Web Notes Online

And now back to our content delivery explosion....
It is important to keep tabs on how our young people are getting their news and exchanging information. I've eluded to this in previous columns. They are an important segment of our society. The traditional forms of information distribution sources need to be aware of how people are accessing information and exchanging ideas.
I monitor a number of podcasts each week. Most of the casts cover technical issues. Some involve material aimed at young adults. The cliche is today's young people are the leaders of the world, tomorrow. Just substitute readers for leaders and you begin to comprehend the dilemma that our information industry has before it. Don't ignore that simple truth. How our young people are becoming accustomed to accessing and exchanging information will be the norm of the future. Information providers ignore it at their peril.
The percentage of homes with high speed connections is rapidly increasing. Along with this is an increased use of features like streaming video. It is not uncommon for school-aged children to turn to their computer when they get home in the afternoon instead of the television. They instant message each other. They update their MySpace accounts and check out what their friends have done. They visit sites like YouTube and checkout the latest popular videos. Or, they might make one of their own to upload and share with their friends.
They don't watch the news on television. They don't listen to the radio. They don't read the newspaper.
When I was a kid, if you wanted to watch a television program, you had to plan to be in front of the TV when the show aired. Devices like Tivo ended all that. You could record your favorite programs and watch them at your convenience. Now, you can download shows over the Internet and either play them on a portable device or watch them on your big-screen television set. Apple will soon introduce a device that will let you send movies to your television from your computer that you have downloaded from their online store.
Television networks now offer shows over the Internet for download and display at your convenience.
This is all new and exciting for those of us who remember when the first television set was carried into their house. (It was a big Zenith in a yellow cabinet in about 1955. Yeah, I'm old.) The young people of today are growing up in an age when information and entertainment are readily available on demand. They will watch what they want; when they want to. It won't matter where that content originated. It will all very much look the same on their television set.
Any content provider--whatever the media, electronic or print--has got to be nervous about the future. The challenge will be how to maintain their special content in the new age of individual information freedom.
Next time how the information revolution is furthering our cultural polarization.

The computer is rapidly becoming the focal point of information transmission. As a technology, it is still in it’s infancy. Born in the middle of the last century, it is still the new kid on the block.

Digital technology is a revolution that will take us far beyond what we can only now imagine. Not long ago it was only an interest diversion. It was an interesting way for academic types to share information. Communications companies, radio, television, newspapers, dabbled in it. They set up web sites designed to serve as adjuncts to their primary product. They soon found that to stay competitive they needed to maintain their presence on the Internet. They needed to keep their brand out there for the public to access.

The Internet has become the gorilla in the room. You may wish it weren’t there, but you can’t afford to ignore it.

Why?

The Internet has made the transmission of information a two-way street. Information is no longer just pushed out from news agencies, etc. It also flows back as Internet users are able to provide immediate responses. You can see it on cable channels. Viewers are invited to take part in an online poll or send their email response on a subject. Those polls and responses are later tabulated and displayed or read to the cable audience.

Apple and its iTunes store has become the fifth largest music store in the country. It now offers audiobooks, podcasts, videocasts, television shows and film trailers. Just recently it announced it will sell movies for download through the online store.

Other firms are also establishing online stories for movies and other material previously only available from broadcast or cable sources.

Apple will soon have a device that will allow you to transmit those movies you download to your computer hard drive to a television set through a wireless connection. It is presently near DVD quality. It will improve to HDTV quality.

Soon it will be hard to tell the source of what you watch on your television. Is it from cable or computer? You won’t care.

Convergence is upon us.

I’m not going to watch television today. It will all be about 9/11. I am burned out on 9/11.

I don’t need to be reminded of what happened that day.

Our nation was forced to face the reality that we were just as vulnerable to terrorism as any other nation on earth.

I don’t need politicians pontificating on the tragedy. Too many politicians have used the events of that day to further their own political careers. Some have found that the politics of fear have enabled them to influence the public. They have been able to enhance their position by warning the people that only they can protect them.

For a long time the public bought it. They responded as anticipated as each threat warning was issued. But you can only go to that well so many times before it runs dry and the public is left with a parched taste in their mouth.

I am reminded of how unified this nation was just following 9/11. The people supported the efforts to root out the terrorists. They backed the government as it went after the terror groups in Afghanistan.

I never understood the urgency of Iraq. We had that country contained. We could afford to smoke out any weapons of mass destruction. The government was impatient. A pre-emptive war was launched on—what I and many believe—was shaky information. The WMDs were gone. Saddam had been bluffing. They had apparently been gone since after the first gulf war.

There was nothing in Iraq to connect it to 9/11. The assertion that there was has not been substantiated.

What has happened in the five years since 9/11 is an increasing skepticism in the word of our government. I choose to use the words of President Reagan when he said “Trust, but verify.” I long to trust our government, but I feel this need to verify. There have been too many instances when our leaders have been wrong.

They misjudged the WMD issue; they misjudged the reaction of the Iraqi people and therefore totally misjudged the number of troops that would be necessary to be essentially an occupying force. They didn’t prepare our troops properly. Stories abound of parents paying for body armor for their sons and daughters in Iraq because the military didn’t have enough. Or of stories of soldiers tacking on steel plates to their vehicles because they weren’t armored properly to guard against explosives.

To top it off our Secretary of Defense quipped that “You go to war with the army you’ve got; not the one you want.”

We went to war when we wanted to. It was pre-emptive. We didn’t have to. We could have been better prepared.

Thousands of people died five years ago today. Thousands of soldiers have now died in battle fighting in the Middle East.

I don’t need shows on television to remind me of the tragedy. I remember. I will always remember. Right now I don’t need to be reminded what has happened since.

Storms have a way of being Nature’s natural pruner. An example of that occurred last Friday as Ernesto sped through the area. The storm dropped a lot of rain as well as branches and leaves all over the Mid-Shore.

Power outages were common. We were without power in Greensboro for about 2 ½ hours that evening. Other places were out longer.

The storm did something that I could only dream of. It played havoc on many of the political signs that have sprung up around the area in recent weeks. Like the trees and bushes, the forest of signs was “pruned” with the more poorly placed or cheaply made ones going do or sagging grotesquely.
I am all for elections. I’ve voted in every election since I registered to vote when I was 21. At that time the age of majority was still 21. Yeah, a long time ago now.

I just think that the political sign is an eyesore. They turn me off to a candidate rather than gain my vote. I see the signs and I think “more trash for someone to clean up.” I know it is difficult for candidates in local elections to get their name out. Political signs are about all some came manage.

I just know that some of these signs will still be out there weeks after the election cycle is over. I don’t know which one’s will be guilty of leaving behind their trash at this point, so I dislike them all in general.

Check out the voter’s guides we have up on the Website to find out who is running in which race. May that be your reference and lot a colorful paper sign that might start turning yellow (with age) before it gets removed. The local league of women voters for the Mid-Shore counties have tried very hard to gather the information on all the candidates for you. The guides were inserted in the paper. There are PDF versions on stardem.com that you can download. I know. I set them up there so you can access them.

I celebrated Labor Day by sleeping in and arriving at work at about 8 a.m. instead of my usual pre-dawn hour. It was pleasant to make the trip in daylight. That usually is only a treat I get in late June and early July when the sun rises extremely here on the Mid-Shore.

If you are among the majority of people who work for a living, you don’t have much to celebrate this Labor Day despite the rhetoric to the contrary.

Recently released census figures show that between 2001 and 2005 the income of the median household fell by .5 percent even as worker’s productivity grew by 14 percent. The people who drive a used Honda or Toyota can identify with this decline, those with a BMW or a Lexus should be puzzled. The growth in our economy has been for their benefit. Enjoy.

Those who fell into the poverty category also increased from 2001 to 2005. The poverty rate rose from 11.7 percent to 12.6 percent during that time.

It tells me the gap between the classic "haves" and "have-nots" is widening. How long can this trend continue before our economy--our culture--begin to show severe stress?

Sleep well. We'll be back at it tomorrow, the day after Labor Day.

Last year when The Times-Picayune found itself in the middle of a flooded New Orleans, the paper found the only way it could publish for the first few days was via the Internet.
On Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005 the paper announced “Today the paper is being distributed electronically only.” In a town almost completely without electricity, the paper found its only way to get information out was by the Internet. For three days the paper was only published electronically. The paper relocated to Baton Rouge where they started printing the paper. A small staff stayed in New Orleans and the coverage of the disaster by the paper garnered the publication two Pulitzer prizes.
When the subway bombing happened in London last year some of the first images to reach the public came via cell phone camera transmitted by some of the victims themselves. It is not uncommon to go to a video site like YouTube to view a video of a breaking event instead of a news site.
The Internet is redefining how and who distributes the news.
The digital age is also shaking the foundation of what we had felt to be fact.
Sadly, a picture can no longer be trusted to be what it appears to be. The advent of digital photography has made capturing images much easier with cameras that give the amateur the ability to produce a professional-looking image. Just about every digital camera now comes with supporting software to load on your computer to help store and modify the images.
Professional photographers have had high-end software available for about a decade to enable them to alter pictures in the computer in ways that were only dreamed of in the darkroom. When I first learned to shoot pictures, we were all film and learned how to process the negatives and print the images onto paper using an enlarger.
You could modify the image by doing things like altering the developing time of the film or modifying the chemistry of the developer. You would choose different types of film for different kinds of shooting situations. Then, in the darkroom, you would burn or dodge areas of an image to enhance some aspect of the photo. Altering an image to change details within the frame was difficult. You just didn’t insert Uncle John into the group shot at the reunion without incredible difficulty and even at that, it was often easy to spot.
Digital photography has changed all of that. Images can be saved on a card not much bigger than a postage stamp. Some of these cards can hold hundreds of images. Instead of changing film to suit special shooting situations, you now can just make adjustments on the camera. When before you would put special high speed film in for night shots and lower speed film for daylight, you now can put both on one card with simple changes in the settings on the camera.
Programs like PhotoShop enable a photographer to manipulate an image far beyond the modifications to film development and print making of the old film days. Uncle John can be inserted in the reunion photo. And, if photographer is careful, he can make it impossible to detect by the untrained eye.
As a matter of professional ethics, photojournalists avoid manipulating photos to distort their appearance. They should only crop, lighten or darken and make sure the image is in focus. These are modifications made in the old film days. This doesn’t always mean that someone doesn’t try to pass off a doctored image.
Two instances have been in the news recently. One involved the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon. A foreign news agency freelance photographer (not Associated Press) was accused of altering a photograph to make it appear that there was more smoke and therefore more damage after an attack in Beirut.
In another case, the suggestion has been made that a television news magazine made its new anchor appear slimmer than she really is. The image in the magazine does make it appear she has taken of a few pounds when compared to the same image obtained elsewhere. To her credit the anchor said she prefers the undoctored image.
Now there is word that some camera companies are including software in their cameras that would enable the photographer to “slim down” the subject even as the image is being captured. We all want to have flattering pictures, but this only further erodes the credibility of the photograph.
Add your comment or contact me at rpolk@chespub.com.