President Obama to Graduates: “Look, Don’t Be Tweeting Your Facebooks All Day”

Yesterday President Obama gave the commencement address at Hampton University and made a somewhat controversial statement if you are an Apple fanboy. Being an Apple fanboy… the most likely way to get beat up as an adult. Here’s an excerpt of his comments:

“You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank all that high on the truth meter. With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.”

I guess I can see what he means about information being a distraction. Look at twitter, for example. I follow roughly 190 people on twitter (they all like it rough), and I prefer not to miss anything. So I waste a significant portion of time keeping up with people’s sleeping/meal habits and other over-tweeting. Some people have viewed the President’s comments as an attack on new media (i.e. blogs, podcasts), but I view it much more simply. He’s a little old. I know he uses a Blackberry and he is the first president to appoint a C.I.O. (which I never got a call back for an interview for that position- your loss), but he’s still old. He just happens to have been turned on to Blackberry by someone. It’s kind of like when your parents or grandparents eventually sign up for Facebook and all of the hot girls I am friends with have to hide all of their slutty drinking pictures. It’s terrible, really.
The decentralization of information is not a bad thing, though. The fact that information doesn’t only come from stuffy news rooms anymore would be something I would be scared of, though, especially if I had things to hide. The free flowing nature of information means it is harder to control. Politicians can’t call their old college buddy at the Post and ask for them to suppress a story for 24 hours while they set up for damage control because they know as soon as Huffington Post or a similar outfit gets wind of the story they will go with it.

[Newser]

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