The XX Factor: What women really think.

Meghan McCain Copes With Fame

Meghan McCain, I was so wrong about you. Just a little more than a year ago, during her father’s failed campaign for president, I wrote a piece for Slate about how McCain had learned to cannily manipulate her very blond public image to its full advantage while still maintaining a modicum of privacy. I even called her shrewd. That was before she joined Twitter ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Why Shouldn't a Woman Tweet a Miscarriage?

A post from DoubleX blogger Amanda Marcotte:

Apparently, I'm one of the few people who read Penelope Trunk's now infamous tweet ("I'm in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there's a fucked-up 3-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.") who wasn't even remotely bothered by it. I found it to be an elegant instance of the power of Twitter and the way people have learned to pack so much information into 140 characters. We as a culture applaud men who come up with choice quotes to describe death, courage, and war, but if a woman employs brevity to express relief at a miscarriage, suddenly there's an outcry against the dangers of getting to the point ... (Read the rest of this post and related posts in DoubleX.)

The Mother of All Tweets

Those Who Can't Do, Tweet

According to the social media analytics company Sysomos, there were 19,235 Twitter users in Iran on Sunday; this in a country of 70 million. Some 93 percent of those accounts were in Tehran. Presumably those users are young, wealthy, and worldly. As Elizabeth Lazar implies in her solid Double X piece on Guatemala, reading the world off Twitter is like peeking into a Connecticut prep school and claiming to have seen America.

Is the "Neda" Video a Snuff Movie?

Hanna, thank you for the necessary astringency of your last post about the "Neda" video and the construction of a martyr mythology in the blogosphere’s reporting on Iran. I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch the entire unedited Neda video on YouTube; it feels too close to a snuff movie. Assuming this graphic clip really does document a young woman’s death at the hands of paramilitary snipers—something we lack the reporting to confirm—what gives us the right to watch it and forward to and fro as proof of our solidarity with the forces of democracy and reform in Iran (something that, as you point out, Mousavi is far from representing)? (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com.)

Neda: the New Face of Iranian Protest

A video of the death of a young Iranian protester named Neda has been traveling incredibly quickly around the Twittersphere and the rest of the Internet (first link contains disturbing images). She has become an instant symbol of Iranian opposition... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com.)

Rachel Maddow Wants to Know, Who Pooped?

Oh joy! I have discovered another reason why I love Rachel Maddow. The totally original MSNBC news anchor and XX Factor heartthrob twittered a link yesterday to Minnesota Zoo's interactive game highlighting their new Africa exhibit. (Maddow's tweet: "My inner 8 year old will not let me do anything today that does not somehow involve this website: http://whopooped.org/.") The game... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Women More Likely to Follow Men on Twitter

Tell Us Your Awkward and Wrong Internet Tales

Scott Anderson's Modern Love Revenge column about a woman who wrote in the New York Times about how she Googled him before their first date, raises interesting questions about online etiquette. The piece that Scott reacted to ran less than a year ago, but already the concept feels dated to me. Embarrassment about Googling someone? As a journalist, I'd be embarrassed to go on a date without having Googled the potential suitor first—and looked him up on Lexis-Nexis and Facebook and (if he's older) Friendster, and tried... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Meghan McCain on Karl Rove: "Creepy"

This week's column from Meghan McCain is my favorite thus far. While her previous installments were solidly naive, this week's manages to be that and hilarious. As it turns out, the senator's daughter is on Twitter, and guess who's following her Twitter feed? Karl Rove. And that gives Meghan the creeps!

"Karl Rove follows me on Twitter," McCain reveals. "That's creepy." Surely, Rove on Twitter is a creepy concept. Does he really have so little to do with his time these days that he feels compelled to send messages like these out into the void? "Joining Bill O'Reilly tonight," he tweets. Not exactly breaking news. But there's more. "Got to the airport with a lot of time to spare." Who says Rove's post-Bush career is not without thrills? My favorite is the one where he discloses he's getting his shoes shined. Fascinating.

So, what's the probs with Karl's tweets, Megs? Apparently, she finds them "disingenuous." Possibly even written by a ghost-twitterer, she ruminates! (I doubt it. Nobody could come across as dull and unself-aware as Rove-on-Rove.) Therefore, she concludes, it's time for folks like herself to "take Twitter back from the creepy people." Employing her usual writing style, in which she expresses some random thought and never really unpacks that random thought, it remains unclear exactly why she finds Rove following her "creepy." In all likelihood, it's another one of her attempts to set conservatives like herself, who find themselves attempting to blindly steer forward a floundering party, apart from the icky old guys like Rove. The problem is that she and Rove have more in common than she comprehends. After all, she's just a Karl Rove creep in sorority girl clothing.

@Oprah

Study Declares That 'Buzz' Starts in Tourist Traps. Huh?

The New York Times this week ran a new map of the geography of buzz. Researchers Elizabeth Currid of USC and Sarah Williams of Columbia mapped the hotspots of creative culture in New York City and L.A. by tallying the locations of the flashy parties chronicled in Getty images. In Manhattan, the big buzz spot winners: Times Square, Lincoln Center and Rockefeller Center. Um, for real? Those areas only pulse with energy if you have a couple hundred bucks to go watch a show; off the stage, they're mostly crammed with tourists, overpriced restaurants with awful food, and a repeating loop of Gap, J. Crew and Pottery Barn. Is that what it means to have buzz?

Pardon the rather obvious web 2.0 refrain, but in my mind buzz happens in the online forums like Twitter and Facebook where people connect and scheme and set trends and define the latest iteration of cool. (It's unclear whether the study's co-author Currid would agree with me, based on her unsatisfying attempt to define the term in the article: "As vague a term as ‘buzz' is, it's so socially and economically important for cultural goods...Even though it's like, ‘What the heck does that mean?,' it means something." Right.) The Times' Twitter watch during the Superbowl seems a far better display of buzz—look at that explosion of Springsteen chatter!—to me than an analysis of stagnant Getty images. The idea of tracking where buzz starts and spreads is fascinating; I'd just like to see it done in a way that doesn't ignore the very relevant role the Internet plays, and by people who can start with an actual definition of what it is they're studying.

A Social Networking Cry for Help

It was big Web news on Friday when Demi Moore responded to an allegedly suicidal tweeter, who had written the actress an online message via Twitter, threatening to kill herself. Moore, along with other Twitter users, tracked the woman who wrote the message to San Jose, California, and many called the police there.* That woman is currently under psychiatric care. Today, there is another story of a suicide intervention via social networking, this time using Facebook. According to the Daily Mail, a 16-year-old boy from Oxford was chatting via Facebook with a Maryland girl when he started talking about suicide and wrote, "I’m going away to do something I’ve been thinking about for a while then everyone will find out." The Maryland girl smartly told her parents, who contacted the British Embassy in D.C., who then called Scotland Yard. The police eventually found the boy, who was alive but had overdosed on pills.

All of this brings me back to an earlier point I made about Peggy Orenstein's essay on Facebook. She argued that teens today will miss out on "growth through loneliness" because they're constantly in contact with other people. For these people to make threats of suicide to virtual strangers shows a profound disconnect, rather than a feeling of satisfying interpersonal interaction. If you need Demi Moore to save you from yourself, you're a very sad person indeed.

Correction, April 6, 2009: in the original post, it was incorrectly stated that the Twitter was traced to San Diego, CA.

Double X Has a Facebook Page and a Twitter!

In the Future, You Will Twitter to Your Own Face

Among the uses envisioned for the "nano skins" are facial or hand displays. These displays would be synched to a WPAn, or Wireless Personal Area network. There would be a display driver implanted to receive signals and allow you and others to communicate wirelessly. This would allow you to send information about remembering things instantly or communicate to someone else discreetly, receiving a friend's text to your hand instead of your phone. You could also have the option to communicate back to your friend your mood. That way, they won't have to ask how you are doing; they can just take one quick look and know.

I envision a texting set-up similar to my computer's calendar. A timed notice would appear conveniently on my hand saying "15 min till you have to call so- and-so" or "1 day till you need to bring work cupcakes."

Dare to dream!

All Atwitter