A Tale of Two E-mails

Regular readers know that I am a big fan of analyzing the rhetoric of anti-Obama viral e-mails. I think that e-mail is often understudied in analyses of Internet politics, because it depends on one-to-one communication and is less associated with youth culture or the practices of early adopters, unlike the politics expressed on blogs, social network sites, or microblogging sites like Twitter.

But it is important not to ignore when thinking about real communication and real elections, especially since such e-mails are probably going to reach the largest pool of likely voters in the over fifty contingent.

Let's look at two different Obama e-mails in circulation with week and examine their rhetorical techniques. Both end with a call to forward the e-mail to others, both are intended to sow doubt about the president's integrity, and both suggest dark possibilities of conspiracy and violence (associated with Chicago gangsterism and Manchurian Candidate puppetry respectively).

E-mail One

Rod Blagojevich is the former Illinois Governor who tried to sell Obama's seat in congress.

Obama was asked, by the press, if he had ever met Gov. Ron Blagojevich.

Barack Obama: "I only saw Rod Blagojevich one time ... and that was in the stands and from a distance at a Chicago Bears Football Game."

during a rally in Chicago , April 16, 2007.

To understand the next 4 years, you have to understand the world according to Chicago

While Chicago is a city in Illinois , it is almost a completely different country when it comes to politics, with a whole different set of morals and language.

There are only three rules and a few Prime Directives which anybody can understand. You don't even need an attorney to understand them --and if you need an attorney, well, you know too much...so look out for Rule #3!

RULE #1...No matter what you see, hear, or do; --you don't know anybody and you don't know nothing!

RULE #2...If you capture something on tape or camera¦ -- it doesn't reveal nothing!

RULE #3...If you know what everybody knows in Chicago¦ --well, you still don't know nothing.

The PRIME DIRECTIVE in CHICAGO ...No matter what the vote. "Democrats win the election. Now pay close attention!

It's very simple....we'll illustrate. Remember, you know nothing.

These two? They don't know each other! They said they didn't.

The fellas in this picture "They never actually met face to face. What fellas? We don't see nothing!

The guy on the left? For all you know he's Santa Claus.

And the guy on the right... well, he's the Easter Bunny! That's all you need to know.

Go to your eye doctor...your eyes are lying to you! Ca'pish?
Remember Jimmy Hoffa? He knew too much and now,

well, now no one knows where he is.

Is the big picture clear? Not these pictures!

Remember, You've already forgot them...

Now, ain't that simple? They don't know each other and they never met!

How is that possible? 'cause they said so! And don't forget it!

P.S. If you pass this on to your friends, don't forget,

you know nothing and they will know nothing.


E-mail Two

WHO the Heck IS HE ???

IS THIS TRUE?????

Read this....

I did some of my own research after reading this. Why was his law license inactivated in 2002?

Why was Michelle's law license INACTIVATED by court order?

There is only one Barack Hussein Obama according to the U. S. Census and he has 27 Social Security numbers and over 80 aliases.

The one he uses now originated in Connecticut where he is not ever reported to have lived. No wonder ALL of his 'records' are sealed!!!

It just gets worse!!!

At least we only have 2 1/2 years of this mystery man left before we can replace him.

Was He There?

Who IS He?

I have always wondered why NO ONE ever came forward from Obama's past saying they knew him, attended school with him, was his friend, etc.

NO ONE, not one person has ever come forward from his past.

VERY, VERY STRANGE.

This should really be a cause for great concern.

To those who voted for him, YOU HAVE ELECTED THE BIGGEST UNQUALIFIED FRAUD that America has ever known!

This is very interesting stuff. Sort of adds credence to the idea of The Manchurian Candidate thing having happened here!

Stephanopoulos of ABC news said the same thing during the 08' campaign. He too was a classmate of BO's at Columbia class of 1984. He said he never had ONE class with him.

Was he there?

While he is such a great orator, why doesn't ANYONE in Obama's college class remember him?

Maybe he never attended class!

Maybe he never attended Columbia?

He won't allow Colombia to release his records either.

Suspicious isn't it???

NOBODY REMEMBERS OBAMA AT COLUMBIA!!!!!!!

Looking for evidence of Obama's past, Fox News contacted 400 Columbia University students from the period when Obama claims to have been there, but none remembered him.

Wayne Allyn Root was, like Obama, a political science major at Columbia who also graduated in 1983.

In 2008, Root says of Obama, "I don't know a SINGLE PERSON at Columbia that knew him, and they all know me.

I don't have a classmate who ever knew Barack Obama at Columbia. EVER! Nobody recalls him.

I'm not exaggerating, I'm not kidding. "

Root adds that he was also, like Obama, "Class of '83 political science, pre-law" and says, "You don't get more exact or closer than that.

Never met him in my life, don't know anyone who ever met him.

At the class reunion, our 20th reunion five years ago, who was asked to be the speaker of the class? Me. No one ever heard of Barack!

And five years ago, nobody even knew who he was. The guy who writes the class notes, who's kind of the, as we say in New York, the macha who knows everybody, has yet to find a person, a human who ever met him.

Is that not strange? It's VERY strange. "Obama's photograph does NOT appear in the school's' yearbook' and Obama consistently declines requests to talk about his years at Columbia, provide school records, or provide the name of any former classmates or friends while at Columbia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Allyn_Root#column-one

NOTE: Root graduated as Valedictorian from his high school, Thornton-Donovan School, then graduated from Columbia University in 1983 as a Political Science major (in the same class as Barack Hussein Obama WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN IN).

Can it be that BHO is a complete fraud??

More intrigue concerning "The Man who WASN'T there."

I m sure the truth will be found out, but too bad not soon enough!

Please do not give up on ousting the people at the top. We must go on, and continue sending these out to everyone. Pass this on to everyone on your e-list. Pass it across America!

The Analysis:

Although neither e-mail has made it into 25 hottest urban legends on Snopes.com, several fact-checkers have certainly found fault with both. At the Obama Watch website that posted the "I don't know nuttin' -- the Chicago way" photo examples last year, several commentators posted objections that Obama never claimed not to know Blagojevich, so the extended refutation with images of the two together didn't have much argumentative power. The e-mail that originally appeared under the saltier title of "OBAMA - WHO THE HELL IS HE???" appears on a blog that doesn't allow comments that is credited to a "Certified Prof. Locksmith & Security Consultant, conservative blogger, computer geek, defender of 2nd Amendment, truth, justice and the American way!" Yet Snopes has disputed the claim that Obama wasn't recalled by any of his Columbia classmates, and other fact-checkers have cast doubt on the eighty aliases statistic, and the fact that Wayne Allyn Root is a libertarian ideologue hardly makes him a neutral source. (And since I know people who knew him at Harvard Law, I don't think he's a likely Manchurian candidate; one can't help but wonder if it is a kind of perverse spam advertising campaign for the company mentioned: Enoch Engineering Services to draw clients to their niche market.)

But it isn't matters of fact that makes these e-mails compelling. What is interesting to me is that they almost completely abandon conventional paragraph structure in favor of a rhythm of single lines with repetitive syntactic elements that turn exclamations and rhetorical questions into lyrical devices.

Goldman's Less Than Golden Moment

Having written about the role of e-mail in the Enron scandal in the Virtualpolitik book, I have been -- of course -- closely attending to the role of e-mail in the official exhibits of the congressional investigative committee examining how Wall Street firms exploited buyers of their derivative products who were unaware of how the instruments functioned and the fact that they were tied to mortgages with high interest "liars' loans."

As Politico.com points out, "E-mails come back to haunt Goldman Sachs," and the Boston Globe
notes that the firm seemed to be well aware that Harvard University was among the institutions it was defrauding.

The New York Times has assembled a number of documents from the Goldman Sachs internal e-mails that illustrate the portraits that they draw of impetuous traders, including the self-described "Frankenstein" Fabrice Tourre. Many of these high finance digerati are so confident that e-mail is a one-to-one rather than one-to-many channel for communication that they make a number of gaffes that my students of digital rhetoric would avoid.

Return to Spender

The Chronicle of Higher Education posted a link to a bad e-mail from a student who seems to lack rhetorical sensitivity (and perhaps basic psychological help) in order to facilitate instructor sharing of their own terrible e-moments in student-professor communication. Publicizing this "greatest student e-mail ever written" does raise a number of questions about student privacy and instructor decorum. Students are also mocked electronically at "That's "Professor' Uptight to You, Johnny."

The Mail Instinct

In "Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome," this "most e-mailed" story from this week's New York Times about -- what else -- the most e-mailed stories of the New York Times claims to present some actual research about what makes certain news stories have epistolary appeal rather than just another example of Internet infinite regress.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page.

The results are surprising — well, to me, anyway. I would have hypothesized that there are two basic strategies for making the most-e-mailed list. One, which I’ve happily employed, is to write anything about sex. The other, which I’m still working on, is to write an article headlined: “How Your Pet’s Diet Threatens Your Marriage, and Why It’s Bush’s Fault.”

But it turns out that readers have more exalted tastes, according to the Penn researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman. People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.

Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list.

Installing for Time

While we are on the subject of gendered humor, thanks to Maiya Williams for forwarding this popular chain e-mail item about male partners and their technical flaws, which can be found archived on the web here. It uses the genre of the install/uninstall query beautifully.

Dear Tech Support,

Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed that the new program began making unexpected changes to the accounting software; severely limiting access to wardrobe, flower and jewelry applications that operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0. No mention of this phenomenon was included in the product brochure.

In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalls many other valuable programs such as DinnerDancing 7.5, CruiseShip 2.3, and OperaNight 6.1 and installs new, undesirable programs such as PokerNight 1.3, SaturdayFootball 5.0, Golf 2.4 and ClutterEverywhere 4.5. Conversation 8.0 no longer runs, and invariably crashes the system.

Under no circumstances will it run DiaperChanging 14.1 or HouseCleaning 2.6. I’ve tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix Husband 1.0, but this is all purpose utility is of limited effectiveness. Can you help, please!!!!

Dear Jane:

This is a very common problem women complain about, but it is mostly due to a primary misconception. Many people upgrade from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 with no idea that Boyfriend 5.0 is merely an ENTERTAINMENT package. However, Husband 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM and was designed by its creator to run as few applications as possible.

Further, you cannot purge Husband 1.0 and return to Boyfriend 5.0, because Husband 1.0 is not designed to do this. Hidden operating files within your system would cause Boyfriend 5.0 to emulate Husband 1.0, so nothing is gained. It is impossible to uninstall, delete, or purge the program files from the system, once installed. Any new program files can only be installed once per year, as Husband 1.0 has severely limited memory. Error messages are common, and a normal part of Husband 1.0.

In desperation to play some of their “old time” favorite applications, or to get new applications to work, some women have tried to install Boyfriend 6.0, or Husband 2.0. However, these women end up with more problems than encountered with Husband 1.0. Look in your manual under “Warnings: Divorce/Child Support.” You will notice that this program runs very poorly, and comes bundled with HeartBreak 1.3. I recommend you keep Husband 1.0, and just learn the quirks of this strange and illogical system.

Having Husband 1.0 installed myself, I might also suggest you read the entire section regarding General Partnership Faults [GPFs]. This is a wonderful feature of Husband 1.0, secretly installed by the parent company as an integral part of the operating system. Husband 1.0 must assume ALL responsibility for ALL faults and problems, regardless of root cause.

To activate this great feature enter the command “C:\ I THOUGHT YOU LOVED ME”. Sometimes Tears 6.2 must be run simultaneously while entering the command. Husband 1.0 should then run the applications Apologize 12.3 and Flowers/Chocolates 7.8.

TECH TIP! Avoid excessive use of this feature. Overuse can create additional and more serious GPFs, and ultimately YOU may have to give a C:\ I APOLOGIZE command before the system will return to normal operations. overuse can also cause Husband 1.0 to default to GrumpySilence 2.5, or worse yet, to Beer 6.0. Beer 6.0 is a very bad program that causes Husband 1.0 to create FatBelly files and SnoringLoudly wave files that are very hard to delete.

Save yourself some trouble by following this tech tip!

Just remember! The system will run smoothly, and take the blame for all GPFs, but because of this fine feature it can only intermittently run all the applications Boyfriend 5.0 ran. Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have limited memory and cannot learn new applications quickly.

Consider buying additional software to improve performance. I personally recommend HotFood 3.0, Lingerie 5.3 and Patience 10.1. Used in conjunction, these utilities can really help keep Husband 1.0 running smoothly. After several years of use, Husband 1.0 will become familiar and you will find many valuable embedded features such as FixBrokenThings 2.1, Snuggling 4.2 and BestFriend 7.6.

A final word of caution! Do NOT, under any circumstances, install MotherInLaw 1.0. This is not a supported application, and will cause selective shutdown of the operating system. Husband 1.0 will run only Fishing 9.4 and Hunting 5.2 until MotherInLaw 1.0 is uninstalled.

I hope these notes have helped. Thank you for choosing to install Husband 1.0 and we here at Tech Support wish you the best of luck in coming years. We trust you will learn to fully enjoy this product!

The Rifled Faculty Mailbox

A recent New York Times article, "Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for Climate Dispute," details how the electronic mail exchanged on scientific mailing lists has become evidence to those who are global warming deniers. Hackers snatched almost two hundred megabytes of e-mail from the British Climatic Research Unit, which is suddenly receiving more traffic from the general public for open electronically published material on its servers as well. They attempted to upload the data to RealClimate.org, which published the following statement in response that provides an interesting commentary about digital rhetoric.

As many of you will be aware, a large number of emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia webmail server were hacked recently (Despite some confusion generated by Anthony Watts, this has absolutely nothing to do with the Hadley Centre which is a completely separate institution). As people are also no doubt aware the breaking into of computers and releasing private information is illegal, and regardless of how they were obtained, posting private correspondence without permission is unethical. We therefore aren’t going to post any of the emails here. We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day.

Nonetheless, these emails (a presumably careful selection of (possibly edited?) correspondence dating back to 1996 and as recently as Nov 12) are being widely circulated, and therefore require some comment. Some of them involve people here (and the archive includes the first RealClimate email we ever sent out to colleagues) and include discussions we’ve had with the CRU folk on topics related to the surface temperature record and some paleo-related issues, mainly to ensure that posting were accurate.

Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.

It is interesting to analyze how these assertions operate and the implications they contain: that old-school listservs are better suited to scientific debates than blogs, that there exist private spheres as well as public ones, and that the Internet fosters conspiracy theories rather than a recognition of dissensus.

From the perspective of what my colleague Mark Marino calls "Critical Code Studies," perhaps the ClimateAudit attempt at reading lines of code is perhaps most interesting and their assumption that a simple comment annotation serves as the "smoking gun" rather than more sophisticated black box algorithms.

Wait, I Thought It Was the Telegram that Was Out-of-Style

This Wall Street Journal story that heralds "The End of the Email Era" admits that e-mail "continues to grow" and yet its "reign" in communication has come to an end only a decade or two after achieving dominance in business, academic, and leisure contexts. One theory about why e-mail seems less relevant that the WSJ presents has to do with ubiquitous computing technologies and social computing that are growing "faster" than their more traditional communication counterpart.

Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don't need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public "status" on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.

The article also asserts that there is a shift in epistolary style that goes on, as communication is perceived as more ephemeral and more like speech.

These new services also make communicating more frequent and informal—more like a blog comment or a throwaway aside, rather than a crafted email sent to one person. No need to spend time writing a long email to your half-dozen closest friends about how your vacation went. Now those friends, if they're interested, can watch it unfold in real time online. Instead of sending a few emails a week to a handful of friends, you can send dozens of messages a day to hundreds of people who know you, or just barely do.

The article closes with an argument about workplace efficiency, which is not surprising, given the source of the publication.

Update: See how Tech Insider disputes this claim.

Style Guide

As more genres of digital communication are developed for the Internet, epistolary style guides and writing manuals may struggle to keep up. One recent how-to book aimed at would-be Twitter masters is 140 Characters: A Style Guide for the Short Form by Dom Sagolla. A recent review compares the book to Strunk & White (a text now loathed by composition instructors, but no matter).

Other publications and lists of tips are aimed at business users, who are interested primarily in increasing market share. Matthew Fraser frequently kees his Facebook friends updated on what could be called a "battle of the experts." From So You Think You're a Social Media Expert to the fact that so-called social media professionals often don't use a full suite of quantitative metrics, Fraser keeps his fingers on the pulse of an emerging profession with all its Foucauldian disciplinary claims. My favorite of his links has to be the hilarious rundown on how to "damage your brand" with social media. Other snafus involve mistakes PR execs make, more complicated relations between bosses and employees, and social media editors who don't use social media.

Nobel Oblige

The mass e-mail sent out to presumed supporters by the Obama administration is marked by a number of interesting rhetorical features, most obviously the dominance of the discourses of self-deprecation and the emphasis, his own reading of the event as a "call to action" or speech act, and his handling of questions of ownership and the language of the gift.

This morning, Michelle and I awoke to some surprising and humbling news. At 6 a.m., we received word that I'd been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009.

To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honored by this prize -- men and women who've inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.

But I also know that throughout history the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it's also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes.

That is why I've said that I will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations and all peoples to confront the common challenges of the 21st century. These challenges won't all be met during my presidency, or even my lifetime. But I know these challenges can be met so long as it's recognized that they will not be met by one person or one nation alone.

This award -- and the call to action that comes with it -- does not belong simply to me or my administration; it belongs to all people around the world who have fought for justice and for peace. And most of all, it belongs to you, the men and women of America, who have dared to hope and have worked so hard to make our world a little better.

So today we humbly recommit to the important work that we've begun together. I'm grateful that you've stood with me thus far, and I'm honored to continue our vital work in the years to come.

Thank you,

President Barack Obama

Thanks to Jenny Cool for the text. As she points out arguing there are some ironies, given the bellicose nature of our national character, in having the president declare that "most of all, it belongs to you, the men and women of America, who have dared to hope and have worked so hard to make our world a little better."

Found Poetry

After Slate magazine published the "poetry" of Donald Rumsfeld in which the Secretary of Defense's speeches and press conferences were converted into solipsistic free verse, the lines became popular choices for those with some ironic distance on the disasters unfolding in the Iraq War to e-mail to each other.

Now, thanks Professor Howard Winant of the Center for New Racial Studies, University of California faculty are enjoying the "poetry" of U.C. President Mark Yudof in a widely disseminated e-mail based on the rhetorically regrettable "Big Man on Campus" interview of Yudof in the New York Times.

Unlike conservative e-mailers who go to considerable trouble to provide testimonials to the authority of their sources, Winant argues that he is not the author of the electronic text he is presenting, since it "came anonymously, I think from a past student."

POETIC VARIATIONS (AND EDITING) OF THE RECENT MARK YUDOF INTERVIEW

And education?

Let me ponder that

The shine is off of it
It’s really a question of being crowded out
by other priorities

I do not

This is a long-term secular trend across the entire country
Higher education is being squeezed out
It’s systemic
We have an aging population nationally
We have a lot of concern, as we should, with health care.

The faculty said furlough sounds more temporary
Than salary cut

And being president of the University of California is like being
Manager of a cemetery
there are many people under you, but no one is listening.

Look, I’m from West Philadelphia
My dad was an electrician
It wasn’t part of what we did
When I was growing up we didn’t debate

I listen to them
I listen to dead people

How did you get into education?
Are you in education?

I don't know
It’s all an accident

The stories of my compensation are greatly exaggerated

I’m there to— some of the things I do very well
I smile
I shake hands
I tell jokes

Dear Obama Letter

This letter has been widely circulated among conservatives on the Internet via e-mail, which is still an important channel of communication in the era of the blogosphere. It is interesting to note both the repetition and the initial misspelling of Lou Pritchett's name. Like many chain e-mail letters, establishing the speaker's ethos is an important part of its rhetorical appeal. The rhetorical figure that he is using with the repetition of "you scare me" is known as anaphora among classicists.

Please read, even if you are an Obama fan. It is legitimate, written by respected Lou Prichett, formerly of Proctor and Gamble. Lou Pritchett is one of corporate America's true living legends - an acclaimed author, dynamic teacher and one of the world's highest rated speakers. Successful corporate executives everywhere recognize him as the foremost leader in change
management. Lou changed the way America does business by creating an audacious concept
that came to be known as "partnering." Pritchett rose from soap salesman to Vice-President, Sales and Customer Development for Procter and Gamble and over the course of 36 years, made corporate history.

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA

Dear President Obama:

You are the thirteenth President under whom I have lived and unlike any of the others, you truly scare me.

You scare me because after months of exposure, I know nothing about you.

You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support.

You scare me because you did not spend the formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American.

You scare me because you have never run a company or met a payroll.

You scare me because you have never had military experience, thus don't understand it at its core.

You scare me because you lack humility and 'class', always blaming others.

You scare me because for over half your life you have aligned yourself with radical extremists who hate America and you refuse to publicly denounce these radicals who wish to see America fail.

You scare me because you are a cheerleader for the 'blame America" crowd and deliver this message abroad.

You scare me because you want to change America to a European style country where the government sector dominates instead of the private sector.

You scare me because you want to replace our health care system with a government controlled one.

You scare me because you prefer 'wind mills' to responsibly capitalizing on our own vast oil, coal and shale reserves.

You scare me because you want to kill the American capitalist goose that lays the golden egg which provides the highest standard of living in the world.

You scare me because you have begun to use 'extortion' tactics against certain banks and corporations.

You scare me because your own political party shrinks from challenging you on your wild and irresponsible spending proposals.

You scare me because you will not openly listen to or even consider opposing points of view from intelligent people.

You scare me because you falsely believe that you are both omnipotent and omniscient.

You scare me because the media gives you a free pass on everything you do.

You scare me because you demonize and want to silence the Limbaughs, Hannitys, O'Relllys and Becks who offer opposing, conservative points of view.

You scare me because you prefer controlling over governing.

Finally, you scare me because if you serve a second term I will probably not feel safe in writing a similar letter in 8 years.

Lou Pritchett

TRUE - CHECK: http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/youscareme.asp

This letter was sent to the NY Times but they never acknowledged it. Big surprise! Since it hit the internet, however, it has had over 500,000 hits. Keep it going. All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing. It's happening right now.

It is interesting that it closes with other references to authoritative citations with a dig at the New York Times and an invitation to check Snopes.com before forwarding. (Many right-wing e-mails do not pass the Snopes test.)

A Nod and a Wink

Social scientists and even some researchers in cognitive science have argued that facial expressions are far from universal, but now it appears that it might be true of emoticons as well, given different styles of abbreviation in Asia and elsewhere that vary considerably from the U.S. lexicon of signs created with punctuation markers.

The Spirit of Industry

Apparently Countrywide's Angelo Mozilo isn't the only corporate executive to have difficulty with the "reply all" feature of e-mail. "Ben Baldanza from Spirit Encourages Awful Customer Service..." describes a regrettable exchange involving a disgruntled customer dealing with the super-low cost airline, which is best known for markets aggressively through direct e-mail blasts that offer unbelievable double-digit prices on airfares. It's no wonder that Spirit leads the industry with complaints per capita, according to USA Today, given a CEO who sends the following message back to the customer:

Please respond, Pasquale, but we owe him nothing as far as I'm concerned. Let him tell the world how bad we are. He's never flown us before anyway and will be back when we save him a penny.

The Mail Instinct

Of course, the big digital rhetoric story of the past twenty-four-hour news cycle has been the tearful admission of Republican Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina's teary confession to being in Argentina with a woman other than the state's first lady. One of the region's remaining newspapers managed to get an exclusive scoop on the story and also published an item about how "E-mails detail intimate affair," which included some of the actual e-mails to be read by the curious public. (They trumpet the print version of their front page in which electronic epistolarity plays a major role.)

Many will be drawing attention to more salacious passages, such as the following example:

I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificently gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curves of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of night’s light — but hey, that would be going into the sexual details we spoke of at the steakhouse at dinner — and unlike you I would never do that!

What I find interesting is evidence of the governor's everyday rhetorical style, which is often manifested in his e-mail. For example, at one point he seems to organize his message to his paramour "Maria" into the form of a memo:

Three thoughts in one note now that I have a moment. One the travel schedule is about to get real busy (and this distresses me for the way it may well make it more difficult to get your notes over the next few weeks), two unfortunately all the feelings you describe are mutual, and three where do we go from here?

Each of these points is given a paragraph in the prose that follows. He even lapses into office speak about "further discussion" of his "last point" at the end of this purple passage:

Got back an hour ago to civilization and am now in Columbia after what was for me a glorious break from reality down at the farm. No phones ringing and tangible evidence of a day’s labors. Though I have started every day by 6 this morning woke at 4:30, I guess since my body knew it was the last day, and I went out and ran the excavator with lights until the sun came up. To me, and I suspect no one else on earth, there is something wonderful about listening to country music playing in the cab, air conditioner running, the hum of a huge diesel engine in the background, the tranquility that comes with being in a virtual wilderness of trees and marsh, the day breaking and vibrant pink coming alive in the morning clouds — and getting to build something with each scoop of dirt. It is admittedly weird but one of my more favorite ways of escaping the norms, constant phone calls and formalities that go with the office — and it probably fits with my weakness in doing rather than being — though you opened up a new chapter last week wherein I was happy and content just being. Last point worth further discussion.

Traffic to Sanford's official web page is jammed, so it is difficult to see how he is handling his formal online mea culpa. His Twitter feed, which his staffers dutifully updated while he was AWOL doesn't seem to have any posts since the scandal.

Country Narrow

Now that the Securities and Exchange Commission is publishing
Excerpts of E-Mails From Angelo Mozilo it appears that the top executive at Countrywide, one of the companies at the center of the subprime mortgage meltdown, has problems with his e-mail rhetoric. Although he was publicly professing confidence in this company's business model, privately he was excoriating these loans as "toxic" and "poison." An e-mail from April 17, 2006 reads as follows:

In all my years in the business I have never seen a more toxic prduct [sic]. It's not only subordinated to the first, but the first is subprime. In addition, the FICOs are below 600, below 500 and some below 400[.] With real estate values coming down…the product will become increasingly worse. There has [sic] to be major changes in this program, including substantial increases in the minimum FICO. … Whether you consider the business milk or not, I am prepared to go without milk irrespective of the consequences to our production.

The "milk" metaphor was apparently a central figure in the company's discourse, as this e-mail from April 13 indicates:

"[i]n my conversations with Sambol he calls the 100% sub prime seconds as the 'milk' of the business. Frankly, I consider that product line to be the poison of ours."

In "Mozilo Was a Master at Ass-Covering," Reuters financial blogger Felix Salmon makes the obvious comparison to Enron and the legal trail of its e-mails, but he points out that there is a fundamentally different rhetorical strategy at work.

What makes this case unusual is the clarity and comprehensiveness of Mozilo's objections to the shenanigans at the company he himself was running. The man that emerges from the SEC's complaint isn't the willfully disengaged chief executive we've seen in so many other corporate corruption cases. On the contrary, Mozilo systematically sets down a record of everything that is going wrong and how it's likely to end. Over and over again, he casts himself as the worrier-in-chief, always just on the verge of changing things. To read over the SEC charges against Mozilo is to see in action a grandmaster of the most cynical of corporate arts: the cover-your-ass memo.

However, Mozilo's troubles with e-mail go beyond his role in producing the specific genre of the "cover-your-ass memo." He's known for making embarrassing mistakes about a given e-mail's addressee. As the Los Angeles Times reported in "Mozilo on distressed borrower's appeal for help: 'disgusting'," Mozilo made a critical error in hitting "reply" instead of "forward" when a borrower asked to renegotiate his loan.

In an e-mail inadvertently sent to a distressed homeowner trying to avoid foreclosure, embattled Countrywide Financial Chairman Angelo Mozilo lashed out at an online counseling service for distressed borrowers, calling the website's efforts "unbelievable" and "disgusting."

. . .

At least two other housing blogs wrote about the exchange Tuesday. On Tuesday evening, Countrywide issued the following statement: "Countrywide and Mr. Mozilo regret any misunderstanding caused by his inadvertent response to an e-mail by Mr. Bailey. Countrywide is actively working to help borrowers, like Mr. Bailey, keep their homes."

After receiving the "disgusting" e-mail comment from Mozilo, Bailey wrote a second e-mail to Countrywide, acknowledging he had consulted an online forum for advice in drafting a hardship letter to Countrywide: "In attempting to come to some way to save my home, I took the advice on forming my hardship letter from a forum. Why? Not all of us have been to a university to study business and we need some help in dealing with these matters. (perhaps, if we had, we would not have fallen for what we did, to start with).

"To have recieved the e-mail that I did, stating by one of your employees, that what I did was 'disgusting' and 'unbelievable' has been just about the final straw. I am trying to do the right thing, I am trying with every ounce of what I have left in me not to blow my brains out over losing the home I have been in for 16 years. The only hope I had left was that perhaps the countrywide company did want to help the people it is servicing ... then I receive that responce to my letter. Just great. Now I know, that it is all a nice fat laughing matter to those who are supposed to help."

Of course, there are two kinds of failures of e-mail etiquette at work in the story, since the borrower admits to cutting and pasting verbiage from another source into what is supposed to be a personally authored missive. Nonetheless, Mozilo definitely comes out looking worse in the exchange and a villain as beleaguered borrowers go online to "tell us your Countrywide story."

Same Old Tune

Of course, there are already hundreds of online parody videos set to the tune of this particular Billy Joel song, but I might as well add "We Didn't Start the Flame War" to the list.

Thanks to Mark Danger Chen for the link.

Laugh and the Blue States Laugh With You

One of the epistolary genres that e-mail can mimic and parody is the classic "Dear John" letter, although most agree that a text message breakup is still unacceptable from a netiquette standpoint.

Now, a widely circulated e-mail called "Dear Red States" is humorously proposing a breakup between the liberal and the conservative parts of the country by making a number of statistical arguments about the greater economic and cultural value of more progressive political territory.

Of course, given the reach of the e-mail, there had to be a "Dear Blue States" response.

Thanks to Samuel Losh, who keeps me current on Republican digital ephemera, for the e-mail!

Message about a Bottle

This week I received the following e-mail that contains a number of compelling appeals to fear and to authority and his circulated virally for a few years through people's inboxes.

from Johns-Hopkins Medical Center

Bottled water in your car is very dangerous! On the Ellen show, Sheryl Crow said this is what caused her breast cancer. It has been identified as the most common cause of the high levels of dioxin in breast cancer tissue.

Sheryl Crow's oncologist told her: women should not drink bottled water that has been left in a car. The heat reacts with the chemicals in the plastic of the bottle which releases dioxin into the water. Dioxin is a toxin increasingly found in breast cancer tissue. So please be careful and do not drink bottled water that has been l left in a car. Pass this on to all the women in your life

This information is the kind we need to know that just might save us! Use a stainless steel canteen or a glass bottle instead of plastic!

LET EVERYONE WHO HAS A WIFE / GIRLFRIEND / DAUGHTER KNOW PLEASE!

This information is also being circulated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center
No plastic containers in microwave.
No water bottles in freezer
No plastic wrap in microwave.

A dioxin chemical causes cancer, especially breast cancer.

Dioxins are highly poisonous to the cells of our bodies. Don't freeze your plastic bottles with water in them as this releases dioxins from the plastic. Recently, Edward Fujimoto, Wellness Program Manager at Castle Hospital , was on a TV program to explain this health hazard. He talked about dioxins and how bad they are for us. He said that we should not be heating our food in the microwave using plastic containers... This especially applies to foods that contain fat. He said that the combination of fat, high heat, and plastic releases dioxin into the food and ultimately into the cells of the body... Instead, he recommends using glass, such as Corning Ware, Pyrex or ceramic containers for heating food.. You get the same results, only without the dioxin. So such things as TV dinners, instant ramen and soups, etc., should be removed from the container and heated in something else. Paper isn't bad but you don't know what is in the paper. It's just safer to use tempered glass, Corning Ware, etc.

He reminded us that a while ago some of the fast food restaurants moved away from the foam containers to paper. The dioxin problem is one of the reasons...

Also, he pointed out that plastic wrap, such as Saran wrap, is just as dangerous when placed over foods to be cooked in the microwave. As the food is nuked, the high heat causes poisonous toxins to actually melt out of the plastic wrap and drip into the food. Cover food with a paper towel instead..

This is an article that should be sent To anyone important in Your life!

Snopes.com characterizes it as a mixture of the true and false, while About.com's urban legends dismisses it as simply false. What I find interesting is how it uses colloquial language and links to both celebrity culture and established institutions of medical expertise to make its argument.

Has Amazon Looked Up the Word "Amazon" and Thought About It Just a Little

The big digital politics story of the day is without question Amazon's choice to remove the sales rank numbers from scores of well-regarded books with gay and lesbian themes on the grounds that they don't want "adult" content to be searchable and ranked side-by-side with supposedly wholesome (read hetero) offerings.

According to "Why Is Amazon Removing The Sales Rankings From Gay, Lesbian Books?," the titles even include the judiciously inoffensive children's book Heather Has Two Mommies. There's already a petition to sign and a Twitter hashtag, #amazonfail, which is certainly trending up in recent days. Annoyed digerati are also suggesting a Google bomb in response.

Mark R. Probst reports that he initially noted the omission in gay romance novels and reposted the bizarre bureaucratic e-mail that they received in response to his query about the stripping of the rank from his own work. One of the blogs from the Los Angeles Times notes the weird inequity in keeping American Psycho in their electronic ledger for publishing bean-counting.

As a new author ("only 1 left in stock!") warned about the danger of rank-watching obsessions by others less recently in print, I can attest to the importance of this kind of numeracy and the role of database thinking in writerly circles.

(Thanks to Siva Vaidhyanathan, Ted Striphas, McKenzie Wark, and Ellen Eades -- who points out that if you "type 'homosexuality' into the Amazon search bar, you get 'A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality' and 'You Don't Have To Be Gay' as two of the top three choices" -- for the links.)

Update: Apparently, Amazon is now describing it as a "glitch." Gawker, however, expresses doubt about this explanation.

Big Update: Even better, now the whole snafu appears to be a case of hacking designed to expose security flaws in Amazon's display of ranking algorithm.

The Unkindest Cut

As the Los Angeles Times writes in "UC San Diego admissions gaffe dashes students' hopes -- again," there was little to laugh about for the 28,000 applicants to UC San Diego who were rejected by the university but accidentally received a welcome e-mail message when the wrong databases were accessed.

Schools such as Cornell University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Northwestern University's prestigious Kellogg School of Management have made similar admission notification blunders in the last five years, but UC San Diego's mistake was by far the biggest.

Unfortunately, it sounds as though there will be little accountability enforced for this monumental error in computer-mediated communication that was emotionally trying for students and gave a digital black eye for the university's reputation as anything other than an impersonal institution with a blind bureaucracy.

UCSD admissions director Mae Brown called the snafu an "administrative error" but refused to say whether the mistake was made by one or more members of her staff or by a contractor or if those responsible would be disciplined.

The official web page from the admissions division at this point contains no public apology.