Before Shaq was too legit for ghost tweets, the Admiral was 2 Legit 2 Quit.It's somehow fitting that I agree with Gawker, which I loathe for its pure persona prurience, in the debate over twitter-ghosts. In Valleywag, Owen Thomas says: That's the grand irony of Twitter: Even the real people on the service are fake. They are their own simulacra. No one actually lives their life 140 characters at a time. What we do is turn ourselves into works of fiction. Who's real? Who's not? Who cares? Guy Kawasaki says in an interview: "Why does it matter who is doing the tweeting? Either the content is good or not good. I'd rather follow a smart intern tweeting for a CEO than an dumb CEO tweeting for himself or herself." Allison Fine, along with a kind nod to me, makes a good point about the reciprocity of trust in her post…

Twee cheers for Ethan Zuckerman, for articulating my same reservations about Sunlight's "twobbying" campaign more clearly than I did. Just because we have the means to open a firehose with twitter or email, doesn't mean that will unlock the true or most enduring power of these tools. Yes, they got Boxer and Claire McCaskill (see 3/11 9:00 pm) to tweet their support for S. 482. But we need to remember that tools don't shape our opportunities, context does. MoveOn used the forward button to turn the Internet into a political engine, but online organizing has moved on. Let's learn faster. Ethan says: "Maybe the lesson here is that the easiest, most straightforward ways to use these tools will inevitably descend into spam. Or that we should look for less obvious, more participatory ways to use the tools." Also ... McCaskill's tweets are really fun (get with it, Boxer!). And a…

My talented colleague Kathryn Joyce has released her book Quiverfull, on the patriarchy movement. Check out the book, and her article in Salon:In 1985, homeschooling leader Mary Pride wrote a foundational text for Quiverfull, "The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality." The book argued that family planning is a slippery slope, creating a “contraceptive mentality” that leads to abortion, and that feminism is incompatible with Christianity. As an antidote, Pride told Christians to reject women's liberation in exchange for the principles of submissive wifehood and prolific stay-at-home motherhood. The core ideology was a direct contradiction of Roe v. Wade: Women's bodies and lives did not belong to them, but to God and his plans for Christian revival.