(Akiit.com) We are a few days from memorial day and I do hope my people stay safe… One need not be on the road, as sadly there will be those who feel the need to drink & drive… Still it will be a nice time to gather and have a chill with family… Grill some burgers and enjoy nature per say… Well uncle mikes store just open recently, and I will see what’s up… Glad to know family owned businesses are thriving, etc… Anyway I need to upgrade my mog music account… Running out of space to store my records…

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(Akiit.com) Seems like everyone is in love these days…. So the ladies promise ring finger now is adorned with a diamond… Something that can lead to marriage in reality… I do wish more people would allow their heart to be taken… Being in love is a beautiful thing… Walking as one instead of 2 souls… Well it seems to washer isn’t working per say… Will need to get a new one soon… It’s beautiful outside, as so many are getting a tan… Kids having fun, etc… Been a few bad thunderstorms lately… I believe the man above is trying to tell us something… Summer is almost up, and I’m ready for a change in scenario….

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(Akiit.com) Just as African Americans have influenced language and style, they’ve “blackened up” Twitter — 140 snappy and irreverent characters at a time.

Twitter’s black tilt is wonderful. The big story is not that it’s sketchy to even notice it. Nor is the big story that the general level of “blacktags” is not that of a graduate seminar. The big news is that America is talking black.

There is so much good about this that it’s hard to know where to start. First, there is the constant well of verbal creativity. It’s not writing, by a long shot. But that’s not the point. Not all that we write is actually writing. This is why worries about what email and blogging are doing to “writing” are misplaced; emailing is speech, except with the fingers. Waiting for written standards in emails is like criticizing Prince for not using the viola.

Twitter is more of this written speech, and even more like speech in its restriction to 140 characters — casual speech comes in packets of seven to 10 words. Twitter is now home to dazzlingly articulate speech, and if that’s by more black people proportionately than we might expect, then even better. Take this one noted in the New York Times: “Looking Forward to a Cup of Cherry Kool-Aide *Sips* .. Its Watermelon # moodkiller.”

Heavens! Inappropriate capitals, no apostrophe in “its,” funky punctuation. No, no — we must expand our sense of what language is. The caps put a theatrical frame around the scene. The asterisks are straight out of a comic book and convey vivid reality; if it’s deep when Chris Ware does it in a graphic novel, why do we want to throw a copy of Eats, Shoots and Leaves at this writer (I mean, talker)?

And even the missing apostrophe — it conveys that this is a real person living and talking, quite germane to this willfully humble little scene. Even if she left the apostrophe out by accident — and probably did — I, if “editing” the Tweet, would make sure it stayed out. This is a kind of art. Twitter means black people being articulate with one another, live, nationwide and 24-7. I say yes.

Another thing: Remember the idea that black America was getting left on the wrong side of the digital divide? Have you noticed that this has started to sound a little “10 years ago”? Twitter can be seen as the official end of this take on black America. I will never forget an article in the Atlantic Monthly in 1999 that earnestly argued that technology has not been black people’s friend, and history has made us shy of it. Even then, the legions of black people cherishing their VCRs and Discmans would have been surprised at this gloomy conclusion.

But black Americans were indeed getting online less quickly than whites. Economics had a lot more to do with this than culture, and we’ve come a long way since then — laptop ownership is now about even among the races. And now we have a concrete smackdown to the notion that there is, or ever was, something anti-technological in being black in the 21st century. With Twitter we have something quite “technological” that black people are more into than anyone else.

And finally, not only are black people using Twitter a lot, but the black comedy style and phraseology of the hashtags is calling the tune to a considerable extent, catching on among all Twitter users. This is part of something that has happened over the past 20 years and is little remarked upon: the browning of American language.

During the brouhaha over Oakland, Calif.’s proposal to use Ebonics as a teaching tool 15 years ago, scholars of the subject occasionally mentioned that Ebonics was becoming a youth lingua franca. The observation was typically taken as novel: One thought, “In fact, yes — I did think I heard a group of black teens near me last week, and noticed when they walked by that they were Asian.”

That’s less of a novelty now. The “youth” of 1996 are now adults, and the white ones often talk a lot more like black people than their parents — who themselves were children of the 1960s and ’70s — do. As do today’s “youth.” The casualness with which white young people of all demographics use “man,” “yo,” “dude” and “bro” or “bra” is now something we barely notice, but it would have looked like science fiction as recently as 1990. Carl Jung once said that American whites talk, walk and laugh like “Negroes” — that is now much more true than it was in his time.
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(Akiit.com) Someone I’ve never met, yet continue to follow, keeps Tweeting about her White Whine anguish in a very bitter way. If Twitter is to be believed, she’s really pissed about being single (sweetheart, sarcasm is the garnish on your heartbreak entree) and finds her parents somewhat tiresome. I think she might also have a pony, but that’s another story.

One day, after a series of annoying interesting Tweets from this individual, I found myself wondering: “What the hey, does this lady stand around the street corner bemoaning her fate to strangers?”

Probably not and that led me to wonder: “Do people tell the truth more often on Social Media than they do in real life?” And that led me to start snooping on friends’ Facebook walls and combing through various Twitter feeds. I also conducted some exhaustive research on the topic by making a trip to the Google machine and typing in “Social Media Truth Telling Research”.

The Google machine led me to something called honestly.com — a “candid community-created reviews of business professionals”. (Like LinkedIn without all the resume padding I guess?)

The Google also brought me to an article on socialmediatoday.com titled “Connectivity, Transparency and Truth Telling”.

“The mutual interconnectedness of all things is not just an idea anymore, it is becoming a reality.

This means that truth-telling is the easiest option. Since, if everything is connected and transparent, falsity will be uncovered. None of this means that we will necessarily transition towards more democratic forms of political organisation. More likely it will organise around current political infrastructure.”

Interesting ….but sort of brainier than what I’m wondering about, which is… just how embarrassingly honest can people be? So I set up a trap, in the form of a Facebook poll that asked my friends which they’d rather be if given the choice: Smart or Pretty/Handsome.

It didn’t go very well. First of all, only seven people answered and that’s because I forced six of them to and also answered it myself. Five chose “Smart” and only two (one of them was me) picked “Pretty/Handsome”. Because I know my friends, I know at least three of the “smart” votes are total lies! So much for honesty on FB.

Deciding not to “insert myself” into the experiment, I moved over to Twitter and simply “observed”. This worked better.

@HfxMan recently devoted a considerable amount of characters to telling the world about his adjustment to single life. Here’s a snippet: “After being married 4 practically my entire adult life, this being single thing is taking some getting used 2.” He goes on, in a series of Tweets, to talk about the difficulties of brunching sans mate. (Dear @HfxMan, I wish you no disrespect, I enjoy your social media ramblings, you just happen to help support my thesis.)

Then there are the types that are overly honest about their lives just by their check-ins. Example? A friend both on social media and off spends way too much time and money at Banana Republic. I know this because he checks into the store on social media every freaking weekend. I wake up on the weekend, I take my dog outside, I check Twitter and — oops! There he is! Shopping for button-up shirts or something. See? He’s being honest about his consumer culture nature and his fondness for an upscale version of The Gap. (Again, no disrespect.)

Others are simply too honest about their desire to be seen as a Social Media Guru (the very phrase makes me ill. Memo to all: no such thing! There are Social Media Strategists and they can help you! But the good ones don’t call themselves gurus and do jazz hands while talkin’ Twitter). These are the types that post blog links, “helpful hints” and factoids all day long. I’m considering expunging them from my feed. Example: @BrettRelander “5 Easy Ways to Liven Up Your Facebook Stream”. Ick, too obvious in your effort to be seen as a Guru @BrettRelander! (I feel another blog post about the most ridiculous Social Media advice ever coming on.)

Then, there are the woe-is-me women, like the stranger on my Twitter feed, who talk endlessly about 1. The cute things their kids say 2. How much they wish they had a boyfriend/husband 3. How mad they are at their boyfriend/husband 4. How they’re suffering from a general sense of malaise and discontent (paraphrasing here). 5. How they just ate soooooooo muuuuuuuch and don’t care cause because it’s so good but are now feeling fat. I vote these the worst set of truth tellers. Please tell me that after 2011 years we have something to talk about other than boys, babies and “does this Tweet make me look fat?”. Please.
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(Akiit.com) The Republicans, deeply dinged by a politically damaging foray in badly designed Medicare reform, are trying to shift the conversation to jobs. Based on my post yesterday on excess capacity in the job market, I’m all for that conversation. (Wow, Eric Cantor must be reading my blog…cool! Yo, Eric…whassup!?)

But as Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman point out, there’s nothing much in there that we should expect to help much. Tax cuts, deregulation (the Obama admin is going there too), trade deals, and that job-creating juggernaut: patent reform.

The important question here is what should we be doing on the jobs front? Or, more specifically, what should we do that we could do.

One can and should wax about optimal ways to rev up the American jobs machine, which has thankfully shifted out of reverse but remains stuck in low gears. Yet given our political dynamics, if those ideas represent traditional Keynesian stimulus, they’ll be… um… hard to get through Congress. I’m all for a good fight, but with unemployment at 9%, and underemployment at 16%, we need more than a fight. We need a win.

[Brings to mind the great Tom Lehrer lyric: "Remember the war against Franco? That's the kind where each of us belongs. Though he may have won all the battles, we had all the good songs."]

Are there any ideas that might pass muster in this climate? One way to think about the problem is as the intersecting circles in a Venn diagram where one circle contains job-creating measures D’s typically favor and the other one has measures R’s favor. Is there anything in that vanishingly small intersection?

Tax cuts are in there, and they’re of course part of the R’s plan, but given the difficulty of enacting truly temporary tax cuts — remember, stimulus should be temporary — and given the fiscal need to raise more revenues once the jobs machine is fully up and running again, I wouldn’t go there.

Infrastructure is in there too — R’s like to cut ribbons as much as D’s, and the country has deep needs for non-porky investment in this space.

David Leonhardt offers some good ideas, suggesting that policy makers, including those at the Federal Reserve, need to take out an “…insurance policy on the recovery.” He adds:

The White House and Congress, meanwhile, could begin talking about extending last year’s temporary extension of business tax credits, household tax cuts and jobless benefits beyond Dec. 31. It would be easy enough to pair such an extension with longer-term deficit reduction.
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