Archives

As Democratic leaders work to unite the party faithful behind presumptive nominee Barack Obama, some local party loyalists who backed Hillary Clinton insist they won’t.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the sexual revolution took America – and the world – by storm. Sex became an act of empowerment, liberation, and personal choice.

Sex historian Dagmar Herzog says those advances have been reversed in recent decades. She argues that the religious Right has taken advantage of our anxieties about sex and redirected the national conversation about sex with messages of shame, abstinence, and monogamous, heterosexual relationships as the norm.

Liberals played their part too, standing by silently as the rhetoric of sexual choice is co-opted by political rhetoric.

Herzog's new book is "Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics." She has taught the history of sexuality for more than a decade, but she tells Word of Mouth that reading right-wing evangelical pronouncements on sex written since the mid-90s left her profoundly shaken.

Remember those heady days of the Internet boom, when start-ups with a big idea, a kicky name and a loft full of programmers could land millions in venture capital just for the chance of making money? Those days are over, with millions of dollars on paper gained and lost.

Now, we’re in the Web 2.0 era, when Internet platforms allow users to create and modify each others work. Social networking is one of the most popular applications of Web 2.0 and is the fastest growing activity on the Web. Networks like Facebook and MySpace are struggling with the old dilemma: how to turn users into dollars.

Josh Bernoff is author of "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies." He’s vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, and joins Word of Mouth to talk about how companies can make money on social networking sites, where people prefer to interact rather than absorb.

(Photo by premiardiego)