Tag: newspaper

FREE-FLOATING ANXIETY 96 HOURS BEFORE THE VOTE

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I am so nervous I can barely breathe.  We’re going canvassing again Sunday and I will try to do more phone calls before then and after but seeing these polls closing – listening to Chuck Todd on MSNBC talk about states that are "tightening" – it’s really scary.  I’ve felt all along that everyone is putting this election away way too soon.  As I sat with friends and listened to Joe Trippi this week, all three of us were troubled by the seeming assumption that the race is "in the bag."  It’s so easy to get complacent and stay home, make fewer calls, do a bit less, if you think things are going your way anyway.

In addition, we don’t know what the "young people" and first-time voters will do.   Will they show up? Can they translate quotes like this one from college student Lauren Masterson, on the NewsHour:

"We see ourselves in him, I think. Even though he is of another generation, people are excited about him because he
seems to understand young people.

into turning out and waiting in line and casting that vote?  Here’s a nice consideration of younger voters and their commitment.

I suppose if I just watched TNT and the endless, comforting Law and Order broadcasts instead of MSNBC, Your Place for Politics,  I’d feel better but after all the years I spent covering campaigns, I can’t imagine avoiding information when it’s available.  And it’s really the first presidential election where I’ve had no editorial responsibility (except my blog) so I have all these habits and nowhere to put them.  I have to sit and listen and worry and watch and bounce from website to website, and to the links provided by friends on Twitter.  Can’t stop.  It’s not that I think I’ll miss the Important Moment, it’s that I keep hoping to hear some good news.  We all know that races tighten at the end but many states are moving into the margin of error and that’s really scary. 

At least I have to go offline for Shabbat, which is going to make me nuts but may be healthy.  Keep an eye on things for me, will you?

 

WILLIAM GIBSON, NEUROMANCER, THE WEB AND THE NEWSPAPER

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I’m a big William Gibson fan.  His new book Spook Country —
just arrived and I’m struggling to wait to start it on an upcoming beach
weekend instead of plunging in like I did with Harry Potter.  It was
he – and his book Neuromancer,
published in 1984, that led me onto the Internet in the early 90s, well before most of my
friends.  Once I dove into cyberspace (Gibson coined the word) I never
looked back.

Neuromancer was Gibson’s first book .  Much of his early work was a dark view of a connected
world full of data pirates and megacities ("the Sprawl" in the US and
"Chiba City" in Japan) with skies, in one of his most famous quotes, "the color of television, tuned to a dead 
channel."
I believed as I read Neuromancer and then all of his subsequent work that it was a preview of a
possible future and that parts of it were already on their way. 

This appeared in Reuters today:   U.S. consumers this year will spend more of
their day surfing the Internet than reading newspapers or going to the
movies or listening to recorded music, according a study released on
Tuesday. The report comes from the highly-regarded private equity firm
Veronis Suhler Stevenson, which examined consumer behavior to inform investment strategies.  Where would future ad money (hence revenue, hence good investments, I assume) go? 

When I began working online, I encouraged clients to include
their URLs in their ads and on their business cards.  In the 90s, a major LA newspaper ran ad trailers in local movie theaters.  Of course I urged them
to include their website URL at the end of the ad.  Concerned about cannibalizing the print product , they declined to do so.  I tell you this just to demonstrate how much has changed and how little many thought leaders realized what was going on around them (I also once heard Michael Eisner – on a public panel – call the Internet a fad – but that’s another story.) 

The study goes on to report
that TV still rules: “in 2006 consumers
spent the most time with TV, followed by radio, which together combined for
nearly 70 percent of the time spent with media. That was followed by recorded
music at 5.3 percent, newspapers at 5 percent, and the Internet at 5 percent.” It then predicts that this year “the Internet will move up to 5.1 percent,
while newspapers and recorded music each move down to 4.9 percent.”

 Except for the fact that  it appears to have omitted consideration of the many of us, particularly younger people, who multi-task and have the TV, radio or music playing while we’re online, it makes sense.  More and more, our lives are online — and our identities too.  More and more the world emerging from the imagination of William Gibson is becoming our world.

Here’s a final thought – a little out there but not totally unreasonable considering the Gibson constituency.  Wikipedia tells us "in his afterword to the 2000 re-issue of Neuromancer, fellow author Jack Womack goes as far to suggest that Gibson’s vision of cyberspace may have inspired the way in which the internet developed, (particularly the World Wide Web) after the publication of Neuromancer in 1984. He asks: What if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?"