Good Morning Internet

I know what you’re won­der­ing: Is the new year going to be pro­nounced “twenty-ten” or “two-thousand ten”? The cor­rect answer is “twenty-ten”. In this episode, I explain why. Feel free to bestow this wis­dom on your friends and fam­ily as mil­i­tantly as you’d like over the com­ing months. Refuse to speak to them until they get it right if you must.

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The Gavin Show is back! In this shaky first episode, I do a brief overview of the events 2009 brought upon me. Some were great, some were awful. The con­sen­sus? 2009 was a stinker. 2010 starts on Fri­day, and not a moment too soon! There are lots of things to look for­ward to. Another year of grad school, cool events all over the coun­try, great friends to hang out with, and a year of podcasting!

So here’s to you, 2009. Now get out of here.

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Here’s a short video I made for the last project in my “Cre­ativ­ity: Ways of See­ing” class, part of my Cre­ative Writ­ing and Pub­lish­ing Arts MFA at the Uni­ver­sity of Bal­ti­more. I made all the video and music. Part of the assign­ment was to make our project pub­lic, what­ever it is we did. So, here it is!

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First of all, Mash­able and TechCrunch are too busy los­ing touch and being need­lessly judg­men­tal, so I’ll say what they both should have said: Con­grats, Dana and Tracy!

On Novem­ber, 21st, fel­low Mary­lan­ders Dana Hanna and his bride Tracy got mar­ried. At the alter, he whipped out his cell and updated his Face­book sta­tus to “Mar­ried” and blasted out a quick tweet about get­ting hitched. He handed his wife her cell and she got in on the fun, too. Dana and the min­is­ter were the only ones in on it, so it was a big sur­prise for every­one in atten­dance.

Okay, it’s geeky, but it’s also a sweet ges­ture. His tweet reads, “Stand­ing at the altar with @Tra­cy­Page where just a sec­ond ago, she became my wife! Gotta go, time to kiss my bride. #wed­ding­day” See? Sweet.

Yes­ter­day, tech blog­ger and semi-professional dick Michael Arring­ton shared the YouTube video in an arti­cle with the snarky title, “Really?” Com­menters chimed in with, “Nerds!” and, “Weirdo nerds!“

Mashable’s cov­er­age is also sus­pect. Jen­nifer Van Grove writes, “While all of us at Mash­able are very avid Twit­ter­ers and Face­book users, updat­ing our sta­tus at the altar might fall out­side our com­fort zone.” You’ve got to be kid­ding me. You guys make a liv­ing cov­er­ing every aspect of social media, and the unique and fun ways in which peo­ple take advan­tage of them. When did you decide you were qual­i­fied to make judge­ment calls?

Some of the com­ments on Mash­able are really harsh. “If I were her, I would have smacked him. That’s also so rude to their priest and the guests in atten­dance.” As noted above, the min­is­ter was in on it.

Another com­menter writes, com­pletely with­out irony, “There are some ethics that an intel­li­gent and well-mannered per­son should respect. The per­son in the video is an obsessed, social net­work­ing addict.” Yes some­one wrote that com­ment on a blog that focuses on social media and social net­work­ing in order to call some­one else a “social net­work­ing addict.” Pre­cious.

There seems to be a sub­text of reli­gious out­rage and enti­tle­ment here. A Mash­able com­menter just can’t let it go, and posts the same re-worded com­ment almost a dozen times. “Houses of God aka churches, are not places in which in the mid­dle of ‘sacred cer­e­monies’ you pop out your mobile phone and tweet or Face­book about it.” What is this, the six­teenth cen­tury?

Hanna has also caught some seri­ous heat on Twit­ter. I’m scratch­ing my head about how this can be inter­preted as any­thing but a fun, über-geeky stunt.

So let me get all of this straight. Michael Arring­ton and Jen­nifer Van Grove, peo­ple who make their liveli­hoods writ­ing about the nerdi­est of nerdy tech news, along with their nerdi­est of read­ers who are nerdy enough to post nerdy com­ments on their nerdy posts have the audac­ity to sud­denly look down on a nerdy stunt? And the peo­ple who learned about it on sites like Twit­ter, Face­book, and YouTube are declar­ing this some­how out of bounds? Really?

It’s insane what peo­ple choose to get worked up about.

Hanna puts it best in a tweet he posted last night. “To all the crit­i­ciz­ers of my video out there ques­tion­ing my san­ity: You don’t get it. I was hav­ing fun at MY wed­ding! Loosen up, have fun!“

Word.

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