If you are a presidential candidate, or you think you may one day become one, remember the following simple piece of advice: the internet makes it difficult to lie.
Facts have become easier to check, and inconsistencies easier to display. And while the internet of a few years ago was a rather more boring place, a video is worth ten thousand words.
So, candidates of the future, do not be tempted to tell a small, convenient lies to get you through a single speech or debate, because someone, somewhere with video editing software and far too much time will be ready and waiting.
In the interests of non-partisanship, I offer the examples of clips featuring McCain, Obama and Clinton, whose ‘sniper fire‘ - um - ‘blip‘ became national news, of course. Which in turn prompted this spoof.
And if you are going to have to lie, dear candidate, just remember that unless you are 100% consistent, someone is going to point it out. And while the cable news channels are going to tire of such things, YouTube won’t.
Just a silly clip - one woman introducing herself in twenty one different accents. As someone who is incapable of mimicking accents, I’m impressed by two things. Firstly, by the fact that she captures the subtleties of several similar accents. Secondly, that she does it all in what appears to be a single take.
An editor for the Telegraph, Roger Highfield, recently volunteered to allow a UK researcher to shut off the speech center of his brain with a high-powered magnetic pulse.
Today shows the the Daily show doing what it does best - showing Clinton’s reassessment of the Democratic Primary process, and illustrating the move from her position “The Voters get to decide” (when she thought they’d pick her) to her new position: “voting is part of the process”, but they don’t really know the candidates. Hmmm. I suppose voters shouldn’t get to have the final say in November, either.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve grown tired of all the different standards for modern electronic communication.
For instant messaging, some people use MSN, some Yahoo Messenger, some AOL, some Skype - and while there are clients that can handle many of these and more, frequently they do so at the cost of not supporting features like video or audio chat, or by having only hazy support for filesharing. In the world of social networking, there are people’s Twitter feeds, their Facebook statuses…and so on and so forth.
To all of which I say, if you will forgive the American imperative, ‘pick a lane!’ I might even add, ‘Dammit! [sic]‘.
Let us compare with email. No one has to run more than one email client: but that is because email is an open standard, that requires no central service to operate, created before anyone had thought to lock users into a proprietary system to sell them advertising.
The domain name system was created by people who were used to a unix command line, and therefore does not allow spaces. While some websites use hyphens in their addresses, most just run the words together. Sometimes with amusing results.