Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 02/01/2013 - 21:19Another month comes around and I start it off with "Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit", that old childhood phrase meant to bring a good month. I've been thinking a bit more about childhood these days, starting with the death of my mother, followed by the death of twenty elementary school children in Sandy Hook.
"Yesterday, a child came out to wander…" It was a song I sang as a kid in school choir. Later, I sang it to my to my oldest children when they were little. I used the lyrics when I wrote about the birth of my third daughter.
There is something about the joyful innocence of childhood. The New Testament has, "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."
And this childhood innocence is celebrated in songs today, like Lowen and Navarro's "Through a Child's Eyes"
I saw you through a child's eyes,
and all your innocence came into my life.
And now my darkest night
is coming to and end,
since I began, to see through a child's eyes
Again.
Perhaps a monthly blog post recalling a simple childhood memory is an important part of keeping it all in focus.
One Word After Another.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 01/31/2013 - 20:43It's been a day of things not working. I was supposed to help some people use Twitter this morning and was getting repeated Twitter service errors. In the afternoon, I found that Fiona's school was without electricity and she was sent home early. This was as a result of a wind storm that took down trees in Woodbridge.
The wind storm also kept me up last night, so I'm more tired than normal. I keep yawning and trying to grab a theme to write about. A quick bite to eat and I have more energy, but still not much.
Storms, things not working, lack of energy, it makes the writing more difficult. There are days that I focus on intent, on impact, on creativity, and other days, simply on just writing, putting one word after another.
Understanding Social Media
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 01/30/2013 - 23:17It's been about half a century since Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media and a lot has changed since then. The need to understand media, and especially social media, has grown considerably since then.
As the Social Media Manager for a non-profit health care organization, I often speak at conferences about social media. Besides my role in non-profits, I also talk about social media from the perspective of a politician and a citizen journalist.
Recently, I spoke about how I like to use social media when I'm at conferences. Typically, I try to take notes at the conference using Twitter. I need to refine the thought down to less than 140 characters. Sometimes, this can be a challenge. Sometimes, people might not get what I'm tweeting, without the context of the surrounding tweets. People need to learn more about context, especially for tweets, where additional context can often be found in the hashtags used in the tweets.
When I mentioned this at one event I was at, people said they felt uncomfortable doing that because others might think they were busy doing things online and not paying attention. As a social media manager, I don't often run into that problem, but it is a common misconception.
Just because a person is writing something on their computer, perhaps via Facebook or Twitter, doesn't mean they aren't paying attention. If they are using social media as a means of taking and sharing notes, they may be paying much more attention than others who are just sitting casually at the meeting.
Another aspect of social media note taking is that it is conversational. It is like being able to take notes and see other people's notes at the same time. It can produce brief interchanges that further enhance the understanding of the topic being discussed. I recently ran into this as I was taking notes via social media of the hearings in Hartford about Newtown.
State Senator Beth Bye posted about a nuanced statement from DMHAS Commissioner Patricia Rehmer about outpatient commitment and forced medication. A few different people commented on different aspects of this and I believe everyone came out better informed as a result.
Yet this style of note taking and communications may be unfamiliar to some. Some people may have a mistaken impression that Facebook is just for games or talking about parties. What is worse, some people may try to capitalize on this misimpression to cast aspersions on others. This is perhaps most likely by those who do not want a serious discussion about the issues our country faces and simply want to force their opinions on others.
Such people may, in fact, use social media to distort, and to try to get traditional media sources to spread the distortion.
This appears to be the case of opponents of gun control legislation that Sen. Bye has introduced. Perhaps it backfired on them because the broadcast that NBC had showed a gun control opponent who was not at the hearing criticizing Sen. Bye for being at the hearing and using Facebook to communicate with constituents about the hearing. It helped paint the gun control opponents as uninformed. Fortunately for those opposing gun control, NBC ended their segment with a gun control opponent who was at the hearing and who lauded Sen. Bye for her efforts to keep people informed.
Over the coming years, I expect to see more and more legislators using social media to communicate with the constituents, especially during hearings. Sen. Bye and several other Connecticut legislators provide a good example of how this can be done to improve civil discourse. Of course, during this time, there are bound to be more issues like this one and we all need to spend more time understanding social media.
Cultural Climate Change
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/29/2013 - 21:32Was it a Facebook post or something else that got me thinking about The Hudson River School? I'm not sure. Yet these old images of the American wilderness have been dancing in my mind. I wander around online and read about manifest destiny and think about rugged American individualism. Pushing west until the Pacific Ocean, and then what? My mind stops briefly at Emerson and then de Tocqueville.
Today, I went to a United Way event. They have a 'Tocqueville Society Philanthropy Award'. These seem to me to be the heirs of manifest destiny and The Hudson School. What was the cultural climate of the early eighteen hundreds?
My mind fast forwards a century to Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt. I often think of Babbitt when I go to a United Way event of Chamber of Commerce breakfast.There is something comforting in it, like the bourgeois geraniums that Hemann Hesse's characters paused to admire before setting out on their own.
Yet somewhere, The Hudson School gives way to socialist realism and over to beat poets. All, accessible with a few clicks. The sounds of domesticity disrupts my writing, so I find an audio clip of the surf to listen to. WIth my headphones on, I'm at Big Sur with Richard Brautigan, at a salt water farm with E.B. White, or perhaps wandering Cape Cod with Henry David Thoreau. It is soothing like the little water fountain at my office, or perhaps like Snow Crash.
Here, in the twenty-first century, we can mash it all up into some online multimedia experience, perhaps even with a Naim June Paik video cello playing The Piano Guys' Cello Wars.
But what does it all mean, nestled between Sandy Hook, and Hartford, where care givers and those who have fought mental illness testify before the legislature?
Space was supposed to be the final frontier. Is that still the case in this globally warmed internet age? Are we on the age of another great awakening, a cultural climate change, or is it all vanity?
Gun Control Bingo
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 01/28/2013 - 20:17Today, I watched parts of the "Bipartisan Task Force on Gun Violence Prevention and Children’s Safety Public Hearing at the Legislative Office Building about Gun Control".
While I haven't seen any talking points sent out by people supporting or opposing gun control, but it sure sounded like a lot people were reading off of one script or another.
Guns don't kill people, people kill people. The only thing that stops a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun. Cars, alcohol, airplanes, etc., kill people, why don't we ban them? We need our guns to protect us from tyrants, terrorists, and home invasions.
However, a lot of what people say is contradictory, just plain false, or even nuts.
For example, people say that limiting high capacity magazines wouldn't have slowed down the shooter. However, banning high capacity magazines would make it difficult for law abiding citizens to defend their homes.
People opposed to gun control talk about 9/11 and how that didn't cause any new legislation to be quickly passed. However, the Patriot Act was passed 45 days after 9/11. Anyone who thinks that 9/11 didn't change things, hasn't flown in an airplane over the past decade. It is notable that other people opposed to gun control cite the Patriot Act as a reason they need to keep their guns.
Those who talk about cars, alcohol and airplanes would most likely be abhorred if guns were as regulated as cars, alcohol and airplanes, and we do require car owners to have insurance.
One of the great talking points is the issue of mental health, and I think that is an important point. When I listen to people saying things like "We're already close to civil war because of a certain man in the White House" and "I call about all gun owners to nullify any law" which limits gun ownership, "I don't trust the government anymore", and "the AMA has drugged our youth", I think mental health is a big issue, and I do hope that Secret Service is paying attention to some of the testimony.
I also have to wonder how many of the people who are calling for more spending on mental health are some of the same people who are calling for lower taxes and less government spending.
Then, there is the argument that no law will prevent criminals from getting guns. No law prevents criminals from doing many different things, but that doesn't mean we should have no laws. However, it seems like the common thread is that we should be making it more difficult for people who should not have guns to get guns.
This is not to say that the hearings have been without content. A spokesperson for the Police Chiefs' Association had what sounded like well thought out suggestions on how to combat gun violence. Likewise, the spokespeople for the Connecticut Council of Municipalities talked about about what efforts were most likely to have a real effect on gun violence in our state.
Perhaps the most interesting was the spokesperson for the National Shooting Sports Foundation who exercised some sophistry to try and dance around comments from Sen. Williams. Sen. Williams called him out on it, but it struck me as if the NSSF has about as little credibility the NRA. On the other hand, the spokesperson for Sturm and Ruger actually spoke persuasively about trying to improve gun safety and wanting to work with the legislature.
I wish more people would speak like the Police Chiefs, the Connecticut Council of Municipalities and work together to find ways to make our country truly safer.
