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This past week, Medill welcomed NPR’s Andy Carvin as Hearst Visiting Professional through the good offices of my colleague Prof. Loren Ghiglione. Given the sheer volume of his tweets, their reliability, and their pertinence, having @acarvin on campus for a few days was a chance for Medillians to press their noses right up against the window that he opens on the world.
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@acarvin – 128192 Tweets, 66992 Followers, 2161 Following.
Senior strategist at NPR. Online community organizer since 1994. Former director of the Digital Divide Network. Writer. Photographer. Dad.0
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Good news, Twitter nerds! NPR’s @acarvin is on campus. Go to Fisk 311 at noon for lunch and a talk about tweeting the Arab Spring.0
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Indeed, “Tweeting the Arab Spring: Capturing History, 140 characters at a time” was the title of the Wednesday talk that would be his last “official” act on this return visit to campus (Carvin is a 1993 communications graduate). And the students were standing by:
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Hoping @acarvin will livetweet his own talk, but I’d settle for audience updates. This would solve my #MedillProblems. Don’t let me down.0
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Ah, ’twas not to be. Harsh reality, at least on Carvin’s own part:
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@DanHillReports Nope; when I’m talking solo I don’t tweet. Otherwise I’d stop talking and that gets pretty awkward.
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But I had already decided that it seemed appropriate to cover his talk in the way that seemed most appropriate: by livetweeting myself. Not that every I captured every worthwhile sound bite, nor that I ever dreamed of maintaining an @acarvin-like pace during his presentation. And so, after a healthy lunch of brownies and chocolate chip cookies, it was time to fire up TweetDeck on my iPad and go.What was I looking for among the anecdotes, illustrations and history? Judging by my tweets, I think I was looking for some wisdom about his particular brand of journalism.But you can judge for yourself.
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@acarvin at #Medill: I’m NPR’s guinea pig-in-residence0
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@acarvin: during #arabspring ‘my Twitter followers were functioning as interns’ #Medill0
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@acarvin: ‘My Twitter account became an amorphous decentralized media literacy experiment’ #arabspring #Medill0
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@acarvin: ‘What I’m doing should never ever be viewed as a replacement’ for the work of journalists on the ground #arabspring #Medill0
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@acarvin: My Twitter account is a news process, not a news product. It’s my newsroom. #Medill0
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@acarvin: If you did a word cloud of my tweets, biggest words would probably be ‘Confirmed?’ and ‘Source?’ #Medill0
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At 13:30 he was off, freed to tweet again. And again, and again….
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I’m at Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD) (Chicago, IL) w/ 178 others http://4sq.com/JVzhc40
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….sometimes on war and its casualties, and sometimes on survivors.
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“Owing to a lack of mirrors on the ocean floor, the calico lobster was very likely unaware of its own rarity.” http://n.pr/KttbDP0
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Category Archives: By ORY
‘Let me not be the first to wish you a happy birthday’ . . .
. . . and, given that it was 10 p.m., and that this was Facebook, this was a reasonably achievable goal yesterday for my Medill colleague Rich Gordon.
There has been, and will continue to be, plenty of offline and online discussion about the impact of social media / the Internet / technology/ mobile broadband / Google glasses on our relationships with one another. I have found Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other to be a great conversation starter since its publication; her piece this past Sunday in the New York Times has restarted some of those discussions, including one I had at lunch yesterday with indefatigable blogger, thought-provoking author, and soon-to-be-ex-North Park-professor Scot McKnight.
At the same time, my data show a flight to, not from, a particular kind of conversation: The exchange of birthday greetings.
(The reason I have this data at all is that my former Tribune colleague Lara Weber and I share April 24 as a birthday with Mayor Daley, Barbra Streisand, and many other gentle readers. We began comparing notes several years ago across multiple platforms, including email, e-cards, text messages and the like, but the Facebook trend line has enough data to seem the most meaningful. As she said in a post yesterday, “wow. FB is a narcissist’s birthday dream come true.”)
Even though we’re not narcissists ourselves, Lara and I like it too – but truth be told, not everyone does. An easily findable example was posted last August on The Atlantic’s Web site: “The problem with Facebook birthday greetings,” by Adam Clark Estes. (He was actually responding to a defense of the practice the previous weekend by Virginia Heffernan on nytimes.com, which itself was a response to a piece on Slate by David Plotz – I need to stop insert hyperlinks because this is looking to be infinitely recursive).
Plotz threw down the virtual gauntlet by positing, among other things, that “the wishes have all the true sentiment of a Christmas card from your bank.” And here I choose to be utterly clear: I think he’s dead wrong:
First, I got emailed birthday greetings yesterday from my former optician, and another from my car dealer with the warm and fuzzy subject line “CustomerBirthday” (sic). Those are the bank-Christmas-card moral equivalents, methinks.
Second, when I finally sat down and scrolled through all of the greetings last night after returning from a “Faculty Appreciation” event at a Northwestern residential college, what I found was that I was actually . . . sentimental. I found myself picturing each and every one of those greeters and remembering / reveling in / appreciating the genesis and continuation of our relationships. I laughed at a few and teared up at a view and clicked ‘Like’ on a few.
And it seems like that is, as Heffernan would argue, completely human: “Real humans send the greetings. And they’re customized.” To further quote her, “At this moment, when so many of the world’s markets seem haywire — with the logic of supply, demand, pricing and debt broken — seeing an economy that works as well as Facebook’s birthday feature gives a flash of hope.”
And thus I hope to do better at returning the favor to my 1,449 Facebook friends. Happy birthday today, A.T. and Danae!
Verbing a noun, in 19 easy lessons
Steven Levy discussing "In the Plex" at Medill, 3/13/2012
The winter quarter at Northwestern is wrapping up, and with it the first offering of my new Medill course for undergraduates from across the university. In response to a suggestion that I find a way to integrate the topics I have been covering for graduate students (economics, marketing, technology, innovation) into the undergraduate curriculum, I went looking for a unifying theme, and I found one in Mountain View, California. Big surprise, eh?
The objective of “The Misspelled Noun That Became a Verb: American Media through the Lens of Google” was to use scholarship, reporting, and reflection about Google to understand the media world around us. The students were to read, think about, react to, and write about excerpts from a handful of books published over the past few years, as well as to combine newspaper and magazine reportage, blog posts, and YouTube videos with observation of their own habits.
On the books front, the issue was identifying which ones might add up to the broadest view of the topic that might fit into 19 two-hour class sessions, which I devoted to Google’s intersection with individual topics such as research, advertising, news, video, mobile, privacy, and even democracy. Six titles made the cut:
The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Business and Transformed Our Culture, by John Battelle (Portfolio, 2005)- What Would Google Do?, by Jeff Jarvis (Collins Business, 2009)
- Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, Ken Auletta (Penguin Press, 2009)
- The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry), Siva Vaidhyanathan (University of California Press, 2011)
- In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, Steven Levy (Simon & Schuster, 2011)
- The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, Eli Pariser (Penguin Press, 2011)
Jarvis and Vaidhyanathan were gracious enough to Skype in for class sessions during the quarter. William Poundstone, whose Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? was published in early January, both visited the class and delivered a public lecture (which Vaidhyanathan would have done, too, save for a last-second family emergency). And Levy, as indicated by the photo above, came to campus this week for a conversation with me on stage in the McCormick Tribune Forum (which, if you have an hour and the right version of Microsoft Silverlight, you can watch here or by clicking on the image).
In addition, I was hoping we’d have some news during the quarter to keep things fresh. That part turned out pretty well:
- On Jan. 12, we were scheduled to discuss the implications for users of personalized search. On Jan. 10, Google launched “Search Plus Your World,” perhaps making it all the more likely that no two people’s search results for the same topic would never be the same again.
On Jan. 26, the syllabus called for the first of two sessions on privacy. On Jan. 23, Google announced it was combining 60 of its privacy policies into one; helpfully, it went on to explain why by using some of the same cute stick figures it had been using to outline its extant practices in a print and online advertising campaign it called “Good to Know” (right).- On Feb. 2, the topic was video and YouTube. On Jan. 16, the New Yorker ran a fine piece of reportage by John Seabrook about YouTube’s “original channels” initiative. On Jan. 23, Google launched a cute little Web site to trumpet the factoid that one hour of video is now uploaded to YouTube every second.
- On Feb. 7, since it was a Tuesday, I had scheduled a focus on Google’s impact on democracy as seen through the presidential primaries and campaign. Here I had expected to use as the centerpiece the previous fall’s YouTube-sponsored Republican debate in Orlando, but on Jan. 31 President Obama cheerfully participated in a Google+ “hangout” that helped to round out our subsequent discussion.
I could keep going, but you get the idea. Did I mention that the Motorola Mobility acquisition passed antitrust muster on the morning of the mobile class?
Add in a visit from by my former Tribune colleague David Tan, now head of SEM agency development for Google, and a field trip to Google’s Chicago offices that Dave hosted near the end of quarter, and you wind up with a pretty interesting quarter, I think. Along the way, the students logged the Google text ads they encountered as they browsed the Web; visited the Northwestern University Library, some for the first time; and debated whether the widespread and automatic use of search engines to answer every question they encounter is making us smarter or dumber.
Tuesday’s public conversation with Steven Levy of Wired was essentially the climax to the quarter, as all the themes and ideas listed above, and many more, pulse through his book. For the purposes of my students (all of them, actually; my graduate students read In the Plex for their final on Monday), it was a chance to hear an expert talk not only about the past, but to publicly mull several possible futures. What might Google do with Lake County-based Motorola Mobility?, an audience member asked. Give away its phones for free to tether its users to Google products and services, he suggested.
What, then, did the students learn, you ask? I could speculate, but I’ll know better in a couple of days, when they turn in their final papers . . . where they have to tell me whether the pronouncements and warnings in the titles and subtitles of our six main books ring true after a quarter of moving the “Googlization of everything” from the background to the foreground of their consciousness.
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