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
How Truthy is the Twitter Torrent?
October 7, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Memes divide and replicate on the Internet in a way they never did through old-fashioned media or word of mouth. In a matter of mouse clicks, the government is planning death panels. The president is a Muslim. There are headless bodies in the desert, medical microchips under our skin and IRS agents are coming for our guns. None of these are true. The question is, who floated these ideas in the first place (presumably while knowing that)? And would it make you feel any better if you knew? "Right now, from your cell phone, pretty much anywhere in the world, you can just push a button and ... Read More
How Congress Uses Twitter
June 30, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Like other Tweeters, U.S. senators and representatives who use the Twitter micro-messaging service choose whose feeds they wish to follow; these attention preferences are depicted below by arcs connecting followers to followees. Members of Congress and associated entities (the Hispanic Caucus and the Prayer Caucus, for example) are arrayed and colored on our diagram according to the partisan lean of the congressional people and entities they choose to follow — going from most Democratic in blue on the left, to most Republican-leaning in red on the right. The arcs are colored according to ... Read More
How to Hold a World of Tweets
April 23, 2010 • By • 1 Comment
After the Library of Congress announced last week that it had acquired the rights to Twitter's entire archive for preservation as a forever testament to how Americans lived and communicated in the early 21st century, the Idea Lobby called up to ask if we could come by and see, well, where they were going to put it. Would tweets be housed amid Thomas Jefferson's 6,487 tomes? Or on the shelf beneath the Federalist Papers? "There isn't really much to see," conceded Beth Dulabahn, the library's director of integration management. Sure, there's a server that physically houses the LoC's digital ... Read More
