The daily Twitter referendum or lottery

Twitter is truly an odd, albeit interesting, beast when it comes to “following” and “followers” for those of us anyway whose numbers aren’t up in the gazillions on either side of the equation and we have at least a general sense of plus or minus changes.

Unlike Facebook or LinkedIn, where one’s number of “friends” and “connections” seem more stable (sure you lose the odd one but generally gain them at least incrementally), Twitter is more akin, at least in my experience, to a daily (if not hourly) referendum or maybe lottery. I’m really not sure which.

While I like social media analytics and trying to figure out how algorithms are applied to determine the feed of tweets in my stream, and find engagement metrics as truly fascinating as the next guy who went through high school years ago loathing mathematics and majoring in history in university, I really find it hard to see direct correlations in terms of the numbers sometimes. Does losing a “follower” on Twitter mean you’ve offended someone? Or even worse bored them? Or maybe they just wanted to round-off their numbers or make room to follow someone else?

Anyway. Below are some of the folks we follow on Twitter. For today anyway. My very unscientific analysis of how I wound up following these folks, based on something like a cursory glance at the list, goes like this. Some are personal friends or former colleagues I’ve known for years. Some are related to places where I have previously worked and lived. A disproportionate number are Catholic, but a good number are simply religion writers in general or journalists. Add in some union activists. Chris Rutkowski, research co-ordinator for UFOlogy Research of Manitoba (URM) by night, communications officer in media relations with the communications marketing office of the University of Manitoba by day, is my go-to UFO guy, while Mark Boslough, an Albuquerque, New Mexico physicist, is a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories and an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico. He also a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and member of the group New Mexicans for Science and Reason. Asteroid 73520 Boslough (2003 MB1) is named after him.

Follow me, tweet me and retweet me. Go ahead. Make me viral. Make my day.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Following

So Bad So Good

@sbadsgood

We hunt best & worst pop culture on the web, so you don’t have to.

Old Pics Archive

@oldpicsarchive

The most interesting historical photographs. Follow, discuss, share!

CANADALAND

@CNDLND

http://CANADALANDSHOW.com

Amy Welborn

@amywelborn2

Catholic,writer,reader,traveler. Blog: http://amywelborn.wordpress.com New book: ADVENTURES IN ASSISI: http://tinyurl.com/adventuresinassisi …

coreyredekop

@CoreyRedekop

Author of (award-winning) SHELF MONKEY [http://ow.ly/A6iQa ], (award-nominated) HUSK [http://goo.gl/PwxpQz ], and an assortment of quality sweets.

CJR

@CJR

Monitoring the press, tracking the evolving media business & encouraging excellence in journalism since 1961.

J-Source

@jsource

News, research and commentary about Canadian journalism. Tweets by @rpobeirne.

ChurchMilitant.TV

@Church_Militant

Save the World. Be Catholic. http://www.churchmilitant.tv/premsignup.php http://www.facebook.com/ChurchMilitant.TV …

Francis X. Rocca

@FrancisXRocca

Rome bureau chief for Catholic News Service

The Tablet

@The_Tablet

The Tablet is a weekly Catholic journal which has been reporting on events of significance for more than 170 years.

Dr William Pelletier

@BibleScienceGuy

Mathematician. IT company vice-president. Bible-Science blogger. Sportsman, Orienteer, Camper. Husband, father of 7.

maurice emelu

@Revemelu

Catholic clergy, TV host, author, journalist, retreat preacher, African content producer for EWTN and President, Gracia Vobis Ministries,…

Jorge Barrera

@JorgeBarrera follows you

Journalist/Periodista, dabbler, occasional absinthe sipper, follower of threads. 6132942011 Email: jbarrera (at) aptn.ca; fax: 6135671834

Rev. Fidelis Omeaku

@RevFICO follows you

Catholic Priest, Gospel Artist and Follower of Jesus Christ, Son of God, Co-Heir of God’s Kingdom and son of our Blessed Mother Mary.

Jeff Mcinnes

@herbalizer306 follows you

Admin for the private FB group Thompson Confidential. Original admin of Thompson Talk. What a shitty list of accolades

Lisa Winters Evasiuk

@greta202 follows you

Someday maybe I will write the story of my life. Maybe.

Steve Lambert

@stevelambertwpg

Reporter with The Canadian Press. President of the Manitoba legislature press gallery. Music geek. Distance runner. Hacks-and-Flacks street…

Mark Boslough

@MarkBoslough

Physicist and skeptic. Tweets about science, asteroids, and climate change. Annoys deniers.

ninaburleigh

@ninaburleigh follows you

Journalist @newsweek, bestselling author. Anywhere on the Med. And Washington, D.C.

John Baert

@JohnBaert follows you

MGEU Special Projects Officer. Views expressed are mine. Jets, Bears, Blue Jays, 76ers, Chelsea.

Tim Fontaine

@anishinaboy follows you

Ojibway factotum. Associate Producer at https://twitter.com/CBCManitoba . http://mediaindigena.com contributor. Tweets about bannock. Often.

The Times

@WellingtonTimes follows you

Prince Edward County’s Independent News Source

Ruth Gledhill

@RuthieGledhill follows you

Loving life one day at a time. Contrib Ed @ChristianToday & student @GoldMADjourno. Reviewer @LondonTheatre1.

Anne D’Innocenzio

@ADInnocenzio

National Retail Writer for The Associated Press. Foodie & theater lover. Having fun with standup comedy. Manhattan. Email me story pitches…

Chris Rutkowski

@ufologyresearch

UFO guy, media guy, writer

Rachel Zoll

@rzollAP

@AP national religion writer since 2001. b. Salem, Mass. rzoll@ap.org

Michael Paulson

@MichaelPaulson

National religion reporter at The New York Times. Living in New York; missing New England.

Religion NewsService

@RNS

Religion News Service reporters, columnists and bloggers cover news & views where faith, spirituality and nonbelief meet society, culture, politi…

Sarah Pulliam Bailey

@spulliam follows you

On vacation! Soon: @WashingtonPost religion reporter. Amateur violist, cook, board gamer. spulliam@gmail.com

Religion Newswriters

@ReligionReport

Religion Newswriters Association provides networking, tools and training for reporters covering religion. We envision fair and informed religion…

GetReligion

@GetReligion

GetReligion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business…

ChristianCinema.com

@ChristianCinema

Since 1999, we’ve been connecting audiences with Christian movies and filmmakers. Now over 4000 titles that will impact lives via DVD, Rental, VOD…

Ted Andkilde

@andkilde follows you

photographer, malcontent, new dad, old soul

Luke Coppen

@LukeCoppen

Editor of the Catholic Herald

Damian Thompson

@holysmoke

Associate editor at The Spectator specialising in religion and classical music. Once described as ‘A blood-crazed ferret’ by the Church Times

Dwight Longenecker

@dlongenecker1

Bob Jones U, then Oxford and an Anglican priest, now Catholic priest, blogger, broadcaster, Author of Romance of Religion and fifteen…

Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

@fatherz

Catholic Priest, Blogger, Columnist – http://wdtprs.com

Anchor, The World Over Live on EWTN Thurs.8PM ET., EWTNews Director, New York Times Best Selling author, journalist, producer, husband, dad.…

L’Osservatore Romano

@LOsservatoreUSA

USA edition of L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, now printed by Our Sunday Visitor. Follow @CatholicReview for latest Vatican…

Fr. Robert Barron

@FrRobertBarron

I am a Catholic priest, author, and creator and host of the award-winning documentary series CATHOLICISM

Our Sunday Visitor

@OSV

Sharing our Catholic Faith online & in print …. Looking at news & trends of today through Catholic eyes.

Vatican – news

@news_va_en

Vatican media: CTV, Osservatore Romano, Pontifical Council for Social Communications, Vatican Radio, Press Office, Vatican website, V.I.S.

Catholic News Svc

@CatholicNewsSvc

Catholic News Service is a leader in religious news. Our mission is to report fully, fairly and freely on the involvement of the church in the world today.

Salt + Light

@saltandlighttv

Salt and Light Catholic Media Foundation is a charitable organization devoted to spreading the light of Christ through media.

Laurie Goodstein

@lauriegnyt

New York Times National Religion Correspondent. Covering the reverent and irreverent since 1993. @washpost @nytimes http://nyti.ms/VFHNZR

Crux

@Crux

Covering all things Catholic, from Church doctrine to personal faith. Featuring expert Vatican coverage by @JohnLAllenJr and edited by …

John L. Allen, Jr.

@JohnLAllenJr

Vatican expert, journalist, author and pug lover. Associate editor at Boston Globe and also at Crux, covering all things Catholic.

Paul Andersen

@PaulAndersen6 follows you

Producer for Shaw TV in Thompson, Flin Flon & The Pas. I only have two talents in Life: Mini Putt and Bubble Hockey. Views are my own.

Shaw TV Thompson

@ShawTVThompson follows you

Shaw TV Thompson brings your local community content to you. We represent your local community programming in Northern Manitoba

Abigail Bimman

@AbigailCTV

Videographer & anchor for CTV Kitchener.

City of Thompson

@cityofthompson

Journalism.co.uk

@journalismnews follows you

News, digital tools and tips for journalists and publishers from http://Journalism.co.uk . Contact @abigailedge or @ajreid. Tel: +44 (0)1273 384290

Thompson Citizen

@ThompsonCitizen follows you

50 years and counting as Thompson’s source for local news.

Steve Ladurantaye

@sladurantaye

Government and news at Twitter Canada.

Neil MacCarthy

@neilmaccarthy

Com. Dir., Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto. Follow @archtoronto for official feed. I’m that church media guy, smiling most of the time. Tweets are my own.

Jeanette Kimball

@dancewithsun7 follows you

Mediator, conciliator, cedar, bamboo and silver flute player. Peacemaker and camera maven.

Ryan Flanagan

@flanaganryan follows you

News dude. Sports fan. Pop culture noun. I’m a web writer at @CTVKitchener.

Dan Heffernan

@DanHeffernan2 follows you

Scott Edmonds

@tsedmonds follows you

Vice-president, Canada, The Newspaper Guild-CWA, Writer, multi-media journalist, Formerly with The Canadian Press

And (did I happen to mention?) you can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Popular Culture and Ideas, Television

If ‘Googled’ is a verb that needs no explanation, can there be any doubt the Internet is changing the very way we think?

“Plasticity and the human brain” was my original draft headline for this post. Seemed like a catchy enough way to draw readers in.

But before I could write this column with such a punchy “hed,” I had to do a bit of research. On the Internet from my desk, of course. That’s when I got distracted. Which is rather the story of the Internet. They don’t call it the World Wide Web – with the emphasis on web – for nothing.

Sharon Begley, senior health and science correspondent at Reuters, was the science editor and the science columnist at Newsweek from 2007 to April 2011. In the Jan. 8, 2010 issue of she had an interesting piece called, “Your Brain Online: Does the Web change how we think?” Begley was commenting on Edge Foundation Inc.’s 2010 annual question by John Brockman to 109 philosophers, neurobiologists, and other scholars, which four years ago was: “How is the Internet changing the way you think?” Not so much, argued some scholars, including neuroscientist Joshua Greene and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, both of Harvard.

Others held a dystopian view. Communications scholar Howard Rheingold argued the Internet fosters “shallowness, credulity, distraction” and as a result that minds struggle “to discipline and deploy attention in an always-on milieu.” Evgeny Morozov, a Belarus-born researcher and blogger and the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom and To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, who studies the political effects of the Internet, says, “Our lives are increasingly lived in the present, completely detached even from the most recent of the pasts … our ability to look back and engage with the past is one unfortunate victim.”

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Claremont Graduate University writes that the ubiquity of information makes us “less likely to pursue new lines of thought before turning to the Internet.” The information is de-contextualized and satisfies our immediate research needs at the expense of deeper understanding, Csikszentmihalyi argues.

This is not exactly a new argument. Nicholas Carr wrote a similar piece in the July/August 2008 issue of Atlantic magazine with the genuinely catchy title: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He argued the online world has made it much harder to engage with difficult texts and complex ideas.

Carr wrote: “Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.”

Carr followed up that 2008 magazine article with a book two years later, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain.

I could go on, but truth is I got distracted around this point in my research. That happens with the Internet – a lot. My mind was soon enough recalling Quantum Leap, starring Dean Stockwell, as Al Calavicci, and Scott Bakula, as Dr. Sam Beckett, a scientist who becomes lost in time following a botched experiment.

It aired from March 1989 to March 1993 originally, a quick detour to Wikipedia confirmed for me. “I thought it was quite good at the time for the sociology more than the science,” I was soon explaining in an e-mail. “Interesting though because it is one of the last shows of its type to air before the Internet was just about to take off in a big way. There was e-mail in 1993 and a very early World Wide Web (WWW), but few people were ‘wired.’”

That might have been OK if that was as far as it went. But soon I was doing some comparative research on Wikipedia for the mid-1980s to mid-1990s sci-fi era. “I also quite enjoyed some of the episodes of Sliders, starring Jerry O’Connell as Quinn Mallory, which ran from from 1995 to 2000, focusing on alternate histories and social norms as the group of travellers “slide” between parallel parallel worlds by use of a wormhole referred to as an “Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky bridge,” I helpfully added after my brief mention of Quantum Leap.

“There was also a series called Max Headroom that aired briefly in 1987 and 1988. Edison Carter, played by Matt Frewer, who actually grew up in Peterborough, was a hard-hitting reporter for “Network 23,” who sometimes uncovered things that his superiors in the network would have preferred to keep private. Eventually, one of these instances required him to flee his workspace, upon which he was injured in a motorcycle accident in a parkade. Bryce Lynch downloaded a copy of his mind into a computer, giving birth to the character Max Headroom, as the last words seen by Carter before impact were “Max Headroom”, specifying vehicle clearance height in the parkade.

“Max Headroom also appeared as a stylized head in some TV ads against primary colour rotating-line backgrounds. He was known for his jerky techno-stuttering speech, delivering the slogan “Catch the wave!” (in his trademark staccato, stuttered digital sampling playback as “Ca-ca-ca-ca-ca-catch the wave”) in the rather disastrous Coca-Cola venture in the mid-to-late-1980s with “New Coke.”

An hour or so has now passed.

I agree heartily with Carr that the web “has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes … a few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after.”

But the fact is that at about this point in reading Carr’s thoughtful treatise, Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s magic Google search engine somehow transported me to Don Terry’s article, “Lou and Me: ‘We work at a newspaper, a real newspaper’” in the January/February 2010 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, which you can be transported to as well via http://www.cjr.org/feature/lou_and_me.php?page=all.

Ah, yes. Lou Grant, the character played by actor Ed Asner in the show of the same name. Editor of the fictional Los Angeles Tribune. Moved from television news in Minneapolis, after being laid off supposedly after 10 years as Mary Tyler Moore’s boss on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, back into newspapers. But on another television show, if you can follow the thread. Debuted Sept. 20, 1977, Terry helpfully reminds me. That’s good to know since time can play tricks and get telescoped with age, I find.

By now, I’m thoroughly absorbed in the reverie of memory and have to remind myself I’m writing a column based on the plasticity of the human brain and how technology can change the very act of how we think and construct reality.

Take typewriters, like I used in journalism school. Friedrich Nietzsche bought a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball typewriter in 1882 and his style of writing changed, long before the World Wide Web and Google.

His already terse prose became even tighter and more telegraphic. “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts,” Nietzsche observed.

How do I know this? I “Googled” it.

soundingsjohnbarker

Tag Archives: Columbia Journalism Review

Following

If ‘Googled’ is a verb that needs no explanation, can there be any doubt the Internet is changing the very way we think?