MotherPie

TV Test Patterns...

You have to be of a certain age to know what this is.  To know that the Indian in full headdress at the top and this pattern came on when programming was off-air.  Those hours when most everyone should be sleeping. 

Adjusting the vertical and horizontal buttons to make the picture perfect. The "ant fights" of the static dead time.

Media.  The old days.

Big Step: Future of the News...

Typepad won't load my picture, but I've put up big news today on the future of the news but it is on flickr.  Go there for the in-depth. You might think the big media news is the start-up announcement of Fox Nation, but it isn't.  It is the announcement by Arianna Huffington that investigative news will be privately funded by a non-profit and the the first subject to be tackled will be The Economy. 

From HuffPo's announcement:

Huffington Post Launches Investigative Journalism Venture
 it will bankroll a group of investigative journalists, directing them at first to look at stories about the nation's economy.
The popular Web site is collaborating with The Atlantic Philanthropies and other donors to launch the Huffington Post Investigative Fund with an initial budget of $1.75 million. That should be enough for 10 staff journalists who will primarily coordinate stories with freelancers, said Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post. ...Work that the journalists produce will be available for any publication or Web site to use at the same time it is posted on The Huffington Post, she said. The Huffington Post venture is reminiscent of ProPublica, a nonprofit independent newsroom funded by The Sandler Foundation and headed by Paul Steiger, former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. ProPublica works with a $10 million budget.

Another way the news is shifting: Slate launched "Shoot the Recession," a project in which readers have been asked to help document the economic crisis in photographs via submitting images to the group page Slate set up on the photo-sharing site Flickr. I've added some of my shots.

Surviving the Downturn...

This was the front page from February 10, 2009 for the Santa Fe New Mexican.  I liked the headline and took a digital shot for my study of the economic crisis and media.  Newspapers are dying and there is not a reason for me to buy this daily paper except to get the inside special edition Pasatiempo published on Friday. And I do like the ads for that special issue.

The newspaper business is dying fast with death throes and rattles and I'm bored even trying to report the dire bad news of the news. I knew when I could easily do desk top publishing way back when in the early 90s that the gatekeeper mode was breaking and anyone could publish to anyone at a much reduced cost.  Whenever we pick up a newspaper here in Santa Fe we lament that it is already news we've seen online.  But over the weekend we had three papers delivered to our driveway and we'd not subscribed at all.  How do you get rid of papers you don't want, besides using them to start pinyon fires?

Naomi had commented on my post earlier about NYU professor Jay Rosen's article, Flying Seminar In The Future of News, which I had read. Go read it.  It is a great March 2009 wrap up of links for mindcasting on the crashing of the newspaper industry and imagining a new news system.

The latest data from the Newspaper Association of America shows that the current economic climate has only exacerbated the already dire state of the American newspaper industry. Specifically, total newspaper advertising revenue fell 16.6% in 2008. Classifieds advertising, which is under a lot of pressure from online ventures like Craigslist, fell almost 30%, and real estate classifieds fell 38%.

March (Internet & Connective) Ideas...

Seven inches of fresh snow fell overnight, making an odd spring image looking over the vase of daffodils on the desk outside the window. Just like looking from here to there, inside to outside, seasons juxtaposed, let's look at our present, much changed, from our times past.  Things are now linked beyond what we could have ever thought possible.

March 2009 marks 20 years since Tim Berners-Lee first proposed a project that would become the World Wide Web. It took until 1993 before the public became aware of the creation and the general public didn't really come online until the mid-1990s with the commercialization of the AOL and Netscape browsers made navigation of the web easy.

Google officially launched in September 1998 and Facebook launched in 2004. Facebook has about 180 million users Facebook has 275 million users (57 million in the U.S.), as of the end of February, while Twitter only has about 10 million and is just three years old. The number of Facebook users over 35 has nearly doubled in the last 60 days.

Good things the internet has ruined forever? Well, newspapers are dying but we still debate if that is a good thing or not.  Our economy is in a disruptive state, so are we.  Ah.... the Ideas of March.

Tar Baby...

It is just a tar baby. There isn't a way to get involved without becoming stuck in a not-healthy way.  It is sort of agonizing to go there, knowing what will happen.

That is how I described a situation to my mid-20s daughter.  She didn't understand the term.  Huh?

I had to stop and explain it.  How if you touch something, you can sometimes never get unstuck and you become tied down, unable to freely carry on. The entanglement, bound up as tar will cling and not let go (ever sat on a tar-blotched beach? I did, in Corpus Christi -- ruined the beach towels). It is a nasty thing... to go there.

Tar Baby.  It was not used in any pejorative, racial or other manner.  Just a way to describe that any engagement with a situation leads to an unpleasant obliged relationship of a no-win set-up. The tar baby image I conjure is a black bush-like blob, nothing like the image I tracked down, which might make it seem racist and with a personification of the tar baby.  My thoughts take me back to the idea of Brer Rabbit.

Some things are better left well-enough alone.  That's the idea.  Gee.  Do I date myself that much?

Seuss, still on the Loose...

Google's doodle for Dr. Seuss' birthday.

Reading the books and learning to think
Would be totally different, and gone in a blink

If those cats in the hats and thing one and thing two
Hadn't made one wonder what non-people do

These Tough Times...

Students from the College of Santa Fe, the oldest college in the state of New Mexico, rallied this week to try to save their private liberal arts school which is headed for bankruptcy without state funding or other miraculous intervention to solve its $35 million indebtedness.  It is not known if the school can even make it to the end of the semester. The bill to save the school died in the Senate Finance Committee without a hearing. This was the legislature's last week. 

Lucy in the Sky (Or Lennon from Toronto)...

This is for my husband, who has just finished reading the new John Lennon biography and urges me to read it but...gee... it is just so heavy. What? 800-something pages?  Maybe better read as a Kindle book.  Anyway, once we were in Toronto staying at the same hotel where Lennon sat in bed for a spell and where this recording now embellished with art, was originally made by a 14 year-old. As first an artist, Lennon would appreciate the creative way the recording is presented in remixed form, using yet another medium - youTube, for his message.

So while I'm home alone getting physical therapy while the two college kids are off with Dad, I'm putting this up for him as I pick up that heavy Lennon tome.  If you've been reading my posts this week, this is a progression of Lennon from music, then spoken words, to cloud, remixed with additive art worth. Not Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, but Lennon in the clouds...

First Lady Bares (Bears) Her Arms...

President Obama came into his own finally at his congressional address.  The only take-away worth mentioning?  The bare arms of Michelle Obama, sleeveless at a formal occasion that wasn't black tie or cocktail.  How novel.  Especially in winter.  The cultural importance of this has only escalated since.  Slice it, dice it, deconstruct it.  She is showing her power, bearing arms in a subliminal physical way.  She is not, now, barely there.  Not anymore.  She is now bare-y big there. Mom-of-the-Moment.

If this is her winter way as she springs into position, what will happen as she warms to her position, flexes those (maternalistic as she sees her role) muscles, brandishing her arms to command our attention, sword-like in armament language, point us to her priorities. She, comfortable in her skin, seems to need no cover for her agenda. How nakedly refreshing? For a certain age?

Textual and Informational Changes & Social Disruption...

So, after writing yesterday about how our brain can change and therefore knowing we are in a state of flux from one state to another due to technology, and thinking further about how we obtain information and interact with it is fascinating.  We are in a state of social and cultural change, let alone cognitive change. That is the part of understanding the context for the death of newspapers but these things need a long-view perspective. This week the Seattle Intelligencer (did I spell that right?) went to online only. Have you looked lately at how thin the printed editions of Time and Newsweek have become? The end of the printed newspaper is being hastened by the economic situation. 

Clay Shirkey's talk at SXSW Interactive in Austin this past weekend has generated a ton of attention. His Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable is worth reading and I'll pull out my favorite part:

The death of newspapers is an example of social disruption. 

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

Tim O'Reilly also spoke and he "began by saying that we're in a bubble - but not an investment one, a reality bubble. The financial crisis was top of his list, but he also referred to health, climate and so on... O'Reilly then spoke about 'the long now', which he said has been a big influence in his life and business. He explained that we should look at the long view, not just the 'right now'." 

So, think of the Word of God, just to put this in a long view.  Only a few held it in their hands but that changed with the advent of the printing press and moveable type.  In the beginning there was the word. But it wasn't printed.  I'm really going off on a long-view tangent, but think, the Westward movement was a religious/political cultural thing (Greek to Roman, to Catholic, to the Protestant Revolution) so I use this as an example in understanding our societal underpinnings in the U.S. Which are being extremely disrupted. Some say civilization would never have been possible without writing.  Text is becoming intangible.

So what is the long view? How will this revolution and extreme disruption play out? Well, the word is moving away from print, moving to cloud form with the growth of cloud computing and consolidation in server capacity/ownership - "on a scale unimaginable before. At the same time, of course, the computing power at the edges, ie, in the devices that we all use, is also growing rapidly," Nicholas Carr writes.  So if you think about the internet being just 40 years old, and we're moving into a huge second stage... then...

Carr (who wrote last summer Is Google Making Us Stupid) more recently says in The Sun: "We used to have an intellectual ideal that we could contain within ourselves the whole of civilization."  He's now enjoying a one-up on his ideas that the new technology is changing our cognition, since when he first expressed his ideas, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt belittled the idea that Google was making us stupid. He quotes Schmidt on a recent Charlie Rose interview (Carr's blog article also has the link to the Rose interview):

“I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information — and especially of stressful information — is in fact affecting cognition. It is in fact affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.
 And I worry that we’re losing that.” 

The King of Cloud, Google's Schmidt, is just now realizing the huge disruptive link between tangible text and learning?

“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” - Albert Einstein said. The economic changes will hasten our changes.  The cheese has moved, societally and culturally. So has the word. To the clouds.