Barrel Strength

Here Comes Everybody
The Long Tail
Planet Google

The world we are currently experiencing is a consequence of technical arrangements which have transformed the nature of markets and drastically lowered the costs of social organization. Lower costs of sorting information on a massive scale have produced a transformation of several activities which characterized the twentieth century: mass markets, hits, the star system, and limited choice. The Long Tail explores the implications of the change from limited to unlimited shelf space. Here Comes Everybody describes the consequences and social implications of these dramatically lowered costs of organizing people for all forms of collective organization.

Of the three, Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations” dwells best on the social implications of the new technologies. His major argument is that what used to be enormously difficult and expensive, such as social organization, has been rendered trivially easy. People can self-identify, collaborate, organize, sign-up, cooperate, and disperse, the prime example being Facebook. The fact that some things that used to be extremely difficult are now easy has grave implications for the professions. Professions exist, he says, to solve a problem of scarce knowledge and limited technical capacity. He argues that printed news media, and the journalists who go with them, are in the process of being eliminated. We do not need the news “profession” any longer. A profession exists to solve a technical problem, in this case, the scarcity of airwaves or printing presses. With the arrival of ubiquitous publishing and picture taking capacities in the general population, the profession of journalism is being gutted, like monks being thrown out of monasteries when printing replaced hand-writing as the way to produce books. The decline of newspaper advertising powerfully combines with increased amateur news collection to reduce reliance on newspapers.

Read the rest…

BBC provides the excuse.

Officers from 76 councils sampled 494 kebabs to test their nutritional value, during the Local Authority Coordinators of Regulatory Services (Lacors) study….

Some 35% of labels listed a different meat species than that actually found in the kebab.

Six kebabs were found to include pork when it had not been declared as an ingredient. Two of the six were described as Halal – food or drink permitted for Muslims, which must not contain pork.

Mr Theobald said it was “totally unacceptable” that people with certain faiths were unknowingly eating meats that were against their beliefs.

h/t Ed Driscoll.  John Ridley of PBS opines.

Every president to hold office has espoused some version of Americanism; the truths that we hold self-evident, even when those truths are not always in evidence. But for all their grand rhetoric and mostly good deeds, none was able to seal the deal on the trifecta of equality, plurality and socioeconomic ascendancy. Obama has. Obama is the more perfect union. He is a house united. Obama is the New Generation and the hot light of a dawn that goes way beyond clever talk of morning in America.

Quite simply, quite plainly, just by virtue his being, Obama is America. The first true American to lead our nation.

Seth (Update (2010-09-08) corrected URL) provides a needed reality check on Obama.

…there were more dissenting voters to his election than any US President in history (59,934,786) – and that’s just counting the major ticket dissenters, not the write in votes for third party candidates.

It’s also worth noting that the percentage of people who voted for Obama is 52.9% …. Obama’s margin of victory (9,522,111) is only the 6th largest of all time, despite having the largest US population in history. Nixon’s 1972 margin (17,995,488), Johnson’s 1964 margin (17,951,287), Reagan’s 1984 margin (16,678,120), Roosevelt’s 1936 margin (11,070,786), and Eisenhower’s 1956 margin of victory (9,551,152) were all greater (with smaller populations mind you) than Obama’s (FiveThirtyEight).

His voter percentage margin of victory (7.2%), is only the 13th best in history. Harding in 1920 (26.2%), Roosevelt in 1932 (17.7%), Hoover in 1928 (17.4%), Wilson in 1912 (14.4%), Van Buren in 1836 (14.2%), Jackson in 1828 (12.4%), Buchanan in 1856 (12.2%), Eisenhower in 1952 (10.9%), Lincoln in 1860 (10.3%), Reagan in 1980 (9.7%), Taft in 1908 (8.6%), and H.W. Bush in 1988 (7.8%) all had greater percentage margins of victory than Obama (FiveThirtyEight).

In terms of voter turnout, the 2008 election was the largest (132,580,096) in history, as it should be with the largest voting age population (VAP) in history (230,917,360) (George Mason University). However, the 2008 VAP turnout rate (the total number of voting age Americans divided by the total number of presidential votes) is only the 4th largest since 1960 (InfoPlease). The 1960, 64 and 68 elections all had higher VAP rates (InfoPlease). The 2008 voting-eligible rate (VEP), which excludes those who did not register to vote and those who are ineligible to vote (because of their criminal status), also falls short of the VEP rates of the 1960s (University of Oklahoma).

When comparing the increase in total voters, the 2008 election only brought in an additional 10,285,118 voters from 2004 (InfoPlease). By comparison, the 2004 election brought in 16,708,704 additional voters from 2000, and 2000 enjoyed 9,129,929 additional voters from 1996 (InfoPlease). The voting age population increased by 9,972,649 from 2004 to 2008, 15,441,931 from 2000 to 2004, and 9,304,000 from 1996 to 2000 (InfoPlease).