The Revolution Will Be Tweeted

Google tells me that Bono said something similar to this post title last week, so he obviously has been reading my thoughts. I'll have to think of some wicked new song ideas.

I'm reading Mike Rapport's 1848: Year of Revolution at the moment. I took it out of the library after being inspired by the Egyptian revolution and was struck by the similarities between that year and 2011. The Arab world is ruled by iron-fisted autocrats in power for decades, just like 19th-century Europe, and while the leaders enjoy untold luxury, large swathes of the population are unemployed and longing for basic freedoms.

When popular protests erupted in 1848, as in 2011, the governments promised superficial reforms. In reading Rapport's book, I was struck by how similar France and Austria's responses to the protesters demands mirrored, for example, Hosni Mubarak's: they fired an unpopular minister, or shuffled the cabinet, or announced from balconies that the people were "children" who needed to be protected by a strong leader. As you can imagine, the rabble wasn't too happy about all this patronizing. When France went, the dominoes fell, and the continent erupted just as the Middle East and North Africa are doing right now.

Anyway, there has been much discussion in the press about social media like Twitter and Facebook being responsible for the Arab revolutions. I think they are important players in the protests, but it's important to remember that those are tools and not the sparks of change. Twitter and Facebook have simply replaced pamphlets, telegrams, and horse-carried messages as the staples of revolution.

Yes, I am on Twitter, but I have a paltry three followers. That doesn't really bother me too much -- most of my friends aren't even on Twitter and I don't think they care that I've had a peanut butter sandwich for lunch. The reason I joined Twitter was so I could follow breaking news events as they happened. So far, it's come in handy when I wanted to follow protests in Iran, Thailand, and now Egypt and beyond. It's like a front-row seat to history.

Grammatical craziness

OK, a little bit of politics. There was a political ad I saw on TV not a half hour ago that featured a glaring grammatical error:

RGA TV Ad: Tom Barrett - Wisconsin

The ad, critical of gubernatorial candidate Tom Barrett, features two bar patrons arguing whether Barrett was responsible for "Higher Taxes" or "Less Jobs." I cringed when I saw this commercial, because the latter claim should read "Fewer Jobs." The word "less" refers to something that can't be counted, as in "I'm in less pain than I was yesterday;" meanwhile, "fewer" refers to something that can be definitively quantified, as in, "If only I'd taken fewer doses of epinephrine."

Way to go, Republican Governor's Association. A focus group thought of this commercial, editors approved it, and a bunch of actors read their lines without anyone noticing? Or were these naysayers dismissed for being too grammatically elitist like they came from the East Village or something?

And perhaps it wouldn't get my goat so much if "Less Jobs" wasn't screamed repeatedly throughout the ad, and featured in two additional TV spots where it is also shouted at the top of everyone's lungs. Come on, RGA.

This is what I get for reading the Language Log.