Internet – Page 2 – Don't Gel Too Soon

AND YOU THOUGHT YOU ALREADY LOVED THE INTERNET

OK. So I’m writing the script for a benefit I have to MC and I can’t find my stopwatch – anywhere. I was a TV news producer for more than 20 years so I have stopwatches all over the place – just not right here where I need one.

You can guess what’s coming, right? I type "stopwatch" into Google and, for the very first post, comes this. There’s just nothing that’s not here, is there? I’m so happy! PS If I knew how to save a web page as a JPEG (I don’t have time to go look it up) I could also show it to you instead of just linking to it. If you know how – let me know. Please.

PARDON ME, DO YOU THINK THE WEB CAN CHANGE THE WORLD?

I began my day at the plenary session of one of my favorite conferences –NTEN — The Nonprofit Technology Network. It’s a gathering of mostly non-profit activists who use the web to enhance their work. They are sharp, committed and fun.

The main session this morning was off the charts: David Weinberger, from Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. He nay be the best speaker I ever heard – certainly one of the best. Of course he’s funny and sometimes outraged – both very good things — but he also offers really thrilling analysis of our lives online and the role of each of us in making the Web what it is, and what it will be. Read more about him from another admirer, at the conference blog.

I also popped in at "Using Technology to Support Your Mission." Very cool but it turned out to be techier than I wanted, so wandered around running into people. This community is so vibrant and purposeful that it’s a wonderful place to hang around. These are people who don’t think the web can change the world, they know it has.

By the way, beyond what I’m learning in sessions, I can tell you what’s hot by the sessions I couldn’t even get into: The Age of YouTube: Using Video Online to Reach the Masses and Leveraging the Power of Participatory Media. Fortunately the YouTube one, at least, was videoed and will appear on the NTEN website where we can attend without sitting in a corner on the floor and sweating from the major body heat surrounding each of us.

Even so, in all it was a great day; sorry this report is so brief. More tomorrow.

CALLING ALL NEWS JUNKIES

It’s almost Shabbat and I only have a second but if you’re hanging around the web this weekend don’t miss this. It’s the newest Jib Jab video and will tell you all you need to know about why I went from TV to the web. Happy Passover!

HILLARY, THE TONKIN GULF AND 1984

OK, those folks who run TypePad and YouTube haven’t found a way to add this blog host to automatic video posting so I’m hooking a link in right here so you can watch this. I can’t decide what I think – it’s funny and clever and a perfect definition of a mashup but it’s also mean and off-mark. While many, including many feminists, have issues with Senator Clinton – this 1984/Apple Commercial version isn’t representative of most of them. Accusations of opportunism and flabbiness on the war are not the same as totalitarianism. True, she voted for the Patriot Act, but so did all but two Senators – and one of them didn’t vote at all!

Now, I remind myself – we still remember who voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska) and that was in 1964 so maybe this vote will last too. Anyway, I don’t know where I’ll land politically this year – I’m really just thinking about the power of the kinds of media manipulation (in the technical sense) that are possible today. How will we ever help newer voters figure out how to determine the truth? Are they so much more evolved than we are in a media sense that we needn’t worry, or is the dismal lack of critical thinking work in current No Child Left Behind education going to affect how people think in the voting booth as well as our educational standing in the world?

Thoughts?

SILENCE IS NOT GOLDEN

Here we are in what is supposed to be the best hotel in Jerusalem and the Internet can not get from the wall to my laptop. I’m down here in the business center just touching base but will post more when I have true access to the web, my camera etc. Sleep well everyone – Jerusalem is a huge intellectual, emotional and spiritual provocation. Will tell more later. Gnite for now. I cant’ find the apostrophe on this Israeli keyboard.

GOOGLE ME THIS

I worked for Excite when it was a brand new search engine. The idea was to write 20 word descriptions of every site and differentiate Excite as the search engine with quality descriptions to help guide the searcher. I wanted to learn about the Internet (it was around 1995 – near the beginning of search) and they were paying $5/review. It was a blast. Why am I telling you this?

I just finished a book called THE SEARCH: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, by John Battelle, who is a remarkable pioneer – one of the founders of WIRED, the late INDUSTRY STANDARD and blog advertising syndicator Federated Media Publishing, Inc. among others.

As the title suggests, it’s about considerably more than the brilliant and turbulent birth and ascent of Google. Battelle makes the very good case that the rise of search as a web application was essential to more than the future of the Internet as the universal tool that it is. In addition, says Battelle, “Search is no longer a stand-alone application, as useful but impersonal tool for finding something on a new medium called the World Wide Web. Increasingly, search is our mechanism for how we understand ourselves, our world, and our place within it. It’s how we navigate the one infinite resource that drives human culture: knowledge.”

In other words, search is changing us, our culture and our world. It’s a very exciting examination of something that’s become so automatic and familiar that it’s easy to forget just how transforming a force it is. The book is out in paperback and if you’re a web rat like me, you’ll really enjoy it.

TRY TO REMEMBER — THE FANTASTICKS, JERRY ORBACH, THE INTERNET AND ME

OK – so I should be used to it by now. I’ve been — as I often say, a walking demographic Baby Boomer as long as I can remember. But on this morning after the re-opening of THE FANTASTICKS* – which ran off-Broadway for 42 years, I read "adults 55+ adapting online." Of course they are — sooner or later whatever I’m doing becomes part of a generational wave.

Don’t worry – there IS a connection.

I saw THE FANTASTICKS with my college room mate and her mother during fall vacation of my freshman year. That was 1964 – four years after it opened. At the end, all of 18, I was crying so hard that the woman sitting next to me – probably 25 or s0 – handed me the rose her date must have given her at dinner. I kept it on the wall of my room for years.

El Gallo — the irresistible seducer and originator of the "hurt’ without which "the heart is hollow" — was first played by Jerry Orbach. [hear him sing Try to Remember here.] I met him when I was close to 50 – and told him I’d seen the show when I was 18. His face just changed – not a trace of Lennie Briscoe but a combination of affection, nostalgia and pleasure. We spoke a bit more and then I apologized for approaching him at a reception and acting like a groupie. He replied "You saw the Fantasticks when you were EIGHTEEN! That wasn’t an interruption that was a pleasure." So I guess the story had the same impact on the cast that it had on girls like me. "Please God please," the young girl ("the girl") cries out – "don’t let me be NORMAL!" That was me alright. Please let me be singular – not like the others!

Well it hasn’t turned out that way. Whatever I come to, my peers hit within a year or so. It made me a great talk show producer – never a visionary too far ahead to be relevant, just enough ahead to know what story to do next. I guess that’s why I accommodated to my role as close enough to normal but with an edge — rather than the downtown woman I had once wished to be.

I knew about this headlong Boomer journey online because my older son, in the industry, had read a similar study. Last weekend I told him that I seemed to be getting a lot more online consulting work and his theory was that companies need boomer consultants more because more "civilian" boomers are finally hitting the web. I always knew we would; the tribe that is the baby boom loves to be connected. The web was a perfect home for us. Just like THE FANTASTICKS.

*OK Feminist friends, there’s an element of sexism in this original fairy tale (they’ve rewritten the only really troubling song) but I have chosen to ignore it. It just can’t trump the wonder and poetry.

OF COURSE IT COULDN’T LAST – RANDOM THOUGHTS ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE WEB

I just spent an hour listening to NYT reporter Kurt Eichenwald on a talk show describing the current state of Internet child pornography. It’s just so sad.

I remember as far back as 1998, when I helped launch an Internet safety campaign called America Links Up. We organized teach-ins, a TV program, a family website and a lot of other material to help parents keep their kids safe on line. I, stupidly, thought people were a little overwrought about the whole thing. If you were honest with kids, they could be trusted. [ASIDE: I am, I often observe, a walking demographic… here for the George Lakoff nurturing parent.] How could we deprive them when the Internet was, as John Perry Barlow said, "the most important discovery since fire?"

I was so besotted that I was incorrigible. My boss at iVillage, whom I represented at American Links Up, used to call me a Web rat. But it’s a sign of my eternal naivete that I never thought it would get as bad as it (apparently) is. AND that so many kids would log on when parents weren’t looking and participate. ( If the stories are true, it’s not just toddlers and preteens being exploited, it is also older teens getting sucked in and abused as well. )

We raised our kids in a style very similar to that described by long-time Wired writer Jon Katz, writing as Wired’s Netizen. In 1996 he wrote a kids’ bill of rights on line – linking web rights to responsibilities met. I wonder how that would play just ten years later.

In addition, I still don’t understand – when there are so many Law and Order SVU and a dozens of other programs portraying the dangers of these people – why young people would engage in this stuff to begin with. Either too many kids are too lonely to care or we just aren’t paying enough attention. Parents have to work and if they want decent housing they often have long commutes. They need help.

So what do you think? Is the Web as scary as Eichenwald portrays it? Is some of it hype? How do we keep kids safe and still help them to savor the Internet in all its wonders and opportunities? Holler out some ideas….