Story, Journalism, and Activism: KONY2012 (NOTE: The clip from the KONY2012 video here has no sound.)

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[via Up with Chris Hayes]

Accentuating the Real?

Whose responsibility is it to censor happiness?

Is it the voice or the ear? Or should the positive be censored at all?

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[via Desperate for changing, starving for truth]

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

[via Wired, HT: IdeaJoy]

Deflecting Attention Away

I tuned in to watch the Republican presidential candidates debate last night, because I'd seen a disturbing report about Mitt Romney.

Bill Keller, a St. Petersburg, Fla., evangelist declared on his website, "If you vote for Mitt Romney you are voting for Satan." If Romney, a Mormon, becomes president, he said, it would "lead millions of souls to the eternal flames of hell."

Keller bills himself as the "Dr. Phil of Prayer" and "the next big thing in mass media religion." Howard Stern calls the guy up to have him on his radio show. Keller's ministry brings in more than $2 million annually. Now his TV show is on the i Network (formerly PAX).

So I tuned in, just in case Keller knew something no one else did. But I didn't see anything evil about Mitt Romney--at least not any more evil than the rest of the politicos.

That's when I decided to find out some more about Keller himself. Could this man be the Antichrist? {continue}

[via The Wittenburg Blog]

Resembles and Rejects

While Falwell trumpeted an increasingly cracked political message (in 2004 he wrote a column for WorldNetDaily headlined "God is pro-war"), other Christians were reconsidering the virtues of the old approach, of shunning politics and withdrawing as much as possible from the sinful American mainstream. The same alternative media that allowed Christians to make their mark on politics (or, perhaps more accurately, to let politics leave its mark on them) also made it easier to build a parallel pop culture that somehow both resembles and rejects the mainstream.

Falwell fulminated til the end against homosexuality, feminism, and the other alleged evils of modernity. But it's hard to escape the impression that his cohort not only lost the culture war, but perhaps did more than anyone else to usher Hollywood's America into Christian homes. In the early days, Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network refused to air reruns of Bewitched on the grounds that it promoted witchcraft. Today the outlet is owned by ABC, which calls it the ABC Family Channel and happily broadcasts not just The 700 Club but Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, not to mention the frequently ribald humor of Whose Line Is It Anyway? As intensely intolerant as Falwell could be, it's harder than ever to imagine America reembracing his views about gender relations or the sinfulness of homosexuality. The one cultural war he may have won, perhaps without even meaning to wage it, was the battle against Protestant hatred of the Roman Catholic Church. Despite his illiberal platform and rhetoric, Falwell's long-term legacy might be one of tolerance.

That could depend, of course, on whether the centralized, politicized fundamentalist community he helped create survives the next media revolution. Television tends to smooth over our differences; the Internet allows diversity to bloom.

[via Reason Magazine, HT: GetReligion in this post]

Marking Your Existence

There are sort of four properties and one key practice that are fundamentally different online. The key practice is that you have to write yourself into being. To a certain degree we do this offline as well, whereby you have a body that you're working with that you then accessorize to hell. Online you don't have a body, you don't have a presence, you don't have anything that sort of marks your existence.

There are four functions that are sort of the key architecture of online publics and key structures of mediated environments that are generally not part of the offline world. And those are persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences. Persistence -- what you say sticks around. Searchability -- my mother would have loved the ability to sort of magically scream into the ether to figure out where I was when I'd gone off to hang out with my friends. She couldn't, thank God. But today when kids are hanging out online because they've written [themselves] into being online, they become very searchable. Replicability -- you have a conversation with your friends, and this can be copied and pasted into your Live Journal and you get into a tiff. That creates an amazing amount of "uh ohs" when you add it to persistence. And finally, invisible audiences. In unmediated environment, you can look around and have an understanding of who can possibly overhear you. You adjust what you're saying to the reactions of those people. You figure out what is appropriate to say, you understand the social context. But when we're dealing with mediated environments, we have no way of gauging who might hear or see us, not only because we can't tell whose presence is lurking at the moment, but because of persistence and searchability.

[via AlterNet, HT: Mainstream Baptist]