Adam Hudson on Wednesday, Apr. 17th
David Petraeus may be out of the military and Central Intelligence Agency but he’s found a new role elsewhere — in the game “Call of Duty: Black Ops II.” Well, his likeness, that is. Set in the year 2025, the first-person shooter features Petraeus as the Secretary of Defense serving under a female President resembling Hillary Clinton. Gamers first see Petraeus on board an aircraft carrier named the “USS Barack Obama” greeting an apprehended terrorist in an orange jumpsuit. While Petraeus was uninvolved in the game’s production, his “Call of Duty” cameo reveals the symbiotic relationship between video games and U.S. militarism.
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In a promo for NewsHour’s Daily Download segment, PBS published this video of our friend Hari Sreenivasan talking with Harper Reed, who was the CTO of President Obama’s campaign.
Reed says post-campaign, he’s considering starting a software company that will, cryptically, “make businesses move faster.” He also discusses some of the changes — fairly minor, as he points out — that a company can make to more seamlessly incorporate their tech teams and avoid stereotypical old-school vs. techie cultural clashes. (more…)
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There’s a good little think piece about a talk from one of my personal heroes, Douglas Rushkoff, over at The Verge right now. Writer Joshua Kropstein gives a good primer on the line of thought Rushkoff– a veteran media analyst– is pursuing these days.
“We don’t question the values of the systems we’re using,” Rushkoff lamented. “What we’re actually building is a society where we are all dependent on the layer directly beneath us. We accept it as a given circumstance.”
Bound up within the article: the idea that the Occupy movement might be a kind of “Public Beta” for the next iteration of democracy. The piece is well worth the read, and if you’re not familiar with Rushkoff it’s a must.
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Zvika Krieger of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace writes in The Atlantic today about the Center’s new interactive map which looks to crowdsource visions of an Israeli-Palestinian border.
While the idea of crowdsourcing a soution to one of the worlds most intractable political problems might strike some as a little… naive is the gentle way of putting it… the map’s true value is in revaling just how complicated the questions involved in the peace process are.
There are hundreds of thousands of Israelis living on the other side of the Palestinian border in the West Bank, for starters. The map encourages users to pick and choose which settlements get to stay, in exchange for land swaps from Israel proper. What the map doesn’t do is explain the quality of the land involved in those swaps.
Still, if you have only a headline-level understanding of what’s at stake this map will unearths some of the hard math that stands in the way of simple peace.
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Remy Schwartz on Monday, Nov. 5th
by Remy Schwartz
The 2012 presidential race has been a leading news item for more than 22 months, and I’m ready for it to be over. The election has grown far beyond television ads and news articles. I can’t open my email without a plea for money at the top of my inbox, and nowhere is less safe than my Facebook or Twitter feeds. David Kaufman is the president of the College Republicans at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and he’s experienced a similar onslaught of election-spam.
“There’s always something from Romney, always something from Paul Ryan. There’s always something sponsored on Twitter that he’s paying for, something trending. Believe it or not, a lot of people my age get information through memes,” Kaufman said. (more…)
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Adam Hudson on Monday, Oct. 29th
The expansion of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia is rarely discussed in mainstream forums, but breaking this silence are two important reports from prestigious universities that shed light on the underreported human suffering and dangerous implications of the drone program. (more…)
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It would be the perfect media narrative. Barack Obama, a candidate molded in the image of a technocratic Millennial’s fantasy who had a Facebook profile way back in 2006, is losing in the social media theater to William Mittens Romney, who is an actual grandfather. So shocking it has to be true. Cue the contrarian articles and arbitrary data-parsing. There’s only one problem: the debate is totally irrelevant. It makes us feel good to talk about the importance of social media in the presidential election, because it makes us and our Tweets feel important, and while social media is integral to the strategies of campaigns in 2012, that strategy has very little to do with what any of us actually say. (more…)
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It’s been difficult to be focused on anything but the slowly evolving news out of Libya today.
The first thoughts through my head when I learned that a state department staffer was killed as part of a riot at the consulate in Benghazi was of Tehran in 1979. The Iranian Hostage Crisis had a huge impact on American politics. Not only was it a fateful blow to the Carter Administration, it set the stage for both the Iran-Contra scandal and tension that continues between Iran and the United States to this day. Deja vu all over again.
How’d we get here? Read on…
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Turnstyle on Thursday, Sep. 6th
A version of this story is also airing on NPR’s All Things Considered.
Youth Radio reporter Bianca Brooks is in Charlotte along with the Youth Radio election team.
Over the past few weeks, President Obama has been heavily courting the youth vote, visiting college campuses in swing states around the country. At the Democratic Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, there’s a big push for youth involvement. There are 644 delegates under the age of 35, and even an official youth engagement coordinator. Polls show young adult support for President Obama at around 55%, slightly down from when he was elected in 2008.
Read the whole story at the Youth Radio Convention 2012 blog.
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This story also aired on Marketplace.
On a mission to find the most lucrative jobs for young folks at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, I began awkwardly asking every young person I saw, “How much money are you making right now?” I found volunteers, making what volunteers make, nothing. I also found crossing guards making 18 dollars an hour. These were the kind of jobs you expect to find at a major political event like this: coordinators, greeters, and support staff.
Read the whole story at the Youth Radio Convention 2012 blog.
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Now streaming: the archive of our Google Hangout On-Air with Jesse Vigil of Psychic Bunny, one of the designers of the new audio adventure game FREEQ (iOS/Android).
Sponsors
We’ve featured dancer Matt Luck’s work before.
I first encountered Sifteo Cubes back at IndieCade last October, and spent some time playing around with the little blocks which I first mistook for iPod Nanos.
Over the weekend I was having a conversation about the new Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Museum that’s been announced.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and promise you that this will be the first of two posts on Present Shock, the Douglas Rushkoff book that has been getting a mountain of attention in the tech press since it was released earlier this month.
