Tag Archives: dictator

Twitter: The Technology Everyone Uses Yet So Many People Hate

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Recently, I’ve gotten into the whole Twitter thing. Before that, I was strictly a blog guy who swore he would never really get into Twitter. But a few years back, I opened up a Twitter account because I’ve always been one of those “well, everyone else is doing it, so I should, too” kind of guys. Like most people who join Twitter, I followed a few people, waited for the throngs to follow me, realized no one was going to follow me and then just stopped using it. I figured, like so many other people do, that it obviously doesn’t work because it wasn’t working for me.

Yet, since then, a few nations, including Egypt, collapsed because of the use of Twitter. No matter how I tried to ignore the story, it was HUGE, and the fact that this strange technology was used to bring down a powerful dictator really was hard to pretend it wasn’t this massively large elephant in the corner, practically taking up the whole room. So, recently, I decided I would go back into the technology to see if maybe I might have been missing something.

What I have discovered is that there’s a lot of very interesting information that gets shared on Twitter, but you have to be patient to realize it. If you go into the game with the thought that you’re going to get instant satisfaction or quick results, you don’t understand Twitter. And I didn’t understand it. Now that I’ve started to follow a bunch of people, I’m starting to realize that it’s a pretty interesting way to view the world. Therefore, I’ve decided to give some advice to those of you who may be thinking about getting into it yourself.

1. Follow people you are really interested in knowing more about. This is really important because one of the mistakes I was making was trying to “sell” me and then getting people to start following me. It rarely happens. It actually looks desperate, and who wants to follow someone who is the equivalent of the loser in a bar trying to pick up on anything that walks in? No one does. However, what I did start to discover is that because I’m a writer, and I’m interested in all things writing, I’m going to find a lot of interesting people to follow who actually might have useful information. You also quickly discover who is just there to use it as a marketing tool and who is there to use it as a communication vehicle. Some writing Twitterers I followed, like Publisher’s Weekly, have interesting information they share with their followers. Others, which I won’t name cause this isn’t really a “diss” kind of article, weren’t all that helpful and turned out to be really annoying more than anything else. The hardest thing I found myself having to do was unfollow someone, but sometimes, you need to just because the amount of spam that someone clutters up your channel with can be overwhelming, especially when it’s not helpful.

2. Some people are on Twitter because their egos need to be checked. A lot of celebrity Twitterers are like that, and it’s unfortunate. But it also tells you a little more about them and lets you realize that you’re probably better off avoiding them. One person I started following in the beginning was Felicia Day, who is the creator of the series The Guild. She doesn’t Twit that often, but when she does, it’s usually interesting and worth following. About half of what she has to say is interesting. Mindy Kaling, however, who is the girl who plays the Indian girl on The Office, I thought would be interesting and funny to follow. Personally, she’s not. I found her attempts at humor to be really attempts to try too hard to be cool, and pretty soon I’m probably going to unfollow her. An interesting celebrity I’ve been following has been Wil Wheaton, who is the man who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I haven’t come to a decision on him so far, as I’m suspecting he’s still looking for validation, as I noticed when some of the senior members of the Star Trek franchise were twittering and left him out, and he actually made a bit of an appeal last night, practically begging for attention. He’s an interesting case because he tends to float between a Felicia Day (interesting to follow) and Mindy Kaling (not worth the time). So the jury’s still out on him. However, it should be pointed out that if you’re hoping to be followed by a celebrity, or even have one actually pay attention to anything you write in response, it rarely happens. I used some of my best funny material in responses to Felicia Day, and I was pretty much ignored, which is probably no different than it would have been had I met her in public. Unfortunately, the lowly among us remain lowly.

3. If your goal is lots of marketing potential, then yes Twitter is a great tool to use, but you’re going to have to put in a lot of work and a lot of time before it ever pays off. If you spam your messages into the channel, people will dump you in a heartbeat, which means you have to use the technology to actually communicate. And like most avenues of communication, if you’re only projecting and not listening, people stop listening to you. Granted, the celebrities still get attention because they’re celebrities, but the average person, like me, is only really going to get attention as long as he has something interesting to say. So if you’re just there to build followers, you’re going to have a hard time unless you can provide something interesting to say. I started off with very few followers, and slowly, I’m building a bit of a following, but I’m not fooling myself into believing I’ve somehow tapped into the Duane-amaniacs. Therefore, I have to make sure that what I have to say is as interesting to me as it is to them, kind of like regular writing is. People avoid spam and really want something interesting to read. Otherwise, why follow you?

4. The social implications of Twitter are huge and have already proven themselves to be excellent. Like Egypt discovered, Twitter gives the average person a voice he or she might never have had before. When people were looking for information about Egypt and the revolution, well, that was an audience just waiting to hear what had to be said. Twitter was perfect for that. What happens to that Twitter audience now is probably even more interesting, but I doubt too many people will study that as researchers always look for that pivotal event, not the continued ramifications of a pivotal event that has run through its play in the media.

5. The complainers and the critics. There was an interesting article today on CNN’s site about the 5 ways Twitter changed how we communicate. What was even more interesting were the comments from the readers. Most of them were from what I like to call the old grandfather who lives in the house that no kid likes to go near, constantly yelling, “damn kids, get off my lawn!” Rather than read the article and be interested in the new technology, the haters showed up and posted responses like Shawn777: “Twitter? I don’t even use that crap” and Guest119 ‘s “200 years from now, provided humanity doesn’t blow itself up with nukes, Twitter will not even be a footnote in tech history.” My personal spin on this is that the majority of the complainers are people who tried it out on a weekend, didn’t get a million followers and then figured it was a dead technology.

6. What is the future of Twitter? Who knows? Certainly not me. I’m pretty late getting on the bandwagon as it is anyway. I do know that somewhere down the line another technology will replace it and be the next “in” thing. I’ll probably be late for that one, too. But right now, Twitter is serving as an interesting way to communicate, and as a writer and a communications professor, it’s hard for me to continue to ignore it.

For the record, if interested, follow me on twitter at DuaneGundrum.

What a No-Fly Zone Really Means

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I really shouldn’t have to write this post, but it bothers me that so many people don’t understand what it really means when they advocated for a no-fly zone over Libya. It’s like we’re playing some kind of video game where America (or the west) is so powerful that we have all of the cheat codes enacted, and there’s no way anything bad can happen. Well, we just declared war without actually declaring war again, so in case anyone thinks this is something less than that, you’re wrong. We’re now at war with Libya for as long as it takes to scare a dictator into surrendering, backing down or something equally improbable. In reality, we’re demanding he step down, which then means he either escape to another country that might take him, hope his own people won’t kill him or put him on trial, or that some other equally undesirable event doesn’t befall him. In other words, we’re asking someone to take a path of worse consequences than the one he’s actually in right now. We did the same thing to Saddam Hussein, who held out until we had to put troops on the ground, decimate his country, kill LOTS of his own people, and then finally capture him hiding out in a cellar somewhere, hoping he might not be caught.

Right now, the French have attacked with aircraft. It’s possible one plane has already been shot down. Details are hard to come by this early in the war. But they have engaged the Libyans on the ground.

Which means people are already starting to die. So, no amount of posturing, pretending or ignorance gets us away from the fact that our entrance into this war means people will now die. Yes, people were dying before, but we’re going to be killing people ourselves now. We don’t get to paint over that with new paint and then put up a new car fragrance ornament to hide the smell. We’re killing people now. And we may lose some of our own. This is war.

I’m not against a war. I just want people to know and understand that they’re in one now. Sure, we’ll all go back to the mall on the weekend and buy videogames, dresses and other crap, but it doesn’t disguise the fact that we have aircraft in the air right now bombing people we don’t know anything about, and probably never will, especially since they will be dead soon. Hopefully, it won’t be as bad as some previous wars, and hopefully the survivors won’t grow up to hate anyone from the west, planning our deaths decades from now while we’re celebrating  a holiday or just going about our usual business.

This is war. It sucks. Don’t let anyone try to pretend it’s anything more pleasant.

But they will. Because that’s what spin doctors do with these sorts of subjects. Just hope that we don’t end up having to send soldiers over there to “finish what we started”  because someone in power who will never see combat can’t see any other way around the “dilemma”. War sucks, and it rarely turns out the way you plan, intended, or desired.

Now, back to American Idol and whatever we were doing before I so rudely interrupted with reality.

I’m Curious…Is America Over?

Economics, Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

us flag  

Towards the end of the Roman Empire, after centuries of power, prestige and prosperity, the great nation crumbled inwards as its inability to acclimate to new events and changes finally led to an eventual collapse. Historians often point at the Visigoths and other non-melting immigrants to the empire that finally brought about Rome’s demise, but it may be possible that the sacking of Rome was more a symptom than a cause of it undoing, as it had probably seen its end on the horizon for at least a century before it realized things were as dire as they became.

Which leaves one to wonder if there had been a number of people who saw it coming but just kept hoping that things would last long enough for their own retirements, the ends of their own mortality and beliefs that it would last just long enough for their children to escape the eventual destruction that was sure to come. Somewhere, at some point, there had to be a number of people watching the horizon, realizing that the end was near, suspecting that it was closer than they were seeing through their focus on the distance.

Which then brings me to today, to looking at our own civilization, our own society and the wonderment at whether or not the Visigoths are already within our borders.

For years now, we have been struggling with cyclical recessions that seem worse some decades than others, yet we continue to tell ourselves that things are still great, that we are still the great empire that we once were. We are Americans, and we see ourselves as the successors of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, having lived through the various vicissitudes of struggles, always emerging with the belief that we are better for the efforts of our past, kind of like a version of the “if it doesn’t kill you, it only makes you stronger”.

Yet, I’m left wondering if we are still the same country that stood up to the British monarchy in the 18th century and then again at the dawn of the 19th century. Are we still the people who rushed to defend Europe during the first and second world wars, emerging as the victors, producing what we believed to be a shining beacon of freedom to the rest of the world to always aspire to. Or did something happen that changed us so that the next generations were no longer the same people who could pat themselves on the back as the nation of people who believed they were most definitely a part of an exceptionalism that we believed no other nation could achieve, yet every nation under the sun might one day aspire?

After the Vietnam War, the United States changed, or at least it may have metamorphasized into something different than what we believed it to be. Instead of that nation that others aspired to be, I start to wonder if we began to live on laurels of people who lived before us, convinced that the rest of the world would always see us as the exceptional Americans we believed ourselves to be, even though journeys to other nations would allow to us to see how little other people actually respected us and believed us to be that shining beacon we still kept adding to our resumes.

Over the years, we have supported vicious dictators who killed their own people, all in the name of feigning friendship to us. When a cold-blooded killer emerged to power in some far-off land, we turned our eye and accepted him because he offered us future economic incentives that we used to enrich already very wealthy people in our lands, even though the majority of the people in our country did not benefit as well. And then we sent soldiers to other lands to defend evil people whose only connection to us was they weren’t the “other guys” who we didn’t like a little more than the ones we were supporting. And now, a lot of those choices our forefathers, or our actual fathers and grandfathers, made have come back to haunt us over the years. Where we sided with bad people because they had fossil fuels we could use to propel ourselves to the local Wal Mart, the children of those who suffered no longer see us as the friends we used to believe we would be seen as because of our past dealings.

Which brings me to today. A lot of very wealthy people in this country seem to control the majority of the government, the economic power and even every decision we might make as a nation. The common person has little input, power or even a voice in this current era of government, which leaves me to wonder if all of our efforts led us to create a dynasty of misplaced power that is only now starting to become cognizant of the dangers that lie in the path before us.

Essentially, we have a nation where those who hold the strings of power have little to no connection to the majority of the people who have to live in that paradigm of a society. The last election should have actually been a wake-up call to those holding the reigns of power, but instead voices of complaint have managed to yield no response from those who are now being tasked to make some kind of comment. We have a nation of leaders who claim to represent large segments of people with whom they have never communicated, and yet believe themselves to be worthy of such power.

As was pointed out previously, there had to be Romans at one point who realized there was something on the horizon yet coming closer to the protection of the front gates. Is that repeating itself today, but we’re reacting the same, partying in the chambers of the Roman Senate until the Visigoths finally overthrow us, slaughtering us in our sleep because we never even realized there was a problem in our midst?

All I can hope is that I retire or reach the end of my coil of mortality before it happens. Some may not be so lucky.

What it All Comes Down to

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I guess it’s time for another update on what’s going on, what’s on my mind, and where I think things are going.

1. My Readership. I suspect I really don’t have anyone reading this blog (my main one). It gets printed also on Open Salon, which might grant me a few readers there, but even there it’s a crap shoot as to whether or not anyone actually reads (or cares about) anything I have to say. I also import my blogs to my Facebook profile, and even though I have a bunch of “friends” there, I suspect practically no one reads anything I have to say there either.

It’s a real problem for a writer who wants to be taken seriously when no one reads anything he has to say. It gets really frustrating. I mean, Snooki can write a book and it becomes a bestseller based on her outrageous behavior alone, but a consistent writer generally has to kill someone in order to get anyone to read his stuff. And they wonder why so many literary types kill themselves before they ever become famous, often discovered after they blew their brains out over the frustration of trying to actually make it as a writer or an artist.

This means when I post my blog, I get tons of traffic, but I suspect it’s a bunch of bots that are trying to get people to buy their shit rather than actual people reading my blog. My spam filter logs dozens of spam messages a day, which are all the type that say something like: “Read your posting, and I completely agree with you. You should try out this new version of sex medication which can be found at….” Yeah, it gets really annoying and frustrating.

But just because I suspect one of my stuffed animals might be reading this by tapping into my wifi at home, I’ll continue….

2. Snow. I really hate it. I do. I’m not from Michigan, even though I live here. I’m from California, and if I could afford to live there or could have ever found a job there, I would be there right now. I hate the snow. I hate the cold. I turned on my heater two nights ago for the first time (been using an electrical set of heaters all Winter long), and it was so much nicer than just being able to heat up one small room, and not very well either. Even though my electrical heater could get the room up to about 70 or so, it felt like it was 45. I’m now using my real heater, even though it’s expensive as hell. But I can’t take the cold any more. I really hate it here.

3. The Whole Nook vs. Kindle Debate. I’ve written a few articles on this because I bought both a Nook Color and the $189 Kindle 3G + Wifi. I’ve completely given up on the Nook. I had two subscriptions to magazines with the Nook Color (Consumer Reports and the New York Times Book Review). I gave up trying to get the Nook to download Consumer Reports. It would start to download and then just stop. I would check the wifi signal, and it would register as fine. After three days of trying to download a magazine I already paid for, I gave up, cancelled my subscriptions and I will never use the Nook again. Contest over. The Kindle wins. It might not look as nice, but at least I can actually get content onto it. The Nook Color is a piece of shit that should never have been sold to people. I will never recommend it to anyone ever again.

4. Egypt. Things are probably going to get really interesting now that Mubarak went on the air and basically told the protesters: “I hear you, but I just wanted to say go fuck yourselves. Have a nice day.” He’s decided that even though people are out in the streets risking their lives, he’s not leaving. The Army has now backed him, which means that one of two things are probably going to happen. They’ll crack down on the protesters, and this will be one of those sorry moments in human history that people try to forget when talking about how great a people we are, or the people are going to end up going the way of the French Revolution, overthrowing the government and killing Mubarak if he doesn’t escape out of the country first. If you’re a dictator, and you pretty much give the finger to your people when they demand you step down, you really don’t have a lot of options that can play out from that moment on. I mean, all sorts of things can happen, but right now, it’s going to be a slaughter of people unless a whole lot of people back down, and when people are backed into a corner, they usually strike back instead of back down. Unless they’re Americans. Then they either sue you or back down and say that they want to spend more time with their families.

5. Relationships. I don’t know anything about this subject. I’m not in one. I don’t recognize one when I am in one. I don’t even know what women are, although I see movies with them in it, so I do believe they might exist, although I can’t verify it in person.

6. Politics in the USA. We’re going to be heading towards another presidential election with no electable people in the Republican Party, a current president who has done nothing to be reelected, other than make arousing speeches that don’t translate to actual action, and a whole lot of self-important politicians who think they deserve to be the next leaders of the free (in theory, at least) world. Right now, the front runners for the Republican Party seem to be Sarah Palin (the joke that keeps giving), Newt Gingrich (a pompous airbag that comes installed as standard equipment), a just-announced “I’m seriously considering it” Donald Trump (another rich buffoon who thinks that being rich translates to leadership potential), and a bunch of other people no one knows, has ever heard of, or cares one iota about whatsoever. So, right now, I’m calling it a boring presidential election where we reelect Jimmy Carter, um, Obama.

7. The Academy Awards. A bunch of movies I didn’t see, don’t want to see, and don’t care about, are competing for the top honors this year. As you can guess, I’m holding my breath in anticipation.

8. SyFy Becomes Shark Attack Channel. I don’t know when this happened, but my favorite channel (I remember actually asking a television station provider if they carried the SyFy Channel and not caring about any others) went from being a station with original science fiction programming with shows like Stargate SG1. Atlantis, Warehouse 13, Eureka, Battlestar Galactica (then Caprica), some variation of Star Trek, and lots of that sort of stuff. Now, it’s Man-Killing Shark and really bizarre movie of the week crap that stars Erik Estrada as a small town sheriff who is fighting a shark that has grown feet and chases people on the beach, but Estrada, who plays Skip William, is afraid of sharks because a shark killed his family in a drive-by shooting in Compton. Okay, that’s not a real show, but it should be. Who stole my SyFy Channel?

9. The Federal Budget is Out of Control. Um, when has it ever not been? We’re approaching the debt ceiling in February, when they told us that if we didn’t do things right, we’d be hitting that debt ceiling by September. Um, it’s FEBRUARY and we’re already arguing for having to increase the limit. And this is the government that’s trying to FIX the economy? Really?

10. Facebook Went Public. I laughed my ass off when I heard it was going to happen. If ever there was a bubble corporation that has absolutely no value whatsoever being sold for so many billions, I couldn’t find one. At least GM makes cars. At least Microsoft puts out a browser or operating system every now and then. But what does Facebook actually produce? Your content. Your friends. Your information. In other words, not a damn thing. Yet, they’re bad boy of leadership is now a multi-billionaire, and they’ve been launched as a fake IPO (a real one wasn’t done because the SEC would have hit them with all sorts of legal injunctions, which should automatically tell everyone something’s not on the up and up, but even that doesn’t cause people to take notice). Yeah, I use Facebook, but it’s such a non-entity in the grand scheme of things and is really only as important as it is at any one moment, knowing that it can go the way of Myspace in a second. Or like AOL, which still tries to regain some importance. Or sadly, like Blockbuster, that sad commentary of a video rental store that hasn’t realized it was obsolete ten years ago.

11. Verizon’s iPhone. Finally. Not that I want an iPhone on Verizon, but now I don’t have to read 10,000 stories manufactured by CNN about how great it would be to have the iPhone on Verizon. It’s there now. Leave me alone and stop hyping the stupid thing on your news site. Nobody really cares, as we discovered when no one lined up at the early Verizon Store openings that day, letting the event come and go without much fanfare. Nobody really cared.

12. Groupon’s Super Bowl Ad. All of the people who are upset about this incident don’t want to even deal with the ramifications of what really happened. First off, they all got upset at the ad where Groupon poked fun at itself by using the controversy of China and Tibet as its canvas. Well, here’s what they’re not getting, won’t get, and especially won’t ever own up to. The humor went over their heads. Not that they didn’t get it. It went OVER their heads, meaning they had to be smart enough to realize what was going on. Consider the source. It came from the direction of Christopher Guest, who is well known for creating comedy that not everyone gets, mainly because it pokes fun at people who are on stage and represents entire groups of people who when they watch it don’t always realize they’re being seen as the morons they really are because they’re so locked into their own little worlds that they are incapable of realizing the rest of the world sees them as ridiculous. It was the exact same humor used with Groupon, and of course, the people watching it were not Christopher Guest fans. They were Super Bowl fans, which I’m going to go out on a limb here and say we’re talking about two completely different intellectual mindsets here. Fill in the blanks to figure out which one I’m probably insulting here. I don’t really care. I’m not selling ads. Those people just didn’t get it and went nuts against Groupon. Why am I not surprised? I’m also not surprised that no one else is either.

13. Lindsay Lohan’s Theft Charge. Okay, I’ll admit it. I enjoy reading about the many demises of Lindsay Lohan. I don’t know her, I’m not a fan, and I probably shouldn’t care. But it’s like watching a train wreck happen in front of me. I probably should call 911 for help, but I can’t stop watching. I don’t get the same trill out of Charlie Sheen. Nothing about him fascinates me, nor does his drama. Lohan’s, on the other hand, completely fascinates me because I keep thinking that ir probably won’t get any worse, and then it does. I don’t even think she stole the thing, but that’s not even what keeps me interested. What keeps me interested is how someone can take her fame and continue to destroy her career, her future and any support from the community that she might ever have. Just the other day, her legal team says that it’s not going to deal with the allegations in public; they’ll deal with it in court. Then the first day of the trial, Lohan tweets her whole ordeal to the public, trying it out in the public again, even though that’s exactly what they said they wouldn’t do.

I can’t stop watching.

14. Writing. I’m taking a break from my current novel and working on a screenplay. Then I’ll be working on a word text game app that I’m designing for the android platform. I realized recently that there aren’t a whole lot of word text games out there any more, and I think it would be fun to create a new one. I remember how fun they were to create back when we were first designing computer games for the early systems, before graphics took over the industry.

That’s really it for now. If you’re actually reading this, let me know. I’d really like to know that there are people actually reading the blog.