I expect social media to be HUGE! More and more, millions of people are signing up for Twitter and Facebook accounts everyday. And, not only are they signing up, they are actually using the tools quite regularly. I predict there will be even more grassroots organization and impromptu events a la the Dupont Circle snowball fight from back in February. It will be easier for many more people to participate in the process using all sorts of social media tools. People who’ve never participated in grassroots campaigning will be able to easily and effectively tweet get-out-the vote messages or fundraise. Both campaigns will be able to reach more people in more personal ways. The key to winning the 2012 election online will be PERSONALIZATION! I’m talking friends appealing to friends, messages of the spam variety will not be effective.

We can expect to see grassroots organizing and campaigning go beyond anything we’ve ever seen. I’m looking forward to this!

I tend to agree with this assessment. Why would a party want to essentially decrease their chances of winning power? That is essentially what will happen if hoards of people start becoming more engaged in the voting process…they will almost naturally create more political parties eventually. Look at how the Tea Party has quickly come into existence. A recent poll showed that more than 70% of those people are “former GOPers” and the vast, vast majority voted for John McCain in the 2008 presidential election. Now, the GOP is forced to walk a tight rope between basically being obstructionists/“strict-conservatives” and cooperating with the Obama Administration and the Democrats on issues that they both genuinely agree on.

So, what would happen if more genuine, competitive national parties sprung up? More specifically, what would happen to the might GOP and Democrats? How would the U.S. legislative branch work then? Would the legislative process be better or worse?

I don’t know the right answer to these questions nor whether there, in fact, is a right answer. But, I’m relatively sure that if there were say…SIX viable national parties then voters would be able to hold politicians more accountable by virtue of the fact that they will have a real choice—meaning there would no longer be the idea of an Either/OR election (i.e. Republican or Democrat). In business, the more choices there are the better the price. Maybe in politics, the more choices there are the better the government.

To the first question, I would answer with a resounding YES. Many people have long held fantastical, detached ideas of what war is when in reality they—well—have no idea about what war is. Being able to access first-hand accounts from the people who actually are on the ground, experiencing the reality of war (i.e. journalists and the soldiers themselves) brings a valuable, educational opportunity to the audience that it would otherwise not have. However, with the thousands of reports that are available to anyone and everyone via different social media mediums, it is important to remember that one should not take any report at face value. Rather, she should look at a variety of sources before forming a definitive opinion on issues related to the War. This idea was reiterated to me last week when it was revealed that the war video I opined on in my last response blog post had actually been edited to favor an anti-war stance. Footage revealing that dangerous weapons had been found amongst the dead had been cut out. Now, would that have changed my opinion on the video? No, it would not have because my opinion was directed not at what the soldiers had done (i.e. shoot people) but rather, how they’d done it.

Now, to the question of how much access to the front lines is too much? I think that should be left up to the audience to decide, as long as the access to front lines doesn’t reveal information that endangers lives or military positioning.

First, after watching the video entitled “Collateral Murder”, to say the least I was disturbed. Okay, I get that war is war and people die in war—a fact of the times we live in—I don’t find that concept disturbing (of course, I don’t like it either). But, there’s the rub…I don’t like it. But, watching the video it is clear to me that the soldiers like it—and like it a lot. That is what I found grossly abhorrent. It was like watching my 11-year old nephew play a violent video game shooting ghouls and goblins. Let me make clear, my nephew is one of the sweetest children. He knows that games are games and life is life. He knows life is not a game. What is sad is that the soldiers in the combat video appear not to be up to the same level of moral clarity and conviction that my nephew is. The soldiers are enjoying the hunt, they enjoy the killing and annihilation—only it is not a game. See for yourself:

Now, I don’t know the exact circumstances of this particular military engagement. I don’t know whether the people on the ground who were shot like sitting ducks were “insurgents” or were any danger at all. From my perspective, they could have been just as well as they may not have been. That is the 50/50-chance perspective the soldiers seemed to base their decision to fire on the crowd upon. They appeared all too trigger-happy, so gleeful at the prospect of shooting at a target, that they quickly assumed that a journalist, who was a part of that crowd, was carrying a weapon when in fact he was carrying a long-lensed camera. And, when a van showed up to pick up the bullet-ridden bodies of the suspected “insurgents”, the soldiers giddily opened fire from their helicopter as the men on the ground were attempting to transport a wounded body to the van. The “suspects” were forced to drop the body like a sack of potatoes and run for cover. After shooting anything that moved, the soldiers ordered a ground team to inspect the scene—they found two injured children who had been sitting in the van that had been blasted with gunfire. Upon learning this, one soldier cavalierly comments, “Well, it was their fault they shouldn’t have brought their children to a war zone”.

Now, I understand our soldiers have a duty to serve and protect. But, I imagine, there is a noble way to do it. I imagine that there is a humane art to killing for a “just cause”, that is why we don’t bludgeon or burn to death people sentenced to be put to die by the justice system. Acting as if you are in the arcade at the mall, hooting and hollering, happily blowing holes through sitting ducks is not at all the noble way to kill in the name of justice or peace.

Or is this all just too easy for me to say because I’m not the one fighting the war?

This exploration of the South African blogosphere tuned me in to the global voices of the world that are so easily ignorable by our American, individualistic psyche. And, what little international news that is able to filter through to us, we promptly dismiss it—“oh, but those people are always fighting” or “those people are always starving”…you get what I mean? I’d never hear of the people the South African blogs spoke about let alone knew their stories. Conversely, they seemed to be quite familiar with our American stories of strife and struggle. For example, in the blog post by Ndesanjo Macha, titled “Remembering Sharpville Massacre”, there are references to Martin Luther King, Jr’s march on Selma and even to American musician, Sam Cooke’s “A Change Gone Come”. The point I’m trying to illustrate is that, the exchange of knowledge and thought between America and the rest of the world is seemingly a one-way street—America being at the end of the block. Everyone (i.e.) knows about us, but most of us don’t know about them. This reminds me of a line from the movie “Inglorious Basterds” when the German actress character lamented “don’t you Americans speak anything besides English!!” Every non-American character in the film was bilingual. I’m not saying that Americans SHOULD speak more than one language—I’m just raising the question of why we don’t.

Anyway, I found that most of the trending topics of South African blogs were focused on political activism, public policy and human rights-related topics. However, I did see scattered posts about topics such as new media and reality television—things I’m more used to reading about. For example, I stumbled upon an entertainment post about Big Brother Africa—didn’t know they had that show there.

Particularly concerning breaking news, Wikipedia and traditional news outlets operate much the same way in terms of the quality of information that is put out quickly and evolving almost just as fast. For example, the London subway bombing coverage discussed in class showed that as the events unfolded during the bombings, updates to the Wikipedia page were grossly inaccurate in immediate, eye-witness reporting of the nature of the incident. But the edits to the page were very frequent and eventually, the facts replaced the inaccuracies.

Would I use Wikipedia as a sole source of information for recent events? Probably not. But, I would definitely feel quite comfortable using it as the only source of information for events that happened a while ago (i.e. at least a few years) because enough time will have passed for the Wikipedia community to have properly edited and assured the accuracy of the facts.

“Here are 10 things I learned during my social media break.

1. People in my extended network understood my need to focus on my immediate network more than I thought. They didn’t take it personally.
2. My immediate network noticed I was paying attention to them much more.
3. I would touch base with my online friends in other ways that were much more personal.
4. People from my extended network reached out and became what I would consider real life friends.
5. When I would check back in online, not much changed. Many of the same people were saying the same things.
6. The extra time I now have improved my quality of life.
7. Social media was very much an all or none proposition for me. If I wasn’t doing it actively, part-time participation lacked interest (excluding my desire to make sure friends are well).
8. I came away with a much better concept of how to manage my time, and what it should be devoted to.
9. My driving improved greatly.
10. My closest relationships became closer, and new relationships flourished, while my extended relationships remained pretty much the same.”

I have roughly 500 “friends” on Facebook. I go on countless times every day to chat with my close friends, randomly check in on acquaintances in my extended network (i.e. highschool classmates, people I went to college with, former co-workers, etc.). After, reading Leonard’s article, I started thinking about just how much I do use social media and how it affects my life. Particularly, I questioned whether it [my use of social media] weakened my current friendships or strengthened them, whether it detracted from my quality of life. Then, I recalled a time when I’d chat on the phone with my friends for hours each day to catch up. Now, Facebook or Twitter frees up several hours of my day by allowing me to spend my mental break from work browsing through my friends’ or dropping a “Happy Birthday” on the Facebook wall of my friend from middle-school. Now, if it weren’t for Twitter or Facebook, I would’ve had to call my friends after work or during lunch to see what they were up to (we’ve all got those mildly, annoying “what’s-going-on-check-in” calls. And, I never would’ve called up my friend from middle-school to say “Happy Birthday” not only because I didn’t have her number, but because it would’ve probably been sort of awkward to call someone you barely know anymore. Which brings me to another question–since I know exactly what everyone has been up to, do I have to go to my 10-year high school reunion next year ?

Fast forward to today, if I have a research paper I don’t go near an encyclopedia. Do they still even print those to sell for the general public? If they do, I can’t imagine why. But, I digress. If I have a research paper today, I most definitely use Wikipedia as a source.

So, to the question, which should be considered more trustworthy: A published encyclopedia or Wikipedia?

My answer is (drum roll, please): WIKIPEDIA!!!

Here’s why. Anyone can change the content on Wikipedia. Now, some would say this is the main reason that Wikipedia is UN-trustworthy and I can see their point. But, I also realize that being able to be changed by different people does not automatically result in Wikipedia’s un-truthiness. Rather, that ability enables the collection of information from experts and amateurs alike, with the end-product being a presentation of a revolving consensus on the facts (er, truthiness)—in real-time. Contrarily, the encyclopedia only presents a one-sided, expert-only view of the facts. The problem with this is that we can find experts in any field that will each give you completely different facts on the same subject. So the truthiness of the encyclopedia rests on the point-of-view of a single or small group of expert(s). Thus, with an encyclopedia, how do we know if we are getting one-sided facts? We don’t!

And, that’s why Wikipedia is more trustworthy than the published encyclopedia. Is it completely trustworthy? Well, no, but compared to an encyclopedia…

World of Warcraft seemed to be more in line with the traditional, consol gaming experience. You are not creating an ideal version of yourself; rather you are playing the typical video game characters and fighting/interacting within the context of a typical video-game fantasy world. I guess this is why I prefer it to Second Life.

Overall, I was not surprised about what I found in trying out these two games. I expected not to like them and turns out I didn’t. However, I do think the games were both effective at getting their messages across. I think that they both can appeal to people who have been into video games for a very long time and also to people who are somewhat new to the idea of gaming and are attracted to the idea of creating and designing their very own alter ego.