Recalling Blog #2…

…titled,”I like print, I need print, I’m very attached to print,” where I state that print is going to survive the rise of the Web, I reaffirm that so long as readers value standards and credibility, print will NOT “die”. It is still held in high regard and the news it provides is fodder for respectable bloggers. It sets a high standard that respectable blogs that produce original content, such as Daily Kos, TruthDig, or HuffingtonPost, strive to adhere to. It offers a relief from the often distracting and chaotic nature of the world wide web and lends prestige to a person holding the paper.

The latter part is perhaps print’s last bastion. When valuing a positive restaurant review, scores for a sports team, an obituary, or an accepted letter to the editor, nothing beats having a clipping from the newspaper. This was evident in the last election, when citizens wanting to commemorate the election of Barack Obama clamored for a copy of Wednesday morning’s papers, forcing many newspapers to print tens of thousands of extra copies to meet explosive demand.

When our Model United Nations team dominated a regional competition in Las Vegas, we could have easily just printed the article online and saved it.  Instead, we found the clipping from “The Orion” to be much more meaningful than something any of us could have cooked up with the right programs and a little time.

Prestige and tangible value are two things that newspapers have going for them, a sort of social currency. A recent Slate article argues that social currency was normally provided by newspapers; tidbits of information to discuss with friends, peers, colleagues at the watercooler, etc. He contends that newspapers have been replaced by social networking sites in easing communication.

However, newspapers do have a future with communities, as people value what a respectable, credible group of professionals have to say about a recent restaurant opening down the street or what a local high school swim team accomplished at regional competitions.

“StumbleUpon”, or “How I Learned to Enjoy my ADD and Embrace Insomnia”

Reddit, Digg, and Del.icio.us are three good examples of social bookmarking sites. In these sites, users submit web pages that they find interesting, enraging, or newsworthy, and based on the number of hits and positive ratings, the submitted link ascends in popularity. The page is then discussed by registered users. These three sites posess some of the key virtues of Web 2.0: they’re interactive, they allow feedback from users, who can then befriend each other etc.

To someone with my notoriously low attention-span and morbid love of surprises, none of these sites, nor their concept, quite appealed to me. Then I found StumbleUpon, which I later discovered to be nothing more than Web 2.0’s crystal meth.

StumbleUpon can be the same as Reddit, Digg, or Deli.cio.us. Stumble’s concept is the same as the other three: users find intriguing sites, submit them, and users rate them.

The fun part is what users call “stumbling.” When you sign up for Stumble, if you’re using a supported browser (Firefox, IE, Opera),  Stumble adds a new icon to your toolbar. This is the Stumble button. Before being allowed to press it, Stumble asks that you mark your interests in a long list of tags that are assigned to web pages, and everything from Art to Journalism to Conspiracy Theories to Conservative Politics to paper crafts are present. After selecting all of your favorite things, you can finally click on the Stumble button, marking the beginning of a downward spiral of addiction, sleeplessness, and dependency.

After a few seconds’ wait, a web page you have never seen before  appears before you, based on the interests you selected earlier. If you enjoyed the page, you click another new button in your tool bar, the Thumbs Up “I like It!” button. This will give you more related web sites that other users with your interests liked. Otherwise, you can leave it alone and take another hit or click the thumbs down to indicate that you don’t want any more sites like this.

This application is not as popular as the other three sites, based on Google searches, yet eBay acquired StumbleUpon for 75 million dollars and moved its headquarters from Calgary, Alberta in Canada to San Francisco.

Users of Stumble have noted its addictive nature and its ability to trigger insomnia. Users have also inserted jokes for other stumblers to stumble into, a sort of meme, my favorite being the End of the Internet.

Render unto the Blogosphere what is the Blogosphere’s…

In one night, Californian voters expanded the rights of poultry while declaring over 15 percent of San Franciscans as second-class citizens.

California’s reputation as a progressive, trend-setting state precedes it not just in the U.S., but abroad. It is perhaps due to California’s avant-garde nature that the battle over Proposition 8 was still observed by national news outlets and pundits despite the historical nature of the McCain/Palin and Obama/Biden presidential race. After the passing of the constitutional amendment, controversy began regarding the proposition system, the ease in amending the California Constitution, the legality of having out-of-state entities and persons influencing California politics, and the beginning of a wave of lawsuits to repeal the decision. But perhaps the most dramatic turn has been the backlash against businesses and churches, and the particularly focused, and well-deserved, internet campaign to strip the Church of Latter Day Saints of its tax-exempt status. The campaign is being aided by online petitions and online databases of donors to Proposition 8. These two pieces of information alone would be difficult to find without slaving away over campaign records. Even more difficult would be disseminating the information. The web is facilitating both the acquisition of the information and its spread.

The nature of the campaign reflects what future historians might call an “Obama” style of grassroots activism, where the internet and social networking sites form the backbone of organization and action. Photos of protesters are posted on Flickr, Facebook and Myspace groups are spreading news of rallies, events, and information, and business and churches that supported the proposition are being publicly displayed to face boycott and/or swarms of gays and their supporters. Business-owners that happily participated in gay pride events to profit but donated thousands to ostracize gays and lesbians are somehow surprised that people can vote with their dollars with a boycott, and they are now caterwauling about being treated unfairly. In an ironic twist, Catholic and Mormon church leaders are pleading for tolerance and understanding. Meanwhile, bloggers rally support and gather and distribute information to repeal the proposition and remove the religious façade and privilege from a political organization.

The Bastard Child of Illiteracy and Innumeracy

The NAAL (National Assessment of Adult Literacy) estimates that some thirty million US adults cannot perform the most basic literary tasks. The NAAL then found an unsurprising correlation between illiteracy and innumeracy and education levels, mother tongue, racial profile, age and disability.

The aggregated data of the illiterate and innumerate is, tragically, a reality we’re more or less accustomed to . If you’re black or hispanic, your share of the illiterate or innumerate population is larger relative than the general population. The same goes especially if you’re disabled or did not graduate from high school or if you’re 65 or older.  These are findings that would not only surprise few people, but they’d actually be expected, and one could even predict living environment, like rural or inner city blacks and hispanics, to be over-represented in the category of illiterate and innumerate.

As discussed in earlier lectures, web literacy for these groups is not prioritized, since their jobs are not likely t o involve the latest technology, and that includes the computer. For those that obtain a job that at bare minimum requires the use of the web, Stanford University has identified levels of competency in web and tech. related skills. At most basic, according to Stanford, novice web users must be able to create or edit simple web pages, which must include, according to their course list and online tutorial, the most basic knowledge like mouse use to proficiency in the use of Dreamweaver.

Learning new web skills, or anything new in general, is an exciting prospect, one that keeps me awake into the early hours of the morning. Trends in online journalism, the latest in international developments, and, of course, the newest technology and its effect on traditional media are things that the highly-educated ought to keep track of because of the ubiquity of technology in their workplaces. But for those whose jobs don’t require technology use, and in some like the custodial work in the service sector, reading and basic computations are not necessary in the slightest. Ideally, every citizen would be able to at least spell their own name or balance a checkbook. In a perfect world, everyone would have access to technology and be able to at least check and send email or use the web to continue or further educational or intellectual pursuits. But in reality, web skills are a luxury that not everyone has or needs.

Web for Readers and Writers

This past weekend, David Sedaris, best-selling author of books such as “When You Are Engulfed in Flames” and “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and contributor to The New Yorker,  read some new essays and gave a  lecture last Sunday in Santa Cruz, CA. In his lecture, he received a question from a mother whose young daughter aspired to become a writer and wanted to know how to get her work noticed.

“I didn’t really give exposure to my early work; I guess I was just lucky,” replied Sedaris. “When I was approached to publish, I pulled a book out of a kitchen drawer and said, ‘Here you go.’”

Sedaris also mentioned the emerging role of the web, cautioning not to put too much of anything online, saying that early bad writing attempts and bad behaviors are best kept private.

For writers such as himself, Sedaris sees serendipity as the best way to get published, and the internet as a double-edged sword best used sparingly. But for consumers of his books,  The New Yorker, or online journalism, reading is quickly becoming more abridged by demand.

Catalyzed by the release of USA Today, news writing became shorter and more succinct than before on the realization that readers want news briefs, not dissertations, and that jumping pages to finish reading stories was unpopular. The web has accelerated this trend, and some now realize that the shorter style of newspaper writing is now too long for readers preferring bulleted lists, highlighted or typefaced keywords, or an inverted pyramid style of writing with the main idea or conclusion at the top and further (to some useless) information through the story. The web lends itself not only to these abbreviations, but also allows readers to watch news stories, see the action happening in pictures, or listen to a sound bite in addition to their short paragraphs or lists. USA Today and its parent Gannett have taken a possibly trend-setting step in promoting citizen journalism by having readers take a more active role in distributing and disseminating the news, an idea first pioneered by The Huffington Post’s “Off the Bus” section.

Nate Silver, a baseball statistician, is the chief contributor to an aggregated polling site that has proved wildly popular this election cycle. Silver takes virtually every bit of polling data available, and using undisclosed algorithms, takes into account the polls’ demographics, past accuracies,  and combines them to produce projections to senate, house, and electoral college votes. The site has some excellent analysis of polls and voter registration data, but the majority of its visitors (myself included when I don’t have the time to read) go for the US Map and the projections down the lef margin or the tables of likely scenarios on the right side. Silver realized early on that the majority of his readers would not care for the statistic argot prominent in his posts, but everyone can take a glance at the graphs, pictures, colors, and charts and get a paraphrased understanding of events from battleground states such as Missouri and North Carolina (a testament to the success of the McCain/Palin campaign).

Web reporting is arguably becoming shorter, but it’s also becoming more Jeffersonian. Some have already begun predicting the end of quality for media as a result of this abridging of information and amateur submissions, saying, “In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public.  Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.” Shockingly, this was not a neo-luddite of the digital age, such as Andrew Keen, who said this, but Oscar Wilde, some 130 years ago.

The Invisible Hand of the Market in the Media

There is no way to describe the Internet without reverting to the clichéd descriptive phrases. “Revolution in communication,””greatest innovation since the printing press,””transforming the landscape/society/world,””series of tubes,” all of these (save one) accurately describe the Internet and the effect it has had since it, or more specifically, “Web 2.0”, took off. But in the same way that publishing the Bible in the vernacular by Martin Luther benefited some and adversely affected others, the Internet continues to leave victors and vanquished in its wake.

The so-called fourth estate’s medium of the newspaper is quickly becoming the Internet’s most discussed victim. It has been argued that the Internet’s real-time news-distribution trumps having to wait until the following morning to receive evening events. However, the Internet is not the first to use speed to undermine the newspaper. Cable news has long chipped away at newspaper readership since the launching of CNN in 1980. In reality, the Internet can be seen as the force that tips over a faltering establishment.

But newspapers have not simply sat idly while the Internet and cable take more and more readers. Big newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York times and even local papers like the Bakersfield Californian have developed web sites that give them the competitive edge they’ve long lost to cable news. In fact, newspaper journalists have, if anything benefited from the Internet. When CNN, MSNBC, or Fox began pulling viewers away from newspapers at dramatic rates, there was nothing much newspapers could do. Short of starting their own news channels, an absurd idea, there was little to be done to stop newspapers’ bloodletting. Newspaper journalists have been wise to take advantage of the Web. By setting up websites that disseminate news in a more cost-effective way and with better content, like multimedia for just about any story, newspapers have a fighting chance they did not get when CNN was launched.

Traditional media, newspaper as well as television and radio, ought to begin taking seriously the influence wielded by sites like drudgereport.com, dailykos.com, or thehuffingtonpost.com. These, and other sites, have swayed political discourse in ways that traditional media could not. In many ways, these sites have exceeded journalist’s own standards. In the lead-up to the Iraq War, the traditional media, in hindsight, was much too complacent in spreading the Bush Administration’s rationales for invading Iraq. Pundits from conservative columnists like David Brooks of the New York Times to liberal commentators like Peter Beinart of the magazine “The New Republic,” all parroted the false intelligence, the “mushroom cloud over Manhattan” horror stories, the alleged connections between Al-qaeda and 9/11 with Saddam Hussein, and condoned launching an invasion into Iraq. While the traditional news media forgot its role as a national watchdog as it joined in the Republican love-fest of advocating preemptive war on an uninvolved country, it has not looked back or has even bothered to address the issue at all. Instead, online sources like indiewire and truthdig.com have had to point out the media’s complacency in demanding answers from leaders, while traditional media have decided that that’s old news and we should move on to more important matters.

If traditional media is to keep itself alive, it would do well to focus on informing the public, keeping the government in check, and educating its viewers or readers on global politics in a respectable manner (nothing at all like the media’s misinformation regarding Iran) instead of just trying to make money. Newspapers and television news have long been corrupted in their chase for the dollar at the expense of disseminating news, informing the public, and promoting discourse (covering the disappearances of young blond females, covering the shenanigans of “famous” blond females, etc., all just to pull in higher ratings.) It’s true that currently, newspapers and cable news depend on advertising revenue, ergo, ratings, to stay afloat, but PBS, NPR, and BBC, whose purposes are to inform and financially break even, are much more objective in covering news and more responsible in selecting their content.

NYT: A Keyhole with A View

Primary source documents are used by historians to give first-hand accounts of the past. The Florentine Codex gives an account of daily Aztec life before the Spanish conquest. The Diary of Anne Frank has become emblematic of the struggle to survive by those persecuted by the Nazi regime. Archeologists use ruins like Macchu Picchu to  admire the architecture of civilizations long gone. Since the development of the newspaper, contemporary historians have viewed the newspaper to be future historians’ peek at what daily life was like for those living in the past.

Should we subscribe to the idea that print is a moribund medium, Daniel Okrunt, former public editor of The New York Times, writes an article that defines what a journal of record is, what it isn’t, and how The Times cannot be a national journal of record in such a diverse country. That latter point is his thesis: ” In a heterogeneous world, whose record is one newspaper even in the position to preserve?” Okrunt uses primary sources, his colleagues; fellow journalists and editors, to define what The Times is, if not the journal of national record.

To further illustrate his point, he takes a past issue of The Times from April 25, 1964 and proceeds to tell readers what that day was like given all that was published in that issue of the paper. He finds that frankly, some of those things were reported for the sake of being reported; just so they’re there somewhere. To emphasize this point, he interviews Bill Borders, a 43-year veteran senior editor of the paper, who points out:

“The Times used to feel an obligation to print lots of things that we knew no one much would read — the new members of the Peruvian cabinet, for example — just to get them on the record. Fortunately those days are over.”

Why are those days ‘fortunately over?’

Okrunt, along with fellow editors and journalists at the paper, believe that because they, as editors, filter so much information, they can’t undertake the task of being a journal record of an entire nation when the real records are in “raw original source material,” as Katherine Bouton points out.

Here’s where I disagree: The New York Times is easily a mirror of the national discourse, be it political, social, cultural, economic, etc.  A front page article might mention the decline of GM stock, the need to bail out Ford because their cars suck of aggressive Japanese and Korean competition. A historian might read this 100 years from now and deduce what economic and social patterns led to the collapse of the once mighty Detroit automakers. Lower expendable income by consumers, lessened demand of GM/Ford’s larger cars, high energy prices, inability to adopt more sustainable business models by GM/Ford’s part, etc., all of these can be seen by reading The New York Times and not having to dig for company reports, individual car dealers’ sales records, etc.

Does this reflect minorities’ views or respect the sensibilities of everyone with an opinion? Perhaps not, but a journal of record isn’t designed to portray the individual lives of each and every citizen, but merely to give future scholars a first-person account of what any citizen might have seen happening in his or her world in the morning when they read their daily.

I like print, I need print, I’m very attached to print

Not even an entire page into Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture had passed before I was able to cast off the author and any of his arguments as unsubstantial. To me, anything he had to say on the subject of the internet and its effect on the media was dead.

It wasn’t because of a weak argument. Hidden among the banal insults better suited for playgrounds, he had some good points to make.  It wasn’t because of poor writing or grammar, one of his legitimate claims in saying the amateur is killing off our culture and media. His writing was admirable, clear, and succinct. Then why do I so easily and quickly snub his argument?

Quick Disclaimer: it’s not because of my bias. I’m very much supportive of the changes taking place in the media landscape as a result of the web, and I know that in the same way that dirt roads adapted to the rise of the automobile and the South adjusted to Brown v. Board of Education so, too, will print survive to see another day. Keen, on the other hand, views the Web as the seven trumpets heralding the end of print, culture, society, and civilization.

Keen’s entire argument suffered a death by ad hominem. One cannot build a convincing argument against a group of people after they just finished calling them “monkeys with typewriters” without suffering a serious loss of credibility. Keen’s argument later suffered postmortem trauma by insisting to the reader that his apocalyptic visions “are no laughing matter.” It’s as if he can see me through the pages, pointing and snickering, not at his claims of a bleak future where not even the children are spared- he hints that Facebook and Myspace are manufacturing pedophiles and child molesters, a laughable claim in its own right- but at his elementary insults and the swift death they brought to what would have otherwise been a decent argument.

For a well-crafted, sound, and mature piece on the effects of the web from an ‘old media’ stand point, look no further than Eric Alterman of The New Yorker. In his article, Alterman gives a brief history of the American newspaper, beginning with Benjamin Franklin, continuing through its influence on global newspapers, past yellow journalism, and then into contemporary times, where the walls of the fourth estate are being purchased by conglomerates or under assault by the Web. His focus on Internet content is on The Huffington Post and its disproportionate influence relative to the amount of money it spends on staff, reporters, and editors.

He makes an excellent and convincing argument about the “parasitic” nature of bloggers who respect old media values of journalism (dedication to accuracy, fact-checking, etc.) but do so at the expense of old media by taking articles from established sources such as The New York Times or The Washington Post. For extra-credit points, he does so without resorting to the petty name-calling that characterizes Keen. He also brings attention to the consequences of the crumbling media establishment without sounding like the schizophrenic town beggar pleading to be taken seriously. And he also suggests a future where remnants of  the fourth estate survive to fill a niche that bloggers cannot fill ( down and dirty news-gathering) and the Web reciprocates by doing cheaply what the old media could not (disseminate said information).

It takes a journalist like Alterman to present what could be his own medium’s swan song in an objective, reasonable, and professional manner and not sound like the shrill bloggers and amateurs that Keen so quickly disparages.

The unwashed masses prefer mySpace; the burgeoisie flock to Facebook

Through online social sites (Xanga) and the Hapsburg talent of dating well above my socio-economic status, I had a decent network of friends that stretched from “ghetto” Eastside Bakersfield, CA to the cozy suburbs known as Seven Oaks or Rosedale. I managed to establish this network well before the rise of mySpace and the advent of Facebook. It was a simpler time, when Xanga and LiveJournal were the social sites du jour, Hummers were selling like hotcakes, and the war in Iraq did not yet exist. Fortunate timing allowed me tokeep this network of friends through the transition from Xanga/LiveJournal to mySpace/Facebook.

This is where Danah Boyd explains our position in a way I never would’ve been able to articulate. Boyd is a Ph.D candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Information, where she researches how people present themselves to an audience of strangers on the web, and more specifically, how teenagers use mySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etc. to socialize. Boyd describes a relationship between socio-economic status and race and selecting between the two social networking giants, Facebook or mySpace.

Boyd noticed that Facebook began as a Harvard site, then extended to all universities. She makes the conjecture that the amount of melanin in one’s skin is inversely proportional to the extent of education and one’s accumulated wealth. She then makes the leap that Facebook students, being college students, will be whiter, wealthier, and by virtue of being college students, well-educated. She also notes that when Facebook first opened up to high schoolers, it was by invite only. Boyd states, in a much more delicate manner, that this elite club of wealthy suburbanites invited their younger brothers and sisters onto Facebook, thus ensuring the next generation of burgeois Facebook users continue. Boyd also points to Facebook’s layout, preferred by its users for being “cleaner,” much like what Boyd descrbes as a “Pottery Barn” look.

Boyd then goes on to infer that because minorities and the poor are less likely to have siblings or friends in universities, they’d stay on mySpace while their lighter and affluent counterparts break the social networking glass ceiling.

Facebook’s sterile, uniform profiles are juxtaposed against mySpace, scorned by haughty Facebook users for being much more kitsch. MySpace is hypersaturated with the usual high school rejects: the goths, the punks, the queers, the geeks, the freaks, the blacks, the Mexicans, the poor whites, the poor in general, the lepers, etc.  Boyd makes these assertions shyly, saying she doesn’t have much empirical evidence outside of observation, but that these trends are visible without the need for statistics.

Yet, she fails to note that mySpace has various channels that appeal to its diverse group of misfit users. MySpace Comics features the latest news and press releases (and sometimes spoilers) from Marvel, DC, even Dark Horse’s, latest books. Myspace also hosts MyspaceLatino, a section of Myspace aimed at Americanized but not quite Anglicized Mexicans living in the U.S. Myspace Music has become the preferred advertising venue for up and coming local bands, usually formed by idle teenagers, hipsters, and groupies.

Had she pointed this out, she would’ve made her argument much more convincing, since Facebook offers little outside of relating your drunk misadventures or hours wasted on posting stickers or buttons on people’s profiles, the only real expression of individuality available on Facebook. In fact, it is that lack of expression that is so appealing to those that are Facebook believers over parishioners of mySpace. MySpace users tend to adorn their profiles with many images, GIF’s, videos, songs and bright colors.

So when my wealthier friends gravitated toward Facebook, my friends entrenched themselves in mySpace (until our college years when we would all obtain Facebook profiles), and I dumped or was dumped by a date-mate, I gradually accepted the five of the ten labels listed above that I belonged to and selected mySpace over Facebook.