Obsessed with idea of being alone in a room w/old unwanted glassware & crockery, obliterating things till satiated, then someone else sweeps 7:25 AM Aug 3rd, 2009 from web

Consider the supermarket sagas. It was a place I spent a lot of time, both because I had young children to feed and because that’s where the pharmacy was. I would wait in line to pick up the narcotics and antiemetics, trying not to look at the varied pleasure-enhancing condoms. If my husband Kevin hadn’t “followed” me, I would have whipped out my phone to share some bitter thoughts about ribbed strawberry rubbers. But when I wheeled my cart away after begging for one or two pills to get him through a Sunday night, I did tweet:

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Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports on the extent to which the Army’s public affairs office is interested in public and media opinion of the Bradley Manning case, noting that P.R. staffers prepared daily summaries of the coverage of the ongoing legal proceedings. This bit jumped out at me:

The Army used a commercial service called VOCUS to track traditional and social media coverage of Manning's hearing. The Pentagon pays close attention to the volume of tweets about the U.S. military during high-profile incidents, like the Air Force One flyover that distressed New York City residents in 2009 …

Here (.pdf), via Gerstein, is the Public Affairs Office media coverage summary that refers to “1,045 social media conversations about the hearing.” It also notes that “the VOCUS media site listed most of the coverage of Manning as negative, the majority of the coverage about the hearing remains balanced and factual.”

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When Texas Gov. Rick Perry declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination Aug. 13, the same day as the Ames Straw Poll, those watching social streams could have rightfully assumed he had won the Iowa contest. Twitter exploded with Perry mentions, even though he didn’t participate in the straw poll, while the winner, Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.), drew far less attention. Social media was the writing on the wall. Perry would soon trend up in polls, surpassing Bachmann and the rest of the field. Twitter was the early — scratch that — Twitter was the real-time warning system.

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"It's always wrong, that's obvious, but I'm rolling my eyes at all the attention she'll get."

While covering the Egyptian protests back in February, CBS reporter Lara Logan was separated from her crew and endured a horrifying sexual and physical assault. And when the news filtered out from Tahrir Square, New York University Center for Law and Security fellow Nir Rosen fired off a torrent of scathing tweets about the attack, admitting "She's so bad that I ran out of sympathy for her," and adding "it would have been funny if it happened to Anderson [Cooper] too." In the wake a furious backlash, Rosen swiftly deleted the tweets, apologized for his words, and resigned from NYU. Today, he's back on Twitter after a brief sabbatical, but as he wrote for Salon last winter, "with 480 characters I undid a long career."

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The first was a piece in the Washington Post profiling the Wiretappers' Ball, a recent gathering in suburban Maryland for those who make tools for surveilling, monitoring and throttling the Internet -- and for the people who buy them. The get-together, according to the Post, featured more than three dozen countries and nearly as many U.S. federal agencies. It's a showcase event for an industry in which behemoths like Cisco, and smaller players like Blue Coat, help control and track the Internet activities of the government's enemies in China (Falun Gong) and Syria (revolutionaries).

The second, smaller development, reported by the Wall Street Journal, was that San Francisco-based Twitter Inc. had acquired Whisper Systems, a two-person firm that specializes in securing the Android mobile operating system. The firm's only employees -- the marvelously named Moxie Marlinspike and fellow researcher Stuart Anderson -- seek to make it harder for snoops to monitor who and how) you are texting, calling and otherwise connecting with digitally.

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Emma Sullivan doesn't have the fiery rhetoric of a Paul Krugman or Rachel Maddow's comprehensive grasp of the issues. She isn't Keith Olbermann or even Howard Kurtz. She's a high school senior in Kansas, a young woman just eligible to vote. But her political commentary has nonetheless created a firestorm way beyond Shawnee Mission East school.

Last week, during a Kansas Youth in Government field trip, Sullivan watched Gov. Sam Brownback speak. Unmoved, she cavalierly tweeted to her roughly 65 followers, "Just made mean comments at gov. brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot." A teenager tweeting that her governor "sucks" and "blows" – "a lot"? Sounds like grounds for an incident of national proportions!

Sure enough, Brownback's office – the Thin Skin Division -- noted Sullivan's tweet, and contacted Youth in Government. As Sherriene Jones-Sontag, Brownback's communications director, explained to the Kansas City Star, "That wasn’t respectful. In order to really have a constructive dialogue, there has to be mutual respect." She added, "It was important for the organization to be aware of the comments their students were making."

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As headlines across the world have made clear, the legendary 84-year-old was not ousted this week because of his age or his job performance. Instead, he was fired for his lackadaisical response to charges that former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky allegedly sexually abused a young boy in a campus locker room. Though Paterno related the alleged incident to his superiors, he did not report any wrongdoing to the police. On Saturday, Sandusky was charged with multiple counts of sex abuse involving eight boys over the course of several years.

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The story in the earlier article was that our sprawling intelligence and national security apparatus was caught off-guard by social media-fueled uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, and that they were going to take steps to be better prepared in the future.

DHS Undersecretary Caryn Wagner said the department was still trying to figure out how to use Twitter and Facebook information for law enforcement purposes. And they seem to be starting completely from scratch:

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Fiennes, who's currently playing Prospero in the Theatre Royal Haymarket's version of "The Tempest," added, "I think we're living in a time when our ears are attuned to a flattened and truncated sense of our English language, so this always begs the question, is Shakespeare relevant?… I hear it too from people at drama schools, who say (young people) find the density of a Shakespeare text a challenge in a way that, perhaps, [students] a few generations ago maybe wouldn't have."

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It's not the first time it has been asked. Gilad Lotan at SocialFlow (and erstwhile Microsoft researcher), spurred by questions raised by participants and supporters of the Occupy Wall Street protests, asks the question: Is Twitter censoring its Trends list to exclude #occupywallstreet and #occupyboston? While the protest movement gains traction and media coverage, and participants, observers and critics turn to Twitter to discuss it, why are these widely known hashtags not trending? Why are they not trending in the very cities where protests have occurred, including New York?

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2. Obvious fact of the day: A new study by the Pew Institute reveals that "30 percent of adults 18-29 have pretended to be on the phone in order to avoid human interaction." The other 70 percent are either playing Angry Birds or sexting, no duh.

3. Terrifying Twitter of the day: Courtney Stodden, the child (but not childlike) bride of 51-year-old Doug Hutchison, continues to prove her classiness online with updates like this:

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If you've had enough of the depressing news for the week, feast those things in your ocular cavities on these 10 pop culture stories that we've culled from the Internet and beyond! (But mostly the Internet.) They aren't here to make you feel OK again, but maybe they'll take your mind off the fact that the world is going to hell in a hand basket.

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Three months later, and the "too soon?" refrain is being sung again, though this time in regard to the riots and looting that have devastated London. A Tumblr called PhotoshopLooter -- which digitally alters photos from the riots to include Justin Bieber, My Little Ponies, giant cookies, and unicorns (among others) -- has only been up for two days, but already has four pages of submissions and thousands of reblogs. Obviously, there is a market in this kind of dark humor on the Internet. And maybe that's not a bad thing.

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2. Race-y comic news of the day: If Glenn Beck doesn't like the new Ultimate Spider-Man, how is he going to feel about Laurence Fishburne playing news chief Perry White in Zac Snyder's "Superman" reboot?  I blame Michelle Obama.

3. Rock loss of the day: NBC exec claims that "30 Rock" will continue past next season, with or without Alec Baldwin. OK. But what about Tina Fey, who Baldwin had also hinted might leave when their contracts expire in 2012?

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"I'm sorry. There is no way you can stay in a hostel in Bogotá without a passport," the woman said. "It's a very strict rule and no hostel will let you stay."

I panicked. It is not an exaggeration to say it was one of the most stressful moments of my life. Nine o'clock on a Friday night in an unfamiliar city, and I was marooned with two young boys. We would be sleeping on the streets for the night.

"Do you have a computer I can use?" I asked. There was a slim chance this would make a difference, but when you're grasping at straws, you grasp them all. My hands shook as I typed out my plea to the twitterverse:

"I need help desperately. Know anyone in Bogota, Colombia? Please RT"

And then I waited to see what happened next.

My husband and I have long been travelers. Back in 1990, we hopped on a plane and pedaled remote roads in Pakistan and India. There was no Internet then (well, we didn't use it anyway). And to travel meant to be completely out of touch with the world save the four mail drops we arranged. Every month or so we wrote a long letter and sent it home.

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So I knew when I told my editor I wanted to write a piece about my daughter's recent experience with getting the wrong vaccine at her annual checkup that I'd be in for flak. But I wrote it anyway, because I felt strongly about two key issues of the story. If you're going in for any procedure, drug or vaccination, take a moment to double-check that the person administering it is giving you what you're there for. Also, I believe my daughters should have final say in whether or not they receive the HPV vaccine. And flak, indeed, I got.

But even I was surprised this morning when writer Amanda Marcotte took some mighty big umbrage on Twitter, who began by calling piece an "overreaction" and then proceeded to engage in something that looks remarkably like overreacting.

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What we found were a barrage of tweets, both informative and conjectural, serious and sardonic. We've culled a selection of the best, from a variety of media commenters, to give you an idea of what it's really like when a major media shocker causes Twitter to explode.

Breaking News!

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1. Lady Gaga's dark secret: Biographer Ian Halperin is telling the world that Gaga is a sick drug addict who is obsessed with her weight.  OK, but is she really bisexual??

2. Bristol Palin questioned on "stolen virginity": Barbara Walters calls out the memoirist for her description of her first time having sex with Levi Johnston. Walters: "It must have been OK, because you kept on having sex with him, yeah?"

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In doing so, she unknowingly strayed from pro-Israel standard parlance: In using the term "Palestine" as opposed to the more standard "Palestinians" she inadvertently implied the existence of Palestine as a place -- something pro-Israel hawks are loath to do.

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