Lions, Tigers and Studies, Oh My
Here at Plugged In we love statistics and studies. In our daily cultural research and media reviews, we’re constantly plucking out quotes and figures from one study or another to back up a point of view or maybe get people thinking. Why, what would morning be in the Plugged In team without a nicely rounded […]
The (No) Paper Trail
As you all know, the world of presidential politics is heating up and will be getting incrementally toastier in the next 18 months. Candidates are vying for attention, and media outlets and opposing campaigns are digging around, trying to find out whether candidate X ever advocated banning drinking water or some silly thing. Anyway, I […]
Heroes in the Tweets
OK, I’ll admit it, I haven’t always been the most vocal supporter of the wonders of social networking. In fact, I was recently contemplating its similarities to the biblical plagues of Egypt—something in the neighborhood of the nagging flies of Facebook and the irritating boils of celebrity tweets. But my faith in the goodness of […]
Techin’ in the Boys Room
I remember the day—many moons back when I was in high school—when the school administration announced that they were going to sanction a certain outdoor spot behind the school as a “smoking area.” Now, not being a smoker, it didn’t really matter much to me. (I mean, my parents were smokers and at home I […]
Getting Your 15 Minutes of Owl
So you’ve given up on your dream of being the next web-discovered pop phenom. And you’ve wisely backed away from trying to wow ’em with some kind of set-yourself-on-fire-and-jump-off-the-roof YouTube vid. But fear not, there are still plenty of ways to display your … well, let’s call it creativity, and get that promised 15 minutes […]
You See This Grimace, Boy?
Since I last blogged about the hacking outrage that allegedly took place in the backrooms of the News of the World newspaper, layers of the scandalous story have continued to be peeled back like a rather oily onion skin. Authorities now suspect that not only were the cell phone messages of celebrities, politicians and other […]
Who’s Listening to Your Voicemail?
For some time now, reporters, writers and the many scribes of our day have been nervously worrying over the changing face, and apparent declining market share, of journalism. The dreaded Internet has been sucking the air out of media’s sails, especially on the print side. And a few years back the biz buzz was that […]
The Face of Things to Come
We Americans have had our share of entertaining pretenders. From yesteryear’s The Monkees to Disney’s Lemonade Mouth, there have been plenty of producer-created bands and groups designed to charm us with their pretty faces and captivate us with well-turned tunes (even when, in some cases, they weren’t even singing). But even our best crowd-pleasing Svengalis […]
A Gunman’s Facebook Status
In one of the more bizarre examples of social networking give and take, an armed 36-year-old guy named Jason Valdez recently held a woman hostage at a Utah motel in a 16-hour standoff with police … while regularly updating his Facebook status. “I’m currently in a standoff … kinda ugly, but ready for whatever,” Valdez […]
The Difference a Teen Mom Makes
Recently, a new report called “The Millennials, Religion, and Abortion Survey” was released by the Public Religion Research Institute. It’s being characterized as one of the largest surveys ever to measure the relationships between people’s moral and spiritual values and their views on abortion. In addition to correlating young people’s views on abortion with demographic […]