Probably the biggest difference between traditional mass media and the social media-enhanced, on-demand videos of the 140 Character Conferences is the latter’s preponderance of upbeat, inspiring stories, calls-to-arms, and tales of altruistic endeavors.

Oh yes, the tail end of the evening news does sport those five-minute “human interest stories” of the kind the late Charles Kuralt had mastered with the 600+ episodes of his  “On the Road” series at CBS, a tradition now carried forth by Steve Hartman. Stories like those of retired minister Jethro Mann, of Belmont Abbey, North Carolina, who selflessly used his meager, fixed income to buy and repair bicycles so all of his neighborhood’s deprived kids would have a bike to ride. Interestingly, ignored by Kuralt and CBS was another, more wealthy Belmont native, Daniel J. Stowe, a retired textile executive, who founded the 380-acre Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden and who privately and quietly helped many families in the Belmont area.

Most of time, even the best of such stories have a mere “three-day wonder” quality to them, since there is no sustained coverage—the mass media must immediately storm off in search of another ambulance to chase.

Ironically, the beloved and immensely likable Kuralt himself fell victim to mass media’s perpetual interest in the lurid when he suffered a posthumous humiliation; namely, the revelation that he had a 29-year-extramarital affair with a single mother named Patricia Shannon.

The relationship between a sensationalistic mass media and social media is complex. On the one hand, outrageous coverage can alert many smaller groups linked by social media and spur them into altruistic action. But sometimes the “mainstream media” just gets things wrong, as in the case of the earthquake in Haiti.

Early on, global media characterized the Haitian disaster as, “The worst emergency the world has ever faced”, “chaotic relief distributions with no-one knowing who is in charge”, “seven days since the quake struck and people still haven’t received water, food or health care”, and the “failure of the international humanitarian system to do anything about this”.

In reality, as the editor of Field Exchange wrote in the August 2010 issue, “While this type of media coverage may be appropriate in one sense, i.e. to help mobilise political commitment at government and civil society level, it was also by turns grossly inaccurate and heavily skewed towards sensationalism. Key facts and contextual factors which largely explain how the international response unfolded were omitted or relegated to ‘throw-away’ paragraphs. Critical information which were not highlighted includes the fact that Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere with the least capacity to host and support an international humanitarian response—particularly in the area of security. To add to this, up to 200 UN workers, including the Humanitarian Coordinator, were killed by the ‘quake making it virtually impossible for the UN to hit the ground running. There was little acknowledgement in coverage that the international organisational response embedded in the recent humanitarian reform process and involving 12 sectoral clusters worked relatively well, with excellent sectoral coordination being achieved within the nutrition sector in a few days. There was little mention either that the humanitarian workers on the ground worked inhuman hours often with nowhere to sleep and no washing facilities and as a result were burning out in a matter of days resulting in high levels of staff turn-over. The scale and speed of crisis meant that if this disaster had happened in the US or another rich Western country (remember Hurricane Katrina) there would still have been enormous challenges in mounting a response.”

A system of media better tied into the social media community (using the latter as old-time ‘stringers’ capable of local reportage) would help here, though some might argue that hyping a humanitarian crisis gets quicker or more intensive results, even though it actually ends up disrespecting the very agencies attempting to save as many lives as possible.

Sensationalistic doom-and-gloom headlines and general “anti-good news” considerations aside, traditional media is increasingly integrating with social media. Twitter is now the world’s quickest news bulletin outlet: it broke the news of Whitney Houston’s death 27 minutes before the mainstream press, and, as Samantha Murphy noted on Mashable: “Celebrity deaths, foreign revolts, and earthquake news is reported so fast on twitter that CNN, HLN, MSNBC, and FOX NEWS are just repeating tweets from two hours before.” Even so, any outrageous reportage from the mainstream media are flames easily fanned by social media, and there is always the danger that, just as Internet-connected individuals may construct and deconstruct their own identities as they see fit, so too may they treat the world of news—and thus reality itself—in the same way, leading to embarrassing, hysterical situations. (Perhaps that last statement can be taken literally: Doctors treating the mysterious twitching disorder of nearly 20 upstate New York teenagers claim the problem is a form of mass hysteria that has spread faster through the girls’ own use of Facebook and other forms of social media.)

The dance of Old Media with New Media has just started. It will be interesting to see how it ends.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

One theme that runs through the more inspiring videos of #140conf is an appeal by our speakers to fairness and altruism. Inciting action among the public using social media must counter the so-called “bystander effect,” where people assume that someone else will do what needs to be done. Researchers in one experiment found that 70 percent of participants waiting alone in a room who heard another person in distress in an adjoining room got up, responded, and helped. When two participants were in the room together however, the response rate to cries for help fell significantly, in one instance to just 7 percent.

But there are more deep-seated psychological phenomena regarding fairness and altruism. I recently came across a fascinating article, “How to Get the Rich to Share the Marbles,” in The New York Times by Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. He was reporting on experimental results published in Nature by developmental psychologists Michael Tomasello and Katharina Hamann at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany [Hamann, K., Warneken, F., Greenberg, J. R., & Tomasello, M. (2011). Collaboration encourages equal sharing in children but not in chimpanzees. Nature, 476, 328-331.]

Here’s the experiment: Place two three-year-olds in front of a machine that has two ends of a rope that hangs out of the front, five feet part. If one child pulls on the rope, he or she just gets more rope. If both pull their ropes at the same time, however, some marbles are dispensed to both kids. However, the marbles are not distributed fairly: one kid receives a single marble, the other kid gets three marbles.

Interestingly, in this situation where both kids have to pull for anyone to receive the coveted marbles, the children “equalize the wealth” about 75 percent of the time, with little if any conflict. Either the “rich” kid spontaneously hands the “extra” marble to the other kid or else the “poor” kid asks for a marble and the “rich” kid gives him the marble, leaving both children with two marbles each.

Another version of the experiment yields results more in line with our conception of greedy three-year-olds: If the inequitable distribution of marbles are already sitting in their respective cups when the children approach the machine, a “finders keepers” attitude prevails, and the child discovering three marbles bestowed upon him by fate is highly unlikely to offer one to the child who has just one. Likewise, the “poor” child is unlikely to ask for a marble. In this scenario the wealth was equalized just 5 percent of the time.

What’s going on here? A third version of the experiment, reveals a remarkable, deeper truth. At first the conditions resemble those of the first experiment: The two kids walk up to a machine and there are two ropes hanging out. When the children pull on their respective ropes, one child receives a single marble and the other is rewarded with three. This time, however, it is evident that both parties do not have to pull on the ropes simultaneously to receive their inequitable rewards. Each child did the equivalent amount of “work” but the collaborative aspect is gone.

What happens? The “poor” kid receives a marble from the “rich” one only 30 percent of the time. As Haidt writes, “Even though you and your partner each did the same work (rope pulling) at more or less the same time, you both know that you didn’t really collaborate to produce the wealth. Only about 30 percent of the time did the kids work out an equal split. In other words, the ‘share-the-spoils’ button is not pressed by the mere existence of inequality. It is pressed when two or more people collaborated to produce a gain. Once the button is pressed in both brains, both parties willingly and effortlessly share.”

Even more interestingly, the researchers found that when one substitutes chimpanzees for the three-year-olds in the experiment, the chimps never share the spoils—they just grab what they can, regardless of the conditions. The experimenters believe that the “share-the-spoils” phenomenon emerged in human evolution over the past half-million years, as humans began to cooperatively forage and hunt.

As Haidt writes, “Those who had the response could develop stable, ongoing partnerships. They worked together in small teams, which accomplished far more than individuals could on their own.”

Haidt notes that income inequality had peaked in 1929 and was kept under control during “the great compression” from the 1950s through the 1970s. Since the 1980s, however, income inequality has returned to 1929 levels. President Obama’s State of the Union address contains the sentence, “we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules,” but genuine shared sacrifice is not actually in the offing: taxes would be raised only on the rich. Senior citizens, who receive the majority of entitlement funds, would be protected from cuts. On the other hand, as Sarah Palin (of all people) pointed out in a September 2011 speech, today’s “crony capitalism” is “the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest–to the little guys.”

As Haidt writes, “The problem isn’t that some kids have many more marbles than others. The problem is that some kids are in cahoots with the experimenters. They get to rig the marble machine before the rest of us have a chance to play with it.”

Haidt thus suggests Democrats (or whoever) focus less on distributive fairness—which is about whether everyone gets what they deserve—and more on procedural fairness—which is about whether honest, open and unbiased procedures decide who gets what.

Alas, the problem is more complicated than it first appears, owing to flaws in the nature of both capitalism and the human psyche. In a box-and-marbles system more in accord with the real world, there is necessary an initial investment of “marbles” and financial risk in pulling the rope for one of the entities. Moreover, that individual is in competition with other risking investors who have their own companies and are pulling their own ropes. They should receive more marbles in return, to reimburse and reward them for their expenses and risk, respectively. As J. Paul Getty said, “Some people drill for oil and find it. Others drill for oil and don’t find it.”

In Getty’s case, however, he inherited an oil company from his father. Getty, whose fortune built the J. Paul Getty Museum—a museum so well-endowed that it is likely to eventually overshadow all other American museums—was an astounding miser whose mansion sported a pay phone and who left a grand total of $500 to his son, John Paul Getty II. Some of these “riskers” have no genuine altruistic tendencies at all. What has your fellow man done for you lately? What has posterity done for you lately? Psychological forces of greed and hypocrisy are more powerful among adults than even among three-year-olds (but not chimpanzees, apparently).

As Mother Jones magazine has pointed out, things are even more skewed than the Occupy Wall Street people believe: “A huge share of the nation’s economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244.” If the median U.S. household income had kept pace with the economy since 1970, it would now be nearly $92,000, not $50,000.

Simplistic rope-pulling and marble dispensing experiments aside, the U.S. has always been an oligarchy, with former slave-owning country squires of the 18^th century giving way to the robber barons of the 19^th century’s Gilded Age, to today’s highly compensated CEOs and denizens of Wall Street. Now, however, the transformation of segments of the upper classes into a rabidly avaricious gang has become so glaringly apparent that the underlying shenanigans to make it so have disrupted the workings of the entire world economy.

Rather than pulling a rope on a box, somebody’s going to have to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

“Presidents Day,” as Bill O’ Connor of the Steubenville, Ohio, Herald-Star wrote back in 1977, “is the result of a million or so bureaucrats who wanted to have long weekends… They made a law which said the citizens were to honor the presidents only when a long weekend could be made out of it.” Or, as U.S. Army combat veteran Harry G. Summers wrote for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate in 1992, “Presidents Day… has degenerated into just another day off work, marked not by patriotic celebrations but by tawdry pitchmen hawking shoddy Presidents Day bargains.”

Allow me to explain.

Once upon a time there was a great American named George Washington who was born on February 11, 1731. Washington, before becoming our first president, was variously offered a dictatorship, emperorship and generic monarch position, all of which he refused (hey, this is Washington we’re talking about here, not Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson). It’s probable that the foundation of Washington’s moral character was laid by a daily reading of Sir Mathew Hale’s Contemplations, his mother’s favorite book, still on display at Mount Vernon. The producers of today’s multimillion dollar presidential attack ads would have been stunned to hear Washington say, “Speak not evil of the absent, for it is unjust,” and, “Undertake not what you cannot perform, but be careful to keep your promise.”

Ironically the man whose military prowess against the British earned the respect of even Napoleon (who bowed his head and called for a minute of silence when he received word of Washington’s death), was not officially recognized as America’s greatest general until 1976 when President Ford signed a bill promoting Washington to a rank of six-star General of the Armies. Amazingly, at the time there was some cynicism expressed and even some opposition. One critic compared it to “the pope offering to make Christ a cardinal.”

In any case, during the 18^th century, the British Colonies used the old Julian calendar (named after Julius Caesar who instituted calendar reform in the Roman Empire in 46 B.C.). The average length of the Julian year is 365.25 days, which is 0.0076 days (10.94 minutes) longer than the actual interval between vernal equinoxes (365.2424 days). Thus, an extra 12.02 days accumulated from the year 1 to the year 1582 (1581*0.0076 = 12.02 days), when Pope Gregory XIII unveiled a better system. When the English Colonies finally adopted the more accurate Gregorian calendar in 1752, Washington’s birthdate anniversary would now be celebrated on the equivalent date of February 22^nd. However, New Year’s Day, the first day of the new year, was not always celebrated on January 1^st. In the English Colonies—believe it or not—March 24th of one year was followed by March 25th of the next year. Thus, combining the 12-day shift in calendrical reform with the shift of New Year’s Day from March 25 back to January 1, George Washington’s birthdate changed from the Julian Calendar date of February 11, 1731 to the Gregorian Calendar date of February 22, 1732.

During the 19^th century, Washington’s birthday (now nailed down as February 22^nd) was celebrated with nearly as much zeal as July 4^th. It was made a federal holiday by an Act of Congress in 1879 (but not celebrated until 1880) for government offices in the District of Columbia (20 Stat. 277) and expanded in 1885 to include all federal offices (23 Stat. 516) in a bill that was signed by President Chester Alan Arthur. It was the first federal holiday to honor an American citizen.

The next great figure whose birthday garnered attention was Abraham Lincoln. Although he had an undistinguished career before becoming the 16^th President of the United States, his fortitude in freeing the slaves and his brilliance as commander in chief—remember, this was back in the days when the Republicans had what was known as “The Thinking Man’s Party”—managed to triumph in the face of lackluster field commanders (George “the little Napoleon” McClellan, Joseph Hooker, etc., until things finally clicked with Ulysses S. Grant) and nefarious cabinet members such as Simon Cameron, who made a fortune selling defective horses and equipment to the U.S. Army, and his successor, Edwin McMasters Stanton, who openly complained about Lincoln’s “painful imbecility” and frequently referred to him as “the original gorilla.”

The earliest known observance of Lincoln’s birthday was on February 12, 1874 in Buffalo, New York. For many decades schoolchildren relished the month of February, for, in many U.S. states, schools were closed on both February 12^th and 22^nd—and then there was Valentine’s Day, too!

The idea to forge a more common “Presidents’ Day” first popped up in 1950 when NATO (no, not that NATO, but the more prosaic National Association of Travel Organizations), suggested celebrating both Washington and Lincoln’s birthdays on a single day, and shifting the holiday to a Monday, thus creating a three-day weekend (at least for Federal employees).

The next time the holiday was seriously proposed was in 1951 when an adding machine salesman named Harold “Hal” Stonebridge Fischer of Compton, California, began writing persistently to America’s state governors over a period of years, pleading for proclamations for a day to honor the office of the presidency, not just President #1.

Fischer, who once ran for Congress as a Republican, was known for having made  226 speeches over a three-year period (1949-1951) on the subject, “Forgery and the Check Artist,” donating all  proceeds from his speeches to such causes as the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund and the Spastic Children’s Foundation, a project of the Elks.

Fisher wanted March 4^th for the observance because it was the presidential inauguration date for 140 years, until 1936. Fischer initially envisioned his Presidents’ Day as an observance to be conducted solely in churches. Radio stations requested listeners pray for divine guidance of the President. (Not exactly what you would call a Separation of Church and State.)

Fischer’s first convert was Arkansas’ Gov. Sid McMath, whose proclamation read, “We Republicans and Democrats alike should let the President know at least once a year that we are grateful and owe him a kind world.” In 1952 Fischer managed to wrangle governors’ proclamations in Arkansas again and in Delaware, Rhode Island and Missouri. Moreover, of 200 support pledges mailed out, three dozen came back signed from such luminaries as the governor of Delaware, the mayors of El Paso, Texas and Camden, New Jersey; the director-general of Lions International and the presidents of Georgetown, Creighton, Duquesne, Cornell and Georgia Tech universities. 1953 brought a total of nine proclamations: Arkansas, Missouri, Nevada, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, South Dakota, Indiana and Maryland. More than 100 mayors also joined in with their own local proclamations, including the mayor of Los Angeles along with its county Board of Supervisors. In 1954 proclamations were issued by Oklahoma, Mississippi, Tennessee, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Arkansas, South Dakota, Nevada, Nebraska, West Virginia and Maryland, with proclamations promised from Florida, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, West Virginia and Colorado. Statements of support were promised from Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Minnesota, Delaware, North Carolina, New Jersey, California, Vermont.

Although by 1955 an impressive 40 states and 10,000 schools supported (at least gave lip service to) Presidents’ Day, Fischer, who later became National Executive Director of the Presidents’ Day National Committee, found that his original formulation of the holiday failed because some states already were celebrating Washington’s birthday and Lincoln’s birthday, and they felt it a third holiday was just too much. A bill to establish Presidents’ Day stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In 1968, however, Congress passed the Monday Holidays Act, which moved the official observance of Washington’s Birthday from February 22 to the third Monday in February. Indeed, it mandated that the other holidays would also be made to fall on Mondays, simply to establish more three-day weekends for federal workers. (Fancy that.) Ironically, this means that the latest possible date for Presidents Day is February 21, so the holiday can never actually be celebrated precisely on Washington’s birthday. At the time, reformers had wanted to change the name of the holiday to Presidents’ Day in honor of both Washington and Lincoln, but that proposal was rejected by Congress; officially and in the public’s mind, the holiday remained Washington’s Birthday.

In 1971, however, when the act finally went into effect, President Nixon issued an Executive Order (11582) on February 11, 1971 defining the third Monday of February as a holiday, and the announcement of that Executive Order identified the day as “Washington’s Birthday.” Amusingly, a newspaper spoof at the time claimed that Nixon had issued a proclamation declaring the third Monday in February to be a “holiday set aside to honor all presidents, even myself.”

Still, Washington’s Birthday has slowly become known solely as Presidents’ Day (actually Presidents Day, without the apostrophe), primary because of the efforts of advertisers/retailers. However, technically, federal holidays apply only to employees of the federal government, and some states do not recognize them, as was the case when Arizona governor Ev Mecham in 1987 rescinded the previous governor’s executive order recognizing Martin Luther King, Jr. day (a federal holiday) as an Arizona state holiday. On the other hand, many states have their own collection of holidays. For example, many former states of the Confederacy celebrate June 3^rd, Jefferson Davis Day. Alabama celebrates Presidents Day, but they call it “Washington and Jefferson Day,” ignoring the fact that Jefferson’s birthday is April 13^th.

This real issue regarding Presidents Day, however, is something more profound.

As Harry G. Summers wrote back in 1992: “Lincoln set an example for civilian leadership of the military that has continued to grow and flourish over the years. If he had faltered, if the military had been allowed to take control to establish a dictatorship to ‘save the Union’ as McClellan, Hooker and other were perfectly willing to do, our republic would be vastly different than it is today.”

“And if Lincoln had failed as commander in chief and the Union gone down to defeat, it is unlikely that February would now be celebrated as Black History Month. After all, it was not the rhetoric of the abolitionists, but Lincoln, and the bayonets of Lincoln’s Army, that were the steel behind the Emancipation Proclamation and the freeing of the slaves.”

“Presidents Day is hardly a reminder of that fact. Rather than elevating Washington and Lincoln to a unique position in our pantheon, we debase them by placing them on par with the many non-entities—fill in the names as you please—that have held that high office. In so doing, we have lost a valuable reminder that our liberties and our freedoms did not just happen. They were bought, not in a Presidents Day sale, but by the courage, sacrifice and perseverance of two remarkable Americans who birthdates we need to return to their former place of honor.”

Should we remember Warren G. Harding with the same reverence as Washington or Lincoln? How about James Buchanan, who did little to oppose Southern states to secede from the Union before the Civil War? Or Andrew Johnson’s decision to side with Southern whites and oppose justice for Southern blacks? (“We continue to pay for Johnson’s errors,” wrote Ohio State University history professor emeritus Michael Les Benedict.) Or Lyndon Johnson who allowed the Vietnam War to escalate out of control? Or Woodrow Wilson, a bigot who also bungled the Treaty of Versailles following World War I? Or the paranoid and conspiratorial Richard Nixon (described by one Spy magazine editor as an “all-purpose crook and figure of evil”)? Or the otherwise brilliant James Madison, who managed to get America mired in the disastrous War of 1812 with Britain?

Have our two greatest presidents—the embodiment of our nation’s guiding principles of democracy and opportunity—been shortchanged by this regrettable, watered-down holiday created by a Congress that desired a three-day break between New Year’s and Easter?

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.