Web Scout: gone Techin' (Courtesy: Flickr user Angelo)
Dear Readers,
A little update: Web Scout is joining forces with our L.A. Times Technology Blog (latimes.com/tech). While it's been a blast to be the Scoutmaster of this operation for almost a year, we believe there's strength in numbers when it comes to blogging, so starting now I'll be posting over there. Should you so desire, you can see future Web Scout posts listed together, and we'll be keeping this blog and all its posts intact for the foreseeable future.
Thanks for reading, and we hope to see you at the new digs!
As a Web-o-centric publicity stunt for the much-hyped "The Day the Earth Stood Still," 20th Century Fox has created an amusing site called "The Earth's Vital List," which asks fans worldwide to assemble a list of things they'd 'save' if the world ended. Heavy, eh?
Of course not. Any possibility that this question would be taken seriously was nuked on arrival by a bit from the press release, which, after immodestly declaring this project "a truly interactive application of global proportions," quotes a Fox marketing executive as saying, "I plan to put macaroni and cheese at the top of my list."
And that appears to be the path consumers have followed. Which is not to say that the nine pages of dogs people have listed are frivolous choices (there are only four pages of "moms"). But it is to say that just about everything else is: For every "modern medicine" that the more serious players have elected to save, there are 50 X-boxes, tweezers, ukuleles, Yodas, "me's," marijuanas, unicorns and roller coasters. So basically, if faced with the dilemma of which things to save in the event of a total apocalypse, the mass consciousness would elect to save ... everything. Sounds about right.
Magic? Crying? Is Mercury in retrograde or something?
Then Will Smith went on Oprah. “Did you cry?” Oprah asked. “Did you cry? Did you cry?” (She had cried in front of millions during President-elect Obama’s election night speech, so presumably she wanted to know if Smith, an action hero, was in the Crybaby Club.)
He was.
And then there was Jesse Jackson. And Colin Powell. And Michael Salerno.
Who? Oh yeah, Salerno’s an IT manager out of Mahopac, N.Y. Barbecue enthusiast, avid reader, father of triplets. He wasn’t on TV like the other guys, and unlike the others, he’s white — but you can still see a picture of him getting teary on election night, because he posted it on Flickr.
“I have never been more proud to be an American,” the caption says, and “yes, I’m crying.”
I found Salerno’s pic, along with dozens of other crying photos and videos, on Flickr and YouTube after several friends told me they’d cried on election night. Two of them were guys I’ve known for a decade without seeing them cry a single time.
In one YouTube video, a blue-eyed guy named Sam with big tattoos and no shirt completely loses it, bawling wordlessly for seven minutes during Obama’s victory speech: a classic.
“I cried too,” wrote four of the video’s 11 commenters, with one adding, “and I’m not even American.”
That was it. The Obama Crying thing was, as far as I was concerned, a full-blown epidemic. One worth further study and explication. I did the only thing I knew how: I went to SurveyMonkey.com.
Survey Monkey lets you create free surveys and send them to people online. It’s easy. So I made a questionnaire: Did you cry on election night? If so, when was the last time you cried before that? And I asked respondents to specify their gender, age range and party affiliation.
Next, I took the hyperlink to my survey and posted it all over Facebook. Seeking parity, I posted it in a number of groups representing many distinct points along the ideological spectrum. I went from the famous group called “One Million Strong for Barack” to “1,000,000 Strong for McCain Palin” to “Reduce the Drinking Age to 18,” and to“weddings 2008.”
Another half-hour of this and Facebook decided I was a spammer and revoked all of my posting privileges, dealing a serious blow to my ability to disseminate the survey. So I turned to Twitter, where I “tweeted” a link to the survey to all 468 of the people who had, through the Web Scout blog, opted to follow my feed.
I popped open a bag of Fritos and let the results trickle in.
Some hours later, my survey had attracted 133 respondents. And are you ready for this? Fully 75% of them said they had cried or “sort of” cried on election night. (I’d included a box for people to say what “sort of” meant, and the consensus was that if you welled up but didn’t actually overflow, that’s “sort of” crying. Fair enough.)
More statistics: 33% of the criers/wellers were male. About half were between 15 and 25, a quarter 26 to 35, and another quarter were 36 to 45; 67% Democrats, 18% Republicans, 11% Independents. An impressive spread across all categories — perhaps this really was a phenomenon!
Among the written explanations were a few gems:
“As the mother of a biracial child I have always been afraid that she would never be accepted by her peers. She wouldn’t be ‘white enough’ or ‘black enough.’ And seeing that an entire country can accept this biracial man as their leader, and also knowing how much the world as a whole supports him — gives me so much hope for my own daughter’s future.”
“So proud that Americans elected a smart President! I also cried when I got a thank you text message from Barack Obama on my phone.”
“I cried because I was so devastated that my country would choose someone who was going to destroy what America was founded on.”
I called Jack Glaser, a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley who has written extensively on race, politics, emotion and the Internet. Quite possibly he could help me publish my findings in some obscure academic journal. When I asked him what he thought of my results, there was a pause. He then told me my methodology was completely flawed and my results scientifically meaningless.
I nearly cried.
“Whenever you have a survey where people voluntarily participate, you tend to overrepresent people who feel strongly one way or the other,“ Glaser said.
As a consolation prize, Glaser allowed that “it does look like there’s more expressed emotion after this election than there typically is. There’s a huge release on the partisan level,” he said, “And also a big exhilaration on the civil rights side. And the two sort of intertwine.”
So no science was had here today. Still, I count this as a victory, skewed and warped as it may be, for the social Web. It turns out that a few minutes on YouTube, Flickr and Facebook, plus a bit of survey monkeying, quickly revealed 100 people who had cried on election night. I don’t think you need science to see that there’s something happening there.
Just as the memberships of those older groups continue to swell (see image at left), the new crop of groups is growing fast.
Opponents are using Facebook to organize protests, boycotts and more creative kinds of political statements.
One group encourages readers to Protest Proposition 8 by paying with $2 Bills! If enough people pay with "The Queer Dollar," the group's description predicts, "$2 bills will flood the economy, and everyone will see how much LGBT and Allies's money contributes."
Proponents of the marriage ban wasted no time in setting up new groups to defend the amendment's passage.
"This group demands that the vote of the people be respected in our democracy," reads the description of 1,000,000 for Defending Prop 8, which has earned nearly 7,500 members since election day. "Thousands of individuals fought for marriage, donated time and money, and sometimes were persecuted for it. We have come too far in this election to have it thrown out after the battle has been won."
Also employing the now-familiar "million for X" brand of Facebook activism is 1,000,000 Million Strong Against Newly Passed Prop. 8. (The group's creator sheepishly acknowledges the redundancy in the name), which already has nearly 60,000 members. "Proposition 8 is not just about eliminating gay rights," the groups founder wrote in its intro box. "It's about DESTROYING the FOUNDATION [of] what our California Constitution stands for."
LisaNova's latest (and last?) Sarah Palin video brilliantly captures the instant irrelevance to which Alaska governor woke up on Wednesday morning. Cruel, cruel fate. And I'm not talking about for her. We here in the elite media have been robbed of one of our most beloved darlings. This woman was like the Mrs. Claus of news -- where every day was Christmas and her heaping gift bag never ran out of articles, blogs, photos or video. But now Christmas has ended a month early, and the nation is once again inundated with the humdrum secular talk of chiefs of staff and transitions to power.
But that was just one part of a much larger Palin-geist. It's hard to overestimate the part that Palin's
glamorous mystique played in the hype that swirled around this election. To take just one measure: a check of The Times
article database reveals that over the last four years, Vice
President-elect Joe Biden has appeared in 52 of the paper's headlines.
Sarah Palin has been in 172, nearly three times as many as Biden -- and
all of them since September.
Google provides another rough measure of Palin's viral spread
through the cultural consciousness. Google results for Biden, who has
been a U.S. senator for 30 years and is a two-time presidential
candidate: 14,000,000.
And on YouTube, a search for Palin returns 167,000 results, nearly 100,000 more than Biden gets, and just about 50% of what McCain gets.
Again, Palin made her national debut less than three months ago, while
McCain and Biden -- in addition to having been in the presidential race
for two years -- were on the national political scene long
before YouTube and Google were invented, let alone the personal
computer.
To put it plainly, Palin captured the nation's imagination, perhaps faster and more completely than any figure this century.
But the election is over now, and the nation's imagination has moved forward, while Palin has gone back to Alaska.
Which is not to say we won't be hearing from her again, just that not nearly as many people will be listening.
It was a high-voltage day for the Internet. I only have stats for a few sites, but rest assured that records were broken all over the place. Personally, I can't remember more than a few minutes (when I went to vote, e.g.) when I didn't have my laptop open, the better to surf around furiously with.
Twitter obliterated its own usage records. According to Biz Stone, the site's co-founder, Twitter's peak messaging rate (measured in messages per second) was 2-3 times higher than the previous record rate, set during the first presidential debate.
"People turn to Twitter during shared, real-time events—these debates and this
election was so massively shared that Twitter benefited from huge increases in
both activity and exposure," Stone wrote in an e-mail.
Digg also reported its highest traffic day ever. Leading the charge was the "Digg this if you voted for Obama" post, which scored a massive 33,000 diggs, making it the most-Dugg post in 365 days, and the second most-Dugg post ever. (The first is this famous one where site founder Kevin Rose addresses the leak of the HD-DVD key). Not surprisingly, Digg's politics section was the most popular area on the site.
At YouTube, the Video Your Vote project netted close to 1,500 videos from across the nation, many of them on Tuesday. That blazing submission rate would seem to leave any of YouTube's previous community projects in the dust, according to this statement sent to me by a YouTube spokesperson:
"The CNN/YouTube Democratic Debate was open for submissions for two months and
we received 3,000 questions. The CNN/YouTube Republican Debate was open for
five months and we received 5,000 questions. Video Your Vote was open
for submissions for a week and we received, in a period of one day,
around 1,200 submissions."
The Los Angeles Times web site broke its all-time page view record with 8.36 million, beating a year-old record.
Twitter, the microblogging service that has become the best way to take the simultaneous instant temperature of thousands of online denizens, is exploding with a river of messages saluting Barack Obama as the next president. Individual users are, of course, unconstrained by any professional worries about their credibility as pundits -- and so they're taking TV commentators at their word that the path to victory for McCain is all but nonexistant. It's just that they're taking the next logical step.
"I'm ready to call it," tweeted ktfromLA, "Congrats President Obama!"
"Obama is going to take Ohio," wrote Lizzy Blackney. "Brace yourselves, folks. President-elect Obama is a reality."
"its over," said annafirsure. "obama is going to be president. over."
Simply type in "president obama" to Twitter's search bar, and you will literally see the inrush of tweets using those words. If Twitter is the wall, then there's a whole lot of writing on it
Katie Couric has just posted her final interview with candidate Sen. Barack Obama on YouTube, and it has some good moments. Obama tells Couric that his line about small towners becoming bitter and clinging to guns was a "stupid mistake on my part," and that it became "Exhibit A of Democrats saying something that made people feel like they were being insulted." (That's at 6:09 in the below clip.)
Couric also asks Obama about what it will mean to him personally if he gets elected. (8:26)
He describes a litany of people coming up to him on the campaign trail, telling him stories of hardship, including from older people of color. "But it's not just a sense of the history made because of race. There is also this overwhelming feeling of humility and gratitude where you say, 'Boy, I really better come through for folks if I win this thing, because they really need it.' "
The Obama president question has had two answers thus far. Until very recently, the answer was this:
But now we're seeing this:
On the other end, we have Ismccainpresident.com. The answer there is perhaps not as ebullient:
But McCain supporters need not worry that the web world has turned against them. We also learned of this nascent Obama impeachment site today -- seems like it has potential.
Google's Hot Trends list, the page that shows the most intensely searched Google terms of the moment, is chock-full of people who want to know the results of the election -- immediately! Eight of top 10 search terms, as of 1:00 p.m. Pacific time, were variants of "exit polls 2008," with one subsection of the searching populace just cutting to the chase and typing in "who's winning the election?"
David Sarno
is the Times' Internet culture and online entertainment writer. His Web Scout print column runs in the L.A. Times Calendar section on Wednesdays.
— Follow David on Twitter.
"People turn to Twitter during shared, real-time events—these debates and this
election was so massively shared that Twitter benefited from huge increases in
both activity and exposure," Stone wrote in an e-mail.
At YouTube, the 
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