Question Technology

Celebrate Blackout Day

This is a good idea.  J. Sinopoli suggests that we make the anniversary of the 2003 Northeast US blackout a voluntary holiday from electricity.  Excerpt from an article at Interactivist Info Exchange:

[We] call to formalize, as a holiday, the August 14 Blackout.

It could be our version of Carnival, and we could use one. It requires no municipal support. We as a people could simply do it. A harmless ritual: You come home from work, or wherever, switch off your circuit breakers, and that's all, it begins. It is not a debauchery, not a wild night, but perhaps a free one. Free of the system, free of the machine, free of the exhaustive burdens of ambition. Free of electricity, and the 24 hours a day you-don't-stop that goes with it. There was a time, before electricity, when people simply retired at night. What else could you do? It was dark. Not anymore. Progress has its compromise. The blackout took us back to the basics, of who we are as human beings, with none of this shine and polish to distract us from the truth.

As with anything good, the blackout as a holiday would be optional; none of the hospitals must shut down, no vital services would close. No one must do anything. But for those who can do it, and wish to, the blackout offers a pre-existing holiday so simple to celebrate there is almost no reason not to. Every August 14 we could easily stage a re-enactment of the largest-known naturally-occurring party in the history of the human race. The city went dark that night and 10 million people did not flip out or riot, or conduct themselves in any way sinister or foul. Newscasters were amazed at how peaceful it was.

Link: Interactivist Info Exchange | J. Sinopoli, "A Proposal for the Adoption of the Blackout as a Holiday".

Mad Cowboy Documentary

PBS is airing a new documentary about Howard Lyman, a.k.a. the "mad cowboy," the former rancher who gained fame for appearing on Oprah and exposing the American beef industry's practice of feeding cattle to cattle.  He and Oprah were then sued by the industry, but the case was later dismissed.

I just caught a few minutes of the show last night, but taped it to watch later.  For airtimes, check his website www.MadCowboy.com or pbs.org.

Pictured above is his latest book, No More Bull! The Mad Cowboy Targets America's Worst Enemy: Our Diet, in which he makes a strong case for veganism.

Bluetooth Headsets and Hummers

The New York Times Magazine has an article about those bluetooth headsets that you've no doubt seen stuck to people's ears, and how the early adopters are generally "golf course guy" instead of the usual, younger early tech adopters.  Excerpt:

Scott Martin, who oversees global marketing of these devices for Motorola, acknowledges that there has been a certain resistance among some consumers that’s attributable to this “Star Trek” issue. But as sales figures suggest, that is fading. Part of this is a simple matter of acclimation: the more we see them, the less strange they look — like the Hummer, Martin suggests.

Link: Headgear - New York Times.

I think he might want to aim higher than the Hummer.  Their marketing seems increasingly desperate.  Yesterday I saw their latest asinine commercial:  We see a young guy waiting at a grocery store checkout for his unmanly items to be rung up -- healthy items like veggies, juice, and even tofu!  Then another guy flops down a bunch of huge steaks and ribs.  The first guy gets humiliated and runs out to a Hummer dealer and buys one.  He drives off as the slogan appears -- "Restore your Manhood."

Today in Chickens

There's an interview at Salon with philosopher Peter Singer about his new book, with Jim Mason, The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter.  Among other things, Singer comes out in favor of engineering chickens without wings or brains so they'll suffer less (i.e., "ChickieNobs," to borrow Margaret Atwood's term).

Link: Salon.com Books | The practical ethicist.

Over at Slate, Gregg Easterbrook discusses the upcoming made-for-TV disaster pic, Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America, and argues that TV networks are far from the only ones who are encouraging irrational bird flu panic.

By the way, I find it amusing that ABC has an "informational announcement" at the top of that page to clarify that no, there is not in fact a bird flu pandemic in America (yet), just in case you mistake their show for reality.  It's kind of quaint to think that a War of the Worlds style panic could be incited in today's cynical/post-ironic populace.

Link: Slate: The Mutant Chickens are Coming! The silliness of bird flu panic.

Nature Needs More TV

Let's face it -- being outside is boring.  In Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv quoted a child as saying, "it's more fun to play indoors because that's where all the outlets are."  That child is our future, and his territory just got a little bit bigger.  The "Outdoor Entertainment Island" can be yours too for only $16,995.  It features a retractable 42" plasma TV and super-fabulous speakers so you can noise-pollute in style.  You'll never have to be bored by simple, unmediated "nature" again.

Man, I wish I had one of these so I could sit outside and read the virtual edition of Cory Doctorow's latest novel in Second Life.  That would be sweet!

Link: Uber-Review : Outdoor Entertainment Island, via Wired: Gear Factor.

People don't want video on their phones

Just a few weeks ago, Wired tried to tell us that people were clamoring for more features like video on their cell phones, despite evidence to the contrary (see earlier post: What do we really want from our cell phones?).  Today the New York Times reports that only one per cent of mobile phone users watch video on their phones, compared to 28% who have the feature available.  (Link: NYT: Video Handsets Mostly Just Used as Phones).  Some will say it's just a matter of time and cost.  But maybe people just don't want it, like they didn't want video phones in the 1970s.

Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed (Center for Media and Democracy)

By now most people have heard at least something about how companies produce "video news releases" that sometimes pop up on local TV news broadcasts, unedited and without any acknowledgement of the source.  The Center for Media and Democracy (the people behind PR Watch) has done a thorough study into the practice and today they released the report, along with video and a spiffy Google map of the participating TV stations.

Here's the link: Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed - Center for Media and Democracy.

Here's a promo from the center:

Just minutes ago, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) published online our groundbreaking expos�, "Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed."

This multi-media report is the culmination of an intensive, ten month investigation by CMD senior researcher Diane Farsetta and research consultant Daniel Price. The report provides the most extensive account to date of how corporate-funded video news releases (VNRs) -- fake TV news -- are routinely aired, without disclosure, as though they were independent news reports.

Read the report here:
http://www.prwatch.org/fakenews/execsummary

And then tell the Federal Communications Commission that fake news must stop, by clicking here:
http://action.freepress.net/campaign/fakenews

We are presenting the report today (April 6) in Washington DC, at a press conference with FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein and the media reform group Free Press. We've also filed a formal complaint with the FCC, calling for the 77 stations we caught airing fake TV news to be held accountable. All such material must be disclosed, to honor the audience's right to know!

Learn which TV stations we caught and watch footage of the VNRs we tracked, plus see how TV newscasts incorporated them and/or related satellite media tour "interviews." It's all here:
http://www.prwatch.org/fakenews/execsummary

And then take part in the joint CMD / Free Press action by clicking here:
http://action.freepress.net/campaign/fakenews

Please forward this email to friends and family. We need action now, to stop this widespread deception! Democracy depends on real journalism, not corporate propaganda masquerading as news.

Lastly, if you would like to help CMD continue its muckraking ways, you can use this secure link to make a tax-deductible donation to our organization:
https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1118

Sincerely,

John Stauber
Executive Director,
Center for Media and Democracy

Can Video Games Help Stop the Crisis in Darfur?

From Wired:

"While critics contend that violent video games can turn kids into tiny terrors, some government agencies and nonprofit groups want to harness the joystick to help churn out model citizens.

"To that end, competitions are under way that are designed to achieve such diverse goals as boosting America's profile overseas and drawing attention to genocide in Sudan. [...]

"Stephen Friedman, general manager of mtvU, is using the internet and his company's 24-hour college network to call students to activism through viral video games. The company, in partnership with the Reebok Human Rights Foundation and the International Crisis Group, is focusing on the genocide taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan.

"The Darfur Digital Activist competition drew 12 viral game submissions from colleges across the United States. More than 15,000 students have played the three finalist selections hailing from Carnegie Mellon University (Peace Games: Darfur), USC (Darfur: Play Your Part and Stop Genocide) and Digipen Institute of Technology (The Shanti Ambassadors: Crisis in Darfur).

"Genocide in the Sudan has been going on for a year and a half and it's not being reported in the news here," said Friedman. "We decided to look at viral games to spread the word. Activism is being reinvented in this medium."

Link:  Wired News: Games Fight the Good Fight.

Pictured: a screen shot from Fetching Water: "In the 'Fetching Water' game you are a Darfurian trying to make it to the well to get water without becoming a victim of the Janjaweed."

Rushkoff on CNN's "Welcome to the Future"

Douglas Rushkoff has an interesting post on his blog about an upcoming CNN special on which he'll appear.  Excerpt:

I just spent three hours recording a special for CNN called Welcome to the Future, along with Jeff Greenfield, Ray Kurzweil, Mirka De Arellano, and the spectabulous (yes, she deserves her own adjective) Margaret Cho, which will air on CNN the evening of March 25.

It was a strange and long journey into various utopian and dystopian high-tech scenarios concerning everything from nano-bots implanted in two-year-olds so they can compete for places at increasingly selective nursery schools to why we never got to ride go carts on Mars even though Lost in Space was set in 1997.

I found Kurzweil brilliant but a little creepy. I'm usually on the gung-ho pro-technology side of discussions, so it was fun to be voicing some of the more cautionary concerns for a change. [...]

Was there a take home from all this? Sure. I think we're moving into an era when we will define ourselves more by the technologies we refuse than the ones we accept.

Go read the rest here: Douglas Rushkoff - Weblog :: Welcome to the Future.

Sounds entertaining...

New proof that "Channel One" has zero educational value

From the Center for Media and Democracy's PR Watch blog:

The controversial in-school television program Channel One "airs 10 minutes of news and public affairs and two minutes of commercials or public service announcements daily." But a new study published by Pediatrics magazine found that students "had a stronger recall of the ads than the programming itself."

Link: Channel One: Zero Educational Value - Center for Media and Democracy, quoting Study: Kids Recall Ads Over Shows - MediaWeek.

See also: Citizens' Campaign for Commercial-Free schools.

 

Proof that TV doesn't harm kids?

Austan Goolsbee writes in Slate:

In a recent study, two economists at the University of Chicago, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro, came up with a different way to test the long-run impact of television on kids—by reaching back to the distant past of the information age. [...]

From the 1966 Coleman Report, the landmark study of educational opportunity commissioned by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Gentzkow and Shapiro got 1965 test-score data for almost 300,000 kids. They looked for evidence that greater exposure to television lowered test scores. They found none. After controlling for socioeconomic status, there were no significant test-score differences between kids who lived in cities that got TV earlier as opposed to later, or between kids of pre- and post-TV-age cohorts. Nor did the kids differ significantly in the amount of homework they did, dropout rates, or the wages they eventually made. If anything, the data revealed a small positive uptick in test scores for kids who got to watch more television when they were young. For kids living in households in which English was a second language, or with a mother who had less than a high-school education, the study found that TV had a more sizable positive impact on test scores in reading and general knowledge. Evidently, Bozo the Clown was better than we remember.

Link: The Benefits of Bozo - Proof that TV doesn't harm kids. By Austan Goolsbee.

(via Steven Johnson)

Goolsbee's "proof" is from a single 2006 study that revisited 1966 data that were collected for a different purpose.  I haven't read the paper but that kind of re-analysis sounds risky.

Poking around a bit, I noticed that the paper has apparently not been published yet.  Hmm.  You always have to question the motive of researchers (and op-ed writers) who promote research in the media before it's reviewed and published in a real journal.

The Extremes of Modern TV

Lore Sjöberg writes about the shock of watching cable TV again after a five-year break:

The biggest shocker, however, has been the gratuitous, licentious, pandering inclusion of post-production computer effects. Gone are the days in which text would just sit there and maybe make your TV buzz a little. Now every damn piece of text has to make a Broadway entrance, swooping and glowing and surrounded by vaguely computery symbols and lines.

When last I had cable, there were 3-D news graphics and sports were starting to create yellow lines on playfields where yellow lines do not actually exist, but now it's everywhere. Nature programs! I watched a show on Animal Planet about moose, and there were all these dancing, spinning, moose-related graphics. It was like some weird mash-up of Northern Exposure and Tron. How I long for the days when a nature show meant long shots of herd animals being chased by helicopters for no apparent reason while an old man tried to sell you insurance.

Link: Wired News: Tune In, Turn On, Veg Out.

I agree... Nature shows these days are especially bad.  Everything's EXTREME! or computer-generated.  We've gone way past the point of nature shows being unrealistic because they showed only the exciting bits (attacking and mating).  Now CG fills in the gaps with even more dazzling performances when the animals aren't up to it.

To give credit where it's due, though: Animal Planet's Puppy Bowl was pure genius (I'm serious).

Hysterical Journalism and more Wikipedia nonsense

Patrick Smith talks about the recent Alaska Airlines incident that got overblown thanks to a "citizen journalist":

[Much] attention soon became focused on the blog of Jeremy Hermanns, a private pilot who was a passenger aboard flight 536. His photos from the MD-80's cabin, including a digital self-portrait complete with plastic mask, were picked up by newspapers around the country, while interview requests began to pour in.

I found Hermanns' account of the incident, which he describes as "horrific," and "the unthinkable," to be luridly overblown. [...]

Along with dozens of other readers, I went ahead and left some comments on Hermanns' blog. The majority of passengers, I wrote, could not be blamed for feeling scared and confused. It was noisy, and no doubt disorienting for many of the plane's occupants; the need for the crew to initiate a rapid descent would have been frightening to those who didn't understand what was happening. But it was not a life-threatening situation. [...]

Most of this was included in my post on Hermanns' blog. He promptly deleted the entire thing. Believing it might have been a mistake, I later reposted the identical text. Again, it disappeared within minutes.

My dissection was meant to be instructive and helpful, and I certainly have no association with Alaska Airlines. Yet he chose to censor it.  It's interesting, because he had no problem leaving up many rude and offensive comments, but deleted mine because they didn't fully jibe with his contentions. [...]

If anyone was working the P.R. angle, it was Hermanns, with his theatrically mask-strapped mug splashed on newspapers and on "Good Morning America," describing a loss of cabin pressure as "horrific" and "the unthinkable." And it's craftily moderated Web pages like his that make many people scoff at the notion of bloggers as journalists.

Link: Salon.com Technology | Ask the pilot.

From Hermanns's response:

That’s where Patrick Smith comes in. Patrick has a site of his own, and a book where he shares with the world his air travel expertise as a licensed pilot (I’m told it’s a real page-turner). Patrick came to my site, offered some critical assessments of my choice of two words (those very same two he was SO aggravated by in the Salon piece) and then proceeded to fill my site with spamtastic links to his books and site. Not only was Patrick beating a dead horse (I’d been chided left-and-right throughout the comments for the very same things he was saying), he was filling my message board with spam-filled messages trying to boost his own site’s traffic and pagerank. But in Patrick’s world, any refusal to help him promote his products is obviously an attempt to manipulate the publicity for my own gain (which, in case you’re wondering, is still at a whopping $0).

I understand Patrick’s bitterness–after all, last week more people read my story than read his writing ALL of last year. But now to help his own cause, he’s decided to try and make himself part of the story. [...]

But as much as having your words blatantly distorted by a “major” publication like Salon sucks, I understand that this is the fate of anyone who publicly shares their experiences, be it online or thru any other form of media. The unique thing I’ve learned about sharing your experiences in a blog (with comments) is that the conversation can develop really fast–and plenty of opportunists, like Patrick Smith, will gladly try to co-opt it, whether or not they have anything to actually contribute to the discussion.

Link: Salon tries to drag the Alaska saga on…, and (earlier) Alaska Flight #536 - Rapid De-Pressurization and Panic at 30K Feet.

Speaking of overly defensive bloggers...

Here's another lengthy defense of Wikipedia by Cory Doctorow, specifically relating to how he was able to edit his own Wikipedia bio -- and it required only(!) "a couple hours over the following weeks coming to a consensus with the various parties in the dispute".  And here's the Register article by Andrew Orlowski that inspired Doctorow's article.  Orlowski's main point was that you'll have a much easier time correcting your Wikipedia bio if you're a Wikipedia fan.  Doctorow seems to ignore that point; instead he trots out the familiar Wikipedia line that you can't edit regular news articles, therefore Wikipedia is better.

High-Tech Dining For Zombies

From the International Herald Tribune:

Sitting outside a restaurant one night and staring at a pager that would tell him when a table had opened up, Dave Thompson had his epiphany. Why, he wondered, did the restaurant give him a pager that did nothing more than vibrate, light up and buzz? Why not a pager that could also give him something to do while he waited?

"I just thought, 'This is really old technology,"' he recalled. "We can do better than this."

Thompson's company, Embedded Processor Designs, based in Fletcher, North Carolina, is selling a restaurant-paging system that not only alerts people when their tables are ready but also can entertain them while they wait, let them check out the menu and even order cocktails or appetizers to arrive when they are seated. [...]

Link: Better mousetrap isn't the only way to catch customers - Print Version - International Herald Tribune.

No disrespect to the man and his invention (we've all got to make a living), but, um, wow...  Do people not talk to each other anymore?  Is it really that hard to bear a few minutes of inactivity waiting for a table?  I guess so.

On the topic of "entertainment while you wait"...  A couple of years ago I was putting gas in a rental car before dropping it at the airport in Cleveland.  The high-tech pumps at this station had little TV's offering weather and trivia and other nonsense to entertain me during my 30 second ordeal.  What did I gain from this luxury?  I was so dazzled that I mistakenly thought I heard the pump stop and I pulled out the nozzle too soon, spraying gas all over the side of the car.  Okay, maybe I'm just an idiot, but I've never done that before -- I blame the TV.

Amusing Ourselves To Death, 20 Years Later

Penguin has just come out with a 20th Anniversary Edition of Neil Postman's classic Amusing Ourselves to Death.  It has an excellent new introduction by his son, Andrew Postman.

I didn't read the original book until 5 or 6 years ago, and I was struck then by how fresh and relevant the arguments are to our present day, Internet-obsessed society.  Here's hoping this new edition attracts many more readers.