inignoct wrote:
] fnord wrote:
] ] "Newspapers ... serve a very valuable function. ... (They)
] ] help us figure out what's really important."
] ]
] ] what a motherfucker
]
] indeed. i can't think of a worse situation for democracy than
] when all media is controlled by the same source (no matter
] what it is). But it's not surprising -- seems like most
] americans (maybe most people everywhere, but i only live here)
] are intellectually lazy, and don't want to have to grapple
] with differing viewpoints or complex situations, so it's
] easier when all the media says the same thing.

I think this one of the key impacts that the internet is having on our society. The medium is the message, right? Well, this medium, unlike the ones we've had previously, forces you to make choices. In the past there were only a handful of broadcasters and everyone assumed that everything they were saying was true. That was sometimes a bad assumption, but it worked well enough that people have developed a tendancy to always beleive in everything they read. You can see Powell struggle with this himself in this interview.

A lot of the stuggles over the internet have been related to this new reality. You are now exposed to a lot of junk. You have to figure out what makes sense and what does not make sense. You have to think. People are not yet very good at that. They are worried, for example, about children not being able to make these choices. Their response, instead of teaching their kids to filter (which they can't do because they don't know how to do it themselves) is to install net nannys, which allow professional filters to do the work for them.

Over time... Maybe over the course of a generation, we'll learn to do the filtering ourselves, and this will make us a stronger society. A populace with strong bullshit detectors, armed with good information, will, I think, make better collective decisions.

Weblogs are an important part of this process. You need to be able to share your decisions about what makes sense so that we can break up the work and so that we can teach eachother how to do this right.

RE: asshole

,----
| The Dixie Chicks have taken a big hit lately for
| exercising their basic right to express themselves. To me,
| they're terrific American artists expressing American
| values by using their American right to free speech. For
| them to be banished wholesale from radio stations, and
| even entire radio networks, for speaking out is
| un-American.
`----

Bruce Springsteen News: brucespringsteen.net

] Things will not be necessarily continuous.
] The fact that they are something other than perfectly
] continuous
] Ought not to be characterized as a pause.
] There will be some things that people will see.
] There will be some things that people won't see.
] And life goes on.

The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld - Recent works by the secretary of defense.

Apparently there is a petition to save Clone High. Canceling this would be a shame. However, online petitions aren't a very effective tool, and of course we've seen Farscape fans raise hundreds of thousands of dollars and not gotten anywhere.

Save Clone High Petition

Thrynn wrote:
] ] "It's a phenomenon that's not on the mainstream radar
] ] quite yet, but it will be in six months."
]
] And read the bit about "targeted advertising".

This is more evolution then revolution.

Consider Tom's Hardware. He sets up a site where he reviews hardware. People find it. He built a reputation for knowing his shit. Now every vendor sends him stuff to review.

A blog is really not different.

Advertisers will be interested in influencing thought leaders in the blogosphere. They will pay for INLINE ads. Paul Harvey talking about arthritis medication in the middle of the news.

Taking things a step further:

Gibson's new novel has a charater who is paid to hang out in upscale bars and chitchat about hip new products with patrons. Totally subtle... In the context of flirting.... Imagine if the girls who go around to different bars giving out Camel cigarettes wore plain clothes, and hung out smoking the stuff, hitting on guys who smoke the stuff, and occaisonally, subtly mentioning their brand preference, particularily with relation to who they would date....

I've heard lots of squaking that this is really what google wants to explore with blogger. The interests of advertisers won't change just because the thought leaders change. Yesterday it was Paul Harvey. Tommorow it might be Cory Doctorow. Either way, Pepsi will be there.

The only way to escape this is to create a culture where advertising, no matter how subtle, is frowned upon (really easy) AND consumers PAY for the media they consumer (really hard).

RE: Blogging goes mainstream - Mar. 10, 2003

] Digital broadcaster Pseudo.com plans to release a weekly
] TV show hosted by rap star Ice-T on the Internet
] file-sharing network Kazaa, in attempts to start a new
] model of advertising-supported television.

Pseudo spins hip-hop TV show on Kazaa | CNET News.com

Welcome to the exhibition of rediscovered works by the mid 20th century illustrator A.C. Radebaugh.

A very cool exhibit, soon to open in Philadelphia, displaying lots of futuristic graphic artwork from the 1950s. Flying cars, urban airships docked at skyscrapers, and more. This stuff is almost propagandist in its technological optimism.

Radebaugh: The Future We Were Promised

] Hansen and Rubin have written a program that allows them
] to probe into all the unrestricted Internet chat rooms in
] the English-speaking world and dredge up thousands upon
] thousands of random sentences even as they are being
] typed. The casual remarks, desperate pleas, and lecherous
] queries that are sucked out of the stream of world
] chatter are then relayed in various ways on the two
] hundred or so small screens and ten loudspeakers that
] make up the machine's public face. The found words and
] sentence fragments can be strung out at random on the
] display monitors or made to race across the screens in
] constant streams, like a Times Square zipper, giving the
] thing a Jenny Holzer-like gnomic and oracular quality.

Chatter

] "I have really never considered myself a TV star. I
] always thought I was a neighbor who just came in for a
] visit."

RIP Fred Rogers

There is no connection between Cayce and Case; no meaningfulness. Gibson explains that as part of his novelist craft, he goes through a complicated artistic ritual in order to summon his characters out of the ether. In this ritual, coming up with the right name is the crucial first step. And the process by which he came up with Cayce, he declares, had nothing to do with Case. "Cayce" was its own "found object" -- much as the name Case, from "Neuromancer," was also a found object, inspired originally by Case pocketknives.

Nodal point