Working Progress » Internet

What to do with traditional journalism.

Will — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:16:30 +0000

So I’ve been hearing non-stop that Newspapers and Magazines are dying at a fantastic rate, despite having a higher readership among readers, especially young adults, than ever. The problem is that the internet is serving the content, which is then aggregated and served ad-revenue-free to readers. No revenue means no more quality journalism, and all your journalistic needs will be found through cell-phone captures and amateur bloggers. With the change of the medium, the message seems to have been released into the territory of ‘free.’ This is bad, not because blogging journalists are bad – they serve their grassroots purpose, most notably to serve up the important issues to the journalists and to keep them honest, but because journalistic expertise is at stake.

Not everyone is a coherent writer, let alone a good one. Not everyone knows how to get to the story, let alone the story behind the story. Not everyone has the desire to research issue to which they are writing, let alone research an issue or a problem for longer than a google search. Journalism has been around since the reign of Julius Caesar (the Acta Diurna); should a profession that has served the masses for over 2000 years go to the wayside because we don’t feel like paying for it anymore?

Sadly, as much as we’d love to have all free content all the time, we have to pay our journalists. They are various models we could go with on this one: micro-payments on articles (lame) premium content (better), or (as suggested by Jon Stewart) aggregator licensing (best). I’m sure there are others, but I hope that whatever model is used, that it is used to save this industry.

My School is, apparently, awesome.

Will — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 18:33:06 +0000

Maclean’s magazine, Canada’s premiere weekly magazine, does two university surveys annually. One, the NSSE, is a pretty exclusive one that Tyndale isn’t in (yet), but the other, the Canadian University Survey Consortium (CUSC), is all about student satisfaction. Here’s the deal:

CUSC results - Tyndale

Tyndale tops the list. Oh yeah. Expensive private school with small classes rule. For more chart-topping results, check out Maclean’s other CUSC results here. This bodes well for my little academic burgh.

Take that Public Universities!

Micro-blogging

Will — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 20:53:58 +0000

If you look to your right, you’ll see a little box that has one or two sentences in it. This is called Twitter, the most popular micro-blogging tool on the internets. That’s right, micro-blogging: the current apex of internet nerditry!

Micro-blogging consists of 140-characters-at-a-time-or-less posts that talk about anything: what you are doing, what you are thinking, answers to others, links, and anything else that can be fit into 140 characters. For those on facebook, it’s basically updating only a facebook status all the freaking time. And then, you follow others’ feeds.

It’s great, and since I got my new iPod Touch (with its bountiful wifi access) from my wife, I use it in excess.

You should too. my twitter page is http://www.twitter.com/wkinchlea. Get jacked in. JOIN US.

The Power of Animation.

Will — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 04:35:57 +0000

First of all, I need to drop a shout-out to stumbleupon, because this little browser add-on is THE thing to find the most obscure (and awesome) things on the internet. You should totally get in on it. Awesomely addictive and potent as a procrastination device. Getting back to the topic at hand:
I have always loved animation. I really believe that only through animation can you fully express one’s imagination to its fullest, most existential extent. Emotion can run high in animation, and that’s great. I’m going to use two examples today to illustrate the power of animation.

(DISCLAIMER: Animation is more than drawings, it is also 3-D computer animation, and – possibly my favourite – claymation, under which these two examples fall.)

EXAMPLE #1 – More, by Mark Osborne.

This short film is an Academy Award-nominated piece about loneliness and the cost of artificial bliss in life. I implore you to watch it.

The second is an exerpt from the Adventures of Mark Twain, made in 1985. The piece is called “the Mysterious Stranger,” and frankly, it’s scary as hell. From my understanding, the original piece from which it is drawn is an atheist’s idea of God vs. the reality of evil in the world, implying Satan as God. (I’m sure he’d like that). Creepy as Hell.

See? Animation is awesome. Make some.

Net Lifer.

Will — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 04:00:11 +0000

I’ve been learning a lot about the cultural anthropology of the internet lately, specifically youtube.com, from Michael Wesch of Kansas State University. I think one of the reasons why I’m so interested in the internet is that I’m totally a ‘net kid.

In 1995, in grade 5, at 10 years old, I was ushered into my mom’s office at the London Public Library, and she put me in front of a computer and showed me http://www.yahoo.com. From there, I spent 3 hours surfing the web, sucking up the information about X-men, Reboot, and various cartoons. Soon afterwards, we got our hook-up and I was surfing the web and sucking as much info as possible on what little time I had on the system.

Fast-forward into Highschool, 2000-2001. I’ve become a master of Napster (before I realized it was wrong), ICQ, and MSN messenger. Geocities is still going fairly strong and I finally make my own website. My website is all about the culture and slang of my highschool. Boom. It’s a hit. It eventually died off, and I’ve tried to find it every since. It’s probably been archived somewhere…

At this point, I’m probably clocking in 3 hours a night on the internet to some capacity.

2004-2008. I’m part of, (and, I believe integral to) an online community that began on a band’s site, and eventually became a whole autonomous internet community. Awesome. But sadly, defunct. At the peak of this time, I’m connected to the internet upwards of 12-13 hours a day.

I say this because the most of my life has been spent connected to the internet. How has this affected my life vs. people even 5 years older than me, and what about the kids 5 years younger than me? What is it like for them?

We live in an increasingly digital society, and we need to understand how this will change communication and culture in (mostly) Western Society. Can people connect at a deep, meaningful level, solely through the internet? How will this affect the learning styles of children as we move from taxonomies (categorizing everything – think old yahoo) to folksonomies (tagging everything, think youtube, amazon, del.icio.us)? What is the effect of no-effort knowledge?

I’ve asked a lot of questions: Questions I hope to answer at some point here. I need to know answers to these, because I think my future may lie within those very questions

I’m going to leave you with this video by Michael Wesch, The Machine is Us/ing Us: