twitter Archive

Filling the 60 minutes of Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D List is no easy task. For each episode, you need a story, access to interesting people, and a few staged events where you can acquire tasty video able to overcome the short attention span of viewers who move along a 200-channel universe with a touch of the remote.

This week, the Griffin show is acquiring raw video for an episode featuring Griffin as “lobbyist for a day.” She’s lobbying to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT). But if there ever was an example of “I just play one on TV,” it’s Kathy Griffin as lobbyist.

Enter Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the DC LGBT organization that claims to be “a grassroots force of over 750,000 members and supporters nationwide.” As hearings take place in the Senate, HRC planned a rally at Freedom Plaza. As they describe it on their “HRC Back Story” webpage: “This week, Kathy Griffin is traveling to Washington to add her voice, by lobbying Members of Congress, meeting with veterans and mobilizing support.”

But there’s a backstory to the backstory, and that’s where the backchannel gets involved. The “rally” was little more than a staged event to provide tasty video for Michael Levitt Productions to sell to Bravo. Ordinarily, that little tidbit would do little more than sicken the attending activists sharp enough to see they were again being used. But Lt. Dan Choi, for reasons only he knows (but I suspect have to do with him being among the sharp ones), took some direct action.

Dan Choi and Kathy Griffin at HRC/Bravo Rally

He asked to speak. What he was told depends upon whom you believe. The HRC claims their president Joe Solmonese told Choi that it “wasn’t his sole decision to make on the spot.” Reports from the scene on the backchannel say Choi was told, “This is Bravo’s Show.” Choi cannot tell us, because he’s in jail tonight, and reports indicate he is not being allowed a phone call.

Griffin ultimately decided to ask Choi to the podium to speak, but I doubt she, her co-producers, or HRC are very happy with what he said. He told the truth about Barney Frank’s inside information that DADT wouldn’t be repealed this year. He pointed out that the White House was where the protest should be, and he asked people to march there with him. Griffin said she would.

Lt. Choi and Capt James Pietrangelo marched to the White House and handcuffed themselves to the fence with the help of Robin McGehee of GetEqual.org. About a hundred true activists went with them, but Solmonese of HRC wasn’t among them. The HRC’s excuse? He stayed behind because he “felt it was important to stay and engage those at the rally in ways they can continue building the pressure needed for repeal.”

Immediate repeal would help neither HRC nor Griffin. Though they’d both take credit for it, HRC would lose a reason to fundraise and provide free extras for video shoots that self-promote, and Griffin would have a stale show. Make no mistake, for Griffin, its about the show. Though she said she’d march with Choi, she stayed at the video shoot, tweeting a fawning misdirection when the backchannel called her on it. After all, Kathy Griffin isn’t really an activist. She just plays one on TV.

When cable and high power satellite suddenly gave the media and the media consumer as many pathways as they could use to stream content and the 2000-channel universe began, something very important died. The ability to create and broadcast more worthy programming than there was room for in the pipe had an upside.

Before the FCC threw open the floodgates and granted new station licenses with abandon in the 1980s, there were relatively few outlets. Radio stations could employ whole staffs to produce shows that aired once. Sometimes they weren’t aired at all, and their production costs written off.

In the golden days of radio, KFI employed an orchestra whose job was to sit in the studio and be ready to play on a moment’s notice if called upon by the local announcer who was himself standing by in case the network feed failed. News departments at the early television and major full-service radio stations, even into the 80s, were large enough they could take over and feed content 24/7 if a new story caught the public’s attention.

Nothing saves energy like shutting down 2 days/week.

In mid 20th century Los Angeles, brush fires, floods, even a little girl down a well, commanded 24/7 coverage. The stations realized that was a part of their service commitment, and the licenses were so valuable and the renewal process so onerous, that overtime got authorized and journalists went without sleep.

Somehow, we’ve lost that. As Iran explodes in anger, MSNBC cries poor and runs Lockup:Indiana and Sex Slaves-The Teen Trade. Ten years ago that might have flown, but in the face of Twitter and Facebook’s minute by minute coverage, MSNBC looks out of touch. CNN cycles old programming, even though CNN International could be switched live to US Domestic viewers, but that brings up commercial concerns.

But last night, an isolated live CNN origination of Larry King Live with Christiane Amanpour crackles across twitter, and numbers soar. Today, CNN is in high gear doing live focused coverage. Perhaps this will convince MSNBC that news is important, even if its not something you can easily cover at a time when you don’t want to spend money. Or perhaps, like radio, NBC/Universal realizes the golden days of cable are numbered and you’re best to take every last dime out before the roof falls in.

The near 60-year history of counterintelligence has been one of having no one in charge of the enterprise. The CI community is not organized or integrated to accomplish a national mission.

Rather, the various CI elements are part of a loose confederation of independent organizations with narrower and varying responsibilities, jurisdictions and capabilities.”

—Michelle Van Cleave

The Twitter social networking site became an international political football this week when the State Department deemed it so valuable in keeping the world abreast of conditions in Iran, that it asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled update and remain online.

The Islamic Republic first tried to control public dissent over suspicious election results by the old-school method of stifling journalists, but they were choking an already dying media and making their own situation worse by helping the decentralized alternative to mushroom.

This has led to a new kind of intelligence and counterintelligence activity, where the role of the “mule” is played by the Internet-astute in their offices, studies and bedrooms; an elaborate cat and mouse game, where Iranian Twitter users tweet information, that information is then repeated by others outside the reach of Iranian control, and the original tweets are deleted by the Iranians who originally posted them.

It’s accelerated the evoution of the citizen journalist, because when you remove the real source because you fear for their safety, you take the burden of the credibility of the content on your own shoulders. A lot of people are coming of age in this sudden change: the Iranian students whose bravery is an inspiration to the world, and the responsible users of the social media networks that are trying to help them by reading the shadows half a world away.

Like so many others twits tethered to computers and net-aware devices by business or obsession, I dabbled with Spymaster from its “beta” days through roll out. It was easy to keep it running on a browser deep in a window stack on a powerful computer. I could click away at it until my virtual energy was depleted, building up cash and virtual weaponry not quite knowing what the right or wrong answers were, figuring things out as I went along.

There wasn’t much there there, but that didn’t matter; I didn’t have much “here” to give it. But then the unfolding events in Iran made the whole thing silly. It just seemed far more productive to spend my free ponder time trying to figure out what to retweet as truth and what to publicly question as disinformation, than figuring out which safehouse to buy and which weapon to sell to buy something more powerful.

There’s a lack of clear goals and strategy in Spymaster that suddenly was supplanted by a real world situation that I could play some small part in from the safety of my real-yet-virtual viewport on it. I could leverage what knowledge I have of the tubes to some real advantage; because out there in the streets of Tehran people are dying for an idea that is only hinted at in Spymaster.

When people are putting their lives on the line for real values and a laudable goal, it just seems silly to play with virtual weaponry when sneaking the right words past Iran’s oppressors could make some small difference.

UPDATE [4:05 AM Tehran Time]: I’ve just been identified on Twitter as an “Iranian Government Account.” This is a tremendous compliment, as it comes from a twitter user (@Persian_Guy) that is almost certainly an Ahmadinejad disinformation entity.

As a self-professed new media expert on Twitter, I’m expected to have at least one “next big thing” social media idea, but I’m so edgy that I’ve got two.

Twitter has now reached its late teens (in social media years) and has begun the process of cleaning up its childish things. It recently announced that it would start cancelling and reassigning moribund accounts.

Somebody who took a valuable username, tweeted one tweet and wandered off in a daze shouldn’t be a dog-in-the-manger for someone who would put that enviable 3-character moniker to good use.

That’s where my new social networks come in: two new sites designed to keep flakes from frittering away the valuable naming resources and web real estate of the big guys.

These are gateway networks, one each for Twitter and Facebook. New users who don’t pass a simple online Web 2.0 proficiency test at Twitter and Facebook are sent to my two networks for their trial runs.

I call them Fritter and Flakebook.

The Great Influenza by John M. Barry is suddenly shooting up on the sales lists. As I write this, its #20,474 at Barnes & Noble, and has hit #3,009 at Amazon. Meanwhile at Twitter “Swine Flu” is trending and some of the comments are scarier than the potential porcine pandemic itself.

Between those with smug security because they don’t eat pork, to those who brag that fear fatigue from 8 years of color-coded panic has desensitized them to any threat, we’ve got a crucible that could concentrate this possible pandemic instead of prepare us for it.

There are lots of reasons to read Barry’s book. Even if this flu mutates into mild in the next few days or weeks (which is at least as possible as a pandemic), The Great Influenza tells far more than the story of virii. It describes how the allopaths rose to power in world medicine, and the abysmal state of medical schools and medical research in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century.

But it concentrates on the many diverse factors that came together to make the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1920 the deadliest plague in recent history. WWI moved mass populations and housed them in close quarters.  These were often people who had no history of travel and therefore little or no exposure to a wide range of virii. This was the powderkeg but a chance mutation was the spark.

In all these intervening years with all our gained knowledge we have also been filling up a new powderkeg. Though most have much greater general immunities, some of our population does not. Our international globetrotting on jets may more than overcome our increased immunity.

But in many ways we’re far better prepared. We have an international media presence that can warn a public in minutes that used to take weeks or months, along with this we also have an international well of gossip and misinformation that travels at the speed of light. If this is in fact a pandemic, we may have to deal with fear broadcast by people who believe swine flu comes from bacon, or that a neighbor’s cough is an act of domestic terrorism.

As we’ve recently seen, Twitter and similar social media can be nothing more than a giant international mood swing or a great force for good, especially when wielded by people whose <140 is backed up by the shared knowledge we’ve gained in the four pandemics we’ve suffered in the last 110 years.

Like many others, I was surprised to read Mark Probst’s Amazon Follies blog entry detailing Amazon’s removal of his gay-themed work from their sales rankings, and like many others, I sent the Internet bookseller the proverbial strongly worded webmail from my Amazon account:

Your removal of rankings for gay and lesbian literature is certainly your right. This is your marketing portal and it is your right to operate it as you wish. I have a suggestion, however, which might make the use of your real estate when my page comes up more effective, because as of today, you’re wasting a lot of space.

I’m not your biggest customer, but I make most of my hard media purchases through your site; almost 100% of my online ones. I sometimes take advantage of your suggestions, because you had a high degree of credibility that your inference engines truly tried to deduce what I would like, based on my searches and prior purchases.

I say “had” because your actions have caused your credibility to disappear for me, and I trust for tens of thousands of others. If you’re willing to “adjust” your sales rankings for criteria other than sales, aren’t you also likely to “adjust” your suggestions based on things like quantity in stock, or shelf life of programming manuals?

I’ll still buy from you, because I like your service and I like your policies, and I trust that I will be well treated by your partners when I use your portal to order from others. But that franchise you had with me, where I chose you and didn’t even go looking at your competitors: that went away the minute your ranking manipulation became public.

As we came to learn, the worst part of Amazon and the cause of the worst of this mess is their crackerjack customer service team wherever Amazon outsources. They handled my customer complaint with the same thorough analysis and investigation that everybody from MSNBC to Francine St. Marie has pointed out. So I wasn’t surprised when I received the same boilerplate answer that the Seattle PI, AP and most of the legacy media received from the PR hack that is Amazon’s current mouthpiece. I answered:

I today received your response to my concerns regarding sales ranking. Your boilerplate mass-mailed response, from an address that made sure I knew was specifically set up so that I could not respond, only served to infuriate me.

Congratulations. As you’ll note my original comment to you was rather mild mannered. I liked your policies and customer service, other than my obvious complaint of course, and while I’d be ordering from you again I just wouldn’t avail myself of your suggestions. After all, I couldn’t trust them.

Your public response to this issue, and your lame denials that fly in the face of your other communications to authors has substantially reduced my desire to shop through you. Perhaps your next communication to me can achieve the result your public relations and customer service departments so anxiously appear to seek, and I’ll write you and tell you that hell will freeze over before I ever shop with you again.

Keep up the good work.

A couple of hours later, I got a copy of the same exact “ham-fisted” letter, with the addition of a link to advise them if they had answered my question or not.

A letter to the editor received from a young reader:

I am 8 years old.
Some of my friends say there is no Twitter Pro.
Papa says, if you see it on THE INTERNETS it's so.
Please tell me the truth; is there a Twitter Pro?

VIRGINIA O'HANLON
115 West Ninety-Fifth Street

VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what Apple and Microsoft tell them.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Twitter Pro. It exists as certainly as user entry form mockups and vaporware and unfunded startups exist, and you know that they abound as dead and moribund webpages on servers this whole world round.

Not believe in Twitter Pro? You might as well not believe in boo.com, or etoys.com or Webvan.

You might get your papa to hire men to watch Source Forge night and day, but even if they didn’t see beta versions coming down the pipe, what would that prove?  Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

No Twitter Pro? Unfathomable. Because VIRGINIA if we tell ourselves that Twitter Pro is nothing but a fairy tale, if we come to believe its just a hoax on the unsuspecting, then we must again ask ourselves that much scarier and vexing question: “How can Twitter monetize itself.”

The Editor

[Snark Rosetta Stone: "Twitter Pro" was an April Fools Joke promulgated by the folks who brought you the Shorty Awards. It was an alleged invitation to participate in the beta program for a rumored paid enhanced service on Twitter that would monetize it. But it really was nothing more than a website that took your twitter avatar and put a "PRO" banner on it, and sent you to your twitter page to replace your avatar with the "enhanced" one. It then let you tweet an invitation to others. A lot of people were fooled, and I was one of them.]

The text message, the rise of IM and Twitter have helped spawn a new argot of phrases shortened to acronyms or words transliterated to letter-number combinations (H8 for hate, 4 instance) or pictographs (<3 for love). In some ways it’s become a cant, but one influenced primarily by the nature of the delivery medium not by the clique developing and adopting it.

But its far from the first time this has happened. The telegraph was an innovation that, for its time, was as revolutionary as the Internet, and it gave rise to a clique that spoke a new language that was as modern as the discovery of electrical current that enabled the telegraph to work.

A whole new set of acronyms were developed, many of them shorthands that described the telegraphy process itself. There were jokes that arose from the way words appeared when they were converted to dots and dashes. There was power in being the first one who knew how the world changed day to day, and in being trusted to know everybody’s business, because you could send a secret telegram, but you had to tell the telegrapher.

Those who spoke this new electric language through their telegraph keys had a bond that elevated them in late 19th and early 20th century society, and many of them became the movers and shakers who would shape the rest of the 20th century, and at the rise of telegraphy nobody saw this coming.

We are in a period of great communications change.  On January 7, 2006, Western Union delivered its last telegram. What was once the paradigm of the important message became meaningless in a world awash in instantaneous worldwide data connectivity. In December of that year, the FCC dropped its requirement that amateur radio operators must pass a Morse Code proficiency exam.

Though we’re losing our legacy communications systems: newspapers dying, radio broadcasting its death rattle, there is tremendous comfort that even as we develop new systems we’re for the most part not making things up as we go along. We’ve been here B4.

CUL 73 CL

These are tough times. Paying firemen and police, fixing roads and water mains and bridges are becoming onerous burdens for municipalities, and its time we considered the free lunch we’ve been handing to churches and nonprofits. For instance:

When Target decided to build a big fancy new Super Target on Okeechobee Boulevard in Palm Beach County, Florida, it meant the smaller Target a couple miles south on Southern would close. When it did, the $6.8 million retail facility on a $5 million corner lot was granted to Christ Fellowship, and as if by magic, $12,485,118 of taxable real property was suddenly given an exemption for every dime.

A Target Born Again

What hasn’t been exempted is the fire protection. the police protection, the cost of maintaining the county offices that ensure that the parishioners in the church are safe should the Fire Department have to make a free call. The church isn’t exempt from any of those regulations, or from the benefits of the municipal services, its just exempt from having to pay for them.

In the early 1970s, as an undergrad journalism student at USC, I spent several days with the folks at Faith Center in Glendale, California. That was before the infamous W. Eugene Scott turned its license into a cause celebre. It was when the early megachurch, which already had an FM license, petitioned the FCC for a television license. Until then, television was too pricey and most churches too poor for a church to ever be a licensee. Pastor Tim Schoch, a good man with some then-innovate ideas, always thought the commission granted them the license in the belief that one church would never get a television station on the air.

But Faith Center did, and Rev. Schoch had a chance to try his marketing theories in the Los Angeles television market. “You take General Motors and these big car companies,” he told me, “and they’re not building auditoriums saying come down here and see my Chevy. They’re using television because they know that way they can get that Chevy into everybody’s living room.” So why, he argued, shouldn’t the Lord have what GM does? (Of course, that was when GM was a big profitable company)

Schoch died not too many years after getting his station on the air, inventing the “praise-a-thon,” and creating a monthly fundraising nut that required real talent to raise every month. He was a charismatic man who raised a fine son, but one who lacked his charisma and abilities and the money dried up. Enter Gene Scott and his horses, hot tub babes and FCC monkey band, but that’s another story.

I’ve told this story to show how churches have changed. They’ve changed in a way that they gives them the resources to pay taxes, and in a way that demands far more public support that creates a serious tax burden for the rest of us. Its time that non-profits and churches pay real property taxes just like the rest of us, and the best way for that to happen is for churches to do it volutarily with the understanding that it sets no precedent beyond that they are caring members of their communities willing to step forward when their government is in trouble.

And if they don’t, then its time they not expect the rest of us to pay for the fire engine to show up when their national television outreach broadcast uplink center catches on fire.