However you come out on the politics of the “to-fund or not-to-fund” ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) issue, the radical change in House and Senate’s support for funding of the organization (or defunding as the case may be) is an excellent example of the impact of new media technologies. Information travels across new media distribution channels out of the control of mass media, and corporate and government agendas. In this case, according to Michael Barone of the Washington Examiner, new media sources played a significant role in forcing Washington to address the ACORN issue. He writes: Democrats voted 172-75 to defund ACORN; Republicans voted 173-0 to do so. This would not have occurred but for http://biggovernment.com/ the Big Government videos of ACORN employees encouraging tax evasion and prostitution. "Mainstream media" studiously ignored this big, big story, because it put Obama's political allies in ACORN in a bad light--such an … [Read more...]
The Positive Psychology Of Entrepreneurship
A version of this post appeared in my blog Positively Media on Psychology Today. There's a lot of buzz about entrepreneurship right now. This is especially obvious if you hang out on LinkedIn, Twitter, or cruise the Ning social networks. It is not surprising, given the amount of people looking for jobs due to cutbacks and restructuring and a few bankruptcies thrown in for good measure. So far, the government plans to promote economic growth have tried to stimulate a lot of things, but stimulating entrepreneurs doesn't seem to be one of them. It's important to encourage entrepreneurship and not just for economic reasons. Entrepreneurship is the ultimate exercise in developing the attributes that we know from positive psychology to be essential to having a good life: self-competence, optimism, engagement, and resilience. I'm against government stimulus the way it's usually done for the same reasons that I'm for entrepreneurship. Sending people checks in the mail may give them … [Read more...]
