This is the status of Twitter at this moment... the site has been slow to respond all day. _____________________________________________________________
Twitter is over capacity.
Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.
Since Twitter is enjoying yet another resurgence in popularity, my entry now is onto a more evolved site and coinciding with a flurry of other newcomers. For several reasons I'm evaluating a number of web tools and Twitter was inevitable in my life, even if only for a short time, so on Twitter I am.
So now I'm a tweeter, albeit a awkward and not prolific or clever one, I get the point, the vision and now it seems obvious. It is the ubiquitous version of the way a few close friends (all I grew up with) and I have juggled instant messaging, text messaging, cell calls for years to be accessible with the technology we had. We still use good old msn messenger as the start of every day as a link to what we are doing and where we are or what our opinion/mood is at the moment. I might send an IM at 7:30 am and at 10:15 pm my friend sends a reply back by text message and...that goes on back and forth all day, you get the idea. I've known for awhile we were using modified tools from the late 90s, Web 2.0 updated, to accomplish a social connection through the day that seemed outmoded. I will say that for 5 people it's very functional and works but that is it's limit.
Twitter accomplishes what we do among other things on a larger scale. As the early adopter among my little crowd, I've learned to wait for the question "what is this Twitter thing you're doing all about?"
to be continued... _____________________________________________________________
"Evan Williams on what's behind Twitter's explosive growth"
In this TED Conference ten minute video with Evan Williams, he talks about the concept of the side project of Twitter and how it evolved to where it is today.
Rick Santelli is one of the few mainstream media tv people I like and after watching him for ten years believe he knows his message. Until Thursday, when he went on this impromptu well spoken rant on CNBC while on the trading floor in Chicago, he flew under most viewers radar. That is rapidly changing. ____________________________________________________________
The Classic Liberal, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Steve Benson of The Arizona Republic, doesn't seemed thrilled with big government intervention events either...
This 1925 photo is fascinating to me. Helen, the switchboard operator, is dignified photographed at this crudely built switchboard for the Many Glacier Hotel in Montana.
A little over 40 years ago, when I was a freshman in high school, I moved to the United States with my parents, my sister, aunt, uncle and my cousin. I'm proud and fortunate to have been able to come to the United States and live my American Dream.
Through the decades I've come across all kinds of people working and living their American Dream. The American Dream is a journey that never really ends since as you travel you discover that is the real destination. For those people who have the character traits that are likely to seek the American Dream, the quest to achieve is never satisfied and with each achievement, their nature is to move on to another quest. How the rewards of successful quest results are utilized is as unique as the individuals who achieve them. We are in an economic crisis and era of social and political change that matches any other in history and a lot of hard work needs to be done...
In the mean time what are we doing to ourselves? Too much mainstream media, government commentary, wall street prognosticators, politicians, all with an overemphasis on the mentality of failure talking. Has everyone lost their senses and their guts and vision? Personally I don't think so. The self-fulfilling prophecy model can happen if more people don't realize that life is not as we knew it but not nearly as bad as we make it and get their mojo back real soon. I believe many already are and will. America was founded on Self-Reliance, Individualism, True Grit, Innovation, Invention and Reinvention...history is on our side, now let's get on with making it.
This is going to be a tough haul and the best thing Americans can do individually is the necessary work to reinvent the way we live to build back a better country.
Some books are timeless and 26 years ago when an odd unintentional medical event sidelined me for a period, I read many books to help me rise above the temporary but difficult immediate situation I was in. One recommended to me by a doctor stands out as still relevant, "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl. Although first published in 1946 it remains one of ten most influential books in the US. It is most worthwhile reading for gaining a healthy non-monetary perspective on our current dilemma.
Social and Technology History: How it made me an Early Adopter
In the early 70s I was hired as one of the first male operators in AT&T’s Bell System, then the largest corporation in the world (think Microsoft, Google, Cisco), The Telephone Company, the first electronic social network, a forerunner of today’s social media.
I stepped into a world that for decades had been the enclave of acceptable “woman’s work.” As a result it became a theme in my working life, dealing with the massive social dynamic of gender politics and the very real conflicts between men and women in the workplace. It paved the way for me to be set on a road bridging the gap between the WWII "Greatest Generation" who ran things and us "Boomers" who questioned why things were run that way. My early work experience provided me with skills to see with pretty good clarity the tension that others don’t always see. The skills required to navigate the waters of historic social change, coupled with work tasks that required interacting with people over a vast telephone network, prepared me for social media today. It is an explanation of why I became an accidental Early Adopter. This 1953 Western Electric (the AT&T subsidiary that manufactured switchboards) operator recruitment ad indicates clearly the job of telephone operator, which could be every bit as complex as working a testboard, was for “girls” of any age only. The men have finished their “men’s work” of building the switchboard and the girls were now needed to “man” the switchboards, for much lower wages than men.
Market forces were not at work then. If they had, then the Bell System would not have been a regulated monopoly and on a larger scale, not with gender job roles and pay treatment. In 1948 and through the early 1950’s Operator Toll Dialing was introduced nationwide, the forerunner of customer Direct Distance Dialing (DDD). Long distance traffic was rapidly increasing and the country was humming along towards the economic recovery of 1954.
The demand for women as telephone operators and service representatives was very high and often difficult to constantly recruit for. If market forces were truly at play then the wages of these woman’s jobs should have skyrocketed due to supply and demand. The social interference of assigned gender roles had a significant economic impact on the entire economy. The government interference with attempting to correct assigned gender roles and pay treatment later had unintended consequences on the economy.
In 1973 Stanford University’s Sandra L. Bem and Daryl J. Bem published a report funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, “Does Sex-biased Job Advertising 'Aid and Abet' Sex Discrimination?” in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology (1973, 3, 1, pp 6- 18). The article answered the question:
“Do [these] advertising practices aid and abet discrimination in employment by actually discouraging applicants of one sex or the other from applying for jobs for which they are otherwise well qualified? The two studies reported in this article sought to answer this question empirically. Both were conducted as part of legal testimony, the first in a suit filed by the EEOC against American Telephone and telegraph Company, the second in a suit filed by the National Organization of Women against The Pittsburgh Press."
The use of the Scientific Method, a “hard” science test on Social Science, a “soft” science, for use in a court of law to argue a social case with the potential for economic disruption is still being debated today. Nonetheless it was allowed to be introduced and the course of events seemed inevitable due to the social pressures of the time.
AT&T signed a Consent Decree with the EEOC and the US Justice Department on January 18, 1973 that opened the door for specific hiring quotas for targeted underrepresented groups. My slot had been secured by federal decree in a Bell System job and my job duties were mandated to be “nontraditional” or in the old parlance, woman’s work.
I never objected to performing those jobs because I was young, grew up outside of the US and generally I wasn't looking for a “man’s job” anyway since for me it would likely have meant being a dreaded “suit.” What I did strenuously object to was the limitation it placed on my career mobility. During the recession of the 70s what little hiring occurred across the nation happened mostly in nontraditional jobs that were being filled by force of hand of the federal government. My fate was sealed.
Technology and social change were meeting in the vast Bell System and other corporations like IBM right at the time I was in college and working at the local Bell Company as a nontraditional male operator. The mood on campuses versus that in technology giants such as AT&T and IBM was a contrast. The technology giants were forced into melding cultures by meddling and our generation was expected to deal with it. The effect of that era of social change, technology and economic conditions on the macro economy is still being studied today.
In the long run for me personally it was instrumental to my becoming an Early Adopter. The skills I learned helped me assist people in adapting technology to people and social change, instead of the other way around. Boomers took the old networks that were locked down and secured away from the average user, except with the intervention of workers like telephone operators, bringing networks direct to the user. The box of Pandora was opened and as we are once again in the midst of great social change, it helps to look back to see how we got here for guidance through the present to the future.
I'm exploring Twitter, dipping my toes in, already seeing the value of it for me and intend to do more in-depth blogs (maybe a vlog) on how I am adapting this social media tool to work for me. This 22 minute video by Dr. Tom Guarriello of TrueTalk and VloggerHeads is a very personable explanation of how to use Twitter coupled with why you would want to use Twitter. I also found it useful in understanding what Twitter is. ______________________________________________________________
The perfect song i'll own it but of course it'll be yours from me
hang on to it all those dresses those shoes you make them so pretty with your smiles one day you'll wear them at dances at spring balls i'll spin you round and round for miles
your blue valentine will turn red your private poet's flubbed lines will be reread all the wrong notes will be rewrote for you
it's always for you my white flame no matter the who or what the name each melody is you with a beating rhythm true for you
repost on 02.20.2009 to add tribute video at end of post.
In late 2005, early 2006 I was discovering the brand new wonders of the video sharing site YouTube with delight. The viral videos were lowbrow to me (sorry Kevin Nalts) but it was way too cool digging through all those tv, movie and best of all, music video clips. I soon discovered the new medium of video web loggers (vloggers) that was developing on YouTube, anonymously watching from my first channel that I created in February 2006. I collected and favorited videos, many of which would not be allowed today and not just because of copyright violations but scandalous content. On that channel (the username an odd mix of letters and numbers) I began to venture out into the social networking world and leave quite a few not so judicious comments. The year 2006 on YouTube was the year of real anarchy where uploading almost anything went unchallenged unless it was pure porn.
In February of 2007 I closed my first channel and opened my current channel with my public username. I had been considering it for a few months and this video "Paypal (Ian's Song)" by ournationalspace for some reason convinced me to do it. Keep in mind that since the 90s I have been cautious and selective regarding which sites I created accounts on, to open a real channel and throw away my anonymous experimental channel, was a commitment of my username. That year the anarchy became a bit more tamed but an online networking social community was crystallizing around vlogging and there was disorder and drama providing the energy that drove the emotional engines of the social community.
One of the best and most prolific vloggers, one of the first that I really remember, was Roger TheBoringDispatcher and especially his "vlog war" with HellionExciter. You probably would have to experienced or been around in that period of Web 2.0 and YouTube to understand why the death of Roger impacted the YouTube community in a very big way and the part it has played since. To me personally he was always very considerate, even if I always wasn’t, while remaining very real.
Just as people I have written about for niche historical publication, that were an early part of different periods of telephone history, were unrecognized at the time for what they were doing, to be later seen as pioneers…I believe people like Roger will in time be recognized for the beginnings of this thing called vlogging.
This is the tribute video created for him a year ago, at the time of his death, where a vast majority of the community posted video response tributes and commented on the loss. It is still the video that best captures Roger and that moment in time with many comments remaining and some of the responses still attached.
______________________________________________________________ Roger Forever (memorial collab for theboringdispatcher) uploaded on 02/20/2009 on You Tube by Lea, user achampag
