I missed it on TV, but thanks to Oliver Willis not the site: Frontline explores the child welfare system.
Monthly Archives: February 2003
Is Net Surfing A Dying Sport?
… “People are treating the Web like a library and going to the card catalog rather than searching through all the books,”
…”After a while you get tired of flipping through the channels and just turn to the programs you like,” he said.
Read the rest over at Yahoo!.
Semi-related: Clay Shirky’s Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, Dave Winer’s and Shelley Powers’s. responses. Shelley’s post is home to a great conversation and I highly recommend it. Jason Kottke adds some good linkage as well.
Birds of a feather flock virtually together, that’s what I always say 🙂
In the end, I think Mark Pilgrim says it best, “All the friendships I?ve developed in the past 2 years?starting long before I was in the Technorati Top 10?grew out of connections I made through writing this weblog and reading others. This month I?ll get 1 million hits on my weblog, and have lunch with 10 friends I met through my weblog. Guess which I care about more.”
Well damn straight.
Chloe in a related BlogRoots thread says,
“What I wonder is why this is being treated as “news”…I’ve noticed this pattern in society from the time I started pre-school.”
Yep, she’s absolutely right. This isn’t news. It’s the same old news. In fact – I wrote a piece, some may recall, a long, long, long time ago, about the power of the link and how some weblogs actually wield more “power” then others. This is old news. If I posted about it – it must be old news!
Information technology usually doesn’t change what we do – just how we do it.
A question though – without idealists like Shelley and Dave (even if they are in the top 20) – would we end up with, instead of an 80/20 “power” (we need a better word) distribution, a 95/5? Think about it. And the play goes on…
Update: They are having a good debate at Slashdot on the Clay Shirky piece.
Young, Jobless, Hopeless
I remember feeling those those portrayed in this NYTimes article. I remember it all too well. Quote:
…Nationwide, according to a new study by a team from Northeastern University in Boston, the figure is a staggering 5.5 million and growing.
This army of undereducated, jobless young people, disconnected in most instances from society’s mainstream, is restless and unhappy, and poses a severe long-term threat to the nation’s well-being on many fronts.
…It’s an article of faith among politicians and members of the media that the recession we continue to experience is a mild one. But it has hit broad sections of the nation’s young people with a ferocity that has left many of them stunned.
…joblessness among out-of-school youths between 16 and 24 had surged by 12 percent since the year 2000. Washington’s mindless response to this burgeoning crisis has been to slash ? and in some cases eliminate ? the few struggling programs aimed at bolstering youth employment and training.
Education and career decisions made during the late teens and early 20’s are crucial to the lifetime employment and earnings prospects of an individual. Those who do not do well during this period seldom catch up to the rest of the population.
…Whether boys or girls, men or women, those who were interviewed seemed for the most part already defeated. They did not talk about finding the perfect job. They did not talk about being in love and eventually marrying and raising a family. They did not express a desire to someday own their own home.
There was, to tell the truth, a remarkable absence of positive comments and emotions of any kind. There was a widespread sense of frustration, and some anger. But mostly there was just sadness.
There are some good signs however.
We’ve Changed
Two stories to make sense of our reaction to Columbia:
Inquirer: John Grogan: 9/11 altered our view of tragedy
Inquirer: Shuttle disaster leaves some teens unmoved
A MetaFilter thread asks will there be songs written about Columbia?
A Nation of Voyeurs
What does how we use Google say about us?
Speaking of big shifts going on…
“The demographic trends do not favor one-size-fits-all news products,” said Peter Francese, founder of American Demographics magazine, which tracks population changes. “There isn’t one community to serve. It’s gone. … It’s now a matter of serving niches rather than trying to be all things to all people,” he said.
Read the rest in Why Won’t Johnny Read?.
OLGA’s in trouble (yet again!)
Mark shares that OLGA.net is being threatened by legal action (yet again). They’ve dodged many bullets in the past, but in this legal environment, this could be the end.
You’ve probably improved your guitar playing by using tablature from OLGA. Make a donation to help support their legality.
Speaking of Rock and activism: Salon has a story on Audioslave’s Tom Morello and System of a Down’s Serj Tankian and their thoughts about what’s going on.
Update: Mark corrects a couple of my misunderstandings in this postings comments. Nevertheless, it’s still a good idea to donate to assist Olga.
Hey – where’d my links go!?!
I didn’t de-link anybody 🙂 I moved my blogroll to it’s own page. This will give me a little more space to try a few neat automated services if I get the urge. The first thing I’m going to do is link to each of your RSS feeds.
What Nielsen is to TV ratings, BigChampagne is to file swapping
I’ve heard about them on NPR before but never investigated. BigChampagne is a very interesting service.
“the Internet is counterproductive to peace”
Hey it’s not me, it’s John Perry Barlow saying that in a recent interview. He precedes this by saying, “There are a million virtual streetcorners with a million lonely pamphleteers on them, all of them decrying the war and not actually coming together in any organized fashion to oppose it. It strikes me that existing political institutions — whether it’s the administration or Congress or large corporations — only respond to other institutions. I don’t care how many individuals you have marching in the streets, they’re not going to pay attention until there’s a leader for those individuals who can come forward and say I represent the organization of those individuals and we’re going to amass the necessary money and votes to kick you the hell out of office. Then they pay attention. But not until. And so right at the moment it would strike me that the Internet is counterproductive to peace.”
Wow! Great quote!
John Perry Barlow, if you are not familiar with him, is co-founder of the Internet-legendary Electronic Frontier Foundation and a former songwriter for the Grateful Dead.
The interviewer says he’s shocked that Barlow would say this. He should read David Shenk’s 1998 classic, “Data Smog”. Time to read Bowling Alone. I’ve been putting it off for a little too long.
Update: Some Slashdotters take it personal while at MetaFilter they argue themselves into a circle.
Will there be a mass movement to utilize tools like MoveOn.org or will the prevailing me-too trend continue where individuals refuse to come together and decide to create their own competing efforts? Everyone shouting the same things – but seperate from each other. Barlow says there needs to be a leader to represent an institution. What I think he fails to see is that we’ve been taught not to trust leaders, even from amoungst us. Leaders fail and leaders fall. So do institutions. So we go our own way and trust in only ourselves. You can’t attribute that to the Internet. It’s the way our generation thinks. Decentralized. Individualized. The Internet is an expression of that. A multitude of choice and the freedom to us it.
The demographic trends do not favor one-size-fits-all news products,” said Peter Francese, founder of American Demographics magazine, which tracks population changes. “There isn’t one community to serve. It’s gone. … It’s now a matter of serving niches rather than trying to be all things to all people,” he said.
That’s from an article about 18-34 year olds rejecting traditional media and switching to the Internet for their news. The same trend has taken place in TV and Music. More choices. Smaller audiences. Less and less shared experience and information. It’s all out there – but it’s up to you to find it or the martketers to find you and lead you to it.
February 1st, 2003: Columbia
No, this is not the Challenger. We’ve grown too coarse, too cynical, and too jaded. The NYTimes says, the nation’s instinctive reaction was to ask, “What’s next?”. Talking to friends and family leads me to believe the NYTimes got it right. Many discussions were attempts at avoiding the subject. Our skin just got thicker. Our wagons circled tighter. Most parents I know didn’t allow their children to watch TV and they didn’t hear the President’s attempt to comfort the nation. In fact, one said outright, “I just don’t want it on TV. What else is there to talk about? Get it off the news”.
I’m going to take a moment not to think about tomorrow, but to say a prayer for those who just lost a loved one and ask for the strength to not further recoil into my own skin.
Garret says, in my favorite weblogger essay yesterday, “there are a lot of ways to die, some ‘good,’ some ‘bad.’ these astronauts lost their lives in action, doing something they loved. in the midst of our horror at their fates, their sacrifice deserves respect, and honour.” Indeed, “space travellers are a special breed; and they come from all nations”.
And that is where Man’s destiny hides. Across the boundries. Not hiding in caves from the coming storm. In a day where personal trust is at an all time low, a generational trend that started 30 years ago, it’s a fight that always deserves to be waged.
Links:
Scripting News – Terrific linkage at a time of sorrow. Many of the links below are pulled from here. I couldn’t find the will to post yesterday.
Similarly, Metafilter was very active yesterday in it’s discussion threads.
MP3 (right click and download): Julia Ecklar singing “The Phoenix” via Code the Web Socket. A touching and powerful folk tune that fits the moment.
Don’t miss reading Meryl’s “Requiem for Columbia” and Shelley’s “What the Shuttles have given us”. You’ll get some indicators as to why I feel the way I do from what some have posted in Shelley’s comments.
In the 80s: I Remember the Challenger. Hundreds of personal recollections of that terrible day.
Go at Throttle-Up, “It would never occur to a baby-boomer that anything associated with the shuttle could have historical significance. Having lived through the heady excitement of real history-makers like Mercury and Apollo, boomers see the shuttle as an afterthought, an unglamorous eighteen-wheeler hauling satellites to and from orbit.”
Poynter Online – a huge collection of related links.
Just as after the Challenger accident, a chorus rises for the Shuttle program to end.
From 1980, Washington Monthly, Beam Me Out Of This Death Trap, Scotty.
The Corner thinks out loud about perfectly normal people starting to think about “Signs” and links to a 1998 Peggy Noonan article.
Finally, the obligatory, they were warned story. It’s always the same isn’t it?