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Bulldozed!

Administrator — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:49:57 +0000

People are starting to get desperate and angry at what they perceive to be inequalities in the system and that anger is beginning to manifest itself in action.

Terry Hoskins of Moscow (OH) owed $160,000 on his $350,000 home when the RiverHills Bank began foreclosure proceedings on his house. He recently received a $170,000 offer from someone to pay off the house, but the bank refused the offer, saying it could get more money selling the home in foreclosure. About a month ago, Hoskins used a bulldozer to level the home he had built, saying he did it to “make the banks think twice before they try to take someone’s home, and if they are going to take it wrongly, the end result will be them tearing their house down like I did mine.” (WLWT, 2/19/10)

Thankfully, Hoskins didn’t go the route of A. Joseph Stack III, who flew his plane into an office building housing IRS workers, partly because of the “unthinkable atrocities” committed by big business and the government bailouts that followed, but the take away is similar. Some people are angry and taking what they perceive to be the serving of justice into their own hands.

Eric Zavolinsky

Twitter Dee, Twitter Dum, Twitter Old, Twitter Young

Administrator — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:14:54 +0000

For teens, a sense of support and connectedness is paramount to active digital lives.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project reported that only 8 percent of online teens have embraced Twitter. This contrasts with the overall increase in social network use of those aged 12-17 that went from 55 percent in 2006 to 65 percent in 2008 to 73 percent today. A study from FJ Metrics found that Twitters growth has slowed and only 17 percent of users updated their account in December – an all time low. (Dallas Morning News, 2/5/10; Brandweek, 2/8/10)

One 17-year-old in the article said “teenagers like to talk, and 140 characters are just not enough”. It appears that community is critically important to this cohort and that the mass “shout out” is not what many teens are looking for in their digital experience.

Charles Hess

Earthshaking?

Administrator — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:17:17 +0000

In the past two weeks, more than 100 small earthquakes have hit Yellowstone National Park, putting seismologists on alert. During January, not only was Haiti hit by a devastating earthquake with significant tremors around the region, but the Solomon Islands suffered a tsunami wave, triggered by an earthquake (7.2 on the Richter scale) in the Pacific Ocean off Papua New Guinea. Also in January, the Sichuan province of China – which is still recovering from a devastating May 2008 earthquake (8.0) – was hit by an earthquake (5.2). An earthquake (5.1) in Tajikistan left 20,000 people homeless and another quake (5.1) off the coast of Guatemala caused no major damage on the mainland but sent people scurrying from their homes. (New York Times, 1/19/10 and 2/1/10; Australia Network News, 1/31/10; New Scientist, 1/9/10; Guardian Weekly, 1/8/10)

Is there a bigger story here?

Ken Hey