Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

The ‘Like’ Button That Came Before Facebook

April 19, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Talking back to our broadcast media seems to be an integral part of the early 21st century experience. Hulu is constantly asking me if a particular ad is relevant to my interests. Major news networks like CNN want me to give my opinion on breaking news stories to them via Twitter. Even here at Pacific Standard we encourage you to leave comments on stories. In the parlance of advertisers, this two-way street of media communication is called "engagement." It might seem like something that's just started popping into conversations recently, but the idea is as old as broadcasting itself. In ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Time Machine
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Best Tweets in the House

March 12, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
(ILLUSTRATION: SÉBASTIEN THIBAULT)

ON THE EVENING of November 18, in Mobile, Alabama, a young newspaper reporter named Robert McClendon sat through a performance by the Mobile Symphony Orchestra while quietly updating his Twitter feed. The program that night featured Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, a passionate work that put McClendon in a reflective state of mind. Exactly ten minutes later, at 9:58 p.m., the thought came to him: At 10:02, the orchestra plunged toward Beethoven’s finale, and McClendon leaned forward in his tweet: And finally, at 10:06, release: Those who prefer experiencing ... Read More

More like this: Culture, March-April 2013
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Predicting House Races by Weight of Tweet

October 31, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
VWYT

With the presidential prediction game dreadfully same-y, surely there’s another constantly changing fix for political junkies. How about forecasting all 435 U.S. congressional races every day, based on brand new data every day? That’s what you get at “Voting With Your Tweet,” an experiment that mines mentions of congressional candidates in the Twitter-sphere to predict who will win each race and what the actual vote share will be. Unlike past efforts at using social media to predict political contests, which made their “predictions” after the voters had settled the matter, this ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The 101
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Not Twitter Revolutions, But Twitter-Assisted Revolutions

April 6, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

It’s tempting to think of the Internet as the world’s best weapon against authoritarianism. Where it goes, democracy will follow, if we can just figure out how to strategically drop enough thumb drives, cell phones, and “shadow” technology. But, of course, the relationship between the Internet and democracy is much messier. And what we are now beginning to understand about it – with scientific rigor, that is – suggests that the laws governing this latest technology are not so different from its predecessors like radio and TV. “The Internet can play a role and facilitate ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The Idea Lobby
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Can Obama Keep His Technology Edge in 2012?

October 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Back during the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama's staff often kicked off his stump speeches with a few words from a warm-up act. A young man would walk out on stage. He'd say something like, "Boy, it's good to see you all here! Candidate Obama is about two miles away and will be here shortly. Let's tell him how much we're looking forward to seeing him ..." and the young man would then lead the crowd in the collective exercise of sending Candidate Obama a welcome text message from a hundred or a thousand phones simultaneously. "I kept shaking my head, saying, 'You all are falling ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The Idea Lobby
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Time for Robin Hood to Make a Comeback

March 11, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

What do you think of when you think of Nottingham? We know, we know — the shopping, the nightlife district, the ... um ... er ... oh, who are we kidding? We all think of Robin Hood, of course. But try telling that to the city leaders. Researchers from Nottingham University Business School surveyed nearly 400 visitors and locals on the question, "If I say 'Nottingham' to you, what immediately comes to mind?" Nearly one-third of respondents named the legendary archer and bandit; shopping came in second, followed by crime. (Apparently "stealing from the rich" really caught on in Nottingham, ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, March-April 2011, The Cocktail Napkin
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Song Lyrics, Twitter Help Chart Public Mood

January 27, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Social scientists seeking to assess the collective mood of large groups of people traditionally have relied on slow, laborious sampling methods that usually entail some form of self-reporting. Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, mathematicians at the University of Vermont, dreamed up an ingenious way to sample the feelings of many more people much more quickly. They downloaded the lyrics to 232,000 popular songs composed between 1960 and 2007 and calculated how often emotion-laden words like "love," "hate," "pain" and "baby" occurred in each. Then they graphed their results, averaging ... Read More

More like this: Media, Science
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Toasting Government’s Good Ideas From 2010

December 30, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

There have been a lot of bad ideas from government officials this past year, knee-jerk responses to national crises or hotheaded proposals that cooled in the wake of the midterm elections. There was Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's ferocious embrace of sand berms, the man-made islands designed to protect his state from the Gulf oil spill that wound up wasting millions of dollars and invaluable time. There was the sudden rallying cry to rewrite the 14th Amendment, the Virginia attorney general's witch hunt of academic research, and that dubious scheme to spend stimulus money on stimulus road ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The Idea Lobby
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Why Facebook Wants You to Have More Friends

October 22, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

We are often bombarded by friend recommendations on Facebook. The geniuses behind online networks care about the health of our "social networks." There is an intuitive reason behind them pushing friend suggestions: The incentive to contribute/participate in an online social network increases with the size of the network, and that ultimately translates into revenue. Online social networks are built on user-generated content. Without this content, these networks are the equivalent of dying blogs (or MySpace). That said, Facebook faces the (potentially impossible) task of keeping its users ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Media
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The Gadget in the Gray Flannel Suit

October 13, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Early this year, to help keep in touch with the office, I bought a semi-smart phone, meaning that it surfed the Web and sent e-mail, but wasn't controlled by a touch screen. I wasn't immediately able to figure how to tweet from it. And how are you going to start a journalistic revolution if your cell phone doesn't do Twitter? As I worked on joining the mobile Twitterverse, I happened to be in Chicago, at a journalism conference that included a talk by a Twitter guru. He was one of those caffeinated, if-I-can-do-it-you-can-do-it-too new media evangelists, and he said he'd won a contract to ... Read More

More like this: Media, Not the Editor's Letter, November-December 2010
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