, the people refused to leave and kept shopping!

How cruel is our society to allow such an act to take place? We need to take a hard look at ourselves. Taking a worker’s life is no excuse for trying to save $20 on a TV. If this is what we can expect from ourselves, then this whole ritual of Black Friday sales needs to end. Now.

Or at the very least, try opening your doors at a decent time in the morning. And that’s coming from someone who wakes up at 5 AM practically everyday.

In all seriousness though, it’s obvious that this was an historic election, and if I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say that, I’d be rich enough to buy our country’s economy right now. This was the first time since 1964 that a Democrat won with more than 51% of the popular vote, and the first African-American to be elected president. But what I think is even more incredible is that Obama accomplished this with everything imaginable being thrown at him, from the Hillary Clinton campaign targeting him as being inexperienced (this accusation got funny later when Sarah Palin entered the race), to the McCain campaign trying to put up a figurehead “plumber” as being “representative” of Americans, and going strongly against Obama, to both campaigns playing the game of Obama being connected to controversial public figures such as Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers. And yet, you did not see the Obama campaign throwing this kind of mud back at the Clinton or McCain campaigns. In the past, attacks by the Republican smear machine have worked to tilt the election in their favor, but this time, the American public by-and-large ignored these senseless attacks and voted in an election where issues and policy mattered, not character flaws and gaffes.

But why in this election? The fact that our country is in an economic mess and still entangled in an unwinnable occupation in Iraq definitely has a lot to do with Obama’s success, but I think his success in the fact that for once, we finally got a different kind of Democratic campaign and a different kind of Democratic candidate. Most of the Democratic candidates we’ve had have been weasels, without the guts to get anything serious done or to take serious positions on anything. For the most part, our elections have been nothing more than a selection between the lesser of two evils–two rather uninspiring, weak candidates to choose from. Why else have the turnouts from the past few elections been so low, and the margins of victory so small (case in point: the 2000 election)? The major change that we saw in this election was that we saw a Democratic candidate who was strong, who had a strong stance on the issues that matter, who inspired many people, especially young people, to take democracy into their own hands and vote. We had a different kind of candidate and a different kind of campaign, one that promised the kind of change we need. And now, that candidate will be our president-elect in two months.

But for those who look at Obama’s election and proclaim that it marks an end of the legacy of racism and hatred in this country, you are sadly mistaken. If nothing else, this election has gone to shine more light on the bigotry and hatred that is still alive, albeit relatively undercover, in this country. In the aftermath of this election, our country has seen an increase in hate crimes and a massive increase in the purchasing of guns. I heard a report on the radio the other day that KKK membership has gone up–all this in response to the fact that we just elected a president who happens to have slightly darker skin color. And at the same time, national attention has turned in the past two weeks towards my home state of California in response to the unfortunate passage of Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriages in the states. We have not moved away from these 20th century ideas of people who are different than us being inferior to us, we have simply shifted the target from African American people to homosexual people. In what is probably the most ironic thing here, the media is saying that exit polls showed that 79% of African Americans that voted in this election voted in favor of Prop. 8. Probably Keith Olbermann said it best last week:

Like Keith, I don’t have much of a personal relationship with this issue. I know no one in my family who is gay, and I personally don’t have any tendencies towards either side of this issue. The whole idea of there being a “sanctity of marriage” is rather ridiculous in my eyes, because I don’t really sanctify marriage at all whatsoever. But it should be shameful that now, in the twenty-first century, we still choose to deny certain people equal rights simply because they are born with a different genetic trait than we are born with.

At the same time, however, I can’t help but find these anti-Prop 8 protesters somewhat behind schedule. Where were you people BEFORE November 4th? I saw lots of “Yes on Prop 8″ rallies all over my county during the weeks before the election, and only a small handful of individuals rallying against it–and my county overwhelmingly voted against 8. Maybe all of the folks who were against Prop 8 were just too busy before the election to do anything important about it, or maybe they just assumed that Prop 8 would fail for sure. But then, once it passed, they weren’t so damn busy anymore, and now over the past two weekends, we’ve seen huge protests across the state and across the country. Which is all fine and well except that THE THING ALREADY PASSED! WHERE WERE YOU??? So no, I don’t know what’s going to happen with this thing going forward, I just hope that someday in my lifetime, we’ll be at a point where we look back on this with disgrace, the way that we look back on the discriminating events of the 1960s with disgrace today.

This election has brought me a bittersweet victory, and it took a few days for me to feel it sink in. In two months, a group of seniors from my high school and I will travel to Washington, DC to witness history. On the 220th anniversary of when George Washington was first inaugurated, a black man, for the first time, will take his oath of office, and move into the White House, a house built by slaves.

“Oh the times, they are a-changin’…”

This election is without a doubt the most important election since 1932. It doesn’t take a partisan person to recognize that in these past years, our country has slid into the crapper–the vast majority of our country agrees. This is the most critical time for us to come together and decide which bridge we are going to cross, because if we don’t start seeing some real change in Washington, we might not make it to the next election in 2012.

I wish I could vote in this election, unfortunately, I don’t turn 18 for another eleven months. However, for all of you who are 18 and who have registered to vote, please don’t neglect to take some time tomorrow to cast your vote. It doesn’t matter whether or not you’re Democratic, Republican, or Independent, everyone has the responsibility to get out and have a say in the future of our country–that’s what a democracy is about. Many people, from soldiers to average everyday ordinary heroes, have given their lives to ensure that everyone, regardless of race, sex, creed, origin, color, or religion, has an equal right to vote for the leaders that represent them. We owe it to them to exercise the right that they gave to us.

I began my first blog four years ago prior to the election of 2004. My blog wouldn’t evolve into Webmacster87.info for a few months yet, but I opened my blog with a message about the importance of exercising the right to vote, and imploring the likely-nonexistent readers that I had to vote in the election. Now, four years later, the candidates are stronger, the lines will be longer, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Please take the time to go vote and encourage everyone you know to do so. Yes, the lines may be long or the machines may be quirky, but please make the commitment to exercise your democratic rights tomorrow. The future of our country depends on it. If you don’t vote, you don’t count.

I’m working at the polls again tomorrow, and I’ll be back on here on Wednesday with my responses to the election results. Hopefully we will have more solid results on Wednesday than we had in 2000 (knock on wood).

Anyway, if you’re interested, here’s links to each of the articles that I posted last week, which gives you an idea of what I was busy with, as well why I only blog about politics on my own blog once in a blue moon. It’s exhausting to do it full-time.

Monday, September 22
What is our Problem with Taxes?
Seven Modest Proposals for President Obama

Tuesday, September 23
McCain-Palin Maybe Not Suited for the White House… Says the Media?

Wednesday, September 24
GOP Campaign Tries to Get VP Debate Postponed
McCain Hides Back in Washington, Wants to Cancel Friday’s Debate
A Look at the Candidates You WON’T See During the Debates

Thursday, September 25
Letterman Responds to John McCain’s Campaign Suspension
Was McCain’s “suspension” Just an Attention-Getting Joke?

Friday, September 26
Jon Stewart’s Birdseye View of our Economy’s “Dive of Death”
Is Palin Losing It?
Open Thread: First Presidential Debate

Saturday-Sunday, September 27-28
The Candidates Take Da Bait, Round 1
Tying Up Loose Ends

Now that that’s over with, I’m hoping to start getting a bit more regular with my own blog here. Stay tuned…