A Net Gain for Oliver

So, in my last post, On Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, I noted that among the names mentioned as a possible successor to Jon Stewart as host of The Daily Show was John Oliver, who had previously been a frequent "correspondent" on the show (referred to as "Senior British Correspondent"), and actually taken over as guest host for eight weeks during the summer of 2013, as Stewart took time off to direct his feature film, Rosewater.

Of course, Oliver has been hosting his own variation on The

Daily Show since April of 2014, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, on HBO. Whether he was contractually unavailable to take over Stewart's Comedy Central program, or simply preferred the deal he had with HBO (or in a more unlikely scenario, was not given the option of taking over The Daily Show), I don't know, and I suppose it doesn't matter much in the long run.

And I think it important to add that Oliver is an accomplished comedian, with a long career doing stand-up, and some significant appearances on television sitcoms, including the fan favorite show, Community. Like Jon Stewart, he is not a journalist, but like Jon Stewart, his comedy news program has served as an important form of social criticism, and media criticism. I think it a reasonable assumption that he has read Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, because one of the segments on his HBO program is called "And Now This," a formulaic saying once commonplace in broadcast news that Postman pointed to as encapsulating many of the problems that occur when television tries to deal with serious subjects. Paradoxically, both Oliver and Stewart validate Postman's criticism by simultaneously turning news into entertainment while critiquing the process.

By the way, I follow up on Postman's 80s critique in my book, Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman's Brave New World Revisited. But you knew that...






So, while Oliver's lack of journalistic background is sometimes apparent, for example when he went to Russia and interviewed Edward Snowden this past April, more often than not he has provided some very powerful critiques. One of them was on a subject near and dear to my heart—net neutrality. It hasn't been something I've gone very deeply into here on Blog Time Passing, but it has come up in some of my previous posts, for example going back to 2007, my first year of blogging, Net Neutrality, or Not, also on a related issue in 2010, All Foxed Up, or Time(Warn'er) for Cable Neutrality, Tell Old Pharaoh to Let My Channels Go!, and ABC You Later, Cablevision!, as well as just a little more than a year ago, Purge the Merge!, followed up last July by Purge the Merge! Part 2 (and happily, the merge in question was indeed purged!).

And just in case you're not familiar with the issue, or even if you are, let me share some of the YouTube videos I've used in teaching about new media at Fordham University over the past decade to help explain the subject to students. First is this straightforward presentation uploaded back in 2006, when net neutrality first became a major issue:






For a more dramatic, exciting, and, yes, amusing (and note the inclusion of a Jon Stewart segment on the subject) video, this winner of a 2007 Webby People's Voice Award also serves as an interesting example of what can be done on YouTube:







And one more from the early days, just a talking head this time, but the head belongs to Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World-Wide Web. And as someone who did not try to commercialize the web, but rather made it publicly available to serve the greater good, he was able to speak with a great deal of moral authority:







So, now,  these three videos, and many others like them, make their point all well and fine, but if I may employ a baseball metaphor, all three represent base hits, while John Oliver's segment on the subject, appearing in June of 2014, knocked the ball out of the part, a grand slam by any measure:






It's a great segment, and it had an immediate impact, as related in this segment from a few days after Oliver took on the Federal Communications Commission:





Note how they acknowledge the blurring of the boundaries between comedy and serious discourse in their discussion, and pretty much celebrate it. Now let's fast forward to November of 2014, as President Obama comes out in favor of net neutrality, and the following CNN segments give Oliver, along with Stewart and Colbert, due credit:





And on February 26th of this year, the FCC finally, finally ruled in favor of net neutrality, a development that Oliver did not fail to take note of, along with the immediate backlash that ensued:







So, as far as net neutrality is concerned, a victory for sure, but the issue is far from settled, as lobbyists for the cable and phone companies that provide internet service continue to try to influence Congress to pass legislation that would undermine or eliminate net neutrality. Clearly, the price of maintaining an even online playing field is eternal vigilance, and we best remember that we won't have John Oliver watching out for us forever.

Returning to the amusing and amazing ourselves to death argument, having more access to the internet is not necessarily a good thing, but in this case, net neutrality does protect sources of serious discourse, which otherwise would not be able to compete with the slick, entertaining content provided by the companies that could afford to pay for an internet fast lane, like, ummmm, HBO, and Comedy Central.

  Paradoxes abound! Anyway, I have more to say about John Oliver, but let me save it for another time, and conclude this post by noting that this is a victory for the concept of fair play, an ideal that once meant a great deal to us, that perhaps has faded a bit, but clearly is capable of being reinvigorated. It would be best if we could just begin with the value of fairness, but if we can't, at least we can arrive at it indirectly through our current obsession with play. 

And let me be clear that the problem is not play in and of itself, play is central to education, and playfulness is the key to creativity. The challenge is in finding a balance between work and play. All play and no work makes Jack an ax murderer after all (reference to the Stanley Kubrick film, The Shining, in case you didn't get it).  And the bottom line that we need to keep in mind is that it takes some serious work if we want to keep things fair!

On Jon Stewart and The Daily Show

So, I wrote another op-ed for the Jewish Standard that was published on April 10th, entitled Thank You, Jon Stewart, and the subtitle given to the piece was, "Why most of us trust him, and why we’ll miss him," and it proved to be my most popular and controversial piece yet. So how could I not share it here on Blog Time Passing? You can, of course, click on the link above to see it over on their site, or just continue reading it here:

The most trusted man in America.

The reality of Jon Stewart’s February 10 announcement that after 17 years he would be leaving as host of The Daily Show on the Comedy Central cable network did not quite hit home until the March 30 announcement that his successor would be South African comedian Trevor Noah.

Noah, who has some Jewish ancestry, in turn was quickly the subject of controversy surrounding some offensive tweets he made in the past, tweets that some consider anti-Semitic, not to mention misogynistic, and perhaps worst of all, simply not at all funny.

But more significant is the fact that Jon Stewart’s replacement is, for all intents and purposes, a nobody. A Noah-body. And this should come as no surprise, despite all the speculation about who might succeed him, with suggestions as varied as Daily Show alumni such as John Oliver, Larry Wilmore, and John Hodgman, and comics Amy Schumer, Chris Rock, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, her former co-star Alec Baldwin, and even MSNBC political commentator Rachel Maddow and disgraced NBC news anchor Brian Williams.

The simple truth is that Jon Stewart would be a hard act to follow. Close to impossible, really, no matter how big the name and reputation. No established star in his or her right mind would risk the inevitable judgments about having failed to live up to Stewart’s legacy, so the only alternative was to find someone with nothing to lose to serve as the sacrificial lamb. Only time will tell whether Noah will be able to survive the flood of comparisons that surely will come his way.

But the big question is how did a nice Jewish boy, born in New York City and raised in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, grow up to become the most trusted man in America? “The most trusted man in America” is a citation that previously was bestowed upon the longtime CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite. That Jon Stewart seems to have inherited the title would no doubt strike the comedian, born Jon Stewart Leibowitz, as both an honor and a disturbing commentary on the state of journalism today. It is consistent with Neil Postman’s observation, three decades ago, that the television medium requires entertaining content, and that journalists on television news shows cannot help but become entertainers. By the 1990s, it became a commonplace to note that most young people got their news from the late night monologues of Jay Leno and David Letterman.

What set Jon Stewart apart from Leno, Letterman, and other talk show hosts, including his predecessor on the Daily Show, Craig Kilborn, was the depth of Stewart’s humor, his intelligence, and the incisiveness of his critique of the news media, and the subjects they report on, especially politics. If the fourth estate is supposed to fulfill the function of the watchdogs of society, Stewart provided the answer to the question of who watches the watchmen, and he has done so with dogged determination.

To be sure, on the conservative side of the political spectrum, Stewart is not quite as well trusted as he is among liberal viewers. His political leanings are well known. As much as he has tried to be fair and balanced in his skewering of politicians and the media personalities who cover and comment on them, he could not help but direct a significant portion of ire and irony at Fox News, whose often blatant attempts at propaganda have made it all too easy a target. No doubt, given our current political polarization, we would be hard pressed to name someone who is equally trusted by those on the left and the right of the political spectrum, so it is enough to say that Stewart has gained the confidence of America’s moderates and centrists. And we also might recall that Cronkite was denounced as too liberal in his day, especially after coming out against the Vietnam War in 1968.

We might also recall that Cronkite was considered seriously as a potential Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 1972, and was urged to run for president in 1980. So it should not come as a great surprise that following his resignation from the Daily Show, there have been calls for Jon Stewart to run for the Democratic presidential nomination for 2016, as the only viable alternative to Hillary Clinton. The calls have come from a variety of sources, including longtime television critic and biographer Marvin Kitman, who notes, “Now I realize Jon will have to talk to his mother in Teaneck first. But I’m hoping he will put his country ahead of the cheap overnight thrill of making just another movie. Or a better chicken soup.”

Stewart run for president? Why not? After all, his friend and colleague Stephen Colbert did it in 2007. And the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear that they co-hosted at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in 2010, which was attended by more than 200,000 people, demonstrated the strength of his popular and populist appeal, and the foundational values on which his comedy was built. The A Moment of Sincerity address that he gave at the close of the event was as good as any campaign speech made by any candidate now out on the stump. Toward its end, he declared, “We know instinctively as a people that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light we have to work together. And the truth is, there will always be darkness. And sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the promised land. Sometimes it’s just New Jersey. But we do it anyway, together.”

Whether he actually runs for office, in a serious campaign along the lines of the one run by United States Senator Al Franken, a Saturday Night Live alumnus, or as a form of satire, as Colbert did, remains to be seen. But what is quite clear is that Jon Stewart was able to transform the Daily Show from just another low budget television vehicle for sophomoric humor into a significant source of news and opinion, commentary and criticism, and entertainment and education, and in doing so, transform himself from just another comedian to a worthy successor to the man who took us from John F. Kennedy’s assassination to the moon and beyond.

And is there any doubt that the secret to Jon Stewart’s success is the fact that his humor has been built on a foundation and rooted in a tradition of social justice, ethical conduct, and compassion for our fellow human beings? His values, the values of his upbringing, shine through his 17 years on The Daily Show. They make clear the fact that he is much more than a comedian—that he is nothing less than a mensch.

Medium is the Muse Launch

So, last summer NeoPoiesis Press published an anthology of creative work co-edited by yours truly and Adeena Karasick, entitled The Medium is the Muse.  Remember?


Oracle of the electronic age, Marshall McLuhan believed artists could wake us and offer new windows into the world. This diverse collection brings together twenty-nine poets, writers, and artists who channel McLuhan as both medium and muse. Like McLuhan's work, this volume will delight, divert, provoke, incite and inspire readers to channel McLuhan in their own imagination and creative endeavors. 

Featuring work from: Lillian Allen, Michelle Rae Anderson, Mary Ann Allison, Marleen Barr, David Bateman, Arthur Asa Berger, bill bissett, Tony Burgess, Jerry Harp, Adeena Karasick, William Marshe, John G. McDaid, Jill McGinn, Elizabeth McLuhan, Peter C. Montgomery, Dean Motter, Alexandra Oliver, John Oughton, Si Philbrook, B.W. Powe, Robert Priest, Stephen Roxborough, Lance Strate, Steve Szewczok, Andrea Thompson, Toshio Ushiroguchi-Pigott, John Watts, Dale Winslow, Tom Wolfe

So, last fall we had a bit of a book launch for the volume at a symposium held by the Institute of General Semantics in New York City. This took place on October 25, 2014, and consisted for five readings from contributors, beginning with my introduction:

I followed by reading an except from one of my pieces in the book:

Next came Mary Ann Allison's poetry reading:

This was followed by Marleen Barr reading the short story she wrote for the anthology:

And now, hold on  to your hats for Stephen Roxborough's rather wild rendition of his poem from the book:

And to top it all off, my co-editor performed two of her poems from The Medium is the Muse:

Since you no doubt now want to order a copy, if you haven't got one already, or if you have, now realize a few extra copies would make for the perfect gift, here's a quick and direct link to Amazon:

And once more, here's some more basic information on the book:

paperback: ISBN 978-0-9855577-5-1
144 pages, list price $16.95, 5.5”x8.5” perfect bound, paper

hardcover: ISBN 978-0-9892018-5-8
144 pages, list price $24.95, 5.5”x8.5” hardcover

The volume includes a series of illustrations by acclaimed comics creator Dean Motter, and a couple by popular culture maven Arthur Asa Berger, and the following Contents:

Introduction

The medium is...
Lance Strate

brush up on yr mcluhan / start dewing it now th medium
bill bissett

Ping-Pong
Tom Wolfe

Man Made Whole Again
Tom Wolfe

All the Information in the Sun
Robert Priest

Short Sound Play
Robert Priest

Micro-Poems
Robert Priest

It Came One Day
Elizabeth McLuhan

Self Reflection
Elizabeth McLuhan

To Sit
Elizabeth McLuhan

Chop Gently
Elizabeth McLuhan

The Purple Rose of Brooklyn Or, Meeting Marshall McLuhan (With a Little Help From Mayan Apocalypse Planet X/Nibiru)
Marleen Barr

McLuhan Kaleidoscope
Mary Ann Allison

Flash in the Pan
John McDaid

Start
Tony Burgess

dear marshall i know you
Stephen Roxborough

Marshalling McLuhan
Lillian Allen

Life
Peter Montgomery

Messy Necessity
Adeena Karasick

In My Blogal Village, Print is Hot
Adeena Karasick

Your Leaky Day
Adeena Karasick

Reader
BW Powe

Technogenie
BW Powe

(lang-gwij)?
William Marshe

Constitution of Silence
Steve Szewczok

we, the real mad poets
Jill McGinn

Late Summer Twilight
Jerry Harp

Pegged to Invisible Consequences
John Oughton

McLuhan’s Bride
David Bateman

The Mechanical Bride’s Consolation
Michelle Anderson

Curriculum Vitae
Alexandra Oliver

M.F.M.: Media Friend Marshall
Toshio Ushiroguchi-Pigott

I Wouldn't Have Seen It If I Hadn't Believed It: A Probe Poem
Andrea Thompson

Dear Mr. Mössbauer, are you online?
Dale Winslow

Silent Resonance
Dale Winslow

It Was Never a Flower to Begin With
Dale Winslow

facebook
Si Philbrook

mY parts
John Watts

Prose
Lance Strate

Centenary
Lance Strate

Biographies
Acknowledgments

And there you have it, hope you enjoyed the readings, and hope you liked (or will like) the book!

Leonard Nimoy and Mr. Spock

In the spirit of catching up with the last few months' activities, the March 6th issue of the Jewish Standard included another one of my op-eds, one I wrote regarding the  recent passing of actor Leonard Nimoy, best known for his portrayal of Mr. Spock on the Star Trek television series and motion pictures. Appearing under the title of Live Long and Prosper, with "Leonard Nimoy and Mr. Spock" as the subtitle, the piece goes like this:


The death of Leonard Nimoy on Friday, February 27, at 83, marked the passing of an American icon—indeed, a star of global renown, and a Jewish hero as well.

Nimoy’s accomplishments were many. He was an author, poet, musician, photographer, philanthropist, educator, and director, and of course an actor who played many roles on stage and screen. But he is best known for his role as Mr. Spock on Star Trek, the television series that first aired in 1966. It is a role he reprised in the various sequels, spinoffs, and remakes that appeared after the original series went off the air in 1969.

Nimoy was a Boston native, fluent in Yiddish, whose parents were Orthodox Jews who escaped from the Soviet Union. As he related in various interviews, his background informed his portrayal of the sole alien being on the Starship Enterprise. Spock hailed from the planet Vulcan but was also half-human, making him an alien on Vulcan as well. His status reflects that of immigrants and their children, first-generation Americans who, like Nimoy, grow up in a household, community, and culture that still has one foot in the old world.

As a child attending Orthodox services, Nimoy observed the Cohenim delivering the priestly benediction, and as an adult he appropriated their hand gesture when he introduced the Vulcan salute. The greeting that he added to the salute, “live long and prosper,” echoes the sentiment of the benediction, as well as the simple greeting “shalom” (further echoed in the ritual response, “peace and long life”). There is certainly cause for pride in this small Jewish contribution to global popular culture, but does this mean that Star Trek incorporates Jewish undertones, as Haaretz writer Nathan Abrams insisted in an article published the day after Nimoy’s death? Certainly, Jewish fans can take pleasure in the fact that Nimoy and co-star William Shatner are Jewish. So were several of the series’ writers, and we can assume that they all brought some elements of a Jewish sensibility to the program.

But let’s be clear that Star Trek was created by Gene Roddenberry, who was not Jewish, and who included characters from a variety of different backgrounds—Scottish, Irish, French, Italian, Russian, Japanese, and African—but never one who was identifiably Jewish. Indeed, the only characters with any real Jewish identity in the Star Trek universe appeared in a few of the many original novels published under license from Paramount Pictures. No doubt this is not because of any bias or prejudice on Roddenberry’s part, but rather because he associated Jewishness with religion, rather than nationality. His vision of the future was one in which science and progress reigned supreme, and any seemingly supernatural phenomena would inevitably be revealed to be a product of a highly advanced science, or biological evolution.

The conspicuous absence of any Jewish characters from Roddenberry’s melting-pot future can lead viewers to search for them in disguised, symbolic form, to look for what Sigmund Freud referred to as the return of the repressed. And the obvious form for a crypto-Judaic character to take would be that of an alien being. Indeed, while Shatner had the kind of looks that allowed him to pass as a WASP from Iowa, Nimoy’s features gave him what was considered at the time to be a relatively interchangeable “ethnic” appearance, so that earlier in his career he played Spanish, Mexican, and Native American characters. And certainly there are Jewish elements incorporated into Nimoy’s man from Vulcan, and into other aspects of Star Trek. Consider the episode called “Patterns of Force,” in which an alien planet patterns itself after Earth’s Nazi Germany, and is trying to wipe out their neighboring planet, called Zeon (an obvious reference to Zion).

But I want to suggest that Abrams and others are wrong about Spock being implicitly Jewish. It perhaps is revealing that Abrams mistakenly refers to the character as “Dr.” Spock, a mistake not uncommon among those not very familiar with the series. Nimoy’s character usually is referred to as “Mr.” Spock, in keeping with naval tradition about first officers, and occasionally by his rank, which was at various times commander, captain, and ambassador. Dr. Spock was, of course, Benjamin Spock, the famous pediatrician whose bestselling book, Baby and Child Care, served as a bible to the parents in the postwar era. Like Roddenbery, Dr. Spock was not Jewish. The name Spock is Dutch, originally spelled Spaak.




Spock’s home planet, Vulcan is named for the Roman god of fires and forges, and Vulcans are revealed to be related to another alien race, the warlike Romulans, named for the founder of Rome. Vulcan philosophy, which venerates logic above all else, represents a view that is very much in keeping with Athens rather than Jerusalem. Vulcans revere Surak as the founder of their philosophy. Surak has little in common with Moses but quite a bit with Socrates, with some Gandhi thrown in for good measure. So while Spock’s home planet is depicted as having the kind of hot, dessert-like climate that we associate with the Middle East, the stronger connection is to the European side of the Mediterranean.

Abrams associates Vulcan intellectualism with the people of the book, but the aliens do not seek a balance between faith and reason, in the fashion of Maimonides, but rather enforce a strict discipline, suppressing all emotion, in a way that is very much in keeping with another branch of ancient Greek philosophy, Zeno’s Stoicism. Moreover, suppression of emotions often is linked to dehumanization, as a means of forcing individuals to adapt to mechanization and industrialism, yielding a technological being well suited to being a cog in a machine, rather than a mensch, a real, well rounded human being. We may therefore identify with Spock’s struggles, and admire his superior physical and mental abilities, but it is his human side that is the most Jewish part of him.

Following a long tradition in western culture, Roddenberry used orientalism to convey a sense of the alien, and this includes Jewish as well as Arabic, Persian, and Chinese elements. With his raised eyebrows, Spock bears a certain similarity to Ming the Merciless, the alien villain from the old Flash Gordon serials. But it was not until long after Roddenberry’s death in 1991 that a Jewish film director, J. J. Abrams, who was recruited to reboot the series, invokes the destruction of the Temple and subsequent diaspora by having the planet Vulcan destroyed by Romulans. In that 2009 film, called simply Star Trek, time travel is used to generate an alternate timeline, and Leonard Nimoy makes a cameo appearance as the original, now-elderly Spock, while Zachary Quinto takes on the main role as the new Spock. (Quinto is of Italian ancestry, and Italians and Jews often have been cast interchangeably in film and television.) Nimoy’s final film appearance was in the 2013 sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness, also directed by Abrams.

 

As a science fiction fan, I can appreciate Star Trek in all of its iterations, and I can enjoy it as a form of American entertainment and popular culture without exaggerating its Jewish undertones. And as a Jewish-American, I can feel pride and affection toward Leonard Nimoy, as a landsman, as the producer and star of the TV movie about a Holocaust survivor, Never Forget, as the author of the photography book Shekhinawith its erotic Kabbalistic theme, and as the originator of the Vulcan salute and the saying “Live long and prosper.”

Abuse on Twitter

Back on February 7th, I was quoted in a Tech Times article entitled, Three Immediate Things Twitter Must Do To Curb Online Abuse And Win Back Users, written by Christian de Looper. I had been asked to comment on the problem of abusive tweets and the general issue of online abuse, and on what Twitter needs to do to address the problem, so let me begin by providing you with my full response to the query:

Twitter is not the only social media platform that has a problem with online abuse on the part of its users—YouTube, for example, is notorious for the problem. The fact that it has become a public relations concern for Twitter reflects the fact that it is second only to Facebook when in comes to communication and social interaction on the internet. 

Twitter ought to be concerned, and can learn a lesson from the fall of MySpace, where a sense of "lawlessness" and "anything goes" contributed to the mass migration to Facebook, where controls over user behavior are more stringent, creating a very safe, you might say suburban, white bread kind of environment. First and foremost, to follow Facebook's lead, Twitter would have to become much more responsive to user complaints, essentially issuing warnings and shutting accounts down whenever any user is accused of abusive behavior. 

The problem they face is that Twitter has gained much from its wide open atmosphere, not so much an open frontier like the old MySpace, but more like an urban and urbane melting pot of myriad voices. Crack down too much on offensive tweets, and you lose the open atmosphere that makes Twitter so attractive, and you alienate users who view that sort of activity as censorship. Twitter will need to engage in a very tricky balancing act between the need to provide a safe and attractive environment and otherwise show users they are in control and care about abusive behavior, while maintaining their status as an open and democratic platform. The problem they face in the virtual world is exactly the same problem we face in open societies in real life, between security and freedom, between the needs of the community and the rights of the individual.

Long time readers of Blog Time Passing may find my comparison of Twitter, Facebook, and the old MySpace familiar, expressed for example in my post of March 1, 2009, About Face(book).

Be that as it may, let's turn now to de Looper's recent article about Twitter, which begins with the following introduction:

A memo written by Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has been leaked, with Costolo admitting that Twitter "sucks at dealing with trolls."

The memo also resolved that Twitter needs to fight online abuse head-on. But what exactly can Twitter do to put an end to harassment on Twitter?

Now comes those three things Twitter can do to curb online abuse, and the first one is where my quotes, taken out of the larger commentary I provided, comes in:

1. Twitter Needs To Get Ruthless

Twitter has been very passive about its online abuse problem. The company has not made real efforts to combat the issue.

"To follow Facebook's lead, Twitter would have to become much more responsive to user complaints, essentially issuing warnings and shutting accounts down whenever any user is accused of abusive behavior," said Lance Strate, professor of communications and media studies at Fordham University, in an email with Tech Times.

Twitter, however, is in the middle of a balancing act. The service currently has a very "open" vibe about it, and cracking down too hard on users could take away from this.

"The problem they face in the virtual world is exactly the same problem we face in open societies in real life, between security and freedom, the needs of the community and the rights of the individual," continued Strate.

So, now, that's it for me, but let's get the other two bits of advice, shall we?

2. Twitter Needs to Be Public About Its Abuse Battle

Online abuse is not a problem unique to Twitter. YouTube is notorious for Internet trolls that comment on videos with the idea of wanting to take people down a peg. Often comments aren't even related to the videos being posted.

The problem for Twitter, however, is a little different because of the public relations issues involved. If Twitter is going to successfully put an end to abuse on its platform, it needs to be public about it. The issues surrounding public abuse on Twitter could end tomorrow, but that doesn't mean that users will think that it has. Twitter's reputation is important when it comes to gaining users. In fact, many users have left Twitter because of its online abuse problem, and it's likely that they won't come back until Twitter is able to successfully deal with the problem.

3. Twitter Needs To Do It In-House

In the past, Twitter has rather famously left dealing with online abuse to third parties, most notably Women, Action and the Media (WAM!).

The fact that Twitter has not dealt with the problem internally shows a lack of caring from the company. It seems, however, as though the company will finally be stepping up.

Twitter must deal with the problem in-house, and must hire people to deal with it. The tools for the company to be able to combat online abuse have been put in place -- there is a "blocked accounts" page where users can see who has been blocked from their feed, for example, and users can more easily report issues. Now Twitter needs to have employees that deal with those problems.

The conflict between safety and growth lies at the heart of Abraham Maslow's humanistic psychology of motivation,  as famously represented by his Hierarchy of Needs diagram

So, once again, it comes down to a fundamental conflict. Openness is democratic, and facilitates originality, creativity, and growth, but brings with it risk and danger, in this instance the possibility of abuse, as well as scams and spam, and various forms of cybercrime. Closing things off provides more of a margin of safety and security, but at the cost of the ferment that made the platform, group, or society interesting and vibrant in the first place. How to find the balance, to avoid being boring as well as to curb abuse, that is the question. 

Brian Williams No-Brainer

It doesn't happen often, but once in a while I'm asked to provide a comment for a news story and at least some portion of what I've provided doesn't end up getting used at all. This happened back in February when Brian Williams came under fire in a genuine way for saying that the helicopter he was in while reporting in Iraq in 2003 came under actual gunfire, when that never happened. The question that was posed is whether his exaggerated, and essentially false accounts of his experiences as a journalist, made not during a newscast but during live public appearances, i.e., public speaking, would be a fatal blow to his career. Or would it just blow over? And why should we, as audience members, give a damn, one way or another.

So, here is the comment I provided:

As a television news anchor, Brian Williams is as much a television personality as he is a journalist. All newscasters are media personalities as well as reporters, so that the truthfulness and factual accuracy of their reporting matters less than their overall image. We refer to their credibility, and that is a quality we look for in actors, to fool us into believing they are the characters they portray.

By telling tall tales, Williams has irreparably damaged his ethos as a TV news anchor. If he were a print journalist, it wouldn't matter, because newspaper reporters are nothing more than a byline, but on television it's his look, the sound of his voice, his overall manner and presentation of self, and his celebrity persona that establish his credibility. In this sense, he is as much an entertainer as a journalist, which is reinforced by his many appearances on comedy talk shows.

The irony is that he was chosen as NBC's anchor in the first place in large part because he looks and sounds like a traditional TV news anchor, he plays the part well. So the moral of the story is that TV giveth, and TV taketh away. We need not feel too sorry for him though, as he can still serve as a pundit on cable news, perhaps even the host of his own show, the credibility standards of cable news punditry being so much lower that network news. 

 As you no doubt know, Williams soon afterwards went off the air, is currently serving a six month long suspension (or at they say in show biz, he's on haitus), and it remains to be seen whether he will ever return as an anchor. My prediction is, he won't.





And I hope you don't mind if I throw in another plug for my book, Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman's Brave New World Revisited, which includes a discussion of Postman's original argument that television reduces journalism to just another form of entertainment, because this is just one more example of that sort of thing. You don't have to be an Einstein to understand what the Brian Williams story. Frankly, it's a no-brainer.

Je Suis Charlie?

My latest op-ed in the Jewish Standard appeared in the January 30th issue, and  is entitled Je Suis Charlie? And as you might pick up from the subtitle, "It depends on what 'is' is," the piece picks up on themes from general semantics. Moreover, media ecologists should also recognize a reference to Lynn White, Jr.'s important study, Medieval Technology and Social Change, and of course there's something to be said about the social media response to the terrorist attacks in Paris last month.  So, without further ado, here "it" "is":

It says much about the age that we live in that so many of us first learned of the terrorist attacks in Paris on January 7th through Twitter, and that the slogan that came to represent much of the international response to the massacre originated as an image tweeted by French artist and music journalist Joachim Roncin, and soon morphed into a hashtag that rose to the top of the day’s trending topics, and has become one of the most popular hashtags in the history of that social network.

I am referring, of course, to Je suis Charlie, or in hashtag form, #jesuischarlie, and its English version, #iamcharlie.

Some followed up on this formula with the variations Je suis Ahmed or Je suis Ahmed Rabet, to acknowledge the Muslim police officer who was so brutally murdered in the attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, and as a subtle reminder that the terrorists are not representative of Muslims in general. Others added Je suis Juif, meaning I am Jewish, to recall the fact that four hostages were murdered in a kosher supermarket, in addition to the 12 killed at the offices of the Parisian periodical. (Several of them also were Jewish.) Members of the Jewish community in France and abroad were encouraged by the appearance of Je suis Juif signs and hashtags, especially as the slogan was displayed by some French Muslims, although there has also been some criticism that it was not shared widely enough.

Another variation on Je suis Charlie, coming from the far right in France, was Je suis Charlie Martel. The reference is to Charles Martel, the leader of the Franks and the grandfather of Charlemagne, who introduced the stirrup and with it mounted shock combat (of the sort used by knights in armor on horseback wielding lances). That innovation allowed his outnumbered army to resist an invasion from the Islamic empire’s Umayyad caliphate back in the 8th century. Considered the savior of Christendom and a progenitor of the feudal system that brought order to Europe in the wake of the decline of the Rome’s imperial authority, he was given the cognomen Martel, the French word for hammer, after his victory, following the archetype of Judah Maccabee.

Outrage against the attacks has not been universally shared, however, and some have shown their support of the terrorists with the Twitter hashtag #IamKouachi, in reference to the brothers who carried out the Charlie Hebdo attack, while a British member of Parliament tweeted Je suis Palestinian. A less extreme expression of disagreement has been the hashtag #JeNeSuisPasCharlie, meaning, I am not Charlie. This counterslogan has been used to express the view that Charlie Hebdo’s publication of cartoons making fun of the Islamic prophet Muhammad was disrespectful to Muslims, without necessarily condoning the terrorists’ violent response to it. It has been used by news organizations to justify their decision not to republish or display those cartoons. And it also has been invoked as a protest against the fact that so many other acts of violence and bloodshed occurring outside the West have been ignored by journalists and social media participants.

In a New York Times op-ed called I am Not Charlie Hebdo, David Brooks argues that if anyone had tried to publish the content of the satirical newspaper on any U.S. campus today, it would have been accused of engaging in hate speech and shut down by the university’s administration. Moreover, Brooks points out that “it is inaccurate for most of us to claim, Je Suis Charlie Hebdo, or I Am Charlie Hebdo. Most of us don’t actually engage in the sort of deliberately offensive humor that that newspaper specializes in.” While characterizing the magazine as sophomoric, indeed juvenile in its humor, and puerile and insulting, he maintains that ridicule and provocation play an important role in any community, and that healthy societies should be tolerant of all forms of speech. They should not adopt codes of political correctness, as many of our institutions have, he says.

As Brooks suggests, taken literally, Je suis Charlie seems a bit absurd, but of course the slogan is not meant to be taken literally. It is an expression of support and solidarity, no doubt fashioned after President John F. Kennedy’s famous quote, part of a speech delivered in West Berlin in 1963, in response to the building of the Berlin Wall by the Communist government of East Germany: “Ich bin ein Berliner,” meaning, “I am a Berliner.” The ambiguity about what exactly is meant by the verb “to be” is what gives this declaration its powerful effect, but it is that same ambiguity that Brooks calls into question. It is an ambiguity that brings to mind another famous quote from an American president, Bill Clinton: “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” This was said in defense of his earlier statement about Monica Lewinsky: “There’s nothing going on between us.” (That is arguably true if “is” is limited to the present moment and not inclusive of what “was” going on in the past.) In the context of a grand jury investigation, the remark came across as invoking nothing more than a legal technicality, but in fact it reflects one of the most problematic elements of our language.

In the approach known as general semantics, the problems posed by the verb “to be” long have been acknowledged. Simply put, the word “is” tends to imply a relationship of identity, of interchangeability, projecting all of the characteristics of one thing onto another, which is why Brooks objects to the slogan Je suis Charlie. Holding the emotional impact aside, it would be more accurate to say that I sympathize with the staff of Charlie Hebdo and their families, I grieve for the victims of the terrorists attacks, and I unequivocally support freedom of speech and the press. Because we tend to respond to the word “is” as if it means “equals,” as if it means the same thing as “one plus one is two,” some general semanticists have suggested avoiding the verb “to be” altogether, with all tenses and traces of the verb eliminated. While this may seem like an extreme measure, substituting verbs like sympathize, grieve, and support for is, am, and are does result in more accurate statements. It also generally yields better writing, forcing us to use more active verbs. This is not to discount the simple power of the ich bin/je suis/I am quotes, but to understand that they are the exception rather than the rule.

To say that the Kouachi brothers are terrorists is to imply that that is all we need to know about them. We absolutely must condemn them as terrorists, and do whatever is in our power to prevent such acts from occurring again. But we do ourselves a disservice by reducing them down to a simple label and a simple equation, when we desperately need to understand the complexities of such violent activities. In the aftermath of the attacks, the statement that Islam is a religion of peace has been repeated countless times, and while we may applaud the sentiment behind it, it is as misleading as saying that Islam is a religion of violence, as misleading as making similar statements about Judaism, Christianity, or Buddhism. Substituting other verbs, such as preaches and promotes, would be helpful, but general semantics also would recommend dealing with more concrete terms. Islam is an abstract concept (so is Judaism, Christianity, or Buddhism), and it helps to use more concrete terms, to refer to specific individuals and groups, statements and texts, and especially, actions.

Modernity, and with it the establishment of the State of Israel as a Jewish homeland, has led to much agonizing over the question of who is a Jew. And while there are issues we grapple with concerning Jewish identity, to a significant degree, the problem may be in our verbs, not ourselves. The answer to the questions of “Who is a Jew?” and “Who is Charlie?” would depend on what the meaning of “is” is.

It is significant to note that this is a problem that does not exist in the Hebrew language, at least not in the present tense. There are no words for is, am, and are, and the verb lihiyot, “to be,” is conjugated only in the past and future tenses. It is a quality that Hebrew shares with several other languages, including Arabic. While it is far from a cure for our many linguistic maladies, it should serve to point us in the right direction. And it is consistent with Jewish ethics to say that what really matters is not so much what someone is, but what someone does. And that includes standing up for the right of free expression and religious affiliation. And that includes defending the right to live in peace and free from terror.