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Media and Community
Saturday, May 09th, 2009 | Author: Moody

As a member of the forty-something crowd, on the cusp of middle-age, I can say that I have seen a great many changes in the world. For example, I remember the decline and eventual death of the 8-Track cassette with the popular advent of Compact Cassettes and Compact Discs. I also remember the arrival of cable TV. Our neighbors were the first people I knew who had ON TV (along with a big, strange box they needed to access it). The first computer in my house was some variety of an Apple II that did not go “online”. The Internet existed, but not for the folks at home, and there was no Web at all.

The media was a different animal, back then. I delivered the newspaper as a kid, on a bicycle with big canvas bags slung over the handlebars. People received their news from me on their lawn or driveway or front porch. They also watched news broadcasts on the networks, and read, like my parents did, various periodicals. Typically, the nightly news on TV and the daily newspapers went together hand in glove, in a complementary linear fashion. Periodicals, such as Time or Newsweek, created, supplemented or helped drive the larger stories. And although there were always “Letters to the Editor”, the system was effectively closed to the consumer. The media was the authority, the arbiter of what made news. You might petition the media for some reason, but it was not responsible to you.

Once widespread adoption of the Web by the populace reached critical mass (circa 1995, with apx. 16 million users then surfing the Web1), the demand for interaction naturally started to become the driving force on the Web. Connectivity on the Internet really means connecting people to other people—their ideas, their shared information. So while the “walled garden” of AOL eventually fell into disrepair because the company couldn’t grok the meaning of the Web to society, newer social networking sites appeared that offered a new and more robust form of open community and communication. Today, with over 1.5 billion users on the Web, more than nine times the number of people who were online in 1995 use Facebook alone. Nor are these people—and I hope you’ll pardon me making such an obvious statement—merely sharing recipes, jokes, and pictures of the family (although they certainly do that). No, like me, millions of people share and discuss the salient news of the world. They leave comments to news agencies as freely as they do to each other, and they expect some form of interaction; they expect, at least, to be heard. They blog and keep up with blogs. They share with various communities online, such as are found at FriendFeed. They tweet throughout the day on Twitter and follow not just friends or celebrities but news aggregators and media analysts.

Today, the near-ubiquity of the Web—enabling users to share massive amounts of information, pretty much anytime and anywhere, with an audience who are, themselves, no longer confined to a single or passive role—means the media cannot continue to operate under their comfortable old M.O. The shift is already well underway. What Steven Walling says of Wikipedia, that “An honest analysis of Wikipedia cannot divorce the content from the software and the community”, is becoming true of the media in general, after a fashion. Or, as Emily Bell, head of digital content at Guardian News and Media, put it in a lecture at the University College Falmouth, “There are two lessons here – one is that the news business is struggling to understand the language of the web, the second is that tools plus users equals content, both are key to the future of journalism” [see also "Emily Bell on The Future of Journalism"].

We are, many of us, de facto journalists now, compulsive fact checkers and news hounds. Armed with multiple means of recording the world around us, we are delivering the news on our virtual bicycles, throwing packets of information and analysis from the information highway right into the laps of our readers (whoever they may be), through their open window on the world. Our future is one of greater and greater connectivity. This is a good thing. It will, in the end, ask us all to be more responsible members of our world-wide community. But it will ask this first of those who are professional journalists now. They will be expected to lead the way, to set the example, to show the old paradigm the door and properly usher their profession into the new way of the world.

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Update. From a salient Op-Ed piece by Frank Rich, titled “The American Press on Suicide Watch“:

…[T]his self-destructive retreat from innovation is hardly novel in the history of American communications. In the last transformative tech revolution before the Internet — television’s emergence in the late 1940s — the pattern was remarkably similar. The entertainment industry referred to TV as “the monster,” and by 1951, the editor of the industry’s trade paper, Variety, was fearful that the monster would “eventually swallow up practically all of show business.” Movies had killed vaudeville a generation earlier. This new household appliance threatened to strangle radio, movies, the Broadway theater, nightclubs and the circus. And newspapers too: “NBC’s New ‘Today’ Attacked by Papers as Competition” screamed a front-page Variety headline in 1952.

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Additional resources: “Why comments suck (& ideas on un-sucking them)“; most anything by Jay Rosen;  50 Awesome Online Lectures for Social Media Masters.

Note: 1. Several things came together in 1995 that, collectively, acted as a booster rocket to the Web. A few examples: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was released and the “Browser Wars” began; the People’s Republic of China made its first connection to the Internet; the last commercial restrictions were lifted when the National Science Foundation ceased its sponsorship of the Internet backbone; Yahoo! and AltaVista were founded; Amazon.com, Inc. launched. [See "History of the Internet".]

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The Web and Education: Access for All is a Necessity
Sunday, August 13th, 2006 | Author: Moody

[image]It seems a bit strange to me that, in this age of computers and their ubiquitous presence, especially in relation to the Web, my coworkers generally don’t surf the Web or use computers outside of work. They are, or so I have found, only dimly aware of what goes on online; their opinions about the Web — about a lot of things, really — seem to come mainly from the television news. None of them, so far as I know, have a blog or a MySpace page. It almost flies in the face of reason that, out of about a dozen coworkers, none of them seem to use the Internet beyond what one would call a minimal amount.

According to the Internet World Stats page for North America, Internet usage has a population penetration of 68.6 percent in this part of the world (Pew puts it, based on a more recent poll, at 73 percent in America). What’s the likelihood of so many of my coworkers being Web ignorant? And what does it mean that they are?

Two of my coworkers have asked me (at least one of them sincerely) if I thought that we, humanity, are living in the “End Times” described in the Bible and, I inferred, in the so-called prophecies of Nostrodamus. I have overheard a few discussions about this — on the surface ridiculous — topic. These are two people I know to be generally ignorant about current world events beyond what they see occasionally on whatever news network happens to be playing on the television in the break room at work. I also know that they do not understand how one would go about keeping up with current events and news online. Another coworker recently asked me, apropos of the weather, if Ohio is located near Texas. This coworker has no computer at home and does not really want one.

I bring this up because it seems to me that the less educated one is (and the less one cares about education), the less interest in or use of the Internet will be demonstrated. It would seem that the Pew Internet and American Life Project (using data gathered in 2002) found this to be true; the vast majority of Internet users in America, 83.7 percent, have a “post-graduate” level of education. Pew also found that

Over time, internet users have become more likely to note big improvements in their ability to shop and the way they pursue their hobbies and interests. A majority of internet users also consistently report that the internet helps them to do their job and improves the way the get information about health care.

A number of my coworkers have children or will likely have children, and I wonder how their children will fare. If these current and future parents have no interest in the Internet or information technology, and if their kids are not taught how to effectively utilize computers and information technology, what will become of them? Are these coworkers, themselves condemned to the wrong side of the digital divide, — are they condemning their kids to the same end?

Although it is clear that more children are now being educated in computer-equipped classrooms, it is just as clear that underfunded schools in low-income districts need help if their kids are to access the computers they need in modern America. It doesn’t take a Bill Gates to notice that American schools desperately need computers and higher technology in their classrooms if students are ever going to compete in the world marketplace. It does take, perhaps, Bill Gates to bring it to the attention of governors:

When [Melinda and I] looked at the millions of students that our high schools are not preparing for higher education – and we looked at the damaging impact that has on their lives – we came to a painful conclusion: America’s high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded – though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean that our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.

My daily life is inextricably tied to my access to the Web. What’s on my mind, what predominates and prevails in my consciousness, leads me to the Web like thirst leads a horse to water; I need the Web to slake my thirst for expansion, — the expansion of my knowlege, my understanding, my comprehension. I would go so far as to posit that this thirst, and this desire to quench or assuage this thirst, is necessary for any human being who would thrive as fully as she or he is capable. That we have the Web is not accidental, not dislodged from cause and effect. It is a manifestation of that thirst and desire, and it is an example — the marketplace aside — of our minds continuing to evolve and struggle to survive.

Therefore, it falls on us, each of us, to promote the Web and to do our best to ensure that it is available to all, regardless of any societal divisions. We can do that by obtaining/maintaining access to a computer for our kids and encouraging them to learn how to use the Web effectively, by fighting for the rights of all to have such access, and by supporting organizations like the Community Technology Centers’ Network. If you are reading this, then you have that responsibility to a greater or lesser degree, because you are positioned to do something to help. Even if all you do is advocate computer and Web use to your peers, friends and family, you are doing something good for society as a whole. The goal is, ultimately, to push people toward a necessary paradigm shift that considers the Web to be an everyday utility like electricity or the phone. In other words, the Web must become transparent in society, something really thought about only when it’s not working right.

Then again, it may be that what I’m really arguing for is the promotion of education and the love of education generally. And that I am, certainly. But it’s guaranteed access to and effective use of the Web that levels the playing field presently. Though the Web is not perfect, and though it has its pitfalls and dangers, it is still the most important tool in one’s toolbox, a Swiss Army knife for education, news, general information, mind expansion, entertainment, and many other things. It is a Swiss Army knife with a passkey to the world’s ongoing life told in first, second and third person (limited and omniscient). Used intelligently and effectively, there are very few limitations to what a person can learn or discover on the Web. Such a tool should not be denied to anyone.

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