Because I’m doing a whole buncha things lately that are preventing me from being a Well Behaved Blogger, Megan has once again herorically taken the reigns. Thusly, I present to you the following guest post:
The Politics of Facebook, Facebook Politics, or
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Me Some Delicious Chocolate Spread
While I am not bold enough to say facebook presents an representative sample of the current political climate in America, it nonetheless presents us with an interesting slice of the American demographic.
That said, everyone is aware that Barack Obama is second most popular person to exist within the facebook world (after Stephen Colbert, naturally.) If facebook were any indication of how the election will turn out in November, Obama would cripple (intentional) John McCain in the election. With his 1,052,575 “fans” (or supporters), Obama utterly blows away McCain, with his mere 154,454 fans. For those of you who can’t perform basic math, that’s nearly 900,000 more fans on Obama’s part. Certainly McCain support base isn’t necessarily the “youth crowd” or “anyone who is technically savvy enough to be on facebook” (which, isn’t much at all since my mother has found her way onto the site.) This shouldn’t be entirely surprising considering he is publicly willing to admit to his computer illiteracy.
Our potential first ladies have a similar disparity concerning this internet popularity. Michelle Obama’s page has 47, 425 fans (for those who need help with the maths, that’s almost a third of the John McCain support base.) However, Cindy McCain pulls in a dismal 519 fans. She does, however, have a group of 51 who uphold her status as a MILF.
Should this disparity concern those in the McCain camp? Most would say no, citing the differences in the Obama and McCain support base, saying that something as frivolous as facebook groups can’t be taken seriously, etc, blah, blah. I would have fallen into this group as well until yesterday, when the wool was removed from my eyes. A fan page popped on my feed saying I had friends who had recently shown their support. No, it wasn’t for Obama, no it wasn’t for McCain. It was for Nutella.
Yes, Nutella. That same delicious Italian (yes, Italian!) chocolate wonder which we’ve all devoured on any trip to Europe (despite our being able to purchase it in the states.) Nutella has over 300,000 fans. Yes twice, twice as many as John McCain. So, what does this all mean? Well, the entire world loves chocolate. The world is less inclined to love aging, white Republicans. That said, maybe the Republican party should have gone with a candidate that more people could stand behind. Nutella in 2008?
Filed under: me stew | Tags: i found it on the internets, kind of a big deal
Hey, what do you know! That last post of mine was my 100th post! Yay me!
When I realized this, I felt a pang of regret because I didn’t do anything special to commemorate the occasion. Then I realized that my hundredth post actually represented some of my most important opinions! Like:
- The Internet is awesome.
- The Internet is paving the way for the Robot Revolution.
- People should read more good books.
- I like steak.
- Bitches should be able to regulate their font usage.
Hooray. And because I was linked there by Tropophilia, I’ve got to share this neato nifty program called Wordle takes big blocks of text and turns the most frequently used words into “word clouds.” Like Taylor, I couldn’t resist plugging in my senior honors thesis, a collection of poems I wrote called Maps and Legends. Kind of pretty, isn’t it?
I was bummed at first that the biggest word I used was “into,” with words like “over” and “through” coming in close after that, but then again, my thesis “investigated the tensions between interiors and exteriors,” so it’s kind of appropriate, yeah? Go try it and report back!
Remember when I babbled for a bit about how the Internet is ruining the way we read? Well, it seems to be a popular thing to do lately, since Slate just deconstructed How We Read Online. An excerpt:
Back to the Jungle
Nielsen’s apt description of the online reader: “[U]sers are selfish, lazy, and ruthless.” You, my dear user, pluck the low-hanging fruit. When you arrive on a page, you don’t actually deign to read it. You scan. If you don’t see what you need, you’re gone.And it’s not you who has to change. It’s me, the writer.
If you can get past Agger’s overly aggressive use of bold font (c’mon, man!), the article is pretty interesting. Apparently, we’re more likely to pore over text if it’s paper text—we’ve come to expect immediacy on a computer screen.
Is this impatience necessarily a damaging thing? Gosh, I don’t know anymore. All I know is that after I blagged about that Atlantic article, I heard the siren song of fiction calling me home. I’ve been reading Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet. It’s really, really good. What’re you guys reading? I feel like sitting down with a steak and a good book would really rock my life right about now.
Filed under: me stew | Tags: i found it on the internets, kind of a big deal, things i love
Are you reading this using Mozilla Firefox right now? If you are, have you upgraded to Firefox 3.0 yet? YOU HAVEN’T? C’mon, it’s been out for, like, 10 hours already! What, like you have something better to do than upgrade your browser software? Get to it! It’s quicker and sleeker and a good many other things that end in -er than Firefox 2.0!
You may now return to your regularly scheduled browsing.
Filed under: where the sidewalk ends | Tags: i found it on the internets, none of the other tags fit!, tee vee
Does this creep you out?
I KNOW, RIGHT? The folks over at Pixeloo untooned Mario a couple months back (along with a couple other cartoon favorites).
Do you know why it freaks us out? It’s because of a theory called The Uncanny Valley, an idea that supposes that when an entity (like video-game Mario) appears sufficiently non-human, its human-like qualities stand out and create a sense of sympathy in us human types. When a non-human entity appears “almost” human, we notice the nonhuman characteristics more and the result is revulsion. Think of The Uncanny Valley as a place where Nicole Kidman owns a summer home.
Got it? If not, check out the following clip from 30 Rock in which Tracy Morgan wants to make a porno video game—I often find that Tracy Morgan helps my knowledge absorption by a good 14%.
Isn’t that fascinating? Apparently, this mechanism might be biologically ingrained in us so that we inherently fear corpses. Or, y’know, zombies (seriously!).
