Papers and Rags

Back in Boston we have three major papers, The Globe, the Herald, and the Phoenix. The Globe is what we call "the paper", the outlet considered the most prestigious and objective. Then there’s the Herald which we call "the Rag" because it’s articles are mostly reactionary rubbish and story’s recycled from the AP wire. The Phoenix, the independent paper with no cover charge, is the only paper we refer to by name. Most of its staff writers have communist tendencies, but it’s the only place off the net where you can find a movie review that isn’t studio purchased garbage.
This hierarchy seems to be the norm in most major American cities; a paper, a rag, and an independent. Each appeal to a different sector, but they all print the big stories. Their differences lie with the opinions. The Paper is usually slightly liberal, and the rag recognizably conservative, at least in blue states. People choose the one that reinforces their own views and ignore the other.
This hierarchy has also defined the structure of internet news, but with even starker contrast. There are extremely liberal sites and extremely conservative sites with very little ground left in the middle. You used to be able to rely of newspapers for an objective view point, but they’re dying out fast because no one reads them anymore. But why is that? Is it because people simply hate the feeling of newsprint in their hands, or is it because people aren’t looking for an objective viewpoint anymore? It’s a scary trend. One that I hope gets reversed in the near future.

I Am in Hardware Hell

Let me explain... this Friday i woke up and my PC was dead. or at least blind. The motor was still chugging but the screen was black. So, "dead video card" i thought, "ill just go down to best buy and get a new one". So I pick up a new Mid-range card, bring it back, pop it in, and it works. For a while at least. The next morning i wake up and the thing is deader than it was the previous morning. It wont even boot up. So I call up a friend who's fluent with PC hardware and he says that my Power supply has probably died. So, Once again, Down to best buy, bring back a new power supply and install it.
Nothing. It's now officially a paper weight.

It feels almost as if a relative has died. I feel totally displaced over here on the couch, bent over typing on my Macbook. The PC nook I've established is very comfortable. Perfect chair, perfect desk height, monitor tilted just so. I spend hours there, surfing the web, writing scripts,gaming. Its like my home within my home. An extension of myself.

Needless to say, this will not stand. ITS UPGRADE TIME. As soon as possible I'm going out and buying a new PC with a processor twice the speed of my 2-year old machine. and with the new graphics card and power supply my computing power will be greater than ever. You'll see. The Nook won't even know that i was gone.

Communism 2.0: Governments + Corporations = Better world, Right?

Yesterday I went to see the documentary “Inside Job” which illustrates how the financial sector made hundreds of billions of dollars by making bets against their own investments which were designed to fail. How were they able to pull off the greatest robbery in human history if full view of the public? Well, first they got their executives appointed to government positions and had them burn the regulations put in place after the great depression to protect the public from unstable and predatory financial practices. Then they consolidated into groups so large that their failure would threaten the economic stability of the world. After that it was open season to make whatever risky bets they wanted. Then, when the floor fell out of the market, the banks turned to Uncle Sam and said, “If we go down, everyone goes down.” At which point congress easily coughed up a trillion dollars that the bankers got to keep, no questions asked.
My point is that government deregulation imposed by corporate interests almost always makes things worse. In the reading, I can see this happened in the radio industry a while ago. When the telecommunications act was passed in 1996, it pretty much eliminated all regulations on radio station ownership, and what we got was a white wash of homogenized crap on the airwaves. Corporations only look out for themselves, and when they don’t have to follow any rules they will attempt, and often succeed, at taking over the whole system. Once this happens we are often left with inferior products because the companies see no need to improve or innovate in the face on zero competition. It basically amounts to a form of corporate communism, and suffers from the same shortfalls that the Soviet Union suffered during its short tenure in human history. Deregulation is un-American because it ends up crushing competition under the guise of encouraging it, but since corporate cronies are still allowed to serve in government positions I can’t see the deregulation bandwagon rolling to a stop anytime soon.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Let The Mind Rape Begin...

Who needs Don Draper when we've got Facebook?

I guess the thing I have against the internet, or one of the things I have against it, is that it isn’t a fair game, at least from an advertising standpoint.
This weekend I saw the new Fincher movie “The Social Network”. A good movie; I’d recommend it. Fincher has a way of making the story of a few nerds inventing a non-porn website seem so exciting. But that is beside the point. The thing that really struck me was one statistic stated during the closing shot of the movie. Facebook, a website designed simply to allow people to share their personal bullshit is worth 25 billion dollars. How the hell did that happen?
But then the simple answer hits like a brick to the happy-sack. Of course! This is the tool advertisers have been waiting for since the invention of advertising. Information advertisers used have to procure through weeks or months of market research is now willingly given up by the consumer, for free, in one centralized location. Age, Profession, Interests, Sexual orientation; it’s all there. Now all advertisers have to do is farm the Facebook servers and they suddenly have relatively precise market coverage. Before Facebook came along advertising was like doing surgery with a police baton. Now they’ve gone and invented the scalpel.
The problem I have with this model is that I don’t want advertisers to have to much information. Otherwise the ads get a little to close for comfort. Because surgical advertising isn’t just confined to Facebook, and not everything I look up on the internet is something I want a major corporation, or the general public for that matter, to know about. But there isn’t any real way to opt out of this surgical advertising model unless you sever all personal involvement on the Net. And that’s pretty hard to do these days because many people only communicate electronically.
Integrate or isolate, those are the choices. Kind of harsh but as our electronic world grows and fundamentally alters our physical world for better and for worse we are left with new, and sometimes frightening, choices to make. The times they are a changing. That’s for damn sure.


PS. Carl- I'm going to be late to class on Monday. For more Explanation, check the e-mail on the syllabus. I sent you a message a couple of days ago but still haven't gotten a response.