The YouTube Moment came at the end, when Jon Stewart devoted about 10 or 15 minutes to a serious speech. He spoke about how, unlike what you see on cable TV news and in Washington politics, Americans are mostly people who work together to solve problems.

On a windblown stage on a sunny afternoon, Stewart tried to make himself the voice of reason in American media. I think he succeeded, but in doing so I’m worried he ignored the role that passion—irrational, rude, confrontational passion—plays in making American work.

During his speech, Stewart played some footage of cars lining up for the Holland Lincoln Tunnel and used it as a symbol for America: People of all different backgrounds lining up and taking their turns to get through the darkness. Stewart noted there is the occasional driver who comes up on the shoulder and cuts people off, but that person is rare and scorned—not hired as an analyst. Stewart identified two problems that cause people to mistrust their fellow “drivers”: Cable television and Washington politics. (Of course, Stewart owes his success to both. His show airs on cable, and a large part of his material comes from ribbing politicians.)

I get Stewart’s point about how we all need to respect one another’s differences. But is the Lincoln Tunnel the America we want? A nation sitting in traffic, waiting patiently in the face of problems? Or do we want a place where people get fired up? This country is not just about solving things. It’s about inventing things. Our greatest writers, architects, engineers and businesspeople did not just set out to make improvements, they set out to create something awesome, to get famous, to make money. Some of the most beloved Americans left behind a trail of hurt feelings and enemies. Thomas Edison did not wait patiently in line for cars at the tunnel. (OK, literally he took the train and the ferry over from Jersey, since the tunnel wasn’t built yet.) He behaved totally unreasonably and irrationally, screwing his investors, taking credit where it wasn’t earned, flattening his competitors, and in doing so managed to bring electric lights to the masses. If he had been a rational man, a large part of the American story would have unfolded more slowly.

Stewart’s call for reason is right on if we’re limiting the conversation to politics. Our political leaders have strayed into dangerous territory lately with statements that slander Muslims and immigrants. Cable news is bad for rational discourse (but probably no worse than the pamphlets, newspapers, rallies and party machines in the last century).

Outside of politics, though, there’s a need for irrational actors. If Stewart himself had followed his own advice—shown restraint, respected everyone—his career probably wouldn’t be anywhere near where it is now, and the millions of people who enjoy his entertainment would have missed out. Sometimes you have to piss people off to get stuff done. And when someone is a jerk to you in America, you sometimes have to be a jerk back.

Not that The Daily Show is any less funny or pointed when Jon Stewart acts righteous. The fact that Stewart can inspire this kind of rally, with this kind of high-quality conversation, is a testament to his skill as a thinker, orator and entertainer.

Update: Here’s a video of the speech:

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

The full text of the ad is:

Our DIVERSITY is our greatest STRENGTH.

When any New Yorker is atacked for who they are, what they believe or whom they LOVE it is a crime against all of us.

Keep our City strong.

LOVE LOVE. HATE HATE.

This is a totally on-pitch PSA that makes me proud of the city. To the best of my memory, this is the first time I’ve seen the slogan “Love love. Hate hate.” That’s a seriously good tagline. Also impressive is how timely this PSA is—the text seems to allude to recent hate crimes against a Muslim cab driver and several gay men in the Bronx, fresh wounds against the city. The campaign was launched October 14, not even 2 weeks after the Bronx attacks. The ads are produced by NYC & Company, the city’s public affairs division; more information in this press release.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

The It Gets Better Project is so good, so spot-on, that it ought to be celebrated as a triumph of Internet video, social media and even the English language. I can’t find one damn reason to be cynical about it.

You’ve probably seen at least a piece of this campaign. It’s an online media project started last month in response to a series of suicides by gay youth who were bullied in school. Writer Dan Savage started a website and YouTube channel seeking videos of adults counseling kids to hang in there, it’s going to get better. Savage recorded the first video with his husband, and promoted it in Savage Love, his nationally published sex column.

The site describes the mission in three succinct sentences:

“Many LGBT youth can’t picture what their lives might be like as openly gay adults. They can’t imagine a future for themselves. So let’s show them what our lives are like, let’s show them what the future may hold in store for them.”

Some earnest LGBT supporters have criticized it as just another act of “raising awareness”—a publicity campaign that spreads a message but doesn’t solve anything. I disagree. The problem of kids being bullied into suicide is one of those rare problems that can actually be improved directly and immediately through words.

Middle and high school is a terrible time. I got teased for being a nerd. But I had good parents, teachers, church members, and Boy Scout leaders who consistently told me people who get picked on in school end up doing well as adults. I got the support I needed. Gay kids are systemically denied that support.

The It Gets Better Project has led to an outpouring of videos from adults of all sexual orientations assuring those kids struggling with bad times that they’ll make it through. President Obama recorded one. Governor Patterson recorded one. Tim Gunn recorded one. So have a lot of other celebrities. But the best ones are by people you’ve never heard of. In the last 11 days, the video of Joel Burns delivering his It Gets Better speech at a Fort Worth city council meeting has been played over 2 million times.

The campaign has also, impressively, caught on among clergy. (I chose to embed a video of Bishop Gene Robinson at the top of this post.) Some of the It Gets Better videos are nothing more or less than small-town pastors and rabbis sitting in their studies, speaking into webcams, telling gay kids that God loves them as they are. Who would have guessed it would take Dan Savage to finally give these good people a national platform!

The genius of the It Gets Better Project is that it carries a near-universal message between generations. It’s a precise, three-word incantation that almost every adult understands, and that almost every child still needs to learn. It’s like the time machine we all wish we could use to give advice to the younger version of ourselves. Saying “It gets better” demonstrates compassion and understanding. How many lives has this phrase already saved?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

• Mike Huckabee: “NPR has discredited itself as a forum for free speech and a protection of the First Amendment rights of all and has solidified itself as the purveyor of politically correct pabulum and protector of views that lean left…. It is time for the taxpayers to start making cuts to federal spending, and I encourage the new Congress to start with NPR.”
• Sarah Palin: “If NPR is unable to tolerate an honest debate about an issue as important as Islamic terrorism, then it’s time for ‘National Public Radio’ to become ‘National Private Radio.’”
• Some dude on Huffington: “It’s clear that NPR would rather play consistently to the left than reach a balanced audience. And for that, they deserve to be pushed away from the public trough.”

I’ve never been a big fan of using tax money to support media programming; its too close to the state-run media in countries with less freedom of speech. But the truth is, in the U.S., public radio hardly gets any tax money. NPR gets no tax money directly. Most of NPR’s revenue comes from private donations. Federal money is funneled through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which doles out grants to local stations, which can use it to pay their NPR dues. How much did the CPB budget for radio this year? $90.5 million. That’s nothing.

I’ve become interested in data visualization, so just for fun, here’s a quick and dirty chart illustrating the amount of tax money spent on public radio compared to a few other choice areas. I threw News Corp’s annual revenues in for good measure. All numbers (except the TARP spending) are from FY 2010.

Sources: 2010 Federal Budget, ProPublica, News Corp. financials, 2010 Federal HHS Budget, Taxpayers for Common Sense, CPB.

Another thought: Fox News has been advancing the narrative that Congress should investigate and defund NPR, with Bill O’Reilly and other commentators framing the federal funding of NPR as tilting the playing field against private broadcasters. So here’s another piece of math if you want it: Federal spending on public radio is less than 0.28% of News Corp’s annual revenue.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

I might have been better off just letting it go, but I wanted to do the right thing. Unfortunately, it became a huge frustration rather than a positive communications experience. Basically, I was letting a company I heretofore never cared about suddenly push me around, demanding my picture and phone number and a big chunk of my time. (You may have already guessed that the site I’m talking about is Yelp.) How annoying!

How many different websites do you use to share your profile, make connections, and respond to people who want to communicate on that platform? Probably at least two, maybe six, maybe ten. It’s a lot of time. Which of these efforts will pay off, and which are pointless work?

We’re all developing profile fatigue. The more common profile fatigue becomes, the harder it is to start a new web business that requires people to set up a login. For years, tech companies have been searching for an answer to this problem. The road to now is littered with burnt-out hulks of multi-site identity systems that didn’t work. (When was the last time you updated your Windows Live profile?)

But for the first time, a universal login seems within reach. The smart money is on Facebook. Almost every new identity-based site being developed today is designed to mesh with Facebook’s infrastructure. You can tap Facebook’s “open graph” for identification the way you tap the power company for energy.

Consider the implications. In a world where our Facebook profiles are displayed everywhere, including in connection with our jobs, we will all be far more careful about what we share. I’d eliminate anything vaguely controversial or mildly rude, for fear of presenting an unwelcoming face to customers.

That means if I wanted to write a post criticizing Christine O’Donnell for not knowing the First Amendment, I might hold my tongue, to keep from souring future encounters with people who support her. I wouldn’t complain about Yelp’s website, in case one day in the future I want to do business with that brand. I wouldn’t write about how some people in my neighborhood get on my nerves, because people in the neighborhood might connect it to my job. To be as professional as possible, I would make sure everything I post on Facebook is as inoffensive as a pair of brown loafers.

I don’t worry much about privacy. But I worry deeply about free expression. When Facebook becomes our public face, there will be intense pressure to be extremely dull. To me, that’s scarier than any privacy breach. Will the social future make us boring?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Before 2007, the two words “social” and “graph” had occasionally been used in academia to discuss, literally, a visualization showing how people were connected by social relationships.

The earliest reference I can find to the modern sense of “social graph” is from a Facebook press release issued May 24, 2007:

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg today unveiled Facebook Platform, calling on all developers to build the next-generation of applications with deep integration into Facebook, distribution across its “social graph” and an opportunity to build new businesses.
…
Applications will gain distribution through what Zuckerberg called the “social graph,” the network of real connections through which people communicate and share information.

So there’s Definition One. Almost immediately following that press release, tech pundits began using the phrase aggressively in blogs and PowerPoint presentations. The first reference to it I can find in the popular media is a London Times article from September 11, 2007, which defined social graph as “a vast database of its users’ social and professional relationships.”

By September 2007, people were already growing suspicious that “social graph” didn’t actually mean anything new. Media and technology writer Dave Winter wrote, “Social network is a much less confusing term, so why don’t we just stick with it?”

But despite Winter’s early warning, “social graph” was here to stay. In October 2007, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked to define the phrase during a talk at the Web 2.0 Summit. Zuckerberg said:

When we talk about the social graph, we’re talking about the set of connections, whether it’s friendships, business connections, acquaintances, that everyone has in the world. And this has always existed, we didn’t invent it. So all that we’re trying to do at Facebook is take the social graph that exists in the world and just map it out. Try to figure out all the connections people have in the world, the real connections. We’re not trying to make new connections. And once we have as accurate of a model, or approaching an accurate model of the social graph, then we can expose those connections in a way that our users our comfortable with their privacy settings, to a set of applications. Those applications can use those connections to help people share information more effectively. … The social graph is just this thing that exists in the the world and we just try to map it out.

In a November 2007 blog post, Tim Berners-Lee, who gave us the World Wide Web, lent his endorsement to the phrase:

Its not the Social Network Sites that are interesting — it is the Social Network itself. The Social Graph. The way I am connected, not the way my Web pages are connected. We can use the word Graph, now, to distinguish from Web.

Since then, the use of the phrase has morphed and expanded. Today the term “social graph” regularly appears in news stories, presentations and marketing copy. Here are a few current examples:

• In a Forbes article this week, Dan Woods of Evolved Technologist divides the “social graph” into two, one for business and one for every other relationship, and says the enterprise-level social network still needs to be built. He writes, ”The enterprise social graph will likely outstrip the public social graph in both complexity and usefulness.”
• This month Mashable writer Adam Ostrow described social media as “providing users with an identity and social graph that follows them across the web.”
• An Internet advertising company markets itself this way: “Using patent-pending technology and social graph data, Media6Degrees provides major marketers with scalable ad campaigns that deliver a high return on investment.”
• A recent ClickZ article by Kate Kaye says, “Facebook has observers wondering whether the company will transform its sprawling social graph into an advertising network.”
• The Wikipedia entry on “social graph” says: “Concern has focused on the fact that Facebook’s social graph is owned by the company and is not shared with other services.”

So depending on who’s talking…

• There is one social graph.
• There are multiple social graphs for various uses.
• The social graph has always existed.
• The social graph was created by social networking sites.
• The social graph is an abstract set of connections.
• A social graph is a database that can be owned.
• A social graph can be transformed into an ad network.
• A social graph can follow people around.

Obviously there are some contradictions here. There appears to be just one point on which everyone agrees:

• A social graph is not a graph.

My point of this rather tedious blog post is that nobody agrees what “social graph” means because it was never precisely defined by the company that coined it, Facebook. “Social graph” has become one of those vague phrases people use to sound smart.

Fortunately, we can now use it as a bullshit detector. The next time you see or hear someone use the phrase “social graph,” ask yourself, “Does this person really know what they’re talking about?”

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

How could a growing number of people get a basic fact so wrong? I don’t believe it’s because 18% of Americans are fools. I think it’s because we are just beginning to see the effects of a radically new way of communicating. The strategy involves a mix of broadcasting and the Internet. Here’s the formula:

1. A mass media person (say, a radio talker or cable TV anchor) tells you something intriguing but also confusing. Then they move on without reaching any conclusion, sometimes with a comment like, “This is obviously a lot to think about!”
2. Left feeling curious and unsatisfied, you spend a few minutes poking around on the Internet. There you find a clear and obvious trail of breadcrumbs reinforcing a dark narrative. You learned what the speaker couldn’t figure out—or was too scared to say on the air!
3. Your hunch is confirmed. Obama is a closet Muslim! Eureka!

It’s immensely satisfying to follow clues and crack a mystery. It’s also a powerful way to learn something. I asked my friend Leslie, a teacher, if there’s a term for this in education theory. There is: Constructivist learning. It’s different from a traditional lecture.

Traditional orators teach facts by talking at you. The best example on TV right now is Keith Olbermann, who makes his case with logic, speaking forcefully into the camera:

On the flip side, the new breed of political commentators uses constructivist learning: Here are the pieces, you assemble the puzzle. The best example right now is Glenn Beck fidgeting with his chalkboard:

You can see why Beck (who leans close to the Obama-is-a-Muslim camp) is so much more effective the Olberman. Olberman is preaching to the choir, while Beck is building a mystery. If you’re in Beck’s audience, it’s up to you to solve the puzzle on your own time. It’s homework—and yes, you’re allowed to use the Internet.

The “broadcaster/mystery + Internet/clues” strategy has powerful advantages.

• You can teach the audience false information, and because they learned it through a process of personal discovery, they will be skeptical of all evidence to the contrary.
• The celebrity host attracts an audience craving hateful secrets, while keeping a safe distance from anything truly radioactive—helping ensure his or her survival on a mass media channel.

A key part of this strategy is dropping obscure, faux-intellectual phrases that audiences can use to find more information on Google. These politically loaded phrases come to life organically online. Once one makes it into wide enough usage on blogs, broadcasters start to use it too. The phrase becomes part of a political brand. To see what I mean, search Google for the word “Obama” with one of these terms: “stealth jihad,” “liberation theology,” “statism,” or “backdoor amnesty.”

Start following links like those and you too might be convinced Obama is part of a secret conspiracy to destroy America. Do this now and you’ll probably conclude it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. However, if you follow those links after listening to Glenn Beck for an hour, you’d be primed to believe conspiracy theories, and you might not snap out of it.

As a political communication strategy, constructivist learning is awesomely effective. You can just plant a seed of a sinister idea, and crowdsource the ugly stuff to a bench of bloggers willing to sacrifice all shame in exchange for the delicious reward of influence. Nobody does this as well as Fox News and the conservative/anti-tax/Tea Party movement. The Democrats don’t appear to have even the slightest clue how this works.

As for the 1990s-era dream that the Internet would produce a more enlightened society by shining light on facts, giving the public access to primary source documents, and opening up a wider marketplace of ideas? Keep dreaming. It’s not about how good your ideas are. It’s about how fun your mystery is.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

* * * *

Yahoo News is one of the most popular news web sites in the world. It has a problem, though. Every major story comes with a generous helping of the most vile hate speech you’ve ever seen.

Earlier this year, Yahoo News restored its long-mothballed comments feature. The given explanation was that Yahoo’s readers demanded a platform to interact with the news. A Yahoo exec told PaidContent.org: ”[T]the feedback from the audience was that the right to comment was sort of an extension of their First Amendment rights.” User engagement is also good for business, since time on site is one metric Internet companies use to set ad rates.

I’m a fan of interaction and free discourse, but let’s face it: Comments on news stories are about the lamest form of user engagement on the Internet. On the some of the more popular sites, comments are a festering cesspool of pure mean. The nastiness comes from two sources. The first is trolls: Creative geeks who make a hobby out of posting the most offensive messages they can think of, to get a rise out of people. The second is true bigots, some of whom post creepy threats of violence. I have a bad feeling that a lot of the people posting comments on Yahoo are not goofing around. This a thriving community of actual racists!

Compared to its peers—AOL, USA Today, The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC—Yahoo comments are spectacularly bad, and they show up in your face, at the bottom of every story. Anyone reading the news, including children curious about the world they live in, will certainly see them.

How bad are we talking about? I’ve collected a few choice comments from Yahoo News over the last few days. Read on. Warning: Rough language ahead.

* * * *

Comment: Texas_Dave: blacks….the bodies of humans…the minds of animals.

Comment: Joeg: Too many colored people in office !

Comment: AlwaysRight: If it wasn’t for white people… blacks and browns would still be poking bugs with sharp pointy sticks in thier loin cloths.

Comment: Zorro: Moslems live to kill each other,but they prefer to kill non-muslims, that’s why Pakistan and Afghanistan will never cooperate with the West.We should not intervene and let those animals exterminate each other.

Comment: DISTURBED: I HAVE AN IDEA: WE ERECT A HUGE CATTLE FUNNEL IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FENCE WITH A SIGN READING: FREE LEGAL U.S. ENTRY 3 DAYS ONLY! OUR OBAMA ADMINISTRATION WILL LEAD THE WAY! AND ON OUR SIDE BY THE OPENING YOU SET ME UP IN A TOWER- WITH FLOODLIGHTS, MY CHAINGUN, AND 5 MILLION ROUNDS! OH AND LOUDSPEAKERS WITH THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER CRANKED 24/7 ! I THINK AFTER THE FIRST DAY THEY’LL GET THE POINT- YOU’RE NOT WELCOME !

Comment: Bigfoot: She is an ugly racist B_itch, hang her and hang her high

Comment: BeRevealer: This is an example of how black people run their country. Not one country with black leadership is without violence on a large scale and poverty of the masses but not the leadership. Could be coming to a city near you the way things are heading in the USA!!

Comment: Burney D: Solution to Border problem, kill all the men and breed all the women, soon they’ll all be white.

* * * *

Whew. Welcome back from the worst place in the universe.

But please don’t form your opinion from my sampling alone. Go to Yahoo News, pick any story, and read the comments yourself. As I write this, the story about Obama apologizing to Sherrod has 29,000 comments. The one about unemployment benefits has 44,000.

Yahoo has some filters, including a peer voting system that’s supposed to hide offensive comments. None of the comments above was blocked when I found it. But some are. If you spend any time on Yahoo News, you’ll notice that comments denouncing the hate or affirming a liberal point of view are often slammed with Yahoo’s “thumbs down” button until they are hidden from view. This comment was blocked: “Right-wing corporate media (FOX) loves to lie to the stupit & racist people they will belive anything.” And so was this one: “We need to ban guns from the continent to stop the violence.”

Meanwhile, this comment on the immigration story has 16 thumbs-up and zero thumbs-down:

By now, you’re probably feeling angry. Here’s what I’d like you to do with that feeling. Go about your business and remember that one day you might bump into someone who works for Yahoo News. I want you to make that person a hero. When you see them, ask them:

• Are you proud of the Yahoo News comments feature?
• Are your managers proud of the comments feature? Do they even know about it?
• Do millions of pages of hate speech make Yahoo a better company and the world a better place?
• Wouldn’t it feel awesome to be the person who solves this problem?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

How quickly things change. Remember when we used to wait to tape songs off the radio? Today we can find almost any piece of media we’re looking for with a few taps on a screen.

When we can’t find something, we actually get frustrated. Recently I read a book called Where The Suckers Moon about the history and impact of advertising, as told through the story of Subaru’s ill-fated 1991 ad campaign. Later I went online looking for samples of the 1991 Subaru commercials mentioned in the book. They’re nowhere! How exasperating!

With this impatience, we anticipate instant progress. This week I read a Bloomberg News story titled, “Time Warner Supports U.S. Postal Service Elimination of Saturday Delivery“. I thought to myself: “Quaint!” Magazine publishers and the Post Office are both collapsing. Surely within 10 years paper distribution of magazines by mail will be a mute point.

Our calls for instant progress are unrealistic. Then I remembered a scene from Where The Suckers Moon in which the ad writers predict the demise of car dealers within 10 years. Dealerships are inefficient, unnecessary and old-fashioned, they reason. Customers would rather order cars and have them delivered, and factories would rather sell right to customers. Didn’t happen. Today, the Internet enables custom ordering and delivery of many products, but not cars. The car dealer system is too deeply entrenched. The same may be true of Time Inc. magazines, the U.S. Postal Service, and the massive and diverse business infrastructure intertwined with their interests. Maybe we’ll be reading paper copies of magazines in 2110.

But we need to demand progress anyway. Nobody ever solved a problem by sitting around waiting for things to happen, or predicting that everything new would fail. Impatience can bypass realistic (and low) expectations. Impatience can invent new systems on the fly that are often stronger and nimbler than if they’d been carefully planned. We need to be impatient. Impatience is good.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.