Understanding Media: Chapter 3 Reversal of the Overheated Medium

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...It is not the increase of numbers in the world that creates our concern with population.  Rather, it is the fact that everybody in the world has to live in the utmost proximity to created by our electric involvement in one another's lives.  ...  Departmental sovereignties have melted away as rapidly as national sovereignties under conditions of electric speed.  Electricity does not centralize,  but decentralizes.  ...  This reverse pattern appeared quite early in electrical "labor-saving" devices, whether a toaster or washing machine or vacuum cleaner.  Instead of saving work, these devices permit everybody to do his own work.  What the nineteenth century had delegated to servants and housemaids, we now do for ourselves.  This principle applies in toto in the electric age.

This section of the text seems similar to Shirky's argument (Here Comes Everybody, page 66), that journalists are as outmoded as scribes when the printing press was invented.  In the example above, washing machines have similarly made servants obsolete.  McLuhan's description of the decentralization of electricity also could apply to the internet, where the ease of publishing is allowing many new voices to join the media conversation (albeit to a much smaller audience), than in the old media world, where you needed a printing press or a broadcast license to become part of the media.  This passage from McLuhan could also be used to buttress Colin's argument in class, that young people will have to work faster in the future.  In offices where secretaries did typing, minor writing, and filing a generation ago, now that work no longer requires as much time or skill, so it is computerized and spread around the staff (decentralized).

BUT...  Does McLuhan's example about work at home still apply?  There has been another change on the homefront since he wrote this book in 1964:  Many more married women now work.  This is another example of decentralization in the electric age, as both men and women are in the workforce.  It could be argued that electricity contributed to the move of women into the workforce, after the feminist movement of the 1960's and 1970's.  The home electric work saving devices McLuhan mentions, may also have given women in the home enough time to stop and think about whether they should be allowed to work, if they choose, or if their families might be better able to get by, if they were bringing home a paycheck.

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Will the techies driving the internet and inventing social media become the next "betrayers to power?"  Perhaps by collecting massive amounts of information about people for the use of "authorities" like marketers, governments, or other organizations?

Life After Newspapers

This post is a response to a question raised on the class blog.

If newspapers go away, there will still be several sources of news available.  Offline commercial news sources would continue to exist, like television and radio, which have been hit less hard during the recession.  They will presumably continue to have a news presence on the web.

Specialty publications like the Connecticut Law Tribune, and the Hartford Business Journal will continue to exist.  Their business model appears to be different from most commercial newspapers, radio, and TV, which get most or all of their money from advertising.  Specialty publications instead make much more of their money from subscriptions.  The weekly Hartford Business Journal charges about $80 dollars for a 1-year subscription, which works out to almost $2 per issue.  The Connecticut Law Tribune, for instance, charges $199 for online-only subscriptions, and one source charges more than twice that for print and online access, for a price of about eight dollars per issue, of this weekly publication.  Some specialty publications make money by hosting conferences or events.  If newspapers went away, I would occasionally look at these web sites for a limited slice of local news, that was professionally gathered and edited.  I would read some of the content that was publicly available, but I would not pay the subscription fees.

Nonprofit news organizations would continue to exist, since they get their money from grants, supporting organizations, and audience donations.  Connecticut radio has several examples of this sort of organization, including college radio stations like WQUN, which receives support from Quinnipiac, and streams online.  NPR affiliates WNPR (Give now!) and WSHU (Pledge now!) both get much of their income from donations, and thus should survive the advertising implosion threatening newspapers.  NPR would presumably survive as a national news source, because of its nonprofit approach.  The Connecticut News Project would become a bigger part of my news diet.  So would The New Haven Independent, or an organization like it, if it covered my part of the state.  I would consider making a donation to one of these organizations, if it became my main source of news.

Local blog news would become a larger part of my news diet in a post-newspaper world, but primarily if they cover my town.  A quick search turned up nothing like this for my hometown of Plainville.  I might contribute to a local 'journalistic' blogger, by sending story suggestions, photos, or interesting information, but I would be less likely to voluntarily send money to a person, or to an organization that is for-profit.

I might use Wikipedia as a news source, programming it to provide me with updates when certain articles are changed, about things I am interested in.  This is a poor solution, because it would be limited to things I had a previous interest in, and because Wikipedia claims it is not a source of journalism.  But other sites treat it as such.  Wikipedia's sister site, Wikinews might be a national news alternative, but today it seems to include a lot of material re-written from old-school media sources, especially the Voice of America (which they say is in the public domain).  Perhaps I would be better served going directly to government-funded news like the VOA, BBC, and CBC.

The death of newspapers could either break aggregators like Google News and Yahoo News, or make them more useful.  Yahoo's local news function relies heavily on traditional media offerings, with the Hartford local search showing most of the newspapers and TV news operations in the state, plus Connecticut Public Radio.  When you localize Google News for Hartford, CT shortly before midnight, November 29, you get 14 Hartford Courant articles, 2 Meriden Record Journal articles, and one article each from the Greenwich Time, the New Britain Herald, and something called Connecticut PLUS, which copies and pastes press releases from the governor's office, and the Sound Tigers.  If most of these sources die, the aggregator will have nothing local to aggregate, and they will be useless for local news.  But aggregators would become more useful, if they were able to pluck reliable information from the blogosphere.

When it comes to my news tastes, my first instinct is to look for organizations, rather than individuals, in the hope that a group, whether volunteers, nonprofit, or for-profit, would build in some sort of editorial backstop, and be more likely to continue producing content, even when somebody goes on vacation for a week.  Perhaps this is a personal bias, based on my status as a partial digital immigrant.

Newspaper web sites have at least one thing going for them:  They are the simplest way to go to one place, and get a quick, fairly reliable summary of what is going on in an area.

Hacking for Government Openness

I wonder if there is anything the Hackathon people can do to help Litchfield, Lyme (which seems to have given up its old web address to a site that advertises Lyme disease T-shirts, remedies for dog lupus, and cream for genital warts), and several other towns that don't have web sites, and therefore don't have their agendas or other town information online.

On a related note, I notice that one of the Hackathon events focuses on Drupal, which I only have heard mentioned recently in citizen journalism contexts.

On the Other Future of News gathering, set for about 2 weeks from now: "It's  tentatively scheduled for somewhere - we need a venue in Mpls-St. Paul."

It may be a bad sign that even though they don't know where they are going to meet, they DO know "There will be beer."

But as with any online journalism project, the business model is still a challenge.  "How that [the beer] gets paid for is unknown at this point."

I hope two things come of this:  1) Now that I have made fun of them, they will be wildly successful, and hit on the key to the future success of online journalism.  2) They will soon post a venue, and this will all be moot.

E-Democracy Post

I would make a change to the post "E-Democracy, E-Governance and Public Net-Work."  Instead of a one-way progression, I would turn it into a circle, with the public work and policy (at least theoretically) flowing back to the populace, in the form of laws they must follow and services they receive.

"As our one-way broadcast world becomes increasingly two-way, will the governance process gain the ability to listen and respond more effectively?"  Government is different from broadcast media.  Broadcast media have power only because they have an audience.  The sharing of information might devalue the services provided by the traditional media.  Government officials have power as the result of an election in which they are chosen to make decisions on behalf of the people.  The easier sharing of information does not inherently change the power structures of legislative, executive, or judicial branches of government.  "Policy leaders can reach out and develop closer relationships with citizens and stakeholders," but it is still the policy holders who have the authority to make their own decisions.  Online information sharing gives interest groups a new tool, but because most (competing) interest groups have access to this tool, it is a relatively weak force.

The online world certainly provides new ways for the governed to communicated with, and get information from the government.  The ease of sending an e-mail may prompt some Congressional staffers to reduce their value, in comparison to phone calls or letters on paper, sent through the mail.  In the end, the elected representative still makes the final decision.

I think Clift likes his E-Democracy Conceptual Model.  He made it look like a flower!

E-Government

The most interesting part of e-government is online voting.  It has already been tried, but should this change in technology prompt a change in the way decisions are made in government?

A local election in Honolulu accepted votes only online or over the phone.  Here is coverage from a mostly-positive, milquetoast specialty publication, and a more critical editorial from a local newspaper.

On the federal level, the FCC (the agency best-known for regulating broadcast media, and some of the companies that carry internet data) is accepting comment on online voting, online registration and online public hearings.  (Comments can indeed be filed online.)

Many organizations are already using online voting.  Student government at state schools in California apparently got it right, on the fourth try.  Of course, there is much more at stake in a government election.

The internet makes it easier and cheaper to gather votes of millions of people, so should more issues in government be voted on?  I don't think this sort of change should be made based on cost savings offered by new technology.

Product of Pain

Photo by Matt Dwyer.

I liked the production of the EPIC media future video, and I think it is a good use of the multi-media nature of internet.  If this had simply been an all-text blog, it would have had much less impact.  

Parts of it seemed dated.  Do people in 2009 think Tivo is going to have a significant impact on the media landscape?  Friendster...?  (Although given the subsequent success of MySpace and Facebook, it was prescient of the creators to include a social networking site.)

As I listened to the video, I wondered where information used in the customized computer-generated news stories people were receiving from future theoretical information outlets was coming from, and what sort of information would be available for this product.  Where are the "editors" these future people are subscribing too are getting their news, to remix for their audiences?  (This idea was prescient of Twitter and simply an extension of blog followers).  Presumably newspaper and other "old media" web sites have pretty much vanished by 2014 in the video scenario, so it can't come from them.  As the video mentions, the information could be gathered by "everybody" (or at least the small percentage of any online community that contributes enthusiastically), plus public relations and government data released online.

Based on observation, in a traditional news sense, "everybody" would be good at reporting on things that effect large groups of people suddenly, like natural disasters or the Iranian election.  "Everybody" would be good at chewing things over, like George Bush's hump, or Megan McCain's bumps.  "Everybody" would also do a good job of covering things that interested everybody who is part of the top of the power law distribution.  Right now, that means things like the top search terms on Twitter:  The vampire movie "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," and celebusician Lady Gaga.  "Everybody" would be poor at covering boring stuff, like local government.  Presumably the web crawlers of the future will be able to find your town's web site, and decode the agenda or minutes for local meetings, and (possibly) determine what is interesting, but it remains to be seen if the bloggers of the future will be able or willing to fill in the human details in an accurate way.

Perhaps media training efforts like this NPR/PBS effort with American University's Center for Social Media will help "everybody" learn how to be a reporter?

Twitter Use 5

Twitter can be used for real-time storytelling.  This could be helpful for journalists or authors, who want to have an audience experience their work "live."

Perhaps play-by-play of sports events could be delivered this way.  A high school student newspaper in New Jersey says they are already doing it, but I don't see any evidence of it on their Twitter feed.  The Huffington Post promises live Twitter coverage of NFL games on sundays, but it seems more like a Tweeted sports talk show about the NFL, than actual information about what is happening right now in any given game.

I decided to try a couple of extremely simple examples of real-time stories, involving two Tweets each, ("BEFORE throwing out newspapers," "AFTER throwing out newspapers," "BEFORE getting a haircut," "AFTER getting a haircut.") showing what happens happens when you take out old newspapers, and when you get a haircut.  Although they are not quite live, something does happen, and they are visual.

I have to admit that real time story telling is not unique to Twitter.  Other social media have feeds, and even regular web sites have the ability to change or update over time...  But Twitter makes it easily mobile through cell phones.

Before and After Haircut 2

Getting a haircut.

After.

I'm not sure After really looks any better.  You could land an F-22 on my forehead.  Maybe it will look more normal after I take a shower.

This is more class-related Twitter fodder.  Really.

Before and After Newspaper 2

Throwing out old newspapers (symbolic for our class, eh?)

After.

This is just fodder for something to put on Twitter, to test it out.

Twitter Use 4

Twitter can be used for poetry.  Artists often create artificial limits for themselves, in part as a way of focusing their creativity.  Haiku can serve this purpose.  Its short length translates well to Tweets.

At least one hash tag has been created for micro poetry.  #micropoetry seems active.

A technological approach can be taken, like this web site, which seems to use a computer program to determine which tweets rhyme, then matches them at random.  The Tweets become a raw material for other art.

Also posted outside of Twitter, Madeline40 used 140 character poems for a serious reason: To honor her late son.  Maybe she chose this form because she has been a technical writer?

In the loosest definition of poetry, anything anyone writes on Twitter is a poem, whether the author thinks of it that way or not.  Of course, under the loosest definition of poetry, pretty much anything written by anyone is a poem.

Of course there are people offering advice on how to write Tweets.

If you read this far, you deserve a laugh.