The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
Megan Garber gives an exceptionally detailed breakdown of applause in this essay, which analyzes the history and evolution of the everyday gesture.
...moreSo the subtleties of the Roman arena — the claps and the snaps and the shades of meaning — gave way, in later centuries, to applause that was standardized and institutionalized and, as a result, a little bit promiscuous.
It was a time in my life when I was frequently “tagged,” along with other Netizens who seemed to keep in touch and do good works. I did no good works, but I tried to keep in touch.
...moreWhat defines a person’s existence? A photo ID or their Internet activity?
It’s a question that has been losing its irony lately. There’s the news of a traveling couple that allegedly went missing in Perú but in actuality was just taking a break from Facebook updates.
...moreWhen Katherine Losse’s The Boy Kings, a book about the sexist culture she encountered while working at Facebook during its early days, came out, Melissa Gira Grant paid attention.
Grant had worked for a Silicon Valley gossip blog during the same time period and had come to her own dismayed conclusions about women’s roles in the tech industry.
...moreMany businesses recently noticed that although their reported “likes” may have increased, only a portion of their posts were actually reaching their followers.
Now, in order for organizations to reach their original Facebook fan base, they have to pay Mr. Zuckerberg a hefty sum.
...moreThe New Yorker recently posted a cartoon which features a naked, and post-coital, Adam and Eve to their Facebook page. What resulted was a kerfuffle between the magazine and social media site over their nudity regulation policies. Specifically, Facebook took issue with Eve’s cartoon nipples, leading to the magazine’s Facebook page being temporarily shut down.
...moreThe answer for me, in this case, is among a group of statues on the Drake University campus in Des Moines, IA. I’m reading from our June Poetry Book Club selection, Allan Peterson’s Fragile Acts. I’ve posted video of this act in our new Facebook group for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club.
...moreIn 1845, Abraham Lincoln tried–and failed–to patent the The Springfield Gazette, a personal paper with striking similarities to our modern day Book of Faces. Here’s the full story.
“He went on to propose that ‘each Man may decide if he shall make his page Available to the entire Town, or only to those with whom he has established Family or Friendship.’ Evidently there was to be someone overseeing this collection of documents, and he would somehow know which pages anyone could look at, and which ones only certain people could see…”
UPDATE: Too good to be true, folks.
...moreIn an interesting move, popular political site Talking Points Memo will begin using Facebook comments as their main commenting system. TPM Editor John Marshall explains the decision here.
“…To make an admittedly long story short, we’re switching to Facebook comments because building or maintaining our own system does not seem like a good use of our company resources and because we believe fixed identities will make the comment threads more civilized, engaging and less threatened by marauding trolls and bad (comment) actors.”
...more“The idea of ‘cleaning out’ Facebook friends is getting more popular: The percentage of people unfriending other Facebook members rose from 56 percent in 2009 to 63 percent in 2011. In gross terms, 158 million people were unfriended in 2009, and more than a half a billion in 2011.”
GOOD explores the potential implications of this epidemic on the company’s interconnectedness, advertising, and investing.
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With healthy doses of Axl Rose and methamphetamines, two new collections, from journalist John Jeremiah Sullivan and crime fiction writer Frank Bill, call forth the power of place and personal history in the Shallow South.
Do you still remember the Internet of last week, just another barrage of all-over-the-place political and cultural events in which millions of people watched, reacted and interacted online?
...moreTwo young adult males–Jordan Blackshaw, 20, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22–both just received four-year sentences for using Facebook to incite a riot in their Cheshire hometown that never happened. Despite the announcement over Facebook concerning the riots that were purportedly going to occur, no one showed up to these locations apart from the police.
...moreSheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook, is profiled in the New Yorker. The gender-divided executive culture in Silicon Valley is manifested in the seriously unbalanced ratio of women and men executives. This essay discusses Sandberg’s history and theorizes about the reasons for this gender divide.
...moreBig hack of the day: the CIA, by LulzSec. And they released 62,000 password and login combinations with a challenge to hackers to find out where they work.
Now, the security breaches are escalating to an all-out hacker war between competing groups LulzSec and Anonymous (complete with Final Fantasy references, oh my).
...moreA twenty year-old French law that sought to keep the news media from promoting commercial enterprises is being newly reinforced.
This means that using “Facebook” and “Twitter” on air is strictly forbidden. This seems like a good way to stave off potential conflicts of interest, however with ubiquity having rendered these terms into (basically) general nouns, it might be difficult to find a vernacularly-fitting way around them.
...more“Welcome to the only dating site that lists real people, sincerely posting their real data and picture. You’ll feel comfortable watching them. Just like in Facebook.”
To construct Lovely Faces, the third column in their phenomenal Hacking Monopolism Trilogy, which began with Google Will Eat Itself and Amazon Noir, Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico borrowed info from one million Facebook profiles, then ran the pics through face-recognition software.
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Mike Young’s debut collection sifts through the lives of characters on the fringe, grounding moments of the surreal in a world that is frighteningly real.
At the end of The Social Network, a new indie flick that no one has ever heard of, I turned to my friend, and out of every intelligent comment I could have made, I said, “There was so much testosterone in the movie that I feel fucked six ways sideways.”
This week in New York Mayhem launches, Darin Strauss lives Half a Life, Nick Flynn knows The Art of Losing, RISK! is dreamy, The New Yorker Festival screens our MOVIE PICK The Social Network, and in ART, Rob Pruitt returns.
...moreOk, guys. We had a good run, but that whole book thing is done and over according to Facebook.
...more“I have no idea how to handle this new mode of living (I guess “living” is the word) in fiction. I probably spend more time e-mailing and reading online than I do having non-virtual human contact—and I bet I’m not that unusual.
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“What great dialogues we’ve had on e-mail, cell phone, text messages, Facebook, and Twitter—uv taut me tns!! ☺”
Fred Vogelstein, writing for the Wired blog Epicenter, looks at Facebook’s history on privacy, and points out that we shouldn’t really be shocked at what Mark Zuckerberg is doing.
“Indeed, Zuckerberg’s challenges to conventional thinking about online privacy have become so predictable, it’s starting to resemble Moore’s Law.
...more“But somewhere in that transition from a social site meant to deepen interpersonal relationships to a self promotional, commercial tool, Facebook lost its appeal.
“The various facets of my life merged into a web of connectivity where I could no longer clearly create distinct relationships with friends, foes, and fast food — either because I can’t figure out how or because Facebook is preventing me outright.
...moreWe’ve all heard the stories about people getting fired from jobs because of overly revealing Facebook photos, or of couples breaking up by changing their Facebook “relationship status” before even talking to one another. Though Facebook is meant to exist in virtual reality, we have given it the power to seep into and intermingle with our actual reality in ways we can’t always control.
...moreFor absolutely no reason except that I feel like it, I’m posting a lot about sex today, so in order to be consistent, Politics Sunday will be Sexual Politics Sunday for today and today only.
The Atlantic discusses the “sexual politics of nominating a Supreme Court Justice.”
“Why I’m Working As A Saigon Massage Girl.
...more“Professor Peter Kelly, director of public health in Teesside, claimed staff had found a link between social networking sites and the spread of the bacteria, especially among young women.”
A researcher in Britain claims that Facebook is contributing to a sharp increase in casual sex, and thus syphilis, in parts of Britain with high amounts of Facebook use.
...moreJonah Lehrer laments a big problem with the social web:
“The one shared feature that I’m most interested in is also a little disturbing: the tendency of the social software to quantify our social life. Facebook doesn’t just let us connect with our friends: it counts our friends.
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