America’s Founding Fathers wrote of our inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, even if we never actually manage to find it.

In the case of religious folk, happiness is, at least theoretically, a lot easier to come by, since many of the world’s great religions are based on a “Divine command theory” of happiness: happiness and rewards follow from following the commands of the divine. Thus, sentences in scripture such as “charity is good” mean the same thing as sentences such as “God commands charity.” Judaism and Christianity are both based on the Divine command theory of happiness. To Christians, true happiness can only be found in the afterlife; in the meantime we can at least avoid sin and zero-in on salvation via the Four Cardinal Virtues (Prudence, Justice, Restraint/Temperance and Courage/Fortitude) and Three Theological Virtues (Faith, Hope and Charity). All of this presumes, of course, that scriptures are in fact stating the will of God. “Revealed” literature ranges in quality from the admirable to the completely crazy, and is open to interpretation by scholars and holy men anyway. I’m reminded of the late Arthur Koestler, who would joke about “…theologians who start from the premise that the mind of God is beyond human understanding and then proceed to explain how the mind of God works…”

In any case, the theories of humanistic psychologists such as Erich Fromm, Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers touched upon the nature of human happiness, but it wasn’t until 1998 that Martin Seligman really brought forth and crystallized the “positive psychology movement,” starting a few months after he was elected president of the American Psychological Association. The Great Moment took place in Seligman’s garden while he was weeding with his 5-year-old daughter, Nikki, who was throwing weeds into the air and dancing around. Seligman yelled at her. She walked away, came back, and said, “Daddy, I want to talk to you… Daddy, do you remember before my fifth birthday? From the time I was three to the time I was five, I was a whiner. I whined every day. When I turned five, I decided not to whine anymore. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.”

As Seligman later wrote, “This was for me an epiphany, nothing less. I learned something about Nikki, something about raising kids, something about myself, and a great deal about my profession. First, I realized that raising Nikki was not about correcting whining. Nikki did that herself. Rather, I realized that raising Nikki was about taking this marvelous skill—I call it ‘seeing into the soul’—and amplifying it, nurturing it, helping her to lead her life around it to buffer against her weaknesses and the storms of life. Raising children, I realized, is more than fixing what is wrong with them. It is about identifying and nurturing their strongest qualities, what they own and are best at, and helping them find niches in which they can best live out these positive qualities… As for my own life, Nikki hit the nail right on the head. I was a grouch… But the broadest implication of Nikki’s lesson was about the science and practice of psychology…. The message of the positive psychology movement is to remind our field that it has been deformed. Psychology is not just the study of disease, weakness, and damage; it also is the study of strength and virtue. Treatment is not just fixing what is wrong; it also is building what is right. Psychology is not just about illness or health; it also is about work, education, insight, love, growth, and play.”

Seligman when on to write Authentic Happiness in 2002 and Character Strengths and Virtues in 2004, establishing himself as the founder and leader of the positive psychology movement. Seligman and his colleagues think that there are three broad areas of research: 1) The Pleasant Life or “life of enjoyment” of normal and healthy living (e.g. relationships, hobbies, interests, entertainment, etc.). 2) The Good Life, or “life of engagement,” which is the immersion and “flow” that happens when a person feels confident that they can accomplish tasks. 3) The Meaningful Life, or “life of affiliation,” which is how individuals derive a positive sense of well-being at the group level: belonging, meaning, and purpose from being part of and contributing back to something larger and more permanent than themselves (e.g. nature, social groups, organizations, movement traditions, belief systems).

What concerns both the aficionados and students of social media is #3–the group level civic virtues that encourage better citizenship, such as altruism, civility, nurturance, moderation, tolerance, responsibility, and attaining a general sense of “elevation,” the desire to act morally and do “good.” However, for many of us, as society becomes bigger, more complex and perhaps more menacing, individuals feel less significant and are less inclined to act to solve problems or “do good.” They become subject to “learned helplessness.” In an intimidating environment, they often shy away from working toward social-based happiness.

To counter this, the Canadian author and journalist J.B. MacKinnon devised a cognitive tool he calls “vertical agitation,” which involves focusing on only one trivial (small), doable portion of the problem at a time, and holding oneself accountable for solving the problem—all the way to the highest level of government, business and society. (A common example given is the purchase of energy efficient light bulbs.) Viewers of our #140conf videos and their social media savvy “characters” will recognize the idea of vertical agitation writ large across the Internet. People find each other and interact  in whatever way they can over the network.

Once enough people are connecting through the network and the problem or goal is externalized, “horizontal agitation” (a concept coined by Jennifer Jacquet) then kicks in, which she describes as simply “peer pressure combined with a pejorative element of what is socially or environmentally unacceptable. One friend lambasts me if she sees me with a disposable coffee cup. Another one does when I drive instead of walk. Researchers in Norway found that people certain about their peers’ recycling behavior were more likely to recycle themselves. In another study on towel reuse in hotel rooms, researchers from the University of Chicago found that a sign indicating how often towels were reused in that specific hotel room made guests more likely to return towels to the rack — more so than with cards that only said to reuse towels to ‘save the environment.’ Peer pressure and knowing what our peers do can be good.”

But as Jacquet acknowledges, today’s problems are too urgent to wait for horizontal agitation. Because vertical agitation can work higher in the demand chain, it can be more effective, since, in Jacquet’s words, “Rather than consumers hassling consumers, vertical agitation implies consumers hassle mega-consumers (chefs, managers, retailers, universities) or government. This is nothing new. Slavery did not end because abolitionists peer pressured slave owners to free their slaves. The destruction of the ozone layer did not slow because consumers convinced other consumers to stop buying products that contained hazardous CFCs. Inherently, we know vertical agitation is best. But very few people seem to feel empowered to try it.”

That’s where we think social media comes in, as a sort of “persuasion multiplier.” As with any form of public relations-type persuasion, however, there are different “publics” and different layers of social media subnetworks working toward the same overall goal. People seeking happiness via good works nevertheless follow the path of least resistance and tend to deal with what they find familiar and comforting (or at least offering less cognitive dissonance).

The trick, as Jacquet says, is that “We each need the perfectly sized problem—not too big and not too small—and then we need to direct it toward the appropriate person or institution. For some people, this will mean continuing to pester their friends. For others it means aiming upward.”

Aside from their use in social media, both vertical and horizontal agitation give the shopworn phrase “movers and shakers” a whole new meaning.

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

Founder and Executive Director of Evolutionary Guidance Media Research & Design, Inc., Dr. Dana Klisanin, one day decided to do some research in the area of altruism and the Internet, conducting an Internet-based search for websites that encourage digital actions that result in benefit to other people, animals, or the environment. (To distinguish these from pure e-philanthropy, the websites scrutinized were ones that didn’t demand any monetary donations from visitors.)

Klisanin’s 2011 paper, “Is the Internet Giving Rise to New Forms of Altruism?” (Media Psychology Review [Online]. 3, 1.) reveals not only that humanity has integrated moral concerns with digital technologies to create a new kind of altruism—digital altruism—but that this new altruism takes three forms:

1. “Everyday digital altruism,” involving expedience, ease, moral engagement, and conformity. These are Internet based initiatives that rely upon user-generated content and/or sharing of expertise created for the public good, e.g., Linux, Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia.

2. “Creative digital altruism,” involving creativity, heightened moral engagement, and cooperation. Creative altruism works against conformity. An American psychologist who pioneered the study of creativity, Howard E. Gruber, wrote of it: “[It is] about how to be of some use in relation to difficult, deep, and seemingly intractable human problems…. [It] expresses the highest development of the individual and at the same time depends on cooperation and mutual understanding…. [It] probably depends above all on a sense of the self expanding−expanding in our era toward world-consciousness.”  Ironically and paradoxically, the very creative yet cooperative act of correcting the inequalities that give rise to the need for altruism obliges us to put an end to the situation that makes altruism possible. In the realm of the Internet, such initiatives are designed to help other people, animals, or the environment, using a click-to-donate format, e.g., Care2.com, or as an integral facet of social networking, searching, shopping, or gaming, e.g., Causes, Goodsearch, Goodshop, ServiceSpace (formerly, CharityFocus); The Rainforest Site, Ripple.org, TheBigTest.org, FreePoverty, etc.

3. “Co-creative digital altruism” involving creativity, moral engagement, and meta-cooperative efforts. Meta-cooperative efforts to solve truly large-scale problems, linked by the Internet, or the grid. Instead being commenced by one or two people, these ambitious initiatives begin at a corporate level or something on that scale, involve transdisciplinary creativity, entail sustained moral engagement, and require cooperation that is transnational, transcorporate, transNGO, and transpersonal (in short, “meta-cooperation”). Examples include the philanthropic efforts of Google.org in this category, such as Google Crisis Response, which has mapped territories struck by natural disasters. Of course, outside of the Internet and in the “real” world, natural disasters are among the few phenomena that can bring corporations, institutions, governments, and individuals to work together across continents to accomplish humanitarian goals. Even Ayn Rand, that eccentric and troublesome incarnation of ethical egoism, thought it appropriate to assist strangers in an emergency—though only a “metaphysical emergency,” which she defined in her essay “The Ethics of Emergency” as an “unchosen, unexpected event, limited in time, that creates conditions under which human survival is impossible,” such as a fire, flood or earthquake. (Not concerning the survival of an individual mind you, but general, human survival.)

As Klisanin, writes, “By recognizing co-creative digital altruism as a new mode of collaborative social action, we create a language capable of referencing ideal forms of global cooperation.” Another example of “co-creative digital altruism” is the World Community Grid consisting of hundreds of global partners (businesses, associations, foundations, government agencies, and universities) and over a half-million members who donate their idle computer time to solve complex problems via a grid computing scenario wherein their many individual computers are joined to create a large virtual system possessing computational power far exceeding that of even the world’s top supercomputers.

Interestingly, one layer of altruism depends upon another. In what Klisanin calls the “altruistic domino effect,” the individual PC owners at the bottom engaging in the “everyday digital altruism” of being willing to simply click-to-donate or donate their unused computer time to the grid are indispensable in making possible the conditions upon which other altruists are able bring about the greater “creative digital altruism” and “co-creative digital altruism” of Care2.com and the World Community Grid in the phenomenal or “real” world. A million mere mouse clicks can lead to the purchase, delivery and distribution of food, medicine, etc., to people worldwide, or can help solve one of the mysteries of the universe, or perhaps just do something amusing like calculate the value of Pi to a gazillion decimal places.

One thing that technology teaches us is that cost and “ease of use” are the two most important factors in the adoption of anything new. For digital altruism, note that small payments can be sent by a smartphone to something like Kickstarter, or that volunteers can easily offer services in ServiceSpace’s charity ecosystem (which evolved from focusing just on technically helping charities, to encouraging everyday people to contribute in meaningful ways to the world around them). This indicates that the up-and-coming generation will find the world of digital altruism a far friendlier landscape to negotiate than the jungle of bureaucratic altruist organizations faced by their parents. Klisanin even speculates that “engaging in this form of creativity may one day become a classroom activity.”

How many people actually participate in this new digital altruism? In 2010 Klisanin estimated there to be 187 million of them. She even thinks that such individuals represent the appearance of a new kind of hero archetype: the “cyberhero.”

Okay all of you cyberheroes out there. You know who you are. Don’t waste money on a distinctive superhero outfit. You won’t need shoulder pads, kevlar vests, titanium-plated armor, oversized belts or ammunition pouches, just a PC and a bank account. That’ll do for starters.

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

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.

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.

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?

# # #

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

The moderator was Julie Cole (@JulieCole) of Mabel’s Labels (http://www.mabelslables.com) a company that makes dishwasher, laundry and microwave-safe labels for the stuff kids lose.

Julie Cole: We have three participants on our panel today. Alexandria Durrell (@clippo) is from Clippo, a cool accessories company that sells thumb clips—in fact, this lanyard is made by Clippo. She is also founder of so-connected, which is a social media company that reaches out to other companies so that they can connect to their online audience (http://www.clippo.ca/ and http://www.soconnected.ca/).

Stephanie Tanner works locally here in Ontario, and she has a company called The Little Mushroom Catering Company (http://www.littlemushroomcatering.com/) and her handle is @CateringFungi. Remarkably, she doesn’t like mushrooms. She’s been in business since 2010 and has no other marketing plan other than using social media.

Debbie Cornelius from Wee Piggies (@WeePiggiesDebbi) has been in business since 2001. She has a company that has a unique way of framing LifeCasts of children’s footprints and handprints, along with their photos. She has about 60 franchisees and affiliates all over the world.

Debbie Cornelius: Julie, I feel like I’m on The Dating Game! [Laughter.]

Julie Cole: I thought I would start by talking about Clippo, because Alex once said to me that social media has changed every facet of her life in every way possible. I would love for you to talk about how social media has affected your business and maybe how it has changed over the years.

Alexandria Durrell: I started Clippo about five years ago [2006] and like a lot of companies that a Mom starts at home, I was on maternity leave with my daughter. I decided to do a craft. I made some hairclips because, honestly, I was too cheap to buy them. I can’t tell anybody that I invented it, I can’t tell anybody that it was a ‘genius idea.’ I couldn’t find anything on the market. So I just took an idea and made it my own. The girls on the web community of which I was a member were pivotal in making that company a success. In the beginning, especially, I said, ‘I made these for my daughtery, and aren’t they cute?’ And they said, ‘I want something like that for my daughter Jenny,’ and my girlfriend wanted it for her daughter too. And the kids took them to school with them and then somebody said, ‘I was shopping in my favorite store, and I showed them your clips, and they want to carry them.’

And so it was from this community where I had built friendships and many of the girls I had never met in my life. They were just these people—random Moms and girls across Canada, who took my company and appreciated the relationship that I had with them and threw it out there across the country.

Within about three months, I wasn’t working. I had taken on this tiny craft. And all of a sudden we had 50 stores across Canada that was asking to stock the product line. It kind of blew me away that a lot of these people who were virtual strangers and those I had considered friends on the Internet had taken my company and made it a success for me.

I then built relationships on Twitter. At first, it was a totally different environment. I didn’t know how to build those relationships, but my sales tripled by being in a different community. It just sort of blew me away that the people with whom I built these relationships online—and a lot of times I don’t meet them until I come to events like the 140 Characters Conference—knew my company and took it and made it a success so that I could have a successful business and I can stay home with my kids and do the fun things that I want to do because of an online-only relationship with these people.

Julie Cole: When you have a small business, we often talk about the conflict between the voice of your business and your own personal voice. I knew everybody on the panel has some experience with that struggle and I’ve had it too. Now, I thought that Debbie could talk a bit about, well, when you’re speaking for your brand and you’re also speaking for yourself, you have to recognize that conflict and find a balance. You have to remember that you have customers who are online and at the end of the day you want your customers to be happy with you, and you want them to buy your product. But at the same time you need to hold onto your authentic voice. That can be a struggle. But I’m actually fascinated by Debbie and this whole franchise thing, because what I would find a huge struggle would be all of these people talking about my brand. What is their right? They are franchisees, so they should have a voice to the brand, but what if it’s not consistent with mine? What if they go wildly ‘off brand’ and one ends up looking like an idiot or feeling unhappy about where it’s going.

So, Debbie, how do you manage all of the franchisees and their voices with your voice and how that fits in with your brand?

Debbie Cornelius: That’s a good question, Julie. We have implemented recently a really strong Facebook plan. So what we do is, we have a Facebook page that we implement, and they have to do all of our graphics, such as our banners, and the branding has to be the same with everybody. The branding has to be the same across the country, so if you go on Vancouver or Nova Scotia, it’s exactly the same brand. However, I do believe that customers will only buy from you if they know and trust you. So our franchisees also have to have a voice of their own. We let them connect with their customers and do contests, and there are also kinds of ways through Facebook that they’re able to do that. We will encourage them to put their personality into it, but it is a struggle, keeping that brand as well as getting their individual personalities out there. But it works really well.

Julie Cole: I guess that’s just one of those everyday risks. You just don’t know—what if somebody says something that makes you go into damage control. That is a risk of having many voices. I know at Mabels Labels we really encourage all of our employees to tweet and to have an online presence and we’re really happy about that, but at the same time if they’re going to tweet about Mabels, then they have to be consistent regarding our core values in their tweets. If they don’t want to tweet about Mabels then they can just go off and tweet their own thing, and that’s a little bit of a way that we try to manage it.

About the whole thing with ‘personal opinions.’ I know that Alex has had some interesting issues, experiences and lessons learned.

Alexandria Durrell: I don’t have any personal opinions that I share, ever! [Laughter.]

Julie Cole: Yeah, she’s very closed [chuckle]. So maybe you could share some of the things you’ve learned about how much information as a business owner you should share online.

Alexandria Durrell: I think I personally cross the line a lot—pretty much daily. The benefit to me is that I own my own company, so if something bad happens I get to pay for that all on my own, which sometimes it does. And sometimes I do offend people, but it’s never my intention to do so. I’ve been involved in different kinds of social media for about 10 years. I had a blog that was very popular, and in that community where it was very successful, I learned very quickly what it was like to build an “authentic personality” as opposed to just a personality. So when I show up at an event and somebody says to me, ‘You’re exactly the person I thought you’d be,’ I really try to reflect that, and I try to give an authentic voice, especially because I have such a small company, because when you’re sharing a personal opinion, there is a fine line. I could say something about a food I don’t agree with, or a product that I don’t agree with for washing my kids’ hair, and somebody gets offended. At that point I know I’ve crossed the line and I’m very open to apologizing and have done so. I also think that it makes you take a step back and sort of choose the hot topics.

Of course, there are some things that I just don’t discuss. You have to draw the line somewhere. It can be personal. I personally discuss my family and children. They’re too young to make a decision for themselves. My husband is fine with me talking about him; he active on Twitter as well. But there some things that we won’t discuss. For example, we won’t discuss some of the personal values that we have or opinions regarding politics. We don’t generally talk about politics and religion and those kinds of things. I find them ‘hot button’ topics. Those aren’t things that I’ll put out there. I’ve learned. I’ve had many a ‘DM’ [Direct Message tweet] where I’m getting smacked around behind the scenes for expressing opinions. There are some that I’ll stand up for, and others that I wouldn’t. I don’t really know how I would handle having other people tweeting for my brand. I don’t think I could handle it. It’s a control freak thing. I just scares me that somebody would come out there and just say something that I would find outrageously offensive. I would just shrivel and die.

Debbie Cornelius: We only have a couple of our girls who are on Twitter. Thus far we’re big on Facebook, which works for us. And they can connect with their customers. So I don’t really see how the franchisees can help being on Twitter at this point. Others talk a lot about that, so they’re going to try to convince me [laughter]. But that is always a concern of mine. A huge concern.

Alexandria Durrell: Yeah I like to keep that control.

Julie Cole: I fell that for me in a lot of ways I have kept my personality there without hitting really tough stuff. I think people sort of know how I feel about topics. But I’ll leave the really tough stuff to Annie [laughter]. I mean, I’ve got to sell labels, right? [Laughter.]

But it’s interesting. For our businesses which are online, we do have a wide reach. And for Stephanie Tanner, she has a local company. She has a local catering company. And many people would argue that say, for Mabel’s, because we’re not one company in that we can have customers all over the world. It’s worth engaging with someone in North Carolina a) because it’s fun, and b) because I might sell them some labels eventually. But that’s not the case for Stephanie. So some might argue that the local or regional businesses don’t get as much value out of Twitter or social media in general, for that matter. And I wonder, Stephie, how you feel about that? As a local business, how are you the same or different to sort of wider ranging businesses that have a wider audience.

Stephanie Tanner:  I find that most of the people who I follow tend to be local and I actually ‘do that thing’ where I’ll take a look at some people on Twitter in this room and I will poach their ‘KW Awesome Lists’ [Editor’s Note: The KW Awesome Foundation’s board of trustees each month hears pitches about ‘awesome ideas’ and then awards $1000 to the best idea. A second, $200 prize is awarded to the ‘people’s choice’ voted on by the audience.] and I start following people who I didn’t know were on Twitter but I now know that they’re local, and then hope that they follow me in return. I would say that the majority of the people who follow me are local. There is a huge Twitter presence here in Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge, etc.

Julie Cole: Yeah, we’ve noticed!  Do you follow people by their geographic area?

Stephanie Tanner: I do. I tend to follow a lot more local people. There are a couple of celebrities I follow too, like Rick Mercer. I’m going to see a taping of his show on Friday. Yeah, there are a couple of celebrities. Then there’s a lot of people throughout Ontario who I’ve met at different events. There are people—such as many of you people here today—who come to events here in KW. Thank you very much for making the trek! And we’ll follow them. But they know other people who are in KW and there is still that referral of business that way.

Julie Cole: It’s that the whole of social media brings word of mouth online, right? It’s a vehicle for that. Now, your business is only a year old, so this whole social media piece is fairly new to you, as it running a business and all the other fun stuff that goes along with that.

I met Debbie probably seven or eight years ago. It was around the first of Momentrepreneur’s Savvy Mom Entrepreneur of the Year Awards [http://momentrepreneur.savvymom.ca/]. Anyway, interestingly, I was feeling like, ‘Huh? Where did that Debbie go? Where is she?’ Because she seemed to disappear after that. And then Facebook was out, and Twitter was out, and I never saw Debbie. And then, finally, it seemed like fairly recently, up pops @WeePeegiesDebbi and I said, ‘There she is!’ So, Debbie, I’m fascinated. Why so late to the party? [Laughter.] And what was it that made you go, ‘Aha!’ What made you finally ‘drink the Kool-Aid’? [Laughter.]

Debbie Cornelius: Well put, Julie! Yeah, what a great community. This has been fabulous! What happened was, I started my business Wee Piggies 10 years ago and in terms of social media we didn’t have the tools we have now, but I did all of the same fundamentals. So we grew our franchise based on connecting with people and the exact same principles of social media, but we did not actually have the tools. It wasn’t until I read a book by Scott Stratton [UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging, 2010] and it was kind of my epiphany, and I went ‘Oh my gosh, these are all the strategies that I’ve used for the past 10 years.’ They work so well! In the 10 years, we’ve actually not paid a dime for advertising and for the first couple of years we were one of the fastest-growing franchises in Canada. It worked out really well.

So I suddenly said, ‘Okay, my franchisees should be using social media.’ During my ‘BS’ or ‘Before Scott’ era—

Julie Cole: Oh, his head’s not going to fit through this door! [Laughter.] Don’t retweet that, anyone!

Debbie Cornelius: In any case, during that first era, I sent all of my girls a message which read, ‘You should be on Facebook.’ So they said okay and they did their own thing. I really didn’t have the direction to give them, so it was really disastrous. Some people picked it up and did really well, but in the case of others, well, we got an email from one of our girls and—now consider that we have a tight community—so one email she sent to the other 58 girls read, ‘I’m literally on the floor, crying, because I can’t figure out Facebook.’ Oh my gosh. So that ‘aha’ moment happened and Scott Stratton’s book happened, and everything kind of came together for me. I said, ‘Absolutely! We need to be in social media! All of my franchisees need to be on Facebook.’ That’s when we implemented the whole plan. I got involved in Twitter. I saw Julie about two weeks ago and she asked me, ‘Where have you been?’ Well, I had been back at home running the business. It’s working really well.

Each of our franchisees has a Facebook page. We encourage them to go on. It’s actually written into our franchise agreement. We have three pages right in our contract stipulating that they must participate in social media.

Julie Cole: Did they put any pressure on you? Did you experience any demands made on you from the franchisees about social media? Have they asked you things like, ‘Dude, where are we?’ Or not so much?

Debbie Cornelius: They love the direction. And now that they have all of this direction, all of the people who were lost now love it. I get emails every day, saying ‘This is fabulous, thank you.’ I have a team of people who know what they’re doing. We do our own graphics and all the back-end stuff, and they make me the admin for their pages. So we have 58 people who have the same page, the same branding and then we still let them have a voice, and they still connect with the customers. So they’re loving it. Mind you, we still have a couple of franchisees who don’t believe in Facebook, so they give me a hard time, and they say, ‘We don’t allow our daughter on it. I’m not going to go on it for business.’ But, you know what? They are learning through the other franchisees that it costs next to nothing—you guys all know that—it’s more effective, and it’s giving them more time to get home with their kids, because that’s what our franchisees do: They work at home. So, it’s winning. It’s doing really well for them.

Julie Cole: Okay, let’s talk for a minute about balance. Alex and I were having a little laugh before we came out here, because we were sharing how many tweets we’ve both done. She tweets a lot. I’m at 7,000, she’s at something like 60,000. Now, how do you deal with your social media and also get your taxes filed in time? Do you closet tweet?

Alexandria Durrell: No, I don’t closet tweet. My husband is addicted. It doesn’t matter. In fact, when my kids get up in the morning, well, here’s a hot button you can tweet about: We ‘co-sleep,’ so when my children get up out of bed, we’re there too, and they bring my Blackberry. They come to my husband with his glasses, and my son says, ‘Eyes!’ and puts the glasses on his face and brings him his watch and brings me a Blackberry. Yes, I carry a Blackberry. I tweet a lot. I tweet personal things. I tweet business things. There’s definitely a problem. I find that if my Blackberry and I’m focusing on work, I actually have to physically restrain myself from paying attention to twitter at times.

Julie Cole: So you have put strategies in place so you can get other work done.

Alexandria Durrell: Absolutely. At times, it’s for fun. And it’s great. And when I’m sitting down and watching TV, I’ve always been the kind of person who does multiple things at a time, so for me, twitter works. Whether I’m at the computer and I send off a tweet while I’m filling out a document or something like that, it’s fine. I used to read and do other things at the same time. I used to watch TV and do cross-stitching or knitting and things like that. So, for me, having twitter available fills the void when I’m sitting and doing other things. I put it down when I’m sitting at the table with my kids. I put it down to play with my kids. I have to force myself to do those things. But it became an addition. So, yes, in my day, when I wake up, I may come on and say hello, and then I have a couple of hours when I work. Being the only person who does most things pretty much for Clippo, other than the manufacturing side—thank goodness I don’t have to do that because it would never get done—it has to be regimented into my day, because Twitter has become such a part of my life, as has Facebook-ing and being active on social media and talking to the girls on web boards and that kind of stuff. So, yes.

Julie Cole: And really, talking about community, many small business owners are working from home. They’re working alone, and without things like Twitter and Facebook, it can be a very, very isolating experience. So obviously, I’m preaching to the choir here.

Alexandria Durrell: I found that too. That’s a really interesting point itself, actually. The isolation of working at home. I’m sure it’s very difficult and I’m sure there’s a lot of people here who know that. When you run your own business and you’re at home, you are that sole person there, and I sit literally in my house, by myself, when the kids are at school or with a caregiver. I’m alone and I don’t have that boss telling me to do anything, and I don’t have that pressure where, if you don’t eat from 12:00 to 1:00 pm, something else isn’t going to happen. I answer to myself, so there’s nothing else stopping me from goofing off from an entire day, except that I wake up the next day and the work is still there waiting to be done. So, it gives me the feedback that I need too, when I’m talking about business, because I’ve sent stuff out and I’ve said, ‘You know, I can’t find a packaging solution and…’

Julie Cole: It’s absolutely brilliant. You get your research done in one tweet. Stephanie, what about you? You’ve got a catering company, so you’re on your feet chopping up mushrooms that you won’t eat, you know, so how do you fit in your screen time when you’re being so physically busy and demanding.

Stephanie Tanner:  I tend not to tweet when I’m in the kitchen, just for sanitary reasons. [Laughter.]

Julie Cole: Fire her! [Laughter.]

Stephanie Tanner: Every once in a while when I’m making sauces or chutneys or something, I’ll tweet little pictures of it, just to get your mouth watering. Twitter has definitely c hanged my life and sort of has taken over things since last year. My five year old was introducing me to another Mom, and said, ‘This is my Mommy. She works for Little Mushroom Catering—and Twitter.’ [Laughter.] Not quite, honey, but yeah. And so it’s been one of those things where Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all those other social media things in which I participate are now part of my daily routine. And so when I get up in the morning I check my tweets, I check my emails, and so forth. Throughout the day, if I’m standing in line at a grocery store, you can bet that I’m on twitter.

Julie Cole: All of you, thank you very much!

Clearly, as is the case with any communications technology, social media can be both a distraction and a secret weapon in the arsenal of any small business, depending on the skill and knowledge of those who work with it. Some small businesses seem to be more savvy with regards to social media than many global  bureaucratic behemoths, but even that is starting to change.

# # #

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

“Say something funny,” he demanded.

“Belly button,” said Bean.

“Come back tonight,” said the owner. Bean did, performed his act, “and I killed. I was the house comic for the next nine years.”

There are as many theories of comedy as there are theorists. Plato thought that the basis of comedy is “foolish false conceit” in that people fancy themselves as more virtuous than they are. Aristotle thought that comic attitude is “not vituperative but ludicrous.” Elder Olson defined katastasis as the equivalent in comedy of catharsis in tragedy, easing the mind to a pleasant, or euphoric, condition of freedom from desires, concerns and disturbing emotions.

At the “twitter + Comedy” presentation at the #140conf Tel Aviv 2010, comedians Benji Lovitt (@benjilovitt) and Charley Warady (@charleyw) spoke of the impact twitter has had on comedians and humanity’s comic sensibility.

“As I was telling Benji, this is everybody’s standup comedian’s nightmare—following a magician!” exclaimed Waraday. [Laughter] “Couldn’t they have had a guitar act before we started? There seems to be one theme in comedy and twitter that came to my mind. The definition of comedy is ‘tragedy plus time.’ Thanks to twitter that time ‘thing’ is becoming less and less. The question that I posed to Benji Lovitt is, ‘These days, how soon is too soon?’ You know, it’s an interesting concept because what immediately came to my mind was the recent incident with the flotilla. [Referring to the ‘Gaza flotilla raid,’ a military operation by Israel against six ships of the ‘Gaza Freedom Flotilla’ on May 31, 2010 in the Mediterranean Sea.] Benji got into trouble—he was bashed by tweeting… what was it, Benji?”

“Tortilla sounds a little like flotilla, so I tweeted, ‘Tortilla Grande: the newest entrée at Taco Bell,’” said Lovitt. “It’s funnier in America. But like everything in the world today, twitter is totally changing what it means to be in the media. In the States, Saturday Night Live for the last 35 years has been the ground-breaking, envelope-pushing show that gets the first crack at satire. And now there’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and funnyordie.com. So, twitter is the latest mechanism for every comedian to use to take a crack at something.”

Warady chimed in with, “So, in the case of the flotilla, I immediately I tweeted that it’s also the A&W Root Beer’s latest selection of their ‘Root Beer Float-illa.’” [No laughter.]

Lovitt knocked on the microphone with his hand, “Is this still on?” he asked the audience. [Some laughter.]

Warady went on anyway: “A friend of mine told me they had onboard entertainment on the flotilla—it was Lady Gaza.” [Laughter.] “And people kept tweeting ‘The Gaza Flotilla’ which is too long for a 140 character message, so I began referring to it as ‘The Gazilla.’” [Laughter.] He also tweeted, “I can’t believe we keep talking about this Flotilla thing when CELINE DION IS PREGNANT!”

“Twitter is really where every comedian is these days,” said Lovitt. “Has anybody here heard of Jim Gaffigan? He’s one of the biggest comedians in the States, and has a quarter of a million followers on twitter. Actually, he was here in Israel a couple of months ago and did a couple of shows in Jaffa and Jerusalem. He’s a devout Catholic. But basically, you don’t have to wait for comedians to come to your town, because they’re all on twitter. What’s great about it is that, well, if you’re a marathon runner you’re compelled to run. Whatever job you have, you’ve got to do the dirty work. But with twitter comedians can write and perform at the same time. It’s great. It’s really changing everything.”

“Twitter is forcing us to edit,” said Warady. “It forces comedians to do a ‘setup’ and a ‘punch’ all in 140 characters. For a person like me, I tend to stand on stage and tell long stories. For me to compact each one into 140 characters takes a lot of discipline. But another nice thing about twitter is that it is immediate in nature. You have your audience out there and you tweet to them and it’s just like doing a live show. There’s immediate gratification. We’re now determining our own self-worth by the number of our retweets. I’ll tweet something that I think is really funny, then I’ll wait two or three minutes, and they I’ll wonder why nobody has retweeted it—they obviously don’t understand genius. [Laughter.]”

“I did a show on the Fourth of July, and so I tweeted a lot of joke beforehand and used the best ones that were retweeted the most often,” said Lovitt.

“Even so, if you do that, by the time you actually do the show the material can become dated,” said Warady.

“Then there’s the guy Justin Halperin, who tweets about the stuff his old dad says around the house every day. He wrote it down and it became a bestselling book and then the first TV show inspired by a series of tweets,” said Lovitt.

“Twitter is so much a part of my life, I get news from it and every day I try to figure out how to make it funny,” said Warady. “Particularly here in Israel, where there’s no end to the material” [Laughter.] It used to be that a day or two would pass after a tragedy or major event before people would have the opportunity to comment on it. Now, in the age of twitter, people start making fun of it a lot sooner. As a comedian, you don’t want to be the last one. So what you wind up doing is hitting on it immediately. And there’s controversy involved. And that’s wonderful, because if everybody loved the things I tweet, then I’m not doing my job.”

Now that the era of the 140 Character One-Liner is upon us and everyone can “riff” among themselves, some professional comedians may find that they can boost or even completely rehabilitate their careers with twitter and other forms of social media.

Or just the opposite. On January 30, 2012, The Sun reported that two British travelers, Leigh Van Bryan, 26, and Emily Bunting, 24, were questioned for five hours and then barred from entering the U.S. after posts on twitter indicated they had plans to “destroy America” and “dig up Marilyn Monroe.”

Bryan told officials the term destroy was British slang for ‘party,’ and the reference to dig up Marilyn Monroe was a joke from the TV show Family Guy, but the two were reportedly held on suspicion of planning to ‘commit crimes,” spent 12 hours in separate holding cells and then were put on a flight home.

“We just wanted to have a good time on holiday. That was all Leigh meant in his tweets,” Bunting told The Sun.

# # #

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

James Surowiecki recently wrote in the The New Yorker (January 30, 2012) that, “the people who run America’s private-equity funds must be ruing the day Mitt Romney decided to run for President.” Conservative candidates—of all people—are portraying private-equity firms, those formerly shining showcases of capitalism such as Romney’s Bain Capital, as predatory, vulture-like creatures that use both their own money and borrowed money to acquire companies in leveraged buyouts, only to suck them dry of funds by having the companies borrow even more and then use that money to pay themselves huge “special dividends” or “management fees.” This enables them to recover their initial investment while keeping the same ownership stake, but sometimes they load the debt on to the point where the acquired companies fail to meet their obligations to creditors and so go out of business, thereby destroying jobs. The private-equity firms then blame the dissolution of the companies on unforeseen changes in economic conditions and “market forces.” (But of course by using this technique with borrowed money, the private-equity firms themselves make money no matter what.)

In his New Yorker piece, Surowiecki notes, “As if this weren’t galling enough, taxpayers are left on the hook. Interest payments on all that debt are tax-deductible; when pensions are dumped, a federal agency called the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation picks up the tab; and the money that the dealmakers earn is taxed at a much lower rate than normal income would be, thanks to the so-called ‘carried interest’ loophole. The money that Mitt Romney made when he was at Bain Capital was compensation for his (apparently excellent) work, but, instead of being taxed as income, it was taxed as a capital gain. It’s a very cozy arrangement.”

Of course, although there are leveraged buyout companies that do indeed suck their companies dry as described by Surowiecki, there are also private-equity companies that bestow upon their companies equity money—but not debt—and, in the best spirit of capitalism, assist them and nurture their growth. Thanks to lobbyist-inspired quirks in the U.S. tax system, however, an increasing number of private-equity firms find it easier to rely on what are essentially government subsidies, with many acquired companies suffering as a result.

As the political scene continues to devolve and the economic gap between the rich and everybody else widens, some amusing scenes from the plays of George Bernard Shaw come to mind…

From Shaw’s Major Barbara (1905):

BARBARA. Oh there you are, Mr. Shirley! [Between them] This is my father: I told you he was a Secularist, didn’t I? Perhaps you’ll be able to comfort one another.

UNDERSHAFT [startled] A Secularist! Not the least in the world: on the contrary, a confirmed mystic.

BARBARA. Sorry, I’m sure. By the way, papa, what is your religion—in case I have to introduce you again?

UNDERSHAFT. My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.

BARBARA. Then I’m afraid you and Mr. Shirley won’t be able to comfort one another after all. You’re not a Millionaire, are you, Peter?

SHIRLEY. No; and proud of it.

UNDERSHAFT [gravely] Poverty, my friend, is not a thing to be proud of.

SHIRLEY [angrily] Who made your millions for you? Me and my like. What’s kep us poor? Keepin you rich. I wouldn’t have your conscience, not for all your income.

UNDERSHAFT. I wouldn’t have your income, not for all your conscience, Mr. Shirley.

Ironically, all of the characters in Major Barbara, even the sardonic, arms merchant millionaire Andrew Undershaft, believe that the greatest crime against humanity is poverty. Undershaft’s views were later echoed by that flamboyant American minister, electronic evangelist, and self-professed heretic, Reverend Ike (1935–2009), who proclaimed that “the best thing you could do for the poor is not to be one of them.” For, as Undershaft says, it the power of money that moves governments and determines our destinies…

UNDERSHAFT. The government of your country. I am the government of your country: I, and Lazarus. Do you suppose that you and a half a dozen amateurs like you, sitting in a row in that foolish gabble shop, can govern Undershaft and Lazarus? No, my friend: you will do what pays us. You will make war when it suits us, and keep peace when it doesn’t. You will find out that trade requires certain measures when we have decided on those measures. When I want anything to keep my dividends up, you will discover that my want is a national need. When other people want something to keep my dividends down, you will call out the police and military. And in return you shall have the support and applause of my newspapers, and the delight of imagining that you are a great statesman. Government of your country! Be off with you, my boy, and play with your caucuses and leading articles and historic parties and great leaders and burning questions and the rest of your toys. I am going back to my counting house to pay the piper and call the tune….

And from Shaw’s Heartbreak House (1919):

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You frequent picture palaces.

MANGAN. Perhaps I do. Who told you?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Talk like a man, not like a movie. You mean that you make a hundred thousand a year.

MANGAN. I don’t boast. But when I meet a man that makes a hundred thousand a year, I take off my hat to that man, and stretch out my hand to him and call him brother.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Then you also make a hundred thousand a year, hey?

MANGAN. No. I can’t say that. Fifty thousand, perhaps.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. His half brother only.

These days, of course, the “99 percent” of us are “poor relations,” increasingly distant from the sources of economic and political control. With social media reinventing social activism, however, the State of NOW and the 140 Characters Conferences can make voices heard and bring about grass-roots-powered change.

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

Berry noticed the blog posting because he had used the term teacherpreneur himself—his article, “Teacherpreneurs: A More Powerful Vision for the Teaching Profession” appeared in the March 2011 issue of Phi Delta Kappan. The article was adapted from the book (and initiative) Teaching 2030, where Barnett introduces the works of a team of a dozen innovative educators and their thoughts on the future of teaching. This “TeacherSolutions 2030 Team” includes Jennifer Barnett (Alabama), Kilian Betlach (California), Shannon C’de Baca (Iowa), Susie Highley (Indiana), John M. Holland (Virginia), Carrie J. Kamm (Illinois), Renee Moore (Mississippi), Cindi Rigsbee (North Carolina), Ariel Sacks (New York), Emily Vickery (Florida), Jose Vilson (New York) and Laurie Wasserman (Massachusetts).

Given that, “Better teaching helps all students achieve more, it gives us a foundation to build a school system worthy of American Ideals,” CTQ and Teaching 2030 want to elevate the voices of those accomplished individuals working on the front lines of the teaching profession.

At this point, the cynic whispers in one’s ear that American ideals are incessantly jeopardized by two of the more base aspects of human nature; to wit, greed and hypocrisy, and that anyone who has read Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life, recognizes the timeless bemoaning of businessmen and political candidates, echoing down to the present day, for more workers with a “practical education” suited to their capitalism-run-amok, China-wannabe needs.

Despite today’s somewhat bleak and menacing social and cultural background, the CTQ and Teaching2030, with its financial support from MetLife, boldly professes ideas for overhauling the sorry mess of American education, describing how the teaching/learning experience should appear in the year 2030, and what we can do now (in a sort of “means-ends analysis”) to get there.

One thing that critics and so-called reformers of education forget is how students themselves have changed, thanks in great part to technology. First, there is the “Googled Learner.” In the past, the salesmen from Encyclopedia Britannica or World Book would terrify parents into purchasing copies of their respective multi-volume encyclopedias, instilling the belief that their children’s whole future was at stake. Today, of course, there is no physical limit to what can be stored on the web, and search engines such as Google and Bing can bring it all up for scrutiny.

Second, in the more mobile, cosmopolitan world of 2030, 40 percent of students will be “second language learners.” Third, students will have to compete for jobs in a global marketplace, with communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creative problem solving as the new “basics.” Fourth, digital tools will be used to enable students to monitor their own learning, even if it’s on an informal 24×7 basis. Sophisticated tools will be deployed to determine whether students meet academic standards, and they’ll tweak and “fine tune” instruction if things go awry. Fifth and finally, teaching will have to be connected to a broad spectrum of community needs. Increasing economic turmoil creates instabilities in families and thus in the greater society, which means that health and social services will probably merge in some way with academics.

Barnett Berry and his Teaching 2030 team would like teaching to be “a well-compensated professional career with differentiated pathways into the classroom, but with guarantees that every child has a well-prepared team of educators, led by the most accomplished teachers whose expertise is spread in and out of cyberspace.” Moreover, they believe America can muster “a leadership force of 600,000 ‘teacherpreneurs,’” which they define as “classroom experts who continue to teach students regularly while also serving as teacher educators, policy researchers, community organizers, and trustees of their profession,” and who will “blur the lines of distinction between those who teach in schools and those who lead them.” It’s quite an ambitious proposal. Detractors reading this are now no doubt muttering that it’s a great idea to implement in a “creeping socialist” place—you know, those crazy places where teachers are respected for what they do rather than how much they earn.

Whether teachers can meet the educational demands of the 21^st Century remains to be seen. America, unlike many of its competitors, needs to adjust its priorities in many areas, not just education. But education is fundamental in that it enables the populace to determine what priorities need to be adjusted and why. Perhaps Barnett Berry and his team of uber-educators are the people to accomplish all this. We wish them the best of luck.

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

Indeed, not just the public but a good portion of the mentalist community as well are completely unaware of Manor’s many contributions to the art—that is, classic tricks actually invented by Manor himself. Take “The Invisible Touch,” for example,  which he devised in 1987, now performed worldwide by the world’s top talent. As its name implies, a volunteer is brought on stage and, in plain sight of the audience, feels the mentalist touching him or her lightly, and yet one can see that the magician’s hands are nowhere near the person.

At his presentation at 140conf Tel Aviv 2011, “Magic and the Real-time Web,” Manor revealed that he had started out with a university education in mathematics and computer science. “There is a strong connection between math and magic, and if you want to be a good magician, you really need to know math,” intoned Manor. “When I fly around the world, because I learned computer science I can talk like an engineer. I will stand in a trade show booth of a big company like Oracle, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft or smaller companies such as SolarEdge, or mid-size such as Adobe, and I will attract people by doing a presentation which has some magic inside it. So people have fun and get the message too.”

“A fly a lot,” said Manor. “In this month alone, I was in Europe, in Rome, England, the United States, Australia, and so forth.”

“Despite my travels, I used to have only five good friends,” said Manor. “But thanks to Jeff Pulver I got on Facebook and I now have many more.”

Manor did one trick involving mathematics. First a person in the audience picked a card, the 2 of Diamonds. Then Manor  displayed the name “Pulver” on the screen:

Manor then selected a person out of the audience and asked them to think of a four digit number. “Now multiply it by 7,206,” said Manor, “divide it by any three digit number. Now multiply it by a two digit number, now divide it again by a three digit number. So what is the result? Ah, it’s .0071312.”

With that, he turned the image on the screen upside down to reveal the number written backwards (Hebrew style) and then flashed an image of him holding a large version of the 2 of Diamonds card that had obviously been taken beforehand:

He also mentioned, amusingly that “Two plus 131 plus seven equals 140, the name of this 140 Characters Conference.”

Psychologists are just beginning to explore experimentally the techniques used by magicians: Psychological (not just physical) misdirection, cognitive illusions (e.g. since our minds think ahead of events, a coin can be made to vanish after it is apparently passed from one hand to the other, when it has in fact been palmed), and “mental forcing” where a volunteer believes that they have a free choice in (for example) picking a card from all 52 cards, but in fact they have been influenced into making a particular, pre-arranged selection.

Today, vision scientists study visual art and illusions to figure out the human visual system’s internal workings, and cognitive scientists now study the cognitive illusions of magicians and mentalists to elucidate the foundations of human cognition.

In medieval and ancient times, of course, the clergy would simply accuse a magician (or any clever inventive fellow, for that matter) of being an authentic supernatural sorcerer in league with the devil, and burn him or her at the stake. In his 1961 book, Profiles of the Future, Arthur C. Clark wrote that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Back in medieval times, however, any science could be construed as magic. As the late Joshua Trachtenberg wrote in his great book-length elaboration of his Ph.D. thesis, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion (1939), even physicians were not immune, particularly non-Christian ones:

In the field of medicine in particular was the reputed Jewish magical skill called upon to perform miracles. According to the popular view, demons and magic were often responsible for disease, and medicine was therefore the legitimate province of the sorcerer. Jewish physicians, though by no means free from the general superstitious attitude, were among the foremost representatives of a scientific medicine in the Germanic lands. Their wide knowledge of languages, the availability of Arabic-Greek medical works in Hebrew translation, their propensity for travel and study abroad, their freedom from the Church-fostered superstition of miraculous cures, relics, and the like, these often conspired to make of them more effective practitioners than their non-Jewish competitors. Paradoxically, their scientific training, such as it was, made them superior magicians in the popular view, and every triumph of medical science enhanced the Jew’s reputation for sorcery.

In those days it was, in the words of the old adage, “smarter to be lucky than lucky to be smart.”

Now, however, smart fellows with great powers of observation such as Lior Manor both entertain and inform us.

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