And That's How Rumors Get Started

With all the ruckus over Romney's statement about cutting funding for PBS in the first Presidential Debate, Sesame Street and its various characters (especially Big Bird) have been getting a lot of air time lately.  Now, I haven't watched Sesame Street in 15 or so years, but I still have fond memories of Big Bird, the Cookie Monster, Oscar the Grouch, and, of course, Bert and Ernie (I mean, "Rubber Ducky" is simply a musical classic).  In all my fond memories, though, there is one jarring note.  I remember I was in middle school when I heard that Sesame Street was planning to kill Bert.  They were caving in to parental fears that Bert and Ernie were teaching their children to be gay by having Bert get run over by a vegetable truck.

This is Bert's mug shot--because apparently he's evil and that's another  reason for killing off Bert

This rumor has circulated for a really long time, and you can find multiple variations of the rumor: Bert was going to be killed in some sort of motor vehicle accident or by some heavy-duty disease; Ernie was going to be killed in some sort of motor vehicle accident or by some heavy-duty disease; Bert was going to be killed because he was gay; Bert was going to be killed because he was evil (see this website); Ernie was going to be killed because Jim Henson (Ernie's muppet-teer) actually did die. According to Snopes.com, the first reliably recorded instance of this rumor was back in 1991.  That's a long time for a rumor to still be floating around.

What does Bert and Ernie have to do with digital culture, you might wonder.  I mean other than the fact that Bert and Ernie are awesome and that there is actually a Bert is Evil website, I think we can learn a valuable lesson from the Bert/Ernie dies rumor.  Rumors spread quickly, even without the internet, but think of how much faster they can spread and how much bigger they can get when spread through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.  For example, remember my post about Facebook status updates? (If not, you can read it here)  Let's say I had posted some vague concern about my older sister's welfare.  How many people  could see that and jump to the worst conclusion--as people are so wont to do? In a more real-time example, I had a friend who posted a picture of his completely totaled car yesterday morning and by about 2 P.M. that same day he had already had 15 people asking if he was ok.  It turns out he wasn't hurt at all, and the car was crashed back in July, but since he didn't post any information along with the picture, people started to freak out.  And that, my friends is not only how rumors get started, but with the power of digital culture, that's how rumors can get out of control.

Halfway Through: thoughts on the class

One of the most surprising aspects of the first half of this semester was how much I actually enjoyed the nonfiction book I chose to read.  I expected Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commandments for a Digital Age, by Douglas Rushkoff, to be a somewhat stiff book about how to program software.  Instead, it is more of a psychological look into how we are using digital media and how we should be using digital media.  One thing that I really liked about Rushkoff's writing is that he pointed out both the good and the bad components of digital media.  For example, in the chapter titled "Identity: Be Yourself," Rushkoff discusses the problem of anonymity vs owning your identity on the internet.  In this chapter, he discusses how there is a time and place for everything, including both anonymity and taking ownership over your own identity on the internet.

This example of identity vs anonymity turned out to be a crucial point to think about as I was reading Going Postal byTerry Pratchett, and also as I began working with Project CCC on our collaborative novel.  In both Going Postal and the collaborative novel, the main character struggles to find a since of identity.  Both of the character must be able to remain anonymous in order to perform their respective jobs, but they are soon forced to show their "true" identities.  Moist von Lipwig (the main character of Going Postal) even admits that he feels naked without his various personalities. Throughout the story, Moist finds that he can be so much more productive when he doesn't have to constantly worry about whether or not he's used that particular guise before.  I've become more interested in this anonymity vs identity as the semester has gone by, and I've started to notice that other people have discussed this.  For example, on October 8 Casey Deans posted a thought about whether or not people put their best selves forward on Facebook.  That led me to this CNN.com article.  I think it is an important issue that is only getting bigger as social media becomes more important in our lives.

It's been an interesting semester so far, and I'm excited to see where it goes, especially as we get rolling with Project CCC and the collaborative novel.

Self-Publishing with Amazon

First off, let me just say that Amazon.com is amazing, and I love that website.  Seriously, if I could do all my shopping there--and I do mean all--I would.  Their prices are almost always unbeatable, they have excellent customer services, and their sell-back prices for textbooks are like 1000% higher than the BYU Bookstore's sell-back prices (that may or may not have been a slight exaggeration).  One of the coolest new things from Amazon is their self-publishing feature.

There are two ways to self-publish with Amazon: publish with CreateSpace or publish with Kindle Direct Publishing.  CreateSpace is a more traditional method of publishing.  You sign up with CreateSpace through Amazon.com, upload your content, select your royalty, and they begin creating your product.  Kindle Direct Publishing is the same basic concept, but instead of actually creating a physical book you simply create a digital copy of your novel.  I have to give it up to Amazon.com for being awesome enough to create the opportunity for authors everywhere to get their works published and into circulation.

Although Amazon.com started their self-publishing deal fairly recently, many authors have found success using this option.  Check out this article from USA Today to read about Amanda Hocking's stellar success story.  Of course, Hocking used a lot of tactics and didn't simply rely on publishing for success.

In the non sequitur of the year, Projecct CCC's (the crowd-sourcing novel project) ultimate goal is to publish  a novel and hopefully sell copies of said novel to people other than our moms.  Self-publishing with Amazon.com is only the first step for our group's project, and we will need to make full use of our promoting skills, but self-publishing will be an extremely important first step.