Archive | Internet RSS feed for this archive

Propaganda 2.0: why Israel and Hamas are fighting a war with rockets and tweets

As I write this, I notice Hamas’ claim that it has shelled “occupied” Tel Aviv. I hear this not from cable news or The New York Times, or from RT America, the Russian government backed twenty-four hour news network that I have streaming on the Roku across the room. Nor do I learn it from CNN, where Anderson Cooper is busting Sen. McCain’s balls for contesting Hillary Clinton’s possible replacement. No, I learn this from Twitter, which isn’t really worth giving much thought to — until you realize that this tweet comes not from a news outlet, but from Hamas. And another tweet, from the Israel Defense Forces, assures me that, in fact, the Hamas rocket never reached Tel Aviv — “#Hamas propaganda is constantly spreading misinformation,” apparently.

Continue reading on The Verge

See also: Realtime war: Israeli military liveblogs, tweets attack on Hamas

Comments Off

November 15, 2012 Comments Off Short URL , Internet

I want my DNC: three days of hashtags and pseudo-events

Matt Stroud, who co-wrote our recent piece on the Republican National Convention for The Verge, has just written a follow-up on the Democratic National Convention.

Read it now on The Verge

Comments Off

September 11, 2012 Comments Off Short URL Internet, Politics

When animals attract: Inside Anthrocon, the Furry utopia

If you’ve been mercifully cut off from the more absurd aspects of internet culture since, well, the dawn of the world wide web, you might wonder what Anthrocon is exactly. First, you have to be acquainted with furry fandom. A “furry,” in their lingo, is an anthropomorphic animal: Bugs Bunny, for example. He contains the characteristics of a rabbit — the tail, the ears, the buck teeth — as well as those of a human. He walks upright, and he presumably has vocal cords that allow him to speak English. Kids love this shit. And sometimes kids grow into adults that love this shit, as well. And some of them don’t just love the funny animals, as they’re known. They want to become funny animals, and they purchase several-thousand-dollar fursuits to make their transformation into an anthropomorphic beast feel a little more real. These people, the fans of funny half-human / half-animals who spend so much time buying comics, creating artwork, and developing full-scale animal personas, or “fursonas,” are known as furries. Their biggest in real life meet and greet is Anthrocon, which takes place annually in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Continue reading at The Verge

Comments Off

June 25, 2012 Comments Off Short URL Culture, Internet, Outsiders

Yasha Levine: using the web to fight ‘journalistic malpractice’

In the United States, the question of who is (and isn’t) a journalist has always been hotly debated, but in the age of blogs and web-only news organizations the issue is more important than ever. For Yasha Levine, a founding editor of The Exiled, this isn’t rhetorical — and he has the mugshot to prove it (or he will, as soon as he gets around to asking for one).

Yasha and I recently spent an hour talking about the rise of Russian-style politics in this country, Occupy LA, the hazards of going against the media mainstream, and what The Exiled is doing about “journalistic malpractice.”

Continue reading at The Verge

Comments Off

June 14, 2012 Comments Off Short URL Internet, News

Scamworld: ‘Get rich quick’ schemes mutate into an online monster

From Boing Boing: ”The Verge’s Joseph L. Flatley delves into the world of Internet marketing scams (those stupid spam pitches you get for “lead generation” and such) in eye-watering detail. Fundamentally, these things are exactly what they appear to be: con artists who suck money out of desperate people by lying to them about the money they can make with “work from home” businesses. They’re pyramid schemes. But Flatley lingers on the personalities, the histories, the motivations and the unique innovations that the Internet has given rise to, providing insight into the feel of being inside one of these desperate, sweaty scams.”

The New Yorker calls it: “[a] fun piece… about the dark, wacky world of Internet con men.”

Kiplinger’s says: “In the age of internet marketing, ‘get rich quick’ scams have evolved way beyond the point of fruitless envelope-stuffing and fake work-at-home jobs. Now national syndicates trick their victims out of tens of thousands of dollars before disappearing into the digital ether.”

O’Reilly Radar: “amazing deconstruction of the online ‘get rich quick’ scam business.”

And Andy Jenkins says: “I’ve been bitten by a rattlesnake… stung by a scorpion, and attacked by an asp.”

Read it at The Verge

Comments Off

May 10, 2012 Comments Off Short URL Crime, Internet

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.