Amplify’d from blog.catchfiremedia.com

The Power Behind Proper Social Media Inclusion & Attribution in Traditional Media

by Abby Harvey on July 30, 2010

Social media has been infiltrating the worlds in which we live for years now—slowly at first, and snowballing as of late. Be it television, radio, magazines, or newspapers; look, listen, and social media will be staring or speaking right back at you. The idea for this blog post arose out of an excellent panel presentation at a Young Professionals Connection luncheon featuring local media professionals, and out of my own background as a journalist.

All four professionals spoke of social media’s influence and importance in their current occupations. Dave Price, a reporter and news anchor at WHO TV 13, said social media has been rewarding for the feedback from viewers—something they’ve “never had in TV.” Colleen Kelly, radio personality from Big Ken and Colleen in the Morning on Star 102.5, said social media has caused a “decrease in phone calls,” due to conversation moving online. Todd Razor, online editor for the Des Moines Business Record, and Brianne Sanchez, staff writer for Juice magazine, spoke of Twitter and Facebook’s usefulness for lead generation and crowdsourcing. Read more at blog.catchfiremedia.com

Google, you always are deploying the exact stuff I need. As a man with many accounts, this is super useful.

Amplify’d from techcrunch.com

Google Will Soon Let You Jump Between Multiple Accounts

by Jason Kincaid on Aug 3, 2010

If you’re a big user of Gmail, Calendar, or any of Google’s other account-based services and have spread your data across multiple accounts, Google has a new feature that you’re going to love: Multiple Sign-In. Yes, you’ll finally be able to quickly swap between multiple Google accounts without having to go through the tedious process of logging out and logging back in every time. Granted, the process generally takes less than a minute, but for those of who have been doing it a dozen times a day, this is a very welcome change.Read more at techcrunch.com

Notable quote? "However, most computer geeks are oblivious to the fact that your parents being able to afford a computer back in the 1980s is a product of class privilege, not your innate geekiness."

Amplify’d from restructure.wordpress.com

If you were hacking since age 8, it means you were privileged.

Often, computer geeks who started programming at a young age brag about it, as it is a source of geeky prestige. However, most computer geeks are oblivious to the fact that your parents being able to afford a computer back in the 1980s is a product of class privilege, not your innate geekiness. Additionally, the child’s gender affects how much the parents are willing to financially invest in the child’s computer education. If parents in the 1980s think that it is unlikely their eight-year-old daughter will have a career in technology, then purchasing a computer may seem like a frivolous expense.

Because of systemic racism, class differences correlate with racial demographics. In the Racialicious post Gaming Masculinity, Latoya quotes a researcher’s exchange with an African American male computer science (CS) undergraduate:

“Me and some of my black friends were talking about the other guys in CS. Some of them have been programming since they were eight. We can’t compete with that. Now, the only thing that I have been doing since I was eight is playing basketball. I would own them on the court. I mean it wouldn’t be fair, they would just stand there and I would dominate. It is sort of like that in CS.” – Undergraduate CS Major

Those “other guys” in CS are those white, male geeks who brag in CS newsgroups about hacking away at their Commodore 64s as young children, where successive posters reveal younger and younger ages in order to trump the previous poster. This disgusting flaunting of privilege completely demoralizes those of us who gained computer access only recently. However, CS departments—which tend to be dominated by even more privileged computer geeks of an earlier era when computers were even rarer—also assume that early computer adoption is a meritocratic measure of innate interest and ability.

Many young men in computer science report having had an immediate and strong engagement with the computer from an early age. That engagement intensified in middle and high school and led the young men to declare a computer science major. On the other hand, many women who are interested in computer science and have similar talent do not report a similar experience. Many of these young women report a more moderate interest in computer science, especially early on, that builds gradually. Distinguishing between an interest in computer science and an interest in computers and technology is important. Historically girls had less interest in and experience both with computers and in computer science. Today women and men are interested in and equally likely to use computers and technology for educational and communication purposes (Singh et al., 2007), but the gender gap in the study of computer science remains.

In other words, at least 75% of male CS undergraduates had parents who were affluent enough to be able to afford computers at a time when computers were very expensive. Clearly, enrollment in CS is a social product of class privilege, not innate ability. Furthermore, this implies that computer geek prestige is an indicator of class privilege, in addition to being connected to technical proficiency. Read more at restructure.wordpress.com

This seams to be more mainstream media critics reaching for relevence than anything else. The article notes that many of the negative reviews writ large the reactions of their authors to internet reviewers. The movie itself has created more audiance excitment (that I've seen) than any other summer movie.

For me, as an SF fan, this movie occupies the same sweet spot as The Matrix. It takes established, though fringe, science fiction conventions and brings them out into the light. However, it does so in a new and unique way. While I wouldn't give it a 100, it would be 85 or above.

I think that the mainstream critic reaction to the movie is much worse than it would have been without the online reaction, which is really just too bad for the movie.

Did you like the movie?

Amplify’d from www.latimes.com

The rise and reassessment of 'Inception'

Director Christopher Nolan's thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio just got to theaters, but the critics have already taken the film on something of a roller-coaster ride.

It was one of the greatest movies of all time, until it wasn't.

Several weeks before it appeared in theaters, Christopher Nolan's "Inception" picked up some of the most flowery hosannas bestowed on a film in many months. A select mix of critics, film awards columnists and online movie bloggers who'd seen early advance screenings rained down unanimous compliments.

But as the film neared its public debut Friday, that unanimity crumbled. Several influential mainstream critics declared themselves less than enthralled.

But overall, the film lost a good fraction of its cachet. A 100% "fresh" rating on the review-aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes early last week had, by the weekend, fallen to 83%. It's telling, too that the site's "Top Critics," which tend to represent the most influential reviewers, were a number of points off that mean — they approved only at a rate of 76%. Those are enviable figures for most films but a notch below the best-reviewed movies of the summer, such as "Toy Story 3" and "The Kids Are All Right."

"We live in an era when there's a tendency to overvalue anything that's even slightly good. In another era I don't know if we'd see gushing enthusiasm," says David Ansen, the longtime Newsweek critic and current artistic director of the Los Angeles Film Festival.

Indeed, one of the unusual characteristics of the "Inception" debate has been critics evaluating the film in the context of other reviews. "I truly have no idea what so many people are raving about. It's as if someone went into their heads while they were sleeping and planted the idea that 'Inception' is a visionary masterpiece," wrote David Edelstein in his New York Magazine review, adding "Slap! Wake up, people! Shalalala! Slap!" Read more at www.latimes.com