Wrapup: Change (in which Obama is only peripherally mentioned)
Posted in The Gnovis Blog
The end of the academic year is coming up fast, which means that, whether we’re graduating or not, we’re all wrapping up our courses and theses and thinking about whatever will come next. Outside of academia, change isn’t constrained by the class calendar, but things still seem particularly busy these days. Maybe it’s just spring.
Here at gnovis
- On the day of my thesis defense, I posted some subjective “Do’s and Don’ts” for future thesis writers, including “Don’t freak out everytime you get tough feedback from your committee” and “Do get plenty of sleep.”
- Akoto chimed in on MTV’s curious reintroduction of music videos… during the graveyard hours between 3am and 9am. “The disappearance of music on MTV is only a business response to the consumption habits of its core audience, which begs the question: Why bother at all? What, then, is the point of AMTV?”
Around Campus
- President Obama spoke at Georgetown, giving what one writer called an “economic pep talk.”
- In Dr Garcia’s Networked Economy class, students reflected on their semester, linking their coursework to Obama’s speech, appreciating their new namedropping skills, and recapping the semester’s themes.
Beyond Georgetown
- Ashton Kutcher challenged Ted Turner to a Twitter race, and won, beating CNN and becoming the first Tweeter with one million followers and, in the process, dragging Oprah into the Twittersphere. Only time will tell whether Twitter’s microcommunities and power users will tolerate this mainsteaming, or will be turned off and driven them to the next bleeding edge social space.
- Swedish courts convicted the men behind The Pirate Bay for contributory copyright infringement, and unhappy members of the Swedish public countered with a rush on membership in the Pirate Party. Americans barely took notice, because we were still preoccupied with those other pirates.