Turns out that on his first day, Jon Stewart was neither funny nor well dressed. Still, I think we can all agree that it’s pretty cool that the Daily Show website offers (immaculately tagged!) clips from shows going back to 1999. Thanks, internet, for this (from before Colbert was a hawk!):
First I posted this Washington Post article to my shared items thing. It’s about young teachers in the DC area whose facebook profiles (and other online things) included questionable content. It’s worth a read, but here’s a highlight:
Erin Jane Webster, 22, a long-term substitute teacher in Prince William, keeps a page similar to other teachers’. Portions are professional, but some parts suggest the author is in the throes of sorority rush.Under a “Work Info” heading, the page reads, “Employer: Prince William County Schools. Location: Parkside Middle School Language Arts Teacher.” The section lists where she attended college (Radford ’07) and high school (Osbourn Park High ’03).
But the page features multiple “bumper stickers,” including one that uses a crude acronym for attractive mothers and another that says: “you’re a retard, but i love you.”
Teensy problem: Webster teaches students with emotional and learning disabilities. In an interview, she acknowledged her use of “retard” could be misconstrued. The word, generally considered offensive, circulates among some young people as acceptable derogatory slang.
“My best friend, she always calls me that because I say ditzy things,” Webster said. “My best friend and I would never go around calling people that. All of my [students] have emotional disorders or learning disabilities. . . . I love them.”
Anyway, my friend Lauren emailed me:
I think the answer is if you want a job in this day and age, you need to clean up your personal BUT PUBLIC profiles. I don’t think it’s that crazy to ask of someone. Yeah you might be 22 and “young” but you’re also asking to be part of the “adult” world. I mean when I applied to grad school I made my friendster profile private and I don’t keep a myspace or facebook page. And I have to accept that when I am on the job market or up for tenure, anything they can google about me becomes acceptable grounds for my evaluation. I guess the slippery slope is when you put something public that you don’t see anything wrong with, but the examples the article gave were clearly stupid!
And then I replied:
Yeah, some of those examples were egregious—might not want to call people “retards” when you work with the developmentally challenged! But there are real issues here, too—people our age put so much stuff online and if we ever become important, it’ll all come out. I don’t think I’ve posted anything that’s a big deal, but I’m sure some of it is objectionable. It’ll be weird once everybody in the public eye has this problem, we’ll have to revise our views of what constitutes “problematic material.”Now I’m going to post this exchange, and it will become part of your permanent online file!
And that’s the story of how I spent 20 minutes I should have been spending writing a paper.
Edit: I just reread this and I hope it doesn’t seem like the point of this post is to make fun of Ms. Webster and the other examples in the article. I just think this issue–the effect of the public/private barrier getting blurred (or erased)–is important, and getting more important every day.
Bonus points for use of Ginuwine’s masterpiece.
And while we’re here, check out the New York Times Review (of a video game!!!!).
CNN.com has this weird new thing where you can take a headline and put it on a t-shirt. This is silly enough, but thanks to someone who wasn’t super careful you can easily hack the HTML to make your own. So I guess my point is, please buy me this. Thanks.
In case CNN wises up and yanks this feature:
So, a guy on the internet got his hands on an old cache of files from the company (now defunct) that released a bunch of great text-based computer games, including the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a huge hit game (based on Douglas Adams’s masterpiece) that made a lot of money. They also worked on a sequel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, but the project and company self-destructed. The story is fascinating. Especially in the comments, where a guy who comes off looking bad in the history chimes in to make himself look even worse. He complains that the material Biao uses paints an unbalanced picture, and that Baio made no effort to contact him in advance of publishing it, and generally that it’s bad journalism.
The irony is that I think he’s probably right–this isn’t very good journalism. Baio should have tried to get in touch with the relevant persons (just about all of whom seem to be quite available) before publishing. No question, it’s a thorny issue–the material he’s citing was company property, so he doesn’t need permission from the employees to post it–and who knows what happened behind the scenes.
At any rate, there’s a lot to enjoy here, if you’re patient enough to wade through it all.
Google’s Shared Stuff app is back online. What a relief. Now, back to work. I have to write 3500 words in the next 24 hours.
Looks like Google dropped its Shared Stuff webapp–which I have been using to share, um, stuff, for a while now. It was never a very sexy product, but I found it really useful. I was hoping that Google would integrate it with the shared items function of Google Reader, but now it’s looking more likely that it’ll just fade away into the mists of fail. It’s too bad. Anyone out there have a recommendation for a replacement?
CAN’T TELL HIM NOTHING!!! from kwest on Vimeo.
No time to write anything substantive, but this is pretty funny. [Kanye's Blog]
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