This is a demonstration of just how powerful social media can be:
Even the stupid can organize under one, albeit misguided, banner.
The reality of the matter: It was created by a bunch of stuck-up sorority girls exhibiting to the Web 2.0 world what sorority girls do best - be bitches incapable of thinking beyond the newest fashion trend and cup of coffee.
It's joined by a bunch of stoned and stupid frat members and people who don't know better.
But I prefer to look at it this way - one person created a group, and 300+ people joined it in little more than two weeks. It's kind of petered out by now (thank God), but the point remains. It's the new age letter to the editor, one adviser told me. The Media should heed it.
It also exhibits Henry Kissinger's famous quote perfectly - "College politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low."
And I tend to agree with them. For these people, it's expressing their frustration in the only way they know how. Lord knows, an e-mail is too old fashioned.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Hands in the cement
It's amazing, this tool we call social networking. You can use it find information about just about anyone.
Give me a person, any person, and I bet you I'll find them on Facebook, MySpace, Google, or somewhere on the 'net unless they are a hopeless shut in.
It's such a great tool for journalists. Because unless you're marooned on an island in the middle of the Pacific, there's some imprint of you on the series of tubes, and it's just a matter of finding it.
I do find it amusing that, when you Google my name, nothing from the Spartan Daily comes up until the second page. This makes me look like a hopeless nerd, because the top find is my old author profile from when I did bad strategy articles about Magic: the Gathering for Pojo.com.
The Heretic's Sermon for the win, folks.
I started taking names and e-mails and plugging things into these publicly available resources just to prove a point. Everyone posting on this article that is criticizing the Spartan Daily on this article is a member of San Jose State's Greek system, because they weren't smart enough to mask it with a different e-mail address.
There are many others I've done this with, some I prefer not to mention because it is internship sensitive.
In short, everyone is on the Web. We all have taken our hands and pressed them into the cement somewhere. Part of the job of a journalist, nowadays, is to find where that may be.
Give me a person, any person, and I bet you I'll find them on Facebook, MySpace, Google, or somewhere on the 'net unless they are a hopeless shut in.
It's such a great tool for journalists. Because unless you're marooned on an island in the middle of the Pacific, there's some imprint of you on the series of tubes, and it's just a matter of finding it.
I do find it amusing that, when you Google my name, nothing from the Spartan Daily comes up until the second page. This makes me look like a hopeless nerd, because the top find is my old author profile from when I did bad strategy articles about Magic: the Gathering for Pojo.com.
The Heretic's Sermon for the win, folks.
I started taking names and e-mails and plugging things into these publicly available resources just to prove a point. Everyone posting on this article that is criticizing the Spartan Daily on this article is a member of San Jose State's Greek system, because they weren't smart enough to mask it with a different e-mail address.
There are many others I've done this with, some I prefer not to mention because it is internship sensitive.
In short, everyone is on the Web. We all have taken our hands and pressed them into the cement somewhere. Part of the job of a journalist, nowadays, is to find where that may be.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)