Not the internet, silly; Jill LePore is talking about the first Death of the American Newspaper, i.e., the Stamp Act and the American Revolution. I love the story of Boston Gazette printer Benjamin Edes:
In 1774, a British commander gave his troops a list of men
In 2009, can a blog’s design matter? Readers of Kottke (and Fimoculous) say yes.
From Jason Kottke’s response on Fimoculous:
I’m surprised (and flattered, I guess) that people want to talk about this. With everyone using newsreaders and “customizing” their blogs with default WordPress, MT, and Tumblr templates, the days of artisan blog design would appear to have passed by, quaint and unworthy of further comment. Like Rex, I love that that’s not the case, at least in a small corner of the web.
Listen to it!
I heard King’s “I Have a Dream” on the radio this afternoon. Despite the grandeur of the visuals of the March on Washington, and the power of the text, I think that radio is the best way to experience it. I am amazed, as a writer, teacher, poet, and speaker, at the range of King’s elocutionary instrument.
He doesn’t just use every sonorous rhetorical tool in the book. He makes words rhyme which shouldn’t. He finds transitory consonants and bends them to fit his alliterative schemes. He has the most versatile spondaic foot I’ve ever heard, so much so it could pass for iambic. (Try to find a genuinely unstressed syllable — or unstressed thought — in the way King says “We Will Not Be Satisfied.”)
And he matches and varies his pitch to highlight his parallelisms of matter and mind, in his voice and in the air; a small, thickly built man, speaking from the roots of the trees, from the center of the earth, knowing that the extension of his own gravity stretches like a column from the molten core to the orbit of the moon. He is a single still point with the granted power to bend straight the crooked lines of history.
I’m pretty amazed by just how many of my friends are going to the inauguration tomorrow. It helps that I live a short train ride away in Philadelphia — Obama himself came through on the way to Washington — but I think it’s still testimony to how much enthusiasm and goodwill there is towards the new administration.
The thing is, though, when people talk about it, they tend to talk about Pres.-Elect Obama* only once you’re pretty deep into the conversation. This Facebook exchange is pretty typical:
- [Friend X]: is Inaugurating. Or at least legitimizing the Inauguration by observing with sincerity, excitement, and dedication (despite the cold).
- [Friend-of-Friend Y]: You in DC? [Friend-of-Friend Z] and I are masochistically hitting the Mall tomorrow. Yesterday was pretty amazing.
- [Friend X]: We are here! What are your nighttime plans? We should attempt to run into each other perhaps? [Z] has my #. And also, it is VERY COLD. I guess that’s just how much I love democracy.
When was the last time you heard twenty-year-olds talking about how much they love democracy — and more important, viewing the ostentatious displays of democracy as something they want to get in on?
There’s a theory with a fancy name called “mimetic desire.” It boils down to this. You may want something or someone, but sometimes you want that something that someone else wants. I was never big into the “cult-of-personality” diagnosis of Obama supporters, but if there’s any truth to it, I think it stems from this desire to get in on Obama’s big vision of what democracy is all about. Our love for him is inseparable from our sense that we want what he wants.
June Thomas on the Secret Service:
The protagonists of disposable lesbian fiction
Atul Gawande, lucid and humane as ever, talks health care reform and the virtues of pragmatism in The New Yorker.
Bonus points to Gawande for employing my favorite social-scientific concept: path-dependence.
Did anybody notice this ingenious little political maneuver in Tennessee last week?
Republicans stood poised to take control of the Tennessee General Assembly for the first time in nearly 140 years. Even Gubernatorial candidate Zach Wamp roamed the halls. … When lawmakers returned from break, now an hour into session, they tackled the Speakers position. Representative Jason Mumpower of Bristol received the first nomination. Republicans hoped to end the nomination process there, but after more political wrangling, allowed Democrats to submit a candidate.
What happened next some may describe as the political play of the decade as all 49 Democrats backed Kent Williams, a Sophomore Republican from Carter County, a district just miles from Mumpower’s hometown.
Found at Political Animal.
Yesterday, I did some research on a new phone I’m thinking about buying. So I googled it and went to the manufacturer’s page, read some online reviews, and compared prices and plans. But my eyes were drawn to the video hits: consumers and reviewers who could SHOW me how the phone worked, THAT the screen resolution really was pretty good, or WHY the keyboard felt too cramped.
I’m not alone — Miguel Helft at the NYT/IHT writes that YouTube is increasingly being used as a reference tool:
With inexpensive cameras flooding the market and a proliferation of Web sites hosting seemingly unlimited numbers of clips, it’s never been easier to create and upload video. You can now find an online video on virtually any topic. Web videos teach how to grout a tub, offer reviews of the latest touch-screen phones and give you a feel for walking across the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy…
And now YouTube, conceived as a video hosting and sharing site, has become a bona fide search tool. Searches on it in the United States recently edged out those on Yahoo, which had long been the No. 2 search engine, behind Google. (Google, incidentally, owns YouTube.) In November, Americans conducted nearly 2.8 billion searches on YouTube, about 200 million more than on Yahoo, according to comScore.
Another good how-to genre, this time from digital to digital, are the video walkthroughs of video games. Compare those with the old text-file walkthroughs for your favorite Super Nintendo game.
Video and text searches also create (ahem) different narratives:
[YouTube’s Hunter] Walk said a good example is provided by an ad for Hillary Rodham Clinton during the Democratic presidential primaries — the one in which a voice asks “Who do you want answering the phone?” at the White House at 3 a.m. during a crisis. A search for “Hillary Clinton 3 a.m.” on Google would bring up news stories about the ad and the controversy surrounding it. On YouTube, the same search brought up the original commercial, as well a response by the Barack Obama campaign, pundits’ commentaries and an assortment of spoofs, giving users a much different understanding of how the story unfolded, Walk said.
So, here are two ways I see this going.
First, we need to leverage the power of YouTube and the power of Wikipedia together by creating a YouTubeiPedia — a comprehensive video reference database on the web. Maybe it wouldn’t need to be the Wikipedia model — there might be room for a traditional content company like Microsoft or Brittanica or whomever to step in here. Or maybe there will be multiple, competing models with different strengths — frank and quirky user-created content jostling with great production values. At any rate, part of the triumph of the text-search optimized Wikipedia is that we’ve largely missed out on some of the promise of a genuine multimedia encyclopedia. But there’s clearly demand for it.
Second, we need to get on this whole visual literacy thing — especially the ability to make visual objects themselves searchable, so that videos can give bot-crawlers the same richness of information a textual entry can. Maybe some kind of video autotagging.
My last idea is a shade more utopian, but it can work! I want a “video search” that isn’t a textual search of a video database, but a VIDEO search of any kind of database. Imagine the power of being able to hold a random object in front of your webcam and being able to ask the next-gen version of Google, “what the heck is this?”
I’m beta-testing Windows 7, and man, the speech-recognition training program is creepy. Instead of giving you something cool to read and letting you figure out your own mistakes and corrections like Dragon NS, it puts you through your paces by reading canned lines.
I should add that the speech recognition itself does work pretty well and the visual integration with the OS pays off. MS clearly thought hard about accessibility. However, they didn’t think at all about personality or humor.
More on narrative from Lev Manovich, circa 2001:
Regardless of whether new media objects present themselves as linear narratives, interactive narratives, databases, or something else, underneath, on the level of material organization, they are all databases. In new media, the database supports a range of cultural forms which range from direct translation (i.e., a database stays a database) to a form whose logic is the opposite of the logic of the material form itself — a narrative. More precisely, a database can support narrative, but there is nothing in the logic of the medium itself which would foster its generation. It is not surprising, then, that databases occupy a significant, if not the largest, territory of the new media landscape. What is more surprising is why the other end of the spectrum — narratives — still exist in new media.
That’s a better articulation of what (I think) I was trying to get at: You can map narratives onto our weird web-world, but it’s something fundamentally different underneath.
From The Language of New Media via Kasia.