Last week I was lucky enough to stumble across Nathan Jurgenson’s great essay Digital Dualism and the Fallacy of Web Objectivity. Jurgenson defines digital dualism as the belief that the “real” and “digital” worlds are totally separate from each other and operate according to different rules. He believes this conviction spawns the belief that the web [...]
Searching for new clips to add to this Monday’s Liftoff, I was drawn to the side bar of the Washington Post headline page. My cousin, Tammy Gary, shared A dose of reality for the HPV debate and my good friend Meryn Chimes echoed this thread of interest by sharing Bachmann questions safety of HPV vaccine [...]
And I’m not talking about Kelsey. In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky, a linguistics professor at MIT, argued that we can blame Twitter for the langu-apocalypse – the demise of the English written word. “An awful lot of communication [today] is extremely rapid, very shallow communication. Text messaging, Twitter…[they] erode normal human relations and make [...]
Ah, yes –1986. My fake ID remembers like it was yesterday. “Rock Me Amadeus” was played in places other than my cousin’s partially finished basement, Tom Cruise had a need for something other than former stars of Dawson’s Creek, and Murder, She Wrote. Oh, and that was the last year that Congress updated our basic [...]
I often read Michigan Daily opinion pieces and also tend to peek at the comments people leave. I find that most of the opinion pieces are coherent, intelligent, and well founded. Most comments, on the other hand, are quite the opposite: uninformed, inaccurate, and simpleminded. But much worse is they are downright offensive, derogatory, and ignominious.
Why then was it this case that captured so much attention? When do certain events capture the public eye while others are ignored? What is it about the news that makes some stories exciting and others mundane?
