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Posts published in “Day: August 14, 2009”

Wyden at Seaside via Twitter

August 14, 2009

Didn't make it (did consider it) to Seaside for Oregon Senator Ron Wyden's town hall there. Wyden has done a mass of town halls (more than 500), is very experienced at handling them, and watching his approach to it would have been of interest by itself.

As it happens, Wyden's staff chief, Josh Kardon, was there and live-tweeted the preceedings, question by question and answer by answer. Even bearing in mind that this was done by an advocate and not a neutral, the results are worth reading.

Overall impression is that this was not a raucous event; the impression comes in part because health care and federal spending weren't the only topics discussed; liquid natural gas and forest policy came up too. But here's what some of the health discussion looked like, according to Kardon's tweets (and the quality of the conversation is a lot better than the more typical promoting of/debunking of outright lies): (more…)

Facing Facebook

August 14, 2009

Got an inquiry from a friend (in the conventional sense) about becoming a friend (in the specialized sense) with someone on Facebook. He and the other person have had political differences, but he got the invitation to be "friended." What to do?

Each to their own tastes. But - and yes, we here are on Facebook, and Twitter too among other things - the basic take here is that being someone's "friend" on Facebook is a little different than the traditional type. A friend on Facebook is someone you choose to keep in touch with, and may or may not be more than that. The question: But would I throttle back on my opinions if I know that so-and-so might see them? Response: If they're on line anywhere, they may be seen. A whole generation of politicians, among others, is about to learn that the hard way. (The rule here: Write nothing, post nothing, anywhere, that isn't essentially open to the world at large. You'll find your desire to keep it private is in inverse proportion to the likelihood of its emergence into unwanted hands.)

Facebook and Twitter do raise a variety of questions for certain categories of people. A question for bloggers and other writers (journalists included): To what extent is a Facebook post or a Twitter tweet "on the record" - quotable elsewhere? A point not yet really resolved.

The next blog post here will make use of Tweets someone else has posted. Probably, those tweets were intended to shared with the world at large. If not, we'll probably find out soon enough.

Via a Facebook post, a link to a pair of essays by two Idaho journalists, Kevin Richert and Marcia Franklin, on the ethical and journalistic issues of social communications. The main takeaway: There's a lot yet to be worked out.