Everybody and their mother is online (almost)

Today, 72% of online adults use social networking sites according to The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. While this may seem obvious to those of you reading this on line, it still is an extraordinary fact that a majority of adults are communicating via platforms that simply did not exist a few years ago. According to the report the percentage of internet users who are on Twitter has more than doubled since November 2010, You can read more about the report here.

The End of an Old Era Means the Beginning of a New Era

I remember when I first became a Washington Post reader. It was the "Funny Papers" that sucked me in as a young kid. I soon moved on to the sports pages, and then the editorials, mostly because of the great political cartoons by Herblock, Now it is on to the great unknown with Amazon's Jeff Bezos at the helm. For those of you who are history buffs, Walter Pincus has written a fine and concise article of The Post, the sale and the news business.

And the Losers Are.....

With the academy awards approaching, we all have our favorite for the best picture of the year, but what were the really, really bad movies of the year. To decide that we have the Razzie® awards, now in their 33^rd year. Not surprisingly the big winner was TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN PART 2. It won seven Razzies® including Worst Picture, Worst Actress (Kristen Stewart) Worst Supporting Actor (Taylor Lautner), Worst Screen Couple (Lautner and 12 year-old Mackenzie Foy) and Worst Screen Ensemble.  You can read more about the Razzies® here.

Can I have a minute of your time? It will only cost you seven to eight million dollars. That’s about how much a minute of ad time will cost for this year’s Super Bowl on CBS. What are advertisers really paying for? They are paying for the path to over 100 million bank accounts. Is it worth it? I think in most cases it is not. I’ll ask people what their favorite ad was, and they’ll describe the spot to me in detail. I’ll ask them to name the product the advertisement was for and they will draw a blank. In reaching young adults, (read – people with money to spend) social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter may be more viable options. I’ll leave you with one final question – What’s your favorite Super Bowl Ad? Here’s one of mine.

Spitting in the Wind

Sometimes when teaching my class I have my doubts. Am I the only one that thinks this  material is important? I’ll mention books in class that none of my students have heard of, then the next day find them on a list of important books that the Library of Congress has put together. When I first asked my class about Twitter, no one had heard of it. Now Twitter has half a billion users, including many of the students I teach. For years I have been showing the films of George Melies in class, then Martin Scorsese creates the movie “Hugo” and wins five Oscars.  I’ve been showing the photographs of Lewis Hines in my class for several years now. I came across this item from CBS. It made my hair stand on end.

A Picture Worth A Thousand Words

The man who captured one of the most powerful images of the Vietnam conflict has passed away. Malcolm Browne, 81, died on August 27th at a New Hampshire hospital. His timeless image will live on. Mr. Browne was a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for The New York Times. When he took the famous picture in 1963, it shocked the world, and its power reached all the way to the White House where President John F. Kennedy began to reevaluate the role of the United States in Vietnam. According to an interview in Time magazine Mr. Browne described how he was able to capture the image:
"The monks were telephoning the foreign correspondents in Saigon to warn them that something big was going to happen. Most of the correspondents were kind of bored with that threat after a while and tended to ignore it. I felt that they were certainly going to do something, that they were not just bluffing, so it came to be that I was really the only Western correspondent that covered the fatal day."

Republican and Democratic parties say, "Please Like Us".

 

The upcoming Republican and Democratic National Conventions will be more intertwined into the fabric of Social Media than any other political conventions in the nation's history. If you doubt that then consider this - Google is the "Official Social Media Platform" at the Republican National Convention. Got your attention? Yahoo! will team with ABC to stream live coverage of the event online. There will not only be a media "War Room", but a "Social media Green Room". Teams from Facebook and Google will be roaming the floor to help people upload content and interact over the internet. Does this bode well for the American political process? I'll Google the answer and get back to you.

They are Keeping a List and Cheking it Twice

Santa Claus knows who has been naughty or nice. I have it on good authority that he keeps a detailed list of all your activities both online and in real life. We have grown to expect that, but did you know that Companies like Target also have a list of your activities, purchasing history, along with likes and dislikes that is so detailed they can tell if you’re pregnant by the second trimester. Yikes!

According to Charles Duhigg of the New York Times –

For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy. “If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest ID,” Pole said. “We want to know everything we can.”

Read on for more.