MyTwitterFaceSpaceBook Thing
Facebook features newsfeed statuses front and center, encouraging conversational commentary.
Part II: Facebook: “Let’s Talk”
The connectivity of Facebook is its greatest strength. It helps to carry over recently disrupted relationships, like the high school graduating class who are now college freshman, and to re-create social networks decades in hibernation (old 30-, 40-, and 50-somethings — college and high school buddies holding ongoing reunions online). In this sense it is essentially a perpetual e-yearbook.
One seeks out friends to sign it, with the depth of message attendant to such friendship: “What are you up to?” “Have fun at the beach!” “OMG” and “lol” have taken the place of K.I.T. and j/k. Like a yearbook, it relies heavily on photos as a form of community-building. Everyone gets to provide his own yearbook photo in the world of Facebook, and better yet, we all get to watch each other’s slideshows. Save me, somebody.
Worse, that guy you never wanted to sign your yearbook can become your “friend” because of the weird social protocol that inhibits the average person from wanting to continue to reject the reject he spent high school rejecting.
The major forms of social bonding I have found in my brief personal experience with Facebook are:
1) old friends from high school re-establishing communication
2) friends announcing what they have recently done or intend to do in the near future
- friends looking for friends to accompany them in their planned activities
- friends letting friends know what kind of person they are by announcing what they do or plan to do
- friends reacting to what friends do or plan to do in order to let friends know what kind of person they are
3) friends participating in FB-designed and -produced online surveys and activities that connect to popular culture and, by extension, express who they are (Five favorite___________’s).
4) occasional forays into cultural/political discussions that carefully avoid true dissent or careful argument
5) occasional emotional distress expressed in statuses, directly or indirectly asking for help and sympathy
6) compulsive sharers, sharing their every meal, drive into the country, or family event. These entries resemble “tweets” and may well be Twitter-generated
The phenomenon of #6 sharers is carried a step further (as hinted at above) with Twitter, which is not a yearbook, but more of a truncated journal written for a public. The egocentric basis and bias of Twitter is, to this observer, its most salient feature. (Which we will explore in our next post, bringing us full circle back to the “Look at me!” world of My Space, We will attempt to demonstrate the establishment of a pattern in terms of initial fluorescence, growth, establishment of market dominance, decline and diminishment of influence both in terms of usage and marketing/business success.) Before looking at Twitter, however, let’s probe a bit more deeply into Faceebook.
There is considerable evidence beyond the merely anecdotal to support my claim about the current ascendancy of Facebook and concomitant decline of MySpace. A number of articles attest to the trends:
Bank On It: Facebook Will Pass MySpace in US Popularity
December 18th, 2008 | by Adam Ostrow
The latest numbers are in from Nielsen Online, and they conclude the obvious: Facebook is downright surging in popularity. The site registered a record 47.5M US-based unique visitors in November, up from 39.9M just one month prior.
Top social network MySpace continued to hover around 60M, with an official count of 59.1M. If you’re looking for a shoe-in bet for your 2009 tech predictions, it’s this: Facebook will surpass MySpace in US traffic at some point next year.
And here is an even more current mapping of Facebook’s surging popularity.
Fortune magazine has a balanced look at the strengths and challenges of the Facebook phenomenon in an article from April 15, 2009, titled “Is Facebook Losing Its Glow? The social networking site is growing — but that also means serious growing pains” by Jessi Hempel.
And this blogger has some salient up-to-date statistics to confirm Facebook’s ascendancy.
Social Networks: Facebook Takes Over Top Spot, Twitter Climbs, Andy Kazeniac (contact – e-mail) — February 9th, 2009
So the evidence is ample, Facebook has overtaken MySpace as the leader in the social networking sector of the blogosphere. This piece is getting a little long, so we will extend our discussion of Facebook into another entry where we will examine how the structure of the Facebook site and the interactivity of the apps have popularized this next phase of the social networking cycle.
MyTwitterFaceSpaceBook Thing
Look at me, I'm wonderful. MySpace celebrates the self.
No need to worry, the Riemblogger has not forgotten that he is in the middle of a series of blogs on the Education Game. The simple fact is that things are in such a state of flux in the field of education, especially as regards funding, that we have decided to table that blog series temporarily. In the meantime, enjoy our musings on social networking sites.
The first in a series of blogs on the emerging subject of micro-blogging and social network sites.
Part I
My Space (and welcome to it): Look at Me (I’m wonderful)
Social networking sites (SNSs), as the new phenomenon of knitting the Internet through enabling micro- communication among groups of friend is known, has hit its stride. That stride is graceless, choppy, and wobbly, characterized by its truncated awkwardness. The insistent present tense, third person formula of Facebook status updates (or statuses) and the staccato comment mode imposed by attenuated attention spans and limited space have essentially created a new idiom that takes us a step further along the road to linguistic ruin, the on-ramp to which was paved by the good intentions of texters everywhere. Twitter takes the reductionist direction of this stretch of road even deeper into the woods, cutting down the possibilities of expression by regulating the number of characters allowed per communiqué. Described as “telegraphic” in quality, tweet-speak certainly falls short of aspiring to the condition of the haiku.
In this brave new world of making Friends and following strangers’ communications, MySpace, the first star of the latest generation of SNSs, has been left out in the cold. The metaphorical significance of MySpace is that it reveals the minimal-effort ethos of Facebook and Twitter by providing a message-shaping template upon which the communication act takes place. In this case the message is simply: “Look at me!” The erosion of MySPace has been gradual.In some ways, MySpace was a victim of its own success. Cases of cyber-bullying and sexual exploitation of teens were one problem. Another issue was the emergence of Facebook as a significant competitor and the fickle nature of teenagers and young adults who comprise a significant portion of the user population of MySpace. Let’s face(book) it: MySpace’s day has come and gone. (Here’s an article on the decline of MySpace: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19717700/ Here’s the lead:
updated 2:58 p.m. PT, Wed., July 11, 2007
NEW YORK – The online hangout MySpace appears to be less popular among teens as rival Facebook draws more of the high school crowd, according to new measurements from comScore Media Metrix.
And then there’s http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/29/myspacefacebook-bebo-twitter
MySpace shrinks as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo grab its users
Staff quit social networking’s former darling, now half the size of Facebook
David Smith, technology correspondent
The Observer, Sunday 29 March 2009
“The “Place for Friends” is starting to feel lonely. MySpace, the Rupert Murdoch-owned website once synonymous with social networking, is losing popularity and key staff in its biggest troubles since launching five years ago.”
Many Facebookers maintain their MySpaces as a kind of left-over incarnation of their web-selves. In some sense, MySpace is a digital graveyard. (Like Xanga and other previous generation SNSs.)
Abstractly, the very design of the MySpace page reveals a significantly different focus regarding community in the Facebook and MySpace worlds. Whereas Facebook features ongoing commentary front and center in the newsfeed central column of the user’s homepage, focusing attention on the interactive dimension of the Facebook experience, MySpace is laid out to celebrate the identity of the homepage user. The nature of written communication on MySpace tends to be in the longer format live-journaling as opposed to the more compact messages in the central boxes of Facebook.
So, to return to our opening thoughts, longer, more complex language gives way to shorter, more simple messages. Again, form follows function, with MySpace communication tools relegated to a box and the bulk of the page serving as an advertisement for the person who created the page – an elaborate profile. As it turns out “Look at me!” Is losing out to “Let’s talk!” Of course the nature of what we shall talk about is – pun intended – open to discussion. Which will bring us to our next post about the Facebook phenomenon.
The Education Game: Part 2
One thing that is largely mysterious to many people regarding the entire field of education — or “the education game” as we pros like to call it — is the field of school funding and finance. This is the first area this series will address, as the allocation and disbursement of funds directly relates to the management structure of schools and districts (our second topic) and school governance (our third topic).
Public school financing is complicated by the fact that it is two-tiered: on one level, heavily regulated and controlled by the state of California, and on the next level distributed down to individual school districts of widely varying size and political clout. The state’s regulation and control has largely eliminated the inequities characteristic of school funding in the 1970s and previously, when school boards had direct access to local property taxes as the primary source of funding. By passing the control of funding up a level to the state, and by imposing “revenue limits” in order to level the playing field at the outset, in California all districts receive reasonably proportional “pieces of the pie.”
The sticking point (especially in large districts like Los Angeles) is the district then distributes monies to the individual schools, according to its own policies — and individual school funding becomes part of hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-a-year, elaborate shell game. A breakdown of all funds follows:
- Federal = 11%
- State = 61%
- Property Tax = 21%
- Local = 6%
- Lottery = 1%
For the exact figures in the ‘ 08-’ 09 school year go to http://www.edsource.org/1824.html
Previous to the current “revenue limit era,” inequalities were rife, as districts in more affluent areas raked in money from local property taxes. Now, those monies are distributed throughout the state and local property taxes are limited by proposition 13. Local schools can still generate extra revenue by local fund-raising through PTAs and booster clubs and the like, but these resources do not severely distort the overall system.
Most of the funds go to salaries. Here, districts are in competition, but even the most lucrative teacher salaries are modest by any standard. Although there is an ongoing debate about the comparability of teacher salaries to other professions — an issue complicated by number of days worked per year — there is obvious truth to the old saw: “no one ever became a teacher to get rich.” And districts certainly figure this into their salary schedules.
The next post will detail how real-world budgeting affects real-world schools.
The Education Game: Part 1 of a Series
This is the first in what will be an ongoing series of posts on a topic about which I am a verifiable expert: the contemporary practice of secondary education in urban America. As the “About the Riemblogger” section of this blog notes, education is one of my interests. I can’t really help being interested in it: it is what I do for a living. It is my vocation.
For 20 years I have served in various capacities in a comprehensive high school in the Los Angeles Unified School District: Verdugo Hills High School. This school has changed considerably over this period of time, mirroring the socio-political milieu of the city of Los Angeles and reflecting the issues that the city has grappled with and continues to try to work out.
I have seen the district go through several complicated, convoluted reform attempts during this time and I have seen none of them work.
This series of posts will examine the most significant of these reform efforts:
· School Based Management
· Standards-based Instruction
· Accountability
· Small Learning Communities
I am not a cynic: I love my work–it truly is a vocation to me. I am not burned out: after 20 years I feel more enthusiastic and passionate about my work than I ever have.
But I am realistic. I have seen precious little improvement over the course of my career (although the school I work at has, according to standard measurements, consistently met its growth goals since their establishment).
The dilemma of public education is complex. First, how schools are funded and the model of administration are problematic. Too much money goes to the wrong places and intimidatory, top-down management styles predominate.
Second, curriculum development has not kept up with societal trends, and where it has tried, this has resulted in a diminishment of the subject matter and its treatment rather than an enhancement of the material and the students’ educational experience.
Third, everyone is an expert. This is best exemplified by the recent and spectacular failure of LAUSD’s Admiral-cum-superintendent, David Brewer III. As a teacher, I am perhaps overly sensitive to the amazingly pervasive attitude that since everyone went to school everyone knows how to fix education. I’ve gone to doctors and hospitals all my life but I would not attempt to remove anyone’s spleen. Most people have little understanding of what the problems are, much less how to fix them.
Fourth, the mission of public education in schools has expanded to such an extent that the institution is charged with tasks the accomplishment of which would require a restructuring of society itself. No longer are our schools places where students learn their basic literacy, numeracy, and reasoning skills (as well as social skills). They are now esteem-building centers wrapped inside of health-care and day-care facilities, built atop food-distribution complexes, annexed to employment development agencies — and the list goes on. No other enterprise is asked to do so much for so many with so little.
Come back to check out how we sort out the problems and to find out how we think the problems can best be solved.
The Riemblog is back
After a rather lengthy hiatus, the Riemblog is back. Picking on George W. Bush was just too easy; we left that to Keith Olbermann. With the installation of Barack Obama, we’ll see what kind of hope and change is in store for us.
So long, it's been good to know you...
GO SOX!!!! Parts III & IV
Well, it might not even matter what uniforms the Rockies or the Red Sox wear. The Sox proved themselves the better team. The Rockies’ Cinderella story turned into a pumpkin a few days shy of Halloween. Looking at things objectively, if the eight days’ layoff hurt the Rockies so much they couldn’t scrape together one win, that is remarkable. I tend to view the Series as an affirmation that the American League is head and shoulders above the senior circuit–and that the Red Sox never quit and are far and away the best team in baseball right now. GO SOX!!!!
GO SOX!! Part II
Well, clearly the Rockies got my memo and, sure enough, they only lost 2-1 in game two. It was gratifying to sit down to watch the game and note that the Colorado crew had regained some sense of fashion decorum and gone to their more traditional uniforms. It was also gratifying to watch the Bosox win again. Go Sox!!
GO SOX!
I think one of the reasons the Rockies were routed by the Sox in game one of the World Series is their abominable choice in uniforms. They deserved to lose 13-1 for trotting out in these dud duds at Fenway. Compared to the classic Red Sox old school look, the Rockies just looked sad. The jersey is the real offender in this get up, clearly. The sleeveless look just looks silly. As we all know: clothes make the man. Admittedly, the mountain men are not in a class with the sartorial sins of the 1980s Astros and other 
pajama-inspired clubs of that particularly deficient era, but their transgessions are worth noting.
Design faux pas?
Here is an architect run amok.(It turns out the architect’s name is Mock.)
My idea is simple, the Defense department today requested 200 billion dollars to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Let’s take whatever is needed out of that fund and raze and rebuild the building in a more appropriate shape.
How could this ever happen?
The swastika aerial view is covered in this story in the L.A. Times: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-swastika26sep26,0,2973328.story?coll=la-home-center
Adobe building semaphore and The Crying of Lot 49
Apparently the Adobe building in San Jose has been transmitting the text of Thomas Pynchon’s ’60’s novelette, The Crying of Lot 49, in semaphore. This quirky item courtesy of boingboing.net. Here’s the link to the San Jose Mercury News story: http://www.mercurynews.com/search/ci_6620943?nclick_check=1
Dog days deliberations
On a recent business trip to our nation’s capital by way of Los Angeles International Airport, a few things got me thinking.
First, no one seems to know what a line is. I say this because getting in line in order to get your tickets, in order to check your bags, in order to get to your gate, in order to get to your plane…getting into each and all of these lines is nearly impossible because no one knows what a line is. And at LAX where the line is, or where it goes. This leads to chaos. As I was taught in first grade, “If you don’t see the back of the head of the person in front of you, you are not in line.” Why can one of the great airports in the world not manage to clearly delineate where lines begin, which way they wend, and where they end? It is bad enough being crammed into narrow tubes like molecules of crushed humanity, but must getting onto the planes be such a gruesome ordeal?
Second, I don’t think the screening process is serious. We all have our anecdotal evidence for this. And don’t get me wrong, I am not a whiner. I understand the need for vigilance. I am for it, but I do not think the process as it stands enhances vigilance. Item 1: As I madly dashed away from the x-ray area, laptop flapping, sandals ready to slap on, hoping not to be nabbed for “additional screening,” I caught a glimpse of someone’s grandma being additionally screened. You know the picture, a frail, elderly woman with her hands over her head, legs spread, a wand being put where it doesn’t need to be. Bad enough. Then I saw it, a teenage boy like the ones I teach, posing with his three foot long skateboard leaning on his hip. He may well have been grandma’s grandson. And I flashed back to a kid with blood gushing from the gash in his skull in the hallway at school, having been bashed with a skateboard wielded as a weapon. You can kill someone with a skateboard. Easily. But here’s this kid, ready to get on a flight with his board, and apparently no one has thought twice about it. But no nail file. And poor grandma. Again, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against skateboarders. Anyone who wants to spend more time practicing falling off something that is moving fast and landing on concrete than they spend reading or thinking is just fine by me. Okey dokey. And terrorist skateboarders are a stretch. But how serious is the TSA and the government about security and passenger safety, really?
Item #2: While eating my hideous fish and chips at the Samuel Adams location at Reagan International, past the screening, able to stroll freely onto my plane it occurs to me that people are ordering and being served beer. Nothing strange there, it is Sam Adams’. But the beer is in bottles. Glass bottles. Now I am not paranoid. And I am not a terrorist, but I don’t trust the Sam Adams beer guy to keep track of the beer bottles. And it is very easy to go into a restroom and bust off a bottle-neck and voila, cutting weapon.Stick in carry-on. Carry on. They don’t even serve beer in bottles at baseball games. With good reason. You can hurt people with them. I know this sounds a little odd, but so is limiting the amount of hand lotion or baby food we can take on a plane. If we’re going to be thorough, let’s be thorough. Or admit it’s a show.
On a different, lighter note, I was reading grants for the department of education in Washington, D.C., and I teach in the Los Angeles Unified School District, so I am awash in acronyms and I have grown to hate them. In reading the grants, it seemed that every applicant felt that they needed to create an acronym for their project. Oddly enough, though, this was not among the criteria for funding. But you would think it was. I cannot reveal the actual grant applicants’ acronyms–believe me, you don’t want to know them, but here are two examples of bad acronymism from my district: SDAIE and LEARN. SDAIE violates one of the criteria for a proper acronym: the initials, when put together, should form a pronouceable verbal entity. But SDAIE has been going strong since I started teaching twenty years ago. SDAIE is pronounced su-die. It stands for (I know you’re dying to know) Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English. SDAIE must die. LEARN stands for Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Reform Now. I know, it skips essential initials. But it’s cute. And that’s why I hate it. Burn LEARN. Join me in my movement to get rid of acronyms. Ban Acronyms Now! BAN. Oh, no.
Karl Rove’s nickname
Well, if I thought “Scooter” was bad, what am I to make of this? Courtesy of US News and World Report, by way of Boing-boing. Check out #9. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/070813/13rovefacts.htm
What’s in a name?
I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s sentence was commuted by President George W. Bush yesterday. I will leave the politics of it all to those who are interested. I don’t care anymore. What I find more interesting is Libby’s name. And this on two counts: 1) its form, i.e., first initial, full middle name, “nickname,” last name; 2) the prevalence of weird, diminutive nicknames/stage-names in our diminishing culture. My inability to be outraged or even to care about the actual case is a good index of my political apostasy at this point. But names are interesting.
First, it is very difficult to find out what Scooter’s name really is. Don’t think so? Read this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eat-the-press/2007/03/13/naming-names-what-the-he_e_43351.html
His first name is Irve, after his father apparently. But of special interest is the form of his name. There is something inherently untrustworthy, I characteristically with no proof assert, about someone who goes with first initial, full middle, last. Never mind the cutesy nickname. Think G. Gordon Liddy (ah, the ironic resonance), J. Edgar Hoover, or for you literary types, J. Alfred Prufrock. I’m sorry if this is how you roll, moniker-wise, but it’s shifty and I, for one, advise against it. And what’s with “Scooter?” Why not “Chopper,” as a friend of mine was tagged in Viet Nam? Or “Hog?” “Scooter?” It sounds like a bad college frat hangover thing. You should outgrow these things. Especially if you are chief of staff to the Vice President of the United States of America.
Little names seem to have come into some sort of vogue, though. Think Fifty Cent (or is it Fi’ty Cent?) Why not Dollar, or Doll-ah? What about Usher? Why not Theater Owner? or at least Projectionist? I would think Concessionaire would be better. What about Movie Mogul? And why only Tupac? Why not Sixpac, or Case? Notorious B.I.G. was a noteworthy exception. Both notorious and big.
I don’t know, but things like this keep me up at night. Call me “Moped.”
Steve Earle’s Jerusalem, a song for our times
Here’s one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite songsters, Steve Earle. He puts a complex matter into understandable terms. One of my favorite lines, “i don’t remember learnin’ how to hate in Sunday school.” Give it a listen…
