Media: April 2005 Archive Page

None of these dedicated reporters and editors is paid for their efforts. In fact, most of them don’t know the first thing about professional journalism. All however are as passionate about their craft as the top earners at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox News or the BBC. What’s more, they’re convinced they can offer better journalism than anything professional news organizations currently supply; one stripped of all bias, covering areas long ago neglected by a mainstream media and produced by thousands of committed citizen correspondents all over the world. This is the dream of Wikinews.

Objectivity, no political agenda and the puritanical pursuit of truth? Surely that’s a pipedream? It’s certainly not a historical trait of American media. Yet if the lessons of the last year have taught us anything, it is that we dismiss citizen journalism at our peril.

[...]

“We were both kinda addicted to Star Wars Galaxies,” explains Ilya a little defensively. “I would travel [in the game] and claim I was with the press so they shouldn’t shoot me. But they still did.”

It’s not being glib to say that Ilya’s Star Wars Galaxy experience translates well to Wikinews. All the interactive and community skills that today’s 20-somethings have learned online provide the underpinning of this new participatory media. And given all the time and effort Ilya spent “practicising” being a journalist – learning style guides and how to structure a news story, who’s to say he’s any less equipped to start plying the trade than many journalism graduates? --Matthew Yeomans
--The Birth of WikiNews (Citrizens Kane)

Robert Pittman, who created MTV, attributed the station's success to the ability of viewers in their late teens and early 20s to process multiple facets of information simultaneously. In television, success brings imitation....

"When Mary Lynn Ryan, who was CNN's producer at the time, did this the news ratings skyrocketed," Grimes said. "So it appeared as though Robert Pittman was correct: if you are from 12-22 years old, your brain has learned how to process all these competing messages simultaneously, but people in their 30s and older have not learned how to do that."

Bergen, however, hypothesized that Pittman's theory was not correct.... "The human brain is today as it was in the 1880s, the 1580s and in the time of the Greeks and Romans. It has not changed," Grimes said. "We are no better able to parallel process conflicting information now than we were 300 years ago. So this notion that Pittman had that people have learned how to do that is nonsense." --Distracting visuals clutter TV screen; viewers less likely to retain content (EurekAlert!)

We'll be starting our own TV turn-off week, one week late.

Tonight, my son asked to watch The Incredibles again, but I told him we'd play together instead. While my wife took a nap, the kids and I read books aloud, played hide-and-seek, "Simon Says," and a game of my own invention -- "The Obedience Game." Just about anything can be fun if you enjoy the people you're with.

Computer turn-off week? I'm not ready for that...

AP started as a cooperative. Today, it is a cooperative in name only. It’s time to take a lesson from music swappers and invent the new AP – a digital cooperative, a Napsterized news service.

The 21st Century news business needs a peer-to-peer network that lets local operations drive cost out of their non-local news packages, divert resources to local web content creation and operate on a level playing field with bloggers, citizen journalists and internet pure plays. --Bob Benz and Mike Phillips --Time for a change: The Associated Press as Napsterized news (Online Journalism Review)

This is a reasonable attempt by the mainstream media to "get it" when it comes to the internet. Another detail that caught my eye:

Confronted with the rapidly growing need for web-specific content like Flash files, audio clips and other multimedia elements, AP has chosen to spend more of its members’ money to create that content rather than facilitate content-sharing among its members.

I'm planning to introduce a Flash unit in an upcoming (Fall 2006, if memory serves) New Media Projects course.

Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new 'libraries' that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.

Many children enjoy reading books, of course, and no doubt some of the flights of fancy conveyed by reading have their escapist merits. But for a sizable percentage of the population, books are downright discriminatory. The reading craze of recent years cruelly taunts the 10 million Americans who suffer from dyslexia—a condition didn’t even exist as a condition until printed text came along to stigmatize its sufferers. --Steven Johnson
--Everything Bad Goes Public (StevenBerlinJohnson.com)

Johnson's satirical thought piece reminds us that our experiences and surroundings determine what we think of as "normal".

The game scene is resorting to faddish ideas from years ago to try to appear original. I'm surprised they haven't come out with Pet Rock software yet.

None of this will save a doomed industry. The business is going to attempt to sustain growth and creativity by making game players buy newer and newer machines. Computer gaming has always been sustained by never-ending improvements in resolution and realism. But once we get to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?

That time is drawing near. We are already getting pre-hype for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 2, as well as the new Nintendo. All this will do is make the visuals more lifelike and the blood and gore more realistic and nauseating. While the kids who are used to this "progress" may not be put off by it, newcomers may be repulsed and skip these new generations of machines altogether.

If that doesn't flatten the market, the never-ending need to satisfy the demanding full-time game-player should do it. --John C. Dvorak --Doom 4: End of the Game Industry?  (PC Mag.com)

Predictably, Dvorak's getting trashed by twitch-thumbed gamers on Slashdot, but Dvorak's curmudgeonly demeanor is only endearing to a point.

Nowadays, news consumers have an almost unlimited choice. They don't sit down with a newspaper for an hour to read it cover to cover. Instead, they bounce from site to site, story to story, link to link, customizing their newsgathering experience, clicking on whatever stories from whatever publications appeal to them. They don't stick around long, but they do visit. It may be difficult for newspapers to figure out how to make money on them, but that doesn't mean that consumers don't find the product appealing.

People haven't been abandoning newspapers (and magazines). They have been abandoning the print medium. --Adam L. Penenberg --The New Old Journalism  (Wired)

Nothing terribly new here, but it's still notable to see support for The Basics in a publication like Wired.

For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ''masses'' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that ''24'' episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of ''24,'' you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ''24,'' you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion -- video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms -- turn out to be nutritional after all.

I believe that the Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today, and I believe it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down. And yet you almost never hear this story in popular accounts of today's media. --Steven Johnson --Watching TV Makes You Smarter (NY Times (will expire))

Just in time for TV Turn-off Week.

Johnson introduces daytime soap operas late in this article, after describing the narrative thread of Hill Street Blues. But that show, along with Dallas and others of a similar ilk, were billed as "nighttime soaps," so Johnson's decision to withhold that bit of information creates the appearance of a complexity that doesn't really need to be there. Of course, that's the choice of the author -- what are you going to withhold as part of the payoff, what will you give away in order to tease your audience.

The Love Boat featured two or three plots that dealt with visiting passengers, one of which typically involved one member of the recurring cast, and if memory serves, there was also a comic subplot dealing with the crew. But M*A*S*H (1971-1983) was a half-hour show that featured two or sometimes three plots happening at once, all designed to give the strong cast of supporting characters something to do (especially in later years, as the show got less farcical and more dramatically experimental).

Johnson's book, from which this article is an excerpt, will doubtless cover more ground. I'm not so sure that passively consuming television is the same thing as reading, but as Johnson notes, some of the best TV on today brings with it a plethora of fan websites and other forms of interacting with the primary narrative. I'll withhold my final judgement until I've read more, but I'm looking forward to it.

Incredibles DVD Freezes in My Player (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The other day, my wife picked up a copy of the widescreen, 2-disc DVD of The Incredibles. The movie disc loaded, played the FBI warning, then froze on the screen that threatens our little family with legal action if we ever offend The Mouse.

I'm used to the annoying tendency of DVDs to refuse to let you jump right to the menu, but this was ridiculous. The screen froze at the warning, and didn't do anything. The only way we could get the DVD out was by shutting off the player.

The bonus features disc plays just fine, and the disk that hung in on our DVD player worked just fine in my laptop. The DVD has imprinted on it "www.TheIncredibles.com/support," but that URL leads to an error. Hacking the URL leads to a Disney site containing no obvious technical assistance.

We brought the box back to Wal-Mart to exchange it, and the same thing happened.

My son suggests that we return the DVD and get a videotape instead, but I doubt Wal-Mart will allow that. Maybe somebody else Googling for this problem will find this page and we can commiserate...

First, pigeons cannot fly through Windows. Second, since they don't fly in darkness either, this method's bandwidth drops to zero 50% of the time. Finally, there's the problem of droppings download. We are pleased to report that all these shortcomings were resolved in our new data transfer protocol, as we now turn to describe.

System architecture: the system is constructed of a back end - a carriage, Ben-Hur movie style, which is made of a yoke made of light Balsa, and outfitted with two huge wheels - 2 DVD wheels, 4.7 Giga each. --Snails are faster than ADSL (Ami Ben-Bassat's Blog)

Our time here may be fleeting ("Out, out brief candle!") but footnotes are not supposed to be. When online citations extinguish, every discipline is befouled, because replication, at the heart of the research process, becomes difficult without stable archiving, which libraries used to provide.

It was called a book shelf, as in Shakespeare's day. --Michael Bugeja --Such Stuff as Footnotes Are Made On (Inside Higher Ed)

PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information. A good PR firm won't bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they've worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they don't want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda.

If anyone is dishonest, it's the reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them. After all, they know good PR firms won't lie to them.

A good flatterer doesn't lie, but tells his victim selective truths (what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients.

[...]

We estimated, based on some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the Web. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral enough. But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quote it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20% of the online store market. --Paul Graham --The Submarine (PaulGraham.com)

The distractions of constant emails, text and phone messages are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis, according to a survey of befuddled volunteers.

Doziness, lethargy and an increasing inability to focus reached "startling" levels in the trials by 1,100 people, who also demonstrated that emails in particular have an addictive, drug-like grip. --Martin Wainwright --Emails 'pose threat to IQ'  (Guardian)

The Wall Street Journal on April 11 wrote that ?despite the occasional controversial article, many of the reader-written sites look more like church bulletin boards than, say, the New York Times.?

Let'snot dismiss church bulletin boards. When I wrote editorials in Omaha, Neb., I watched a Republican candidate win his way into Congress via a campaign conducted mostly on church bulletin boards. I suspect that in the most recent U.S. presidential election, church bulletin boards delivered far more votes than the New York Times did. We should hope that our work rises to the level of influence and inspires the loyalty of a church bulletin board. --Robert Niles -- Printer-friendly version Virtual roundtable: Grassroots journalism leaders discuss the nitty-gritty (Online Journalism Review)

From the intro to a "virtual roundtable" with Mike Noe, Lauren Ward, and Lex Alexander, " some people who actually are making grassroots journalism work for their publications."

When was the last time you stretched your arms, locked your fingers together with palms facing out, and executed a satisfying snap before channeling your energies into a one-on-one encounter? I am not referring to the clicking of a mouse button, which is about as immersive as punching a warm soda from a vending machine. I am referring to your hands poised above the keyboard, your eyes glued to the monitor, and your torso leaning forward in the classic "game player position." Interacting with this game is similar to telling a gorgeous waitress your lips are parched, and her serving you a tall, wet glass filled with cold, fizzling soda and just the right amount of ice. It involves more than your basic senses; it involves your entire self. True, the game is built on convention: exploring pre-rendered environments, collecting items, solving puzzles, and opening new areas of the game, but it also turns convention on its ear while keeping its tongue firmly in cheek. The text parser forces you to interact with the game, pulling you into the solving of puzzles rather than allowing you to click your way to a resolution, the characters help or hinder the outcome of the game, depending on the nature of your interactions, and the carefully constructed game realm is the sum and substance of logic. Yet impregnating the entire concept, including the graphics, sounds, characters, architecture and puzzles, is a genuine sense of humor that is never forced. --Starship Titanic (review) (Adrenaline Vault)

Wonderfully sensual paragraph from a review of this 1998 graphic adventure game.

Theater owners are in three different businesses: showing movies; showing advertisements--previews, which must be shown as part of their contract, don't generate any revenue--and selling popcorn and soft drinks. The only business that makes a profit for them is the third, so it makes sense to cater to teenage males, who gobble the most popcorn and slurp the most soda. This demographic is reputed not to give a hoot if the picture is fuzzy and dim, as long as they can see the explosions.

[...]

It's hard to imagine even Wal-Mart imposing the kind of rules that made the Hays Office ridiculous, such as requiring married couples to be depicted sleeping in twin beds. But does freedom always improve art? Or to put it more provocatively, does censorship always hurt it? What is the proper place of public morality in popular art? Is it different from the place of morality in elite art? What is the appropriate standard by which to judge Hollywood movies?

[...]

But like the new censorship, the new technology raises the quality question. The advent of the DVD has paralleled that of the CD. Not only has it influenced the packaging of new material, it has stimulated the re-packaging of old. We may regard with mixed feelings the prospect of buying our favorite childhood TV shows in immaculate-looking boxed sets, but that is only the tip of the marketing iceberg. The DVD is making whole libraries of movies as available and accessible as the paperback made whole libraries of books. Will this help to educate the public about the history of film, thereby developing its taste and improving quality overall? Or will it degrade taste by reducing the experience of watching a movie to something you can do any time, anywhere, on your ever-miniaturizing laptop? (Lawrence of Arabia . . . Coming soon to a video phone near you!)

Granted, it is probably too soon to assess the aesthetic impact of the DVD--not to mention the whole "digital revolution" of which the DVD is but the leading edge. But Epstein's reluctance to address the quality issue also hobbles his attempts to come to grips with the enormous change that stands at the heart of his study: the one that occurred in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the power in Hollywood shifted away from the moguls who founded the studios and toward the top stars, the top directors, and the agents who perfected that power in the new "art of the deal."

[...]

Speaking of the theater, it might be worth taking a moment to consider how Epstein's mode of analysis would illuminate that realm. The theater industry, if you'll pardon the expression, is a lot older than the movie industry. But think of all the regime changes it has gone through. In ancient Greece, it was part of a religious festival sponsored by aristocratic citizens who competed fiercely for performance spots and prizes. In Rome, it was the plaything of plutocrats, who cared more about the lavish special effects than about the drama (sound familiar?). In ninth-century Europe, plays were performed in church by priests. In Renaissance Italy, there was the elegant proscenium of Aleotti and the funky commedia dell'arte of the streets. In Elizabethan England, the Globe Theater was run as a profit-making venture by entrepreneurial actors and other investors. The French bourgeoisie plunked down good francs to see realistic drama. And in spite of themselves, the Communists gave the world Bertolt Brecht and the post-Revolution Moscow Art Theater. What is the point? To quote one of those entrepreneurial actors, "The play's the thing." Under all of these regimes, the theater has been dominated by a lot of junk. (Even the Globe Theater featured bear-baiting on off nights.) But in most eras, the junk has been punctuated by a few great works, which is why we bother to pay attention at all. --Martha Bayles reviews Edward Jay Epstein's The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood --Hollywood Means Business  (The Weekly Standard)

There's even a passage in this review that defends Patrick Stewart as an accomplished stage actor. Bayles knows her stuff.

For the few seconds between the announcement that Ratzinger was named pope, and the announcement of his choice of name, the Wikipedia entry was titled Pope Joseph... I just happened to catch it on the fly (it was changed before I could update it)... --Stephen Downes, in a comment. --How the Community Can Work, Fast (Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.)

That's some fast work on the part of the Wikipedians...

"God forbid, if someone shot the President, which network would you turn to? It will be cable, the Internet--something other than General Hospital being interrupted." --Sam Donaldson, former ABC News anchor --Donaldson: Network News Dead (BroadcastingCable.com)

--i am 8-bit

A Los Angeles art show.

Website requires Flash.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament. --David Keys and Nicholas Pyke --Decoded at last: the 'classical holy grail' that may rewrite the history of the world (The Independent)

Although not traditionally the domain of special collections, I have chosen to use the donation to create a new collection in the area of interactive fiction, specializing in the early works published by Infocom. Interactive fiction is a genre of computer game that is more literary than most computer and video games popular today. Also known as text adventure games, these works present story text to players, who then type in commands to the computer, which then prints text in response, back and forth, in the process unfolding and determining a story. Although not commercially popular today, the genre may be of great scholarly and historical importance as interactive electronic games grow both in general popularity and as subjects worthy of academic study. --Adam Mathes --Collecting and Preserving Infocom Interactive Fiction (AdamManthes.com)

Via Nick on GrandTextAuto., where Mathes notes that this is a hypothetical project, written for a class.

I wonder... quite honestly, are the best-known commercial IF games really the ones that are most in need of collection and preservation? Still, Infocom's works were undeniably influential.

Here's what you can do with a text book: read it. You can also lose it, rip the pages out, deface the cover, and generally abuse it until it has to be replaced. But as far as a delivery vehicle for content goes, you can basically only consume it by reading it.

Here's what you can't do with a textbook:

You can't annotate it. How strange is it that students can't add their own reflections or thoughts or reactions, that they have to do that in a different space?

You can't search it.

You can't link it to other relevant ideas or concepts in any organized way.

You can't access it if it's not in your posession.

You can't copy out important information and paste it with other important information.

You can't share it in any meaningful way.

You can't have the most up to date information about the topic.

You can't edit it.

Think of how much more interactivity we have with digital content, how much more power we have to make meaning of that content through connecting ideas and people with it.

--The Case Against Textbooks (Weblogg-ed)

If students own copies of the book, then of course they can annotate it.

They can search a book if someone else has prepared a concordance, and they can link to the contents of the book by referring to a page number.

And there are all sorts of things that you can't do with a digital text -- such as read it without access to a computer, or add its weight to the milk crate in which you plan to present your tenure review package. Of course, the former concern comes with the territory, and the latter is no flaw in digital text itself.

But I'm picking nits, because I'm mostly in agreement. I use printed collections of essays in my teaching, and of course I use printed literary works, but rarely do I use traditional textbooks.

Since I think of myself mostly as a writing teacher, I tend to think of content as a means to an end. So I'm more interested in getting students to be critical thinkers and researchers, rather than have them absorb the contents of a book and remember it long enough to take a quiz.

I'll use a textbook in my "Newswriting" course this fall, but in my upper-level courses, I'm more likely to use web pages, supplemented with journal articles. Textbooks that cover digital culture go out of date so quickly that Wikipedia is often a better resource.

Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a lawn, which was the stage, and the lawn went back towards the lake in the grounds of the college, and the play began in natural light. But as it developed, and as it became time for Ariel to say his farewell to the world of The Tempest, the evening had started to close in and there was some artificial lighting coming on. And as Ariel uttered his last speech, he turned and he ran across the grass, and he got to the edge of the lake and he just kept running across the top of the water -- the producer having thoughtfully provided a kind of walkway an inch beneath the water. And you could see and you could hear the plish, plash as he ran away from you across the top of the lake, until the gloom enveloped him and he disappeared from your view.

And as he did so, from the further shore, a firework rocket was ignited, and it went whoosh into the air, and high up there it burst into lots of sparks, and all the sparks went out, and he had gone.

When you look up the stage directions, it says, "Exit Ariel." --Tom Stoppard, as cited by Lary Opitz --The Play's the Thing: Drama versus Theatre (Skidmore)

I'm teaching "Drama as Literature" this fall. It will be a survey from the ancient Greeks to present day. I haven't decided exactly what texts to use, but I've never taught Stoppard's Arcadia. I think I will use Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, in parallel with Hamlet, but I'm not sure I want to do two Stoppard plays...

"Certainly, I didn't do as much as I should have after all the excitement of the late 1990s. I suspect many of you in this room did the same, quietly hoping that this thing called the digital revolution would just limp away." --Rupert Murdoch, "old media" mogul. --News must adapt to web, says Murdoch  (Guardian)

Simply counting the volume of conversations and comments and the number of trackbacks is one indication of the size and scope of the network surrounding your blog. Whether or not those comments are in agreement or disagreement requires content analysis, but presumably positive or neutral comments would be indicative of a healthy relationship between the blogger and his/her audience.

Examining the credibility and authority of the people who are commenting and/or linking to the site is another way to assess the impact and importance of the blog.

One needs to look beyond just quantity of postings or links to the quality of the dialog. I like the way Dennis G. Jerz of Seton Hill University categorizes blogs in his classroom and have adapted his categories below:

"Coverage" -- The number of times your brand or issue is mentioned.
"Depth" -- How deeply does the posting discuss the brand? Is it just a passing mention or does the blogger go into the subject in depth with numerous links?
"Interaction" -- What was the nature of the interaction? Was the posting designed to solve a problem, compare different brands, or simply allow the author to rant?
"Discussion" -- What was the nature of the discussion? Was it a true dialog with extensive exchange of ideas, or was it just bantering back and forth.

Jerz further classifies comments as:

Comment Primo -- a comment that launches a discussion on someone else's blog
Comment Grande -- a long comment posted on a peer blog, which is then advertised via a cross-blog posting
Comment Informative -- in which a commenter uses his or her particular knowledge in order to flesh out a general or incomplete statement made in a peer's blog entry
Link Gracious -- a link that draws attention to the source of an idea or to a good conversation happening on someone else's blog

Consider also adding Tonality, an indicator of the health of the relationship between the blog community and the brand. If the tone of the posting leaves a reader less likely to do business with your organization it is negative. If the posting leaves a reader more likely to do business with your organization, or recommends the brand, it is positive. If it essentially just discusses facts it is neutral or balanced. --Katie Delahaye Paine and Andy Lark --How To Measure Blogs, Part One... and what to do with the data (The Measurement Standard (via Cymfony))

Apparently the folks at Cymfony were so excited that they appeared in this (subscription-only) article that they pasted the whole thing on their website. I've added extra line breaks for legibility. The link goes to Cymfony's copy, but it originally appeared on The Measurement Standard. I note that authors removed "xenoblogging" and "wildcard" from the categories I proposed, and their interpretation of "interaction" is very different from what I intended. Still, it's a good article, one to which I'll return fairly soon, since this summer I'll be helping two different university administrative units launch PR blogs.

Odd that the article is written in the first person, but is credited to two authors.

Wireless internet is an idea that first formulated back during the Cold War. It was a young Al Gore who first was struck in the head by an apple (much like Sir Newton, except this apple was thrown at Gore by Ollie North). Mr. Gore said to himself, in a very slow and monotonous tone, "I should create a world wide communication network... with my bare hands! All by myself!" And then, about an hour later, over a bowl of scrambled eggs with ketchup, he thought out loud, "You know what... once I have this internet thing completed, I should make it go through the air without wires... I will make this with my bare hands! The question is how..." --Mike Rubino --Wi-Fi Madness (Tranquility Lost)

Lately I've been love-bombing Mike Rubino, a graphic arts and creative writing double major, who's a major presence on blogs.setonhill.edu, but who for some silly reason won't declare a new media journalism major. He hasn't even taken a class with me yet. (Was it something I said?)

Anyway, he's a great satirist. I'm surprised I missed this back in August when he first posted it.

In the spirit of endism, here's a list of all the forms of major media and how they're trending. Make of it what you will.

Flat to Down to Way Down:

• Music: sales last year were down 21% from their peak in 1999
• Television: network TV's audience share has fallen by a third since 1985
• Radio: listenership is at a 27-year low
• Newspapers: circulation peaked in 1987, and the decline is accelerating
• Magazines: total circulation peaked in 2000 and is now back to 1994 levels (but a few premier titles are bucking the trend!)
• Books: sales growth is lagging the economy as whole

Up:

• Movies: 2004 was another record year, both for theaters and DVDs
• Videogames: even in the last year of this generation of consoles, sales hit a new record
• Web: online ads will grow 30% this year, breaking $10 billion (5.4% of all advertising) --Mainstream Media Meltdown (The Long Tail)

To include books along with all the other media dinosaurs is misleading.

The growth rate of books seems flat, but compared to the other traditional media, books look healthy.

I'm also not sure that measuing the advertising dollars spent on the web is a good way to measure the importance of that media. So, while the author coyly withholds commentary in an attempt to appear unbiased, the selection and organization of this particular list carries an ideological slant. I'm not criticizing the author for having an ideology, I'm just noting the rhetorical impact of the author's compositional decisions.

When people don't fill out forms, they often use the excuse that it's too much work. Consider how to encourage them with negative or positive incentives. The IRS appears to have entirely solved this problem, too. Once again, the key comes from the close relationship with the criminal justice system that the IRS enjoys. Willful failure to file your taxes can result in criminal charges. However, the IRS also has an elaborate and complicated set of financial penalties available for people who fail to file their taxes or pay them in a timely manner.

On the other hand, the IRS offers rewards too. As many people overpay taxes during the year, customers who are unsure about their taxes often fill them out early in the hopes of "winning" a refund of their overpayment. This helps keep users interested. --Peter Seebach --The cranky user: Bad design can be so taxing (IBM)

Although a failed business enterprise, Laurel'sPurple Moon seemed to do exactly what it had planned -- hit it off with girls. Her idea that games should consist of relationships, values such as loyalty, love, and courage, and conflicts such as jealousy, cheating, exclusion, racism, materialism, and broken homes seems worthwhile, but as a young girl I also would have wanted some action as well. Perhaps there is a happy medium that would please both boys and girls -- a video game that incorporates action and physical complications into an in depth storyline filled with rich characters, relationships, emotional conflicts, and growth. --Johanna Dreyfuss --Utopian Entrepreneur (The Long and Winding Road)

My student Johanna Dreyfus reflects on Brenda Laurel's Utopian Entrepreneur. I'm looking for this game, too, Johanna! Let me know if you find it!

The moon base landing dome opens in pie slices like eye muscles, or the jagged mouth of a cyclops. Pods are not designed strictly for function but thematic meaning: who would fly one without side ports? Tunnel vision. The dark port in the white pod body is very eye-ballish. Similar also is the deep socket of Discovery's bridge. It's lit red early on when Bowman inhabits this superskull, later it's dark/blind when HAL takes charge, signalling his dismissal of the astronauts, prefiguring his death. The space station shuttle bay was read as a vaginal slit by Freudian reviewers; the clipper ship entering can also read as a symbolic prestatement of the blinding of the Cyclops, an archer's arrow aimed at the widescreen audience. Similar blind slits are in the Orion moon shuttle and lunar surface flyer. --Mark Martel --Another Odyssey: Design and Meaning in 2001 (Visual Memory)

An interesting Homeric reading of Kubrik's version of Clarke's novel. It's only a stab at a full-fledged essay -- there's plenty listing of interesting parallels, but none of the "so what?" that turns a list of observations into a thesis.

The senior wireless operator was John "Jack" Phillips, age 25, and the junior operator was 21 year old Harold Bride. The radio transmitter was of the "spark" type, and the radio operator used a telegraph key to transmit a "Continental" version of code, which is slightly different from the American "Morse" code. The ship's radio actually required two separate rooms, one for the receiver, and one for the transmitter, to keep the loud buzzing of the transmitter from interfering with the receiver. --Dwight A. Johnson --The Radio Legacy of the R.M.S. Titanic (Avisa)

"Shut up! We are busy...." Phillips telegraphed, after yet another warning about ice in the vicinity.

The Titanic struck an iceberg less than an hour later.

Phillips had been up at 5:30am the previous day, fixing a problem with the radio equipment. During the outage, a pile of outbound messages from passengers had built up... he and an assistant were apparently still catching up on the backlog by the following night. Once the enormity of the accident was clear, Philips stayed at his post, sending distress signals until the last possible minute.

The official inquiry found that the chain of unlikely events that led to the loss of so many lives was not the fault of any one person.

Among the many factors contributing to the loss of life:

• reducing the number of lifeboats in order to gain more deck space
• releasing some nearly-empty lifeboats early
• the desire to make the ship's maiden voyage a race against time
• the captain's decision to steer away from the iceberg, permitting it to scrape all along the vessel's flank, rather than just ram it head-on
• the height of the watertight compartment walls

In the past few years, I have seen Titanic museum displays hosted by pro-salvage and anti-salvage groups. The Titanic wreck was discovered by Robert Ballard, who advocates leaving the wreck as it is. But a company called RMS Titanic Inc was awarded salvage wrights; they have pulled up artifacts such as china and fixtures, and they sell chunks of Titanic coal. (See National Geographic's "Retrieval of Titanic artifacts stirs controversy."

If something needs to be prettier, they just add a few lines of description (or remove some - "beautiful" could challenge your mind to create an entirely different image than "beautiful blonde") instead of spending hours rendering.

In fact, there's so much content, Mihaly says it would just be too difficult to convert his game into a conventional MMOG. "Most good text MUDs would be way too expensive to translate to graphics because the range of features would require ungodly huge heaps of graphics... We'd have to strip out the soul of the game (as well as most of the features) to make it work," he said. While a picture can speak 1,000 words, it seems a few lines of text can conjure thousands of mental pictures. --Joseph Blancato --In Search of Deeper Content (War Cry Network)

Increasing graphics and cooler monsters doesn't always satisfy. Sometimes, less is more...

That's your lot. That's the movie we've been waiting 26 years for. And let me tell you, it was not worth the wait, not for this. The whole film is true to neither the letter nor the spirit of Douglas Adams' books and scripts. And it really seems that many of the changes have been introduced for no reason at all. For example, the novel leads us into the story by saying that the tale 'begins very simply. It begins with a house' whereas in the film Stephen Fry's narration tells us that it 'begins very simply. It begins with a man.' Even though, when Fry says this, we are looking at a house! --Hitchhiker's Guide Movie Review, Long Version (Planet Magrathea)

The quotation is from the conclusion to a depressing review of what might have been a good movie. From the review: "This is a terrible, terrible film and it makes me want to weep."

Sad. It was a great series of books, at any rate.

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