Talk to the Editor for November 19: American foreign policy
By John Yemma | 11.19.09
This webcast, recorded live on November 19, features a discussion between Monitor Editor John Yemma, The Monitor’s Pat Murphy, and International Affairs reporter Howard LaFranchi about President Obama’s recent visit to Asia and American foreign policy in general. Join us for our next live show on Thursday, Dec. 3 featuring a conversation about technology, the environment, and big ideas. (more…)
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How Facebook improves online conversation
By John Yemma | 11.16.09
Can we talk?
In the old days, we might have retired to the parlor to chat about great ideas.
Or we could have organized a polite debate: “Resolved: That civilized discourse is good and noble.”
We might even have initiated Jane Austen-style correspondence of the sort that opens, “I am in receipt of yours of the 7th instant.”
That we have forgotten how to converse is far from an original observation. Lamenting the lost art of conversation and the debasing of discourse is a regularly scheduled reaction to the attention-challenged, talk-radio-inflamed, red-faced-TV-panel way we live today. The writer Stephen Miller captured the problem nicely in his 2006 book “Conversation: A History of a Declining Art,” in which he also pointed out that we live in a time when “rude people are celebrated as authentic.” (Here’s the Monitor review.)
Rude excels on TV.
The camera loves emotion, passion, and controversy. Radio is a bit more thoughtful, although red-meat outrage plays well at certain hours and on certain frequencies. That’s entertainment.
Conversation, on the other hand, is where a concept is floated, explored, added to, challenged, and often made better because thoughtful people stop posturing and for a few minutes concentrate on one another’s ideas. Conversation can be clever, informative, and honest (although a colorfully embroidered yarn can be part of a good conversation, too).
Whatever else it is, conversation is not rude.
In theory, the online experience should change the way we talk to one another. Instead of journalists and pundits battling it out among themselves or dispensing hot-button opinions from Olympus while the audience mutely listens, everyone can now be part of the conversation.
But you’ve no doubt run across comments on the Web. So you’re probably familiar with classics such as these:
•“You call this news, knucklehead?”
•“What kind of right-wing (left-wing) zealot would believe X?”
•“Great site. Click here to buy (insert name of performance-enhancing drug).”
•And the always clever: “@#$#*!” (because Anglo-Saxon swearwords just never get old).
We really are better people than this. Part of the problem is anonymity. When you give your name, your reputation is on the line. When you appear as “Kid4eva” or “dawgtown31,” you can say anything. The easy solution would be to ban anonymous comments. But anonymity is a protection in some cases, given the problems of harassment, stalking, and identity theft. Not everybody chooses to live a public life even if they occasionally want to contribute to a public conversation.
At the Monitor, we would love to be in an online conversation with you. Here’s what we bring to the table: We report what is happening in the world. You bring your experience and thoughtfulness. Together, we might even come up with some solutions to problems. That would be an intelligent, interactive network; for want of a better term, how about calling that an “Internet”?
For several years, we’ve experimented with comments at the end of some blogs on CSMonitor.com. We are acquiring new tools that will enable us to have more comments on more articles and to manage them better. We’ve also established a promising forum for conversation on Facebook.
Under the moderation of Monitor staffers Kevin Curley and Jenna Fisher, we post news and ask questions and then a conversation begins. Because it is Facebook, only registered users can use it. It’s a salon with more than 7,000 members so far. If you have not joined, think about it. Go to Facebook.com and search for Christian Science Monitor.
It’s the closest we’ve yet come to a knucklehead-free zone on the Internet.
• John Yemma is the editor of The Christian Science Monitor.
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Talk to the Editor for November 12: Power in Russia
By John Yemma | 11.12.09
This webcast, recorded live on November 12, features a conversation about the power structure in Russia, the relationship between Russia and the west since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and more with Monitor Editor John Yemma, The Monitor’s Pat Murphy, and Moscow correspondent Fred Weir. Join us next Thursday at 1PM EST for a conversation about US foreign policy with writer Howard LaFranchi. Video after the break (more…)
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Talk to the editor: Who’s in charge of Russia?
By John Yemma | 11.11.09
Join us Thursday at 1 pm EST for a conversation with the Monitor’s Moscow correspondent, Fred Weir. We’ll ask what exactly is the relationship between Vladimir Putin and Dimitri Medvedev? They’ve cast themselves as the two amigos, and Putin has long been thought to be the guy calling the shots. But lately there’s talk that Medvedev is establishing his own authority. Can Russia, which has a long history of powerful autocrats in the Kremlin, really have two leaders at the helm? Can any nation?
We’ll also discuss relations between Russia and the West, especially the US. Eighteen years after the collapse of communism , Russia seems to be trying to reassert itself. It has troops in Georgia, has induced the US to alter its missile shield plan for Eastern Europe, and has asserted its interests in its “near abroad” — from Ukraine to Central Asia.
Fred has lived in Russia for 23 years. He has seen communism collapse, the disruption of shifting to a market economy, the era of robber barons, and a surge in prosperity based on oil wealth. He knows the ins and outs of this sprawling, changing nation.
The conversation will be webcast in this blog via Ustream. You can watch it live here.
Send your questions to us:
- via Twitter at #csmonitor
- by posting on the Monitor wall on Facebook.
- by submitting a comment below
Ustream will be featuring the 1 pm Thursday webcast live on its site (we’ll embed it on this blog afterwards so you can catch up if you missed the webcast). You can also download a Ustream application for your iPhone at the Ustream site.
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Scientists prove that Mom was right
By John Yemma | 11.10.09
Science marches on. Every day, a torrent of research pours out of universities, science labs, and corporate R&D departments worldwide. Scientists hypothesize, experiment, log the results, conclude, and publish. Some science news is wowza – new dinosaurs, comets, lasers, nanotech breakthroughs. Some is prosaic – garden moles, chemical reactions, fluid dynamics.
And a surprising amount of it is common sense. When you go to the heart of it, it often just confirms what Mom always said.
Here, for instance, are three Mom-could-have-told-you items extracted from a day’s worth of reports published on the esciencenews.com website:
Item 1: “People are unconsciously fairer and more generous when they are in clean-smelling environments, according to a soon-to-be published study led by a Brigham Young University professor. The research found a dramatic improvement in ethical behavior with just a few spritzes of citrus-scented Windex.”
(It turned out that all Osama bin Laden needed was an afternoon of vigorous window cleaning of his Tora Bora bungalow. The whole world suddenly looked brighter. And that lemony fresh smell! OBL shook his head and chuckled: “Gosh, I guess somebody has some apologizing to do.”)
Item 2: “Exercise can help smokers quit because it makes cigarettes less attractive. A new study from the University of Exeter shows for the first time that exercise can lessen the power of cigarettes and smoking-related images to grab the attention of smokers.”
(Huffing across the Madison Avenue Bridge in the New York City Marathon, ad man Don Draper felt funny. Somehow, the cigarette he was puffing just wasn’t helping. He stubbed it out. Sprinting to the finish, his eyes lit up: “Smoking bad,” he thought.)
Item 3: “A new study from Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business finds that Americans who believe in equality are more-impulsive shoppers.”
(Why did I bring home another flashlight, honey? I was at the checkout counter of Home Depot and for some reason I started thinking about the Declaration of Independence.)
* * *
The cleanliness experiment validates the time-tested aphorism about the link with godliness. It’s not just that happy homes, safe neighborhoods, and successful businesses are usually also clean and neat; cleanliness and neatness may actually contribute to safety and success. That sort of makes sense.
Smoking and exercising? They just never seemed a natural pairing to me. Think about it: When was the last time you saw a track star light up? I thought so.
The shopping study was a little harder to puzzle out. I contacted Prof. Vikas Mittal at Rice. Eighty percent of luxury goods are impulse purchases, he said. “We started looking and saw important differences in impulsive buying across different countries. Then we wanted to see what specific aspects of culture may explain these differences, and found a systematic pattern with … a belief in equality.”
Americans, it turns out, don’t expect as much disparity in power and equality as do people in Russia, the Philippines, Singapore, China, and India. Even within the United States, people who believe more in equality are 1-1/2 times more likely to go for chocolate and soda at the checkout counter than yogurt and granola bars.
Equality and the pursuit of happiness are good. That’s freedom. But then there’s the supersizing, overdoing-it problem that Americans are known for. In other words, too much of a good thing can be bad for you. The remedy isn’t less freedom, says Dr. Mittal. Just exercise a little self-control.
Which sounds like something Mom would say.
John Yemma is the editor of The Christian Science Monitor.
