March 8, 2009 archive

Note to Dharmaniacs: This is obviously directed towards the Daily Kos community, but the theories and principles apply everywhere and to all walks of life.

The Obama Code is both moral and linguistic at once.  The President is using his enormous skills as a communicator to express a moral system.

For supporters of the President, it is crucial to understand the Code in order to talk overtly about the old values our new president is communicating. It is necessary because tens of millions of Americans-both conservatives and progressives-don’t yet perceive the vital sea change that Obama is bringing about.

The Obama Code by George Lakoff

I think it is safe to say that everyone here admires or at least respects Barack Obama. Among the many reasons there are to do so, none stands out as much as the central one. He is effective. His approach, tactics and methods, above all considerations of style or personal charm…..work.

And a bigger part of that than can be measured in the fact that the Code that Lakoff talks about …works. It is a form of “walking your talk.” It is communicating who you are and what you stand for not just in what you say, but in how you say it as well.

Web-savvy Obama ‘rarely’ reads blogs, says they’re misleading

Jeremy Gantz, RawStory, Sunday March 8, 2009

Although he owes his current job in part to the Internet’s unique networking and communications tools – and his campaign’s unprecedented ability to raise money online – President Obama “rarely” reads blogs because he considers some of them misleading and simplistic.

The comment, made during a wide-ranging New York Times interview aboard Air Force One, may surprise those who follow  WhiteHouse.gov’s own blog or those who followed his transition team’s blog.

Asked about his news consumption habits at the end of the interview, during which he acknowledged that the United States is not winning the war in Afghanistan, Obama said he “rarely reads blogs,” but reads newspapers – in their paper form – and weekly news magazines.

“[P]art of the reason we don’t spend a lot of time looking at blogs is because if you haven’t looked at it very carefully then you may be under the impression that somehow there’s a clean answer one way or another – well, you just nationalize all the banks, or you just leave them alone and they’ll be fine, or this or that or the other,” Obama said. “The truth is this is a very complex set of problems and bad decisions can result in huge taxpayer expenditures and poor results.”

Although bloggers at prominent progressive websites such as Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo are likely annoyed by his remarks, Obama may have a good excuse as to why he isn’t keeping tabs on their posts: He’s busy reading government briefings.

A full transcript of the interview can be found here.

Despite the Obama campaign’s web-savvy skills, WhiteHouse.gov – which also has its own YouTube channel – has run into a few snags since January’s inauguration. The website “has been overwhelmed by challenges that staffers did not foresee and technological problems they have yet to solve,” the Washington Post reported Monday. Obama would like to send out mass updates via email and text messages, but the White House does not have the technology in place to do so, according to the newspaper.

Since his election in November, it’s become a near cliche to note that Obama has harnessed the Internet to speak directly to Americans just as Franklin D. Roosevelt used radio and John F. Kennedy utilized television. Clearly, Obama – famously addicted to his web-enabled BlackBerry – has used and will continue to use the Internet to reach an increasingly wired nation.

What’s less clear, however, is how the Internet is influencing Obama’s governing decisions. If his lack of respect for blogs is any indication, the president’s use of the Internet would appear to be more about transmitting his own messages than receiving others’. He may have been the first president to ask an online reporter a question when he called on the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein in early February, but that doesn’t mean he’s visiting the web-only news and opinion site to read what Stein wrote.

I’ve always been terrible at science – something I blame on my 10th grade biology teacher (that’s a whole long boring story). But recently I’ve been pretty intrigued by what we’re learning about how the brain works. It could be that I have just enough knowledge to be dangerous because I pretty much stick to layman’s interpretations of this information rather than digging in to the actual science. But I’m more interested in the overview anyway.

The whole distinction between how our left and right brains work is the part that has most fascinated me. From the amazing speech that Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor (video link) gave at a TED conference as well as other sources, I’ve learned that the right brain is responsible for taking in all of the stimuli that we gather from our senses. And the left brain is responsible for sorting and naming so that we can make sense of it all.

The tricky part is that our senses and our right brains take in way more stimuli than we can sort. So the left brain has to develop some short-cuts to help us with that. One of the ways it does this is by sorting things into patterns that it has seen before. These short-cuts are what I’m calling “invisible thinking.” Our brains place incoming stimuli into previously developed patterns so that we don’t have to spend so much time analyzing and sorting through the myriads of data that we take in. Of course, the problem with this is that when we want to change our invisible thinking, that can be difficult to do unless we examine the patterns we’ve incorporated.