media: August 2004 Archives

Maybe I picked up the vibrations of the recent ST convention, because it's been on my mind - sharing all those videotapes with Catalin and Raz en route to Shemaya. ;-)

The NY Times had a story today, Fans Hope Suns Can Rise Again on Star Trek.

Full text of the article is in the extended entry. Why do I love Star Trek? Besides the fact that the crew from the original series were my best friends while I was growing up (!), the vision now embodied in I.D.I.C. - "infinite diveristy in infinite combinations" and the way they deliberately try to forecast current events into the future has always inspired me.

"Freedom of information is at the root of American democracy, and yet every day we see that freedom being compromised, controlled and limited. The Grokster decision is a ruling in favor of keeping our bets open about which technologies will turn out to serve our freedoms best."

The Supreme Court rules (finally!) against corporate control of copyright!

Grokster and the Information Exchange

From another story in the NYTimes this morning: "While people are spending less time listening to radio over all, public radio's share of radio listenership is up, from roughly 1 percent 20 years ago to more than 5 percent of all listeners today, according to the Station Resource Group, a public radio strategy and analysis organization."

I would guess this increase represents a demographic of those folks with enough education, savvy, and resources to want to engage in the knowledge/power struggle of the species. While clearly many of these lean conservatively, they are likely not so fundamentalist as to resist all change. Perhaps this is a way of measuring the vanguard of social change, even social evolution. :-)

I'm having trouble adding blogs to the rss feed. Yesterday I tried to add Media Log by Dan Kennedy and just now I tried to add george.h.williams: literature, technology, culture, education, academia, also to no avail. Poo!

From Dan Kennedy's Media Log (Dan is an award-winning media critic and investigative reporter).

www.dankennedy.net

PLYING THE MEDIA WITH LIES.

"The media have not necessarily done a horrible job of covering the claims of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Indeed, if it weren't for news orgs such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, it might not be as clear as it already is that the vets' claims consist of nothing but ugly lies.

Still, editors and news directors should consider that the way they practice journalism allowed the lies to circulate and propagate..."

~ from Donna

If anyone wants to participate in a survey about how people manage their online identities I'm sure the researchers would be thrilled. :-) Here's their frame:

"We are studying various ways people manage (or negotiate) their identities and present themselves as who they are in the cyberspace."

~ posted to the Air-l listserv by Meng Ma

An internet ad from the Kerry campaign: http://www.johnkerry.com/petition/oldtricks.php.

I've not been reading the air-l list for awhile, one of those things I had to just cut out, hopefully only temporarily. Then they switched the server and there's been a rash of folk reacting to the change - online group dynamics. I responded to two different emails. One I tried to make individual (not to the whole list) but it got bounced back. Which makes me wonder if the person is using an alias (!), which was the subject of the second response I posted. :-) Hilarious if so, and ironic if not?

When I need to find a number while traveling...http://corp.sover.net/docs/exchanges.html.

Another embarrassing confession - what is the difference? Oh, I get the 1's and 0's coding thing....but...I need a better grasp of the big picture.

"Success in digital processors and memory chips boils down to recognizing accurately and rapidly whether a circuit is on or off. That simplicity makes measuring performance and cost relatively straightforward and has even allowed the industry to predict fairly accurately how fast digital technology will improve. But the more variable world of analog data defies the emergence of a blockbuster analog design that fits many products." From: A digital world with analog as it's workhorse".

Raz is gonna love this documentary. Wish he was here to watch it with us tonight, but maybe we can see it together once he's back in the country.

The line that struck me the most was Hassan, talking about how the American people will defeat the American empire. Not only are we, perhaps, the only ones who can, we are certainly the ones most closely positioned to do it sooner rather than later.

Prem said he thought this movie was more powerful than Fahrenheit 9/11. I'm not sure, but the two together certainly pack one heck of a whallop. Control Room adds no editorializing, one simply sees what folks are thinking in the moment, as opposed to the narrative storyline that ties the incidents of F 9/11 together. Each movie reveals facts. F 9/11 makes its case explicit, essentially telling you what you ought to think, what the evidence means. Control Room is more subtle, it assumes the audience can piece the evidence together without guidance.

I found it both disheartening and encouraging. It is encouraging to see the commitment and integrity to a journalism that struggles with itself as it seeks to represent events in the world that we all must grapple with and are affected by. At the same time, it is discouraging to be reminded, once again, of the formidable barriers in the way to peaceful co-existence and collaborative modes of problem-solving. Lt. Rushing states the contradiction most clearly when he says that he doesn't like war but he doesn't believe we're ready to live in a world without war. I would suggest that most of us ARE ready to live in a world without war, but we must convince our political leaders that this is what they need to pursue, and that whatever costs or fears they have about peace's uncertain (?) outcomes need to be faced squarely and openly, without compromise or rationalization.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is scary-feeling, all the way through. The mood (lighting, music) is almost all dark and invokes uncertainty and threat. They've taken the bones of the story and reproduced it....it all seems to happen very fast...all the transitions and character and relationship development in the book is rendered in short-hand: you know it's there but you don't really see it happen. The new Dumbledore is (how could it be otherwise?) disappointing. The all-pervasive wisdom and sense-of-humor is weakened by a casual disregard for the immediate (Dumbledore would never, ever inflict pain through carelessness, as occurs in the hospital scene when he slaps Ron's wounded leg). :-(

Otherwise, as the turning point in the series, when the forces of evil start to gain ascendancy and the battle starts to seem unending, I think it serves its purpose well.

"...what the [current spate of Olympic] mascots have in common: the aggressive, predatory and rapacious traits of the creatures they represent have been eliminated."

Said traits have been transferred to capitalism - the game of the age.

"Ancient Games had their origins as somber celebrations of death....Part of the reason the ancient Games were so uncompromising and often violent has to do with what was at stake. The Greeks, for the most part, had no heaven; with some notable exceptions, good and bad all went to the same gray, characterless, drizzly underworld after death, and that was that. In the absence of a post-mortem reward for moral goodness, the one thing you could strive for was immortal fame -- doing something so glorious that men would talk of you in years, centuries, millenniums to come. "

"And so, whereas today's Olympic committee prefers to ''celebrate humanity'' (an official slogan of contemporary Olympiads), the Greek athlete wanted only to be celebrated himself; it was his one ticket to immortality."

This reminds me of my conversation with Ingrid last night when I got so passionate about

"Now I am beginning to wonder if well-built architecture occurs only at a very fragile economic moment," says an architecture professor, commenting on differences between overall sloppy American architecture and the more skillful and precise artifacts produced in Asia and Europe.

Building a Bad Reputation: Sloppy American Construction.

Check out The New School.

It looks cool. ;-)

I'm confused - didn't I post something a few days ago? I read her blog, wanted to add it to the rss - bibliophile - and even posted a comment there! I think I did the trackback thing too (sigh)....

It has to get past "screening" - we shall see, we shall see...

Preview of Art Speigelman's upcoming comic (!) book about 9/11 and it's aftermath:

"I saw heroism in being able to live in the present and a lightness of touch." I gotta be working on that "lightness of touch" part. But maybe our muses know each other: "I wish I could do comics about "My Year in Provence," or something. But so far it has been the painful realities that I can barely grasp that force me to the drawing table. I'm kind of hoping my next work will be a humorous bedroom farce about the amusing foibles of the upper middle class, intercut with succulent dessert recipes. Unfortunately, I seem to have a rather grotesque muse."

An excerpt: The New Normal

Technology has done a lot for opening up new experiences for people with disabilities. Here's a great resource for producing visually accessible materials for people with vision impairments, the Lighthouse, such as contrasting color combinations for print materials and other useful tips.

Epson C84

http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/consumer/consDetail.jsp?BV_UseBVCookie=yes&oid=36033903

Fahrenheit 9/11 will be shown with open captioning on August 29 and 30 at the Crown Palace 17 in Hartford. For more info, check out Insight Cinema.

~ Vermont Interpreter Referral Service virs@sover.net; www.virs.org

Critt's passion is stopping the genocide in Sudan. I don't have explicit ideas, but the media - mass communication - has got to be part of the solution. People in general have to be hooked into caring. I think Fahrenheit 9/11 (still in the top ten!) might be one kind of model...

One can only hope that the explicit link between corporate greed and government misbehavior shown here makes it a bit easier for folks (independents, especially, and moderate Republicans) to see what seems so plain to so many of us about Bush, Cheney, Halliburton, United Defense, Saudi Arabia, oil...Michael Moore may have used some cinematic techniques to enhance W's "doe in the headlights" look (as my dad described him), but the facts are still the facts, and no alternative explanation has so far been forthcoming...

Anyway, me and Andrea enjoyed it! ;-)

might have to check this out too, along with the rss stuff when Ben gets back from kayaking...

radio.userland.com

Reinforcement of identity from amazon:

"[Book] reviewers who use their own names will have a Real Name badge posted next to their reviews. (Pen Names are permitted, but they're less acceptable.) According to its Web site, Amazon believes that "a community in which people use their Real Names will ultimately have higher-quality content."

What interests me is a condoned shift from anonymity to ... what, some kind of transparency re identification? This at the same time that Wired magazine says anonymous blogs are the new hot thing, "wired," while paid blogs are "tired" and popular blogs "expired."

And here's another blog for the rss: Beyond the Beyond, Bruce Sterling's, for/from Wired.