What If We Lost Loss?

The presentation by the University of Iowa's John Durham Peters yesterday about "God and Google" made some of the same rhetorical moves as recent talks by Virtualpolitik friends Benjamin Bratton (about the idea of a Google Caliphate) and Siva Vaidhyanathan (about Google's universalizing mission). Like these other scholars, Peters also traces back the history of "new media" far further back than its seeming computational origins.

He opened by enumerating three distinct functions that the computer performs: recording, transmission, and organizing, the last of which would prove to be the subject of his talk. He argued that media studies was far too focused on cinematic, photographic, or audiophonic origins and far too often ignored the history of indexical media, which he said was part of a "deeper history of media." He took issue with my UCSD Digital Higher Ed colleague Lev Manovich not for the part of The Language of New Media for which I have taken Manovich to task: his assertion that "[w]hile it is probably possible to invent a new rhetoric of hypermedia that will use hyperlinking not to distract the reader from the argument (as is often the case today), but rather to further convince her of an argument's validity, the sheer existence and popularity of hyperlinking exemplifies the continuing decline of the field of rhetoric in the modern era." (Manovich has since developed his thinking on the subject with interesting observations about "database rhetorics." Instead, Peters criticized Manovich's dichotomy of narrative vs database media, which make the novel and the cinema appear as hegemonic forms. (This is a position upon which Manovich also now takes a much more nuanced view.) As Peters asserted, almanacs and bibles are not read front to back.

Furthermore, Peters argued that there were many forms of "logistical media" oriented around indexing. In answering the familiar question, "what is new about new media?", he pointed to the work of Harold Innis in explaining his choice to explore "God and Google" and the "oldest and newest media." For Peters, Google's ambition to omniscience was explicitly indexical. He also pointed to the work of Hans Blumenberg and how technik was always opposed to nature. Using the categories of techne and physis, which were so important to Heidegger, Peters asked, "where is God?" He challenged the idea that "pure religion was only unmediated," when Luther's "sola scriptura" doctrine was so important in intellectual history.

Then Peters showed a number of examples of "logistical media," such as prayer flags and bells, and paid homage to the work of Alain Corbain. He noted that such bells could serve as an "auditory signature to orient you in time and space, and reminded his audience of how the Jewish shofar was imagined by Jacques Lacan as "the voice of god as a dead animal." He followed with a brief disquisition on the history of clocks, the Muslim Qibla, and his own religious tradition, which was organized around the Mormon temple

He argued that the "three ethical monotheisms are all media religions" and that writing is "the mother of all media," notale for its capacities for convenience, access, and tracking, even though "writing is radically unnatural." (Here he pointed to the research of Stephen Pinker and the role of language communities. He insisted that writing is "dangerous" and "mysterious," although histories of writing as a medium for preservation and transmission might be radically different, depending on if writing was first imagined as a vessel for poetry like Homer's or of ecomic records with primarily quantitative functions.

To understand the "use of writing in name," Peters emphasized two distinct traditions. In "Tradition 1" "the book holds everything " as in the case of the book of life or liber vitae through which God serves as writer and "everything tracked" in a "book of the living" or a "book of judgment." "Tradition 2" is primarily "bureaucratic" and is epitomized by the rule of Philip II and the royal register. (As a departent chair, Peters at this point joked about his own identification with Philip's view that "if it is not on file, it does not exist.) Peters also discussed the Doomsday book and the covergence of heavenly and earthly bookkeeping that such documents might represent.

Before moving to an exploration of the advent of the digital, he showed a slide of a beautiful Gijsbrechts paper machine. In retracing the origins of the digital era, he discussed Leibniz as a royal librarian and how for him "1" symbolized creation, while "0" symolized void. Then he pointed to the inventor Charles Babbage and his pre-quantum belief that the air itself is one vast library in which nothing is lost. He also acknowledged how the title of his talk drew on Norbert Wiener's God & Golem, who was primarily concerned with artificial life not AI, he argued.

At this point, he turned his attention to the rhetoric of Google itself, and how "white space means class" on the home page, which was also full of divination and randomizers, like other theological entities. In the assertion on the site "I feel lucky," he asked "who is I" and raised the role of interpellation as a concern. Then Peters noted that when Google announced their initial IPO offering in 2004, they chose the mathematical constant e to determine the price. He also illustrated his talk with the appearance of slogans like "In Google we trust" and "What would Google do? In his AoIR talk, Vaidhyanathan ran a search on "God" on Google, to demonstrate some of his claims about how the search engine worked. In Peter's talk, he ran a search for the results of a "God" and "Google" search. (Peters cited his friend Darin Barney as the inspiration for some of his thinking about Google in this section of his talk.)

He closed with what he considered to be a few essential distinctions about the search engine company:
1) Google is a content organizer not a content producer
2) The page rank algorithm is about a network logic of reading links with co-citation analysis in mind, which treats the Internet as an implicit voting system
3) Google orders by indexing not arranging and by tagging not trying to organize the entire web
4) Google is not omniscient, since most of the Internet is dark matter
5) Google is not omnibenevolent, as Google.cn shows, which essentially throws away part of the card catalog.
6) We should be wary of the Platonic fantasies spoofed by the famed 1993 "On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog" cartoon.

He showed the "Parisian Love" Google Superbowl ad, not only to note the oddity of the company doing a mass media ad, which Google is famous for avoiding, but also for the reproductive narrative that it represents in which Google can actually make babies too. Thus the homosocial space so famously defined by Alan Turing can enable heterosexual coupling. Of course, I've written about Google Search stories before here on Virtualpolitik, but Peters reference made me look at them again on YouTube, and also find all the amazing parodies, most of which are tediously about planning a murder or dismemberment (see here, here, and here), but some of which are actually more developed like the "Is Tiger Feeling Lucky Today?" parody or "Google: Parisian Oops."

In concluding with a slide of Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus, Peters insisted on the importance of the fact that none of them wrote although all could write.

In the question and answer session he talked both about the "erotic weirdness of new media." (It is worth mentioning that Peters is recently writing about pornography as well as new media.) He also asserted that "loss is part of the program" and "not incidental." He even expressed "two cheers for attrition!" and asked "what if we lost loss?" For those who haven't read Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, check out this review, which also mentions the Virtualpolitik book.

Hello Dalai

Although the Dalai Lama may have been skeptical about Twitter, he now has a verified Twitter account with frequent postings. Mashable credits a meeting with Twitter CEO Evan Williams for spurring the Tibetan spiritual leader and advocate for his people's political sovereignty to join the popular microblogging site. A Dalai Lama hoaxster had deceived the more gullible in the Twitterverse for a while. Of course, as my colleague Jenny Cool has pointed out, Tibetans have been active users of social media for a long time, in order to manage their government-in-exile of their San Francisco hosted domain.

Long Pass

This anti-abortion Super Bowl ad muted its message by directing viewers to a website sponsored by the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, where the group could use the longer format available with online video to promote their trademarked "Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life" narrative that promotes the ministry of former Heisman trophy winner and supposed former baby once at risk of abortion Tim Tebow. (There are a number of other sections of interactive content on the site, including their pages for online Focus on the Family valentines.)

Unlike other "gotcha" ads like this one that have been rejected by the Superbowl, Focus on the Family's use of Internet content to outsource the polemics made its way past network censors wary of offending viewers in a lucrative TV time slot.

Of course, I most like this parody of the Doritos user-generated content contest spots when it comes to depicting the Tebow family's media presence.

Divine Guidance (and GPS)

According to "Obama Receives Religious Devotionals by Blackberry," the President of the United States uses ubiquitous computing technologies to receive snippets from Christian scriptures suggested by one of his spiritual advisors.

President Obama doesn't need to step foot in a church to find spiritual inspiration -- it comes directly to his BlackBerry.

Every day, the president receives "devotionals," or passages meant to bring one closer to God, from Joshua DuBois, the head of his Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

"Whether it's a passage of scripture or a piece out of a book that I think he might be interested in or a prayer, it's something to start his day off on the right note," DuBois told Fox News.

When he took office, Obama fought vehemently with his security staff to keep that BlackBerry, a highly-secure version of the standard store-bought phone and messaging device that has now become something of a spiritual lifeline.

The conservative Fox news service actually used this story largely to remind its audience that Obama has yet to choose a physical church for face-to-face religious observance and that this hesitance to join a congregation may be traced to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright scandal.

Communion and Communication

Today AP is reporting on its wire service about a simple command: "Pope to priests: Go forth and blog." According to the instructions in the Pope's new religious directive, his new "Message of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI for the 44th World Communications Day," the priesthood now have an obligation to master social media tools.

The theme of this year’s World Communications Day - The Priest and Pastoral Ministry in a Digital World: New Media at the Service of the Word – is meant to coincide with the Church’s celebration of the Year for Priests. It focuses attention on the important and sensitive pastoral area of digital communications, in which priests can discover new possibilities for carrying out their ministry to and for the Word of God. Church communities have always used the modern media for fostering communication, engagement with society, and, increasingly, for encouraging dialogue at a wider level. Yet the recent, explosive growth and greater social impact of these media make them all the more important for a fruitful priestly ministry.

All priests have as their primary duty the proclamation of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word of God, and the communication of his saving grace in the sacraments. Gathered and called by the Word, the Church is the sign and instrument of the communion that God creates with all people, and every priest is called to build up this communion, in Christ and with Christ. Such is the lofty dignity and beauty of the mission of the priest, which responds in a special way to the challenge raised by the Apostle Paul: “The Scripture says, ‘No one who believes in him will be put to shame … everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ But how can they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how can they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone to preach? And how can people preach unless they are sent? (Rom 10:11, 13-15).

Responding adequately to this challenge amid today’s cultural shifts, to which young people are especially sensitive, necessarily involves using new communications technologies. The world of digital communication, with its almost limitless expressive capacity, makes us appreciate all the more Saint Paul’s exclamation: “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel” (1 Cor 9:16) The increased availability of the new technologies demands greater responsibility on the part of those called to proclaim the Word, but it also requires them to become become more focused, efficient and compelling in their efforts. Priests stand at the threshold of a new era: as new technologies create deeper forms of relationship across greater distances, they are called to respond pastorally by putting the media ever more effectively at the service of the Word.

The spread of multimedia communications and its rich “menu of options” might make us think it sufficient simply to be present on the Web, or to see it only as a space to be filled. Yet priests can rightly be expected to be present in the world of digital communications as faithful witnesses to the Gospel, exercising their proper role as leaders of communities which increasingly express themselves with the different “voices” provided by the digital marketplace. Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis.

Using new communication technologies, priests can introduce people to the life of the Church and help our contemporaries to discover the face of Christ. They will best achieve this aim if they learn, from the time of their formation, how to use these technologies in a competent and appropriate way, shaped by sound theological insights and reflecting a strong priestly spirituality grounded in constant dialogue with the Lord. Yet priests present in the world of digital communications should be less notable for their media savvy than for their priestly heart, their closeness to Christ. This will not only enliven their pastoral outreach, but also will give a “soul” to the fabric of communications that makes up the “Web”.

As someone who has taught Paul's Epistles in a course on globalization, I find Pope Benedict's rhetoric not particularly surprising. After all, Siva Vaidhyanathan argues that Silicon Valley companies also embrace similar appeals to universalism and a similar missionary zeal. Given the Catholic church's suspicions of capitalism's grubby materialism and survival-of-the-fittest ethos, it may be surprising to hear the Pope talk about the "digital marketplace," and it also may be surprising to hear a religious organization devoted to the one word praise multiple "voices" of individual expression and a "menu of options," but this message to the masses indicates that the Pope is interested in growing the ranks of the faithful, even if he came into his position preaching for a less universal church.

Who Owns the Pope's Face

The Catholic News Agency explains in "Holy See declares unique copyright on Papal figure."

The statement cited a "great increase of affection and esteem for the person of the Holy Father" in recent years as contributing to a desire to use the Pontiff's name for all manner of educational and cultural institutions, civic groups and foundations.

Due to this demand, the Vatican has felt it necessary to declare that "it alone has the right to ensure the respect due to the Successors of Peter, and therefore, to protect the figure and personal identity of the Pope from the unauthorized use of his name and/or the papal coat of arms for ends and activities which have little or nothing to do with the Catholic Church."

The declaration alludes to attempts to use ecclesiastical or pontifical symbols and logos to "attribute credibility and authority to initiatives" as another reason to establish their “copyright” on the Holy Father's name, picture and coat of arms.

This isn't the first use of copyright law by the Vatican, as this Virtualpolitik story from 2006 indicates, but it represents an interesting attempt to control the visual rhetoric associated with the Pope, as well as the verbal rhetoric. And this is a pope who had previously warned against excessive copyright restrictions and the exercise of power by rich countries that they represented.

Of course, like all public figures, the image of the pontiff has been Photoshopped, as in this gallery of images of heightened security around the Pope, and there is even a Photoshop tutorial about turning the Pope into Governor Palpatine of Star Wars fame.

Pray to Play

Mass We Pray, supposedly from PrayerWorks Interactive, actually leads to a trailer for the upcoming videogame/literary adaptation of Dante's Inferno, which has been praised by Ian Bogost and which I played at Comic-con this year.



Thanks to Marc Van Gurp of Osocio for the link!

The Twittering Guru

The blog of personal empowerment guru James Ray has finally been updated with a statement indicating his condolences for those who died in a New Age sweatlodge during a retreat at which he was facilitator. However the logic of not responding to individual comments in the era of Internet access doesn't seem to make as much sense.

Out of respect for the deceased and their loved ones and for those who have taken ill and for whose speedy recovery we pray, we will not be replying to individual postings. Instead, we thank you for writing, and we hope you will share in our continued wishes of support, strength and comfort to all those impacted by this tragedy.

See this story in TechCrunch for how Ray deleted seemingly incriminating Tweets from his Twitter feed.

JamesARay: is still in Spiritual Warrior… for anything new to live something first must die. What needs to die in you so that new life can emerge?

JamesARay: Day 5 of SPW. The Spiritual Warrior has conquered death and therefore has no enemies, and no fear, in this life or the next.

Remover of Obstacles

Today I went to a celebration of the Hindu god Ganesh at the Pacific Asia Art Museum, which involved a mix of traditional instruments and laptop computers. At one point a poem from a member of the group in Germany was read to the audience via YouTube. The associated exhibition of photographs encouraged visitors to the museum to go to the website for Discovering Ganesh, which combines a number of competing rhetorics: promoting tourism, spurring humanitarian aid to a developing country, and proselytizing for one of the world's major religions.

Ask Questions Later

The murder of doctor and abortion rights activist George Tiller in his church has spurred many to use social network sites to call for donations to pro-choice organizations. As a church-going religious liberal who still remembers the shootings in a Unitarian church last year, I would also suggest that readers from larger and more conservative faith traditions visit a congregation of a smaller and politically progressive denomination to express their support for religious minorities. Tiller's Reformation Lutheran Church, which serves the Wichita area, has blanketed their website with a single statement to the media.

Our congregation strives to be a safe place for all people. We deplore the violence that took place within the walls of our church. Further, we reject any notion that violence against another human being is an acceptable way to resolve differences over any issue. We must always strive to engage in peaceful discussion. Our faith calls us to this. Our humanity demands it.

In the wake of this tragic event, our deepest concern is for the family of George Tiller. We ask the community to join us in prayer for them as they face the difficult days ahead. Our hearts ache with them. We also ask that the family's privacy be respected.

Under normal circumstances, the Reformation website looks more like this:

The website for Tiller's clinic at Women's Health Care Services has undergone an even more dramatic transformation. At one time it contained many forms of rhetorical address to deal with the exigencies faced by women considering late-term abortion. For example, the clinic had a number of "If You Are Pregnant" buttons that led to booklets and directories. (Click to enlarge.)


Now the stark appearance of Dr. Tiller's website indicates that an obliterating disaster has taken place. It also makes its own plea for privacy and time offline.

Prodigal Son

The complexities in posting certain kinds of news stories online, when reader comments are also displayed, may be obvious in cases of rape, racial discrimination, and police brutality items, where anonymous bigoted cranks may post comments supportive of abuse or even violence.

But it can be difficult to predict what kinds of stories will stimulate heated commentary and online flaming. An AP news story entitled "Missing 3-Year-Old Found In Woods After 2 Days" seems to demonstrate that even an innocuous and even uplifting child-rescue story can generate angry exchanges. Specifically, several readers took offense because the toddler's father's expressed a belief that the outcome proved the existence of divine intervention, while others tried to defend an interpretation based on God's will. Here is the offending sentence:

"It's undescribable how grateful we are," Childers said. "I mean, you doubt if God's actually with you for awhile, and then something like this happens, and you know he's there."

Irritated atheists offered several retorts to the father, including these two observations:

As much as the god of the Middle East likes to kill babies, the Flood, Jericho, the murder of the first born in Egypt, it is a wonder the little boy made it home at all, if indeed, the christian god had anything to do with this little man's return home.

Good news: the kid was found and he was okay. Hooray for the evolved resilience of young humans!
Bad news: god didn't save him.

Still other readers took issue with the quality of the reporting itself and the unflattering light in which it depicts the parents elsewhere in the article:

The way this story was written: "...while his father slept and his mother talked on the phone" left the parenting skills open to interpretation.

Local coverage does a slightly better job of telling this story, here's a quote from KSDK, a St. Louis based news station: "Police said Joshua disappeared as his father, who works nights, was asleep, and the little boy's mother was on the phone, for a period of about five minutes. The family spent about 45 minutes searching for Joshua before they called authorities."

Lightning Strikes More than Once

In "Funny Anti-Gay Marriage Ad Sparks YouTube Revolt," Wired reports about the digital afterlife of the "Storm" PSA ad from the National Organization for Marriage that expresses strong sentiments about the imagined dangers of same-sex unions. The ad has been widely mocked on cable channels and has received notable jibes from Stephen Colbert and Rachel Maddow.

The fun really began when Human Rights Campaign leaked the green screen footage of the auditions of the actors' wooden acting, so that mash-up madness had an opportunity to run wild on YouTube, even though NOM keeps making copyright claims on the content that it finds and filing takedown notices. (This link will still take you to the footage, complete with humorous annotations.)

For example, a video that uses compositing software to include klansmen and Nazis in the ad complains about how intellectual property law is being applied against political responses to the ad:

We are removing the name of the organization because YouTube has begun removing all the videos that have re-edited or reuploaded. By the way, they recently removed all the audition tapes of all these actors that have appeared in the videos. Yes, none of these people are who they claim. They are ALL actors.

They might be sending out a lot of take down notices. And besides, there are many videos that would be hard to describe as including direct copies of the group's digital files. Now there are spoofs with live action, chatbot-style parodies, and send-ups with puppets. Given that YouTube is well known for celebrations of bad acting (and that the Internet is generally associated with dissimulation already), it's understandable that the topic is irresistible for videos like this one.

Update: Mack McCoy points out a great parody here.

Preacher Man

As the controversy brews about Obama's choice of anti-gay marriage pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at the presidential inauguration, I thought it might be useful to look at the digital media-making efforts of Warren and his church and the digital rhetoric strategies that they deploy to reach audiences who might not necessarily be otherwise attracted to his mega-church.

In particular, it is worth noting that Warren has announced the launch of Purpose Driven Connection, a "Christian social networking site" undertaken in association with Reader's Digest. Certainly his Internet presence shows familiarity with the "vlog" solo talking head format, complete with abrupt cuts in the footage, as he indicates in videos such as "How to Make a Marriage Work."

Warren's wife Kay Warren also has a carefully crafted online media persona that emphasizes her career as a nurse in connection with the church's HIV/AIDS mission.

There are also a number of virtual tours of Warren's church at Saddleback Family, where the physical space is presented as a site for intergenerational fun and social interchange.

Seven Deadly Sins

For rhetorical flourish, I have to hand it to friend and fellow blogger Siva Vaidhyanathan for making the allegorical argument in the online video above about Google and Seven Deadly Sins. The closing statements of the panel involved in this Google debate are here.

Update: NPR has provided coverage of the debate here.

Send in the Wikipedians

As a lifelong Unitarian, I love to make fun of my particular niche in organized religion for its tendency toward verbosity. Unitarian hymnals will often substitute three-syllable words for phonetically simple terms such as "God" and "man" and thus often render traditional spirituals unsingable. Now the Unitarian church has begun seeking input on its Principles, which apparently needed more explanation and elaboration in the minds of church administrators.

This draft, structured like an online survey or tutorial -- complete with time completion bar -- invites feedback from individual members, although there are so many constraints created by checkboxes designated as "excellent," "good," "okay," and "not acceptable" that it curtails the possibilities of real deliberation, since there are no useful categories for debate.

As a writing instructor interested in paragraph coherence, I find sentences like those in the following section almost unreadable.

Section C-2.3 Sources.

The living tradition we share draws from many sources.

Unitarianism and Universalism are grounded on more than two thousand years of Jewish and Christian teachings, traditions, and experiences. Unitarian Universalism is not contained in any single book or creed. It draws from the teachings of the Abrahamic religions, Earth-centered spirituality, and other world religious traditions. It engages perspectives from humanism, mysticism, theism, skepticism, naturalism, and feminist and liberation theologies. It is informed by the arts and the sciences. It trusts the value of direct experiences of mystery and wonder, and it recognizes the sacred may be found within the ordinary.

Wisdom and beauty may be expressed in many forms: in poetry and prose, in story and song, in metaphor and myth, in drama and dance, in fabric and painting, in scripture and music, in drawing and sculpture, in public ritual and solitary practice, in prophetic speech and courageous deed.

Grateful for the traditions that have strengthened our own, we strive to avoid misappropriation of cultural and religious practices and to seek ways of appreciation that are respectful and welcomed.

It's interesting to imagine the role that a Google doc or a wiki may have played in creating this collaboratively generated prose. I would like to know more about the role of computer-mediated communication in creating collective statements from religious organizations.

Special Delivery

For one of my faculty colleagues, today's edition of the Los Angeles Times on her doorstep included a disk of the movie Obsession: Radical Islam's War against the West. Since my copy of the LA Times did not include the controversial film, which -- according to the New York Times -- is "the latest flashpoint in the bitter campus debate over the Middle East, not just because of its clips from Arab television rarely shown in the West, including scenes of suicide bombers being recruited and inducted, but also because of its pro-Israel distribution network," I am assuming that this was a fluke, particularly since my colleague is Israeli, and I could not find any mentions of this form of distribution from sources at the paper. According to the website, creators of the film are assuming that at least some of the film's audience will watch it online for $4.95 rather than pay ten dollars more for the DVD.

Nonetheless, this conjunction of print media and digital video raises an interesting possibility, that political causes that now pay for full-page ads may choose to use digital media packaged with the newspaper to get their points across in ways that seem sanctioned by our formerly Pulitzer Prize-winning institution of local journalism.

Update: I saw the actual DVD, which turned out to have been packaged with The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Ones That Got Away

Given the forthcoming Virtualpolitik book about institutional media-making, I'm sorry to have missed a number of the sessions at the annual convention of the Society of American Archivists. Thursday’s session with Helena Zinkham on "Putting Pictures on Your Path" about the Flickr page of the Library of Congress apparently mentioned one of the phenomena that I have also written about: the presence of Internet "spoilers" who doubt the authenticity of particular images, such as this one of a car crash. For more about the project, including their internal debate about using a proprietary commercial site rather than open source software and problems with the available Creative Commons licenses, see this interview and the second part of this podcast.

I was also sorry to miss the creepy "Past Rites: Marketing for the Future" with representatives from the Archdiocese of Chicago, JPMorgan Chase Bank, Proctor and Gamble, which claims that organizations are "learning to capitalize on their heritage to enhance the perception of their integrity and performance," and that "corporations are mining histories to reinforce market presence and increase reputation and respect by forging stronger bonds with customers and employees." Managers of religious archives hosted a reception for the "Sisters of the Presentation Archives."

The most bang for the book probably would have been had at "Three Federal Digital Agencies Confront the Challenges of Digital Preservation” with James G. Cassedy, Kenneth Thibodeau, William LeFurgy, and Michael L. Wash discussing the Electronic Records Archives of the National Archives, the Federal Digital System of the Government Printing Office, and the Library of Congress's National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Project.

Note also that the Library of Congress is following the lead of other federal agencies by hosting its own official blog.

Paintbrush Preacher

Pastor and political protester Eddie Romero has created a number of YouTube videos in which he paints anti-government murals in post Beijing hotel rooms to protest Chinese treatment of evangelical Christians and other anti-Communist dissidents. His videos also pay homage to a particular genre on YouTube that garners views: the speeded up art-creation video.

Romero's bio claims that in his youth, he and his wife "experimented regularly with drugs and we were both spiritually lost." But Romero, a Southern California local, apparently also teaches philosophy in the area. According to his students on his RateMyProfessor page, he gets high marks as a teacher.

Romero's videos now link to the "Gadfly project" at Exodus8one.org. As Romero explains his rationale on the website, it almost comes off like some kind of an alternate reality game with titles that include cryptic headings like "Story Emerges from a Shroud of Mystery."

Supporters describe Romero as currently in hiding, although he is likely to eventually face consequences for hsi acts of vandalism.

Gaydar

Last month, there was considerable mockery aimed at the American Family Association, because the online Christian news service that it sponsored, OneNewsNow.com, had an autoreplace function that substituted the word "homosexual" for the word "gay" on its AP news feed, in keeping with the group's bizarre logic that the word "gay" might have overly positive connotations and thus unintentionally encourage behavior fundamentalists abhorred. Of course, the fact that the AFA trumpets their not-safe-for-work posting of images of nude celebrators at a McDonald's-sponsored gay pride parade might actually represent a much more significantly mixed message doesn't seem to merit much reflection from the group.

This oddity in their display algorithm wasn't obvious to others until the feed posted several items with an altered version of the name of athlete Tyson Gay. As Right Wing Watch explains, Gay's performance qualifying for the U.S. Olympic team appeared under the headline "Homosexual eases into 100 at Olympic trials." The Sleuth has compiled a number of the unintentional double entendres generated by the snafu, including the following gem:

"It means a lot to me," the 25-year-old Homosexual said. "I'm glad my body could do it, because now I know I have it in me."

Now that some time has passed, it is clear that the AFA and OneNewsNow no longer prohibit the use of the word "gay" in their online copy. Nonetheless, "gay" is still a dirty word in their lexicon and discrimination is actively rather than passively encouraged by live writers in the absence of bots. For example, the sites have postings about "gay pride parades" and "gay issues" prominently featured, and their homophobic editorial policy is obviously not making any laudatory remarks.

Help Vaunted

Carnegie fellows Joshua Fouts and Rita J. King of Dancing Ink Productions have announced an effort devoted to "Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds." This YouTube video, which shows Fouts and King in the form of their Second Life avatars, invites user-generated content about Muslim identity and community in the form of text comments and response videos.