Jay Rosen has penned an important piece that articulates the conundrum for the professional press in a way that should help a lot of people understand what’s really taking place. He uses the metaphor of a migrating tribe to illustrate the problem:

Migration, which is easily sentimentalized by Americans, is a community trauma. Pulling up stakes and leaving a familiar place is hard. Within the news tribe some people don’t want to go. These are the newsroom curmudgeons. Others are in denial still, or they are quietly drifting away from journalism, or they are being shed as the tribe contracts and its economy convulses.

And like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them, when to leave, where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life, and which parts were well adapted to the old world but may be unnecessary or a handicap in the new. They have to ask if what they know is portable. What life will be like across the digital sea is of course an unknown to the migrant. This creates an immediate crisis for the elders of the tribe, who have always known how to live.

When I think of the press in these kinds of terms, I’m reminded of a wonderful speech that C.S. Lewis delivered at the University of London in 1944 called “The Inner Ring.” Lewis felt that the internal drive to be within certain closed societies was one of the great evils of humankind, and it describes Rosen’s “tribe” of the press perfectly.

The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain. And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the center of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that its secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.

Jay Rosen thinks it’s time we expanded the press and our ideas about it. How about breaking the inner ring to not only let the press out but everybody else in?

Few people tell it like Stowe Boyd.

This weekend, Boyd added his considerable insight to a fascinating discussion that has grown out of Nick Carr’s provocative Atlantic Monthly article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Later, Scott Karp added his wealth of insight, and now Boyd. It’s a complex topic but boils down to Carr’s question about what’s happening with our his mind these days. He feels his mind shifting and doesn’t like it. Do yourself a favor and read all of the link references, beginning with Carr’s.

Karp elaborates on Carr’s premise by discussing the differences between absorbing knowledge in big chucks versus little chucks, and Boyd agrees with Karp that the answer to Carr’s question is a resounding “no.”

As I have been saying for years, the inherent conservatism of the mass media and other mass organizations (those that are based on one:many modes of communication, like government, religions, business, and so on) will lead them to say that this new sort of thinking is illegitimate: they war against it, saying that our new ways of talking and thinking and the social structures that they engender are bad, inferior, immoral, and stupid; and that those in favor of this web revolution are dumb, misguided, or evil fringe lunatics.

This is exactly the nut of the thing for me, too, but my take has always been the shift from the modernist, colonialist, hierarchical culture to the participatory, postmodernist, post-colonial culture. Traditionalists will love the concept of Google making people stupid, because it beautifully validates their illusions about knowledge and life and gives them a platform from which to point and say, “See? See?” It’s demagoguery, plain and simple, and I don’t believe for a minute that the cultural changes are “bad” for us. Does it make me feel uncomfortable? Perhaps, but that’s just fear of the unknown.

I’ve oft quoted my daughter Jenny, who at age seven got her first calculator (in the mid 70s). She asked me then, “If I have one of these, why do I need to study math?” Is she stupid, because her mind wants to explore other uses? If she uses her calculator, does that make her more stupid than one who doesn’t?

We’re always hearing how we humans only use 10 percent of our brains, but dammit, we sure seem to be comfortable with that. Why?

The ability to instantly deconstruct vastly complex arguments with a mouse click is certainly the enemy of a culture run by protected knowledge and absolute authorities, but it doesn’t follow that this means doom for humanity. Besides, cultural changes tend not to be “all or nothing,” so hierarchy of some form will always have its place.

I first became familiar with the term “critical mass” in the early 1980s as producer of The 700 Club. Most people don’t realize the extent to which the program and its founder, Pat Robertson, were driven by research. Little was left to chance back in my days there, which is why executives would occasionally gather at an enormous country house at the Homestead in the Virginia mountains to talk about culture and trends.

I remember one such occasion when our marketing director spoke of the rise of the remote control, and what it would mean once it reached 50 percent of the households with TV. Half of consumers is known as “critical mass,” a magical threshold that somehow validates the concept in the world of marketing. We all know what happened with the remote control, but now a new concept has crossed into validity — Web 2.0.

According to an article in Online Media Daily, the latest installment of an ongoing tracking study from Interpublic’s Universal McCann unit reveals that text messaging, blogging and social networking have reached critical mass, with more than half of all adults in the U.S. using one of these to communicate with friends, family, or colleagues on a regular basis. But the big story — and it is huge — is that nearly nine of ten in the age group 18-34 use these, making it the most dominant form of communications for the group.

Yet we wonder why traditional media methods of communicating are dying.

In ten years, this group will be 28-44, and the new 18-34 year old group will be even more socially connected.

Text messaging, meanwhile, proves that mobile media also is becoming a dominant source of personal communications beyond the cell phone, even if mass marketers haven’t yet figured out how to crack the potential of marketing through the medium. The percentage of U.S. adults who say they’ve never sent a text message fell to 41% this year from 49% a year ago. And among 18- to 34-year-olds, it dropped to 22% from 38%.

“Even if mass marketers haven’t yet figured out how to crack the potential of marketing through the medium?” Good grief, let’s hope that never happens. It would be like a phone call being interrupted for a brief commercial announcement.

Hopefully, I’ll be long gone before that ever reaches critical mass.

“These guys are good” is the slogan of the PGA Tour, but there are really two tours — the one when Tiger Woods participates and the one for events he passes on. Woods’ shocking announcement today that he’s done for at least the season due to knee surgery hurts professional golf more than it can ever admit. No British Open with Tiger. No PGA Championship. No Ryder Cup.

Who cares about tour number two, really?

I was fortunate to be old enough to enjoy the Palmer/Nicklaus era, as I’m fortunate today to witness the athletic phenomenon that is Tiger Woods. I used to enjoy all tour events before Tiger came along, but frankly, he’s so changed the game that a tournament without him is like watching the junior varsity. The PGA Tour has ridden his coattails to record financial years, and it will now have to do without him for at least the rest of this season. It’ll be interesting to see what happens, especially as the announcers struggle to make compelling TV without Woods.

May God bless Tiger Woods and bring him back whole.

The Encyclopedia Britannica opens its wall just a bit.

The Supreme Court decision earlier this week that gave for-profit fantasy baseball league sites the right to use the names of real players without paying a licensing fee is much bigger than it appears on the surface. It’s a pro-consumer vote by the court, and one that puts a big monkey wrench in the efforts of professional leagues — regardless of the sport — to frame EVERYTHING associated with their business as under their control.

You could almost sense a collective smile from media companies, who’ve seen their access to professional sports diminish to the point where the leagues are basically saying, “We don’t want or need you anymore.” This decision opens the door to create applications that serve the same purpose as cozying up to the leagues in the first place — the ability to serve advertising targeting a young and male audience.

Oops!

“Billions of dollars in licensing fees” are at stake, if you believe Major League Baseball’s argument, which was supported by the National Football League, the National Basketball Assn. and the National Hockey League. I don’t think it’s as much about licensing fees as it is about advertising. These leagues not only want to control everything about their sports (it’s their business), but they also want to control any ancillary access to potential profits. Sports isn’t about sports anymore; it’s all about the money.

My heart bleeds for professional sports. Really.

I want to take a moment to mark the passing of Lorenzo Odone, the namesake of the movie “Lorenzo’s Oil.” He passed away this week, one day following his 30th birthday, which is at least 20 more years than he was given by doctors at the time of his diagnosis at age 6 with adrenoleukodystrophy, or ALD.

The story of Lorenzo’s oil (which is now the essential treatment for ALD) is a remarkable example of what can happen if lay people get involved in science, and it’s one of the illustrations I use to express hope in a world where knowledge is free. Odone’s parents proved that the needs of parents are different than the needs of scientists, and this paved the way for their remarkable discovery. They “became” scientists, experts in the human processing of enzymes. They were driven by the need to save their son’s life instead of accepting the death sentence that science gave them. That Lorenzo lived to be 30 years old is a testament to their efforts, to say nothing about what their work gave to other children with this awful disease.

Within the lofty towers of medicine and medical research, Lorenzo Odone’s suffering was sad but nothing more. With the right amount of money — and a compelling reason to study the disease — medicine would’ve eventually discovered the same thing. The Odones proved that the reason to study is more important that the money required for the research, and it is in this area that science continues to fail humankind. Popular ailments get the attention and the money, and that’s the flaw in the system.

However, if enough humans with a pressing need can probe deeply enough — regardless of what the institution of medicine says can or “should” be done — I think we’d be amazed at what could happen.

R.I.P., Lorenzo. Gone but not forgotten.

Don’t miss Jack Shafer’s follow-up to previous pieces about Michael Crichton’s 1993 predictions of the demise of mass media. It’s a worthwhile read:

As we pass his prediction’s 15-year anniversary, I’ve got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It’s gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren’t going extinct tomorrow, Crichton’s original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.

Crichton’s 1993 prophecies shocked the media world at the time, and he was certainly off by several years. Nevertheless, I agree with Shafter that it’s “advantage Crichton” at this point.

The “mass” is the problem, because the ability to communicate on a large scale has been separated from the “special” application formerly required, as former FCC Chairman Michael Powell so brilliantly observed in a 2004 Silicon Valley discussion.

Now to be a phone company, you don’t have to weave tightly the voice service into the infrastructure. You can ride it on top of the infrastructure. So if you’re a Vonage, you own no infrastructure. You own no trucks. You roll to no one’s house. They turn voice into a application and shoot it across one of these platforms. And, suddenly, you’re in your business.

And that’s why if you’re the music industry, you’re scared. And if you’re the television studio, movie industry, you’re scared. And if you’re an incumbent infrastructure carrier, you’d better be scared. Because this application separation is the most important paradigm shift in the history of communications, and will change things forever. . . . I have no problem if a big and venerable company no longer exists tomorrow, as long as that value is transferred somewhere else in the economy.

Powell was referring to the telephone business, but the paradigm shift about which he spoke applies to every form of communications today. Couple that with the rise of personal media and you have Crichton’s disappearing mass.

This is why it’s so important for all local media companies to understand what business we’re in. We’re not newspapers, television stations and radio stations; we’re all in the information and entertainment business. If we approach tomorrow “only” as a TV station, for example, we’re living in the problem of disappearing mass and, therefore, completely missing the possibilities.

I don’t write much about web growth anymore. I even gave up on web advertising growth stories a couple of years ago, because it seemed kind of foolish to keep saying the same thing. Anybody even remotely interested in the Web could tell that everything about it was moving northward (still is).

But the Borrell report below and a new study from market research firm IDC are too much to resist. According to the IDC report, overall Internet advertising revenue in the U.S. will double from $25.5 billion in 2007 to $51.1 billion in 2012. That’s right: double! Borrell reveals that local online revenues are growing “at a phenomenal rate of 50 percent this year” and that double digit growth will continue for at least another 18 months. His prediction that 2008 will be a $13.1 billion year for local online spending is in line with the IDC numbers.

A little context is in order. Television advertising in the U.S. is a $70 billion industry. While there have been a lot of doomsday predictions about broadcast revenues, I think that number is going to be around for awhile. But at $51.1 billion in 2012, web advertising revenue will be pushing TV. IDG actually predicts that by 2012, internet advertising will displace TV and be second behind only direct marketing.

Think about that for a minute.

Meanwhile, the report offers promise for those who already live in the world of video (can you say TV?):

Video advertising will be the principal disruptor of Internet advertising over the next five years by attracting the most new marketing dollars. Its revenue will grow sevenfold from $0.5 billion in 2007 to $3.8 billion in 2012 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 49.4%. This growth will take place because brand advertisers will shift significant amounts of money into these video commercials, primarily from broadcast television and to a lesser extent from cable television.

And these kinds of predictions are always based on current models. What happens if the Web finally figures out how to advertise for real? It is a very long time (in web years) between now and 2012.

The point is the Web is where it’s at, and the size of those numbers mean disruptions will continue to relentlessly pound the status quo, even if that status quo was only created yesterday. We’re in an incredible season of change, and nobody really knows how its all going to play out, if it ever really does.

But you already knew that, right?

The Justice Department has announced a major settlement in its anti-trust case involving the National Association of Realtors (NAR) and the use of its Multiple Listing Services (MLS) by internet-based residential real estate brokers. In a nutshell, it means Realtors won’t have exclusive access to MLS listings; they will be shared with those who are competing with Realtors by offering much lower commissions.

A New York Times article on the matter notes that MLS listings are the “lifeblood” of the real estate industry:

The settlement “is a win for consumers, certainly, who will now have the benefit of unrestricted competition,” Deborah A. Garza, deputy assistant attorney general for antitrust, said in an interview. “There inevitably will be more efficiency and more competition in the market.”

…The National Association of Realtors, with more than 1.2 million members, said that the settlement was “a win-win” for both the real estate industry and consumers. It noted that the association admitted no wrongdoing and paid no fines or damages as part of the deal.

The NAR notes that consumers won’t notice much difference, but I disagree. This opens the door for a high level of innovation in a $93 billion industry, and it will certainly benefit home buyers and sellers. Realtors? Not so much.

In a Buzzmachine.com post on the settlement, Jeff Jarvis says, “Kiss your 6 percent commission goodbye, Ms. Agent!”

This new economy can now come to real estate sales as information becomes freer. Oh, it’s not fully freed yet. But I do believe that the combination of this settlement and what it does to empower discount players and the depressed real estate market will combine to finally shove dynamite up Realtors’ rears.

I don’t know about that, but what I do know is that this is further evidence of the cultural shift from modernism to postmodernism, one that threatens every modernist institution of the West.

Protected knowledge (or access) is what empowers such institutions, and as we’re already witnessing with media, when you remove the protection, the institution collapses. Craig Newmark did it to classifieds with Craigslist, so what’s next?

How about medicine and the law, to name a couple. Back in the early days of the Web, the American Medical Association formed a special lobbying group to make sure they maintained control of medical information (to protect the people), because those within the group with vision could see what would come down-the-pike. Will we have a “doc-in-a-box” someday? The insurance industry might be interested in that. How about a “lawyer-in-a-box” to represent your needs in court?

I know those ideas are way out there, but the horse of postmodernism — that participatory, interactive culture — has already left the barn, and its destination is unknown.

Dear Les Moonves,

It was a very smart move for you to acquire CNET. I’ll save all the business analysis for others, because I’m not sure you really understand a certain intangible — namely that the talented group of observers and writers who make up your acquisition can really, really help you with your, um, other business.

The first thing you should do is invite Dan Farber (and if they’ll come, the rest of the Gillmor Gang) into your office and have a nice little sit down. I know you’re the guy who normally does all the talking, but this time, I’d suggest you might want to just listen. Bring your underlings along and tell them to listen, too.

Take a hard look at CNET-TV and invite the writers in to talk to them about communicating with an audience. Yeah, I know; tech isn’t Iraq (and so forth), but neither is a lot of the other crap that passes for news these days.

There’s a point to this whole strategy, Les, and it’s why I think you’d be wise to implement the “CBS listens to CNET” campaign: These folks grew a media business without being a part of the media business! That means they BEGAN outside your box, and while I’ll bet you want to suck them into it, you’d be smart not to. Why? Because they can teach you things that those inside the box don’t even see, and isn’t that exactly what traditional media companies need in this day and age.

Now go out and make it a great day.

Your pal,

Terry

According to Parade Magazine (via David Weinberger), here are the top ten baby names for boys and girls this year.

As David points out in his piece, we rarely find common names like these anymore (He calls it the “long tail” of names, LOL). The preference seems to be to so badly misspell the name that the identity of the person becomes “unique,” to which I can only ask, “WTF?”

I noticed a couple of years ago that receptionists began asking me to spell my first name. This shocked me, until I realized that there are now dozens of ways to spell a simple name like mine. Why do parents do this? Don’t we realize that we’re creating a friggin’ monster here?

Oh, I forgot. Everybody’s “special” these days. My bad.

One of the great things about the Web is the immediate access to knowledge and information, something about which I’ve written here often. All of the institutions of colonial modernism are under attack, in part, because their place in the culture — their authority, if you will — is granted by access to protected knowledge. This culture clash is uncomfortable for those whose position is being picked apart, and so they’re fighting back with arguments that are often specious, at best.

One such argument has been thoroughly dissected here, that of terrified elitist Andrew Keen and his assertion that amateurs will surely destroy the world. This meme — this attack on everyday people with access to knowledge — has been picked up by others with something to lose in the culture clash and is now rather widespread among all elites.

And it’s absolutely wonderful to find the occasional person who kicks back against this crap, and I was introduced to a spectacular example today in the form of Mike Caulfield, his blog and an entry titled If a Columnist Calls a Tail a Leg…

In this outstanding piece of work, Caulfield elegantly deconstructs a Keenish form of argument by Monica Hesse in, of all places, The Washington Post. Her column is provocatively called “Truth: Can You Handle It?” She attacks what she pejoratively calls the “wiki-world” and uses what she feels is a false quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln to make her point.

Unfortunately for Ms. Hesse, HER Lincoln reference is the one that’s wrong (Oops!), and Caulfield’s legwork on the matter is worthy of any journalism award.

Go read the whole thing. You’ll thank me later on.

In a Vanity Fair article, Buzz Bissinger explains his tirade (tirade here) last week on HBO’s Costas Now against Deadspin blogger Will Leitch. Bissinger later apologized, not for his feelings but for the manner in which he expressed them. It was a classy move.

But the Costas segment was a stunning illustration of the real angst between mainstream sports writers and the sports blogosphere, which is increasingly setting the agenda for all sports reporting these days. As a guy who’s been following this for a long time, I found it painful to watch Bissinger make a fool of himself, and I felt equally uncomfortable watching Costas try and defend the status quo. Both are incredibly smart guys, but they’re blinded by their own perspective.

Costas referred to sports writers with “real credentials and real access.” The comment was obviously meant to separate “real” sports writers from (unreal) bloggers, and this doesn’t get anybody anywhere.

He also referred to the “legitimate complaint” about the sports blogosphere, namely the tone of gratuitous potshots and criticisms. Both Bissinger and Costas used quotes from commenters to make their case, which caused Leitch to note that, “surely we can differentiate between the blogger and the commenters.”

As I’ve written in the past, sports journalism has changed dramatically since Watergate brought to the surface the form of journalism known as “gotcha.” It has gone from entirely cheerleading to some excellent and insightful work by serious writers, be they mainstream or other. There’s still the sense, though, that access to athletes is a gift granted by their owners (yes, they are “owned”), and that this can be a significant conflict of interest, especially when such access crosses from professional to personal. Professional sports leagues are going out of their way to restrict access, because they want to control their message, and the extent to which the mainstream press is forced to go along with this is sad.

One of the very definitions of “news” goes like this: dog bites man, not news; man bites dog, news. So the norm is not news, and therefore when athletes perform according to their gifts and expectations, it doesn’t fit the definition of news. The exceptional athlete — Tiger Woods, for example — is certainly newsworthy, but the PGA’s slogan is “These Guys Are Good.” In that light, a “good” performance isn’t news, but a bad performance is. Yet we rarely see stories when “these guys are bad.”

Hell, show me, shot-by-shot, the 15 that John Daly scored on number 9, because that’s news.

So there is a symbiotic relationship between sports and sports writers, and that’s okay. But that isn’t the only form of sports journalism, for the output of this symbiotic relationship is fair game for observers (and fans), because both (the sport and the pro writer) are on the same pedestal. News about the news is one of the hallmarks of the blogosphere, and it may make the mainstream press uncomfortable, but it is every bit as much “journalism” as that which is published by the pros.

Moreover, I most disagree with the assertion by blogosphere critics (such as Bissinger and Costas) that bloggers are a part of any real or perceived “dumbing down” of the information stream. Any time I hear that, I’m immediately drawn to the Lippmannesque reasonings of colonial thinking, that culture must have an elite class to lead the ignorant and emotionally-driven masses. That is insulting and just plain wrong. The voices from the mass may seem crude to the pedestal dwellers of the culture, but those voices count as much as anyone’s.

When I first began writing and publishing my essays, it followed a period of cultural study that led me to the conclusion that we were at the dawning of the Age of Participation. It’s one of the key concepts of my view of postmodernism/postcolonialism, and I always develop a warm smile when thoughts that I believed were original at the time begin to show up elsewhere. As I’ve posted before, this is a part of touching the unbroken web, and I wouldn’t trade it for all the money in the world.

In watching a documentary on the Doors the other night, John Densmore made a statement about playing some nights at the Whiskey A-Go Go in Los Angeles during the late 60s, where the band really got their break. Densmore said there were some nights when it was magical, “and nobody owns that.” He was describing touching the unbroken web, something all artists have felt at one time or the other.

So when I read or hear about others speaking of an “age” or “period” of participation, I can’t run out and scream, “Hey, you’ve stolen that from me!” All I can do is rejoice that I was privileged enough to “see” the concept as others have and do.

Below is a must-view video from Blip.tv of a speech by Clay Shirky at this year’s Web 2.0 conference. I’m not suggesting that I’m in his league in terms of intelligence or extemporaneous speech, but listen to the absolute brilliance of his experiences with the unbroken web, especially the epiphany with his four-year old daughter.

The Industrial Age is another way of describing the era of cultural modernism, and I agree with Shirky that what we’re witnessing today — participating in today — is something brand new and that the future is very bright as a result of it.

Click To Play

As if it really needed defining, right?

In an ongoing case that continues to baffle common sense, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has refiled its suit against Universal Music Group for bullying YouTube into pulling a 29-second clip of little Holden Lenz “dancing” to background music of the Prince tune “Let’s Go Crazy.” The original suit was tossed out by Federal district court judge Jeremy Fogel in San Jose, who said the EFF hadn’t proven their claim that the clip’s fair use of the song was “self-evident.” Any sane human being could recognize that it was, so the EFF’s new case spells it out, and it’s precious:

“The video bears all the hallmarks of a family home movie–it is somewhat blurry, the sound quality is poor, it was filmed with an ordinary digital video camera, and it focuses on documenting Holden’s ‘dance moves’ against a background of normal household activity, commotion and laughter,” the new complaint charges. “The snippet of ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ that plays in the background (not dubbed as a soundtrack) of the Holden Video could not substitute for the original Prince song in any conceivable market.”

Kudos to the EFF! There’s no reply from Universal yet, and they’d be well-advised to just settle the thing, because if this makes it through the courts, it’ll become a fatal setback in their efforts to win the personal media battle through the legal system.

It was, as we say here in Texas, dumber than a bucket of hair to push this case in the first place (the video had only 29 views when Universal lawyers found it - now over 463,000), and anything from here on out just adds to the foolishness of Universal’s actions.

Sometimes a simple choice of a word can make all the difference in how we think. John Morton, the dean of American newspaper analysts, writes for the American Journalism Review (Enough is Enough) that by relentless cost-cutting, newspapers are committing a form of suicide. He calls cutbacks “wrongheaded” and “shortsighted” and believes they threaten the future of the industry altogether.

He writes that the days of “exceptional profits” for media companies are over, and he worries that the brand name and reputation of papers needs protecting as we move forward.

Mr. Morton has been around a long time, and there’s certainly room for his position in the broader discussion of media disruption. It’s true that when push comes to shove with public companies, the bottom line is all that matters, and adjustments by cutting staff, while not easy, are a necessary part of survival.

But John Morton’s thinking about the suicidal nature of such cuts is colored by questions over the validity of the disruption:

All these reductions are a response to two years of declining revenue and profit and a perceived shift of readers and advertisers to the Internet.

Perceived shift? Perceived? That’s not a slip of the pen keyboard, I suspect, and it underscores the difficulty of accepting change in the culture of skepticism that envelopes most newsrooms. After all, if all of this is just a “perceived shift,” then it’s not really real, right? Advertisers aren’t really moving money to the Web, and consumers aren’t really getting their news and information online, right? It’s all just a matter of perception.

Or not.

Charlton Heston is gone and all of Life mourns his passing. But here’s an interesting tidbit from my friend Holly.

I was reading a discussion board at 11:10 (last night, central time) when someone posted that Charlton Heston had died. A few minutes later, I went to Wikipedia to look at his Wiki entry. Yep, already there. It beat the front pages of all the major news sites. It’s not on CNN’s front page as of my clicking Compose Mail to send you this.

Like it or not, mainstream media, this is the way it is.

A week ago, I wrote about the concept of “finding” news consumers based on a comment from a student during a focus group. “If the news is that important,” the young man said, “it will find me.” How does that happen? Word-of-mouth and examples like this.

The change to Heston’s Wikipedia page could have come from his own people, or it could have come from a fan. But the fact that it occurred ahead of major news outlets is a stunning example of how people are able to sidestep the gatekeepers in the quest to be informed.

The group of hackers known as Anonymous may have been behind a series of whirling and blinking applications inserted into a popular discussion board run by the non-profit Epilepsy Foundation last weekend, which caused multiple seizures and other uncomfortable symptoms for users. Wired spoke with victims:

RyAnne Fultz, a 33-year-old woman who suffers from pattern-sensitive epilepsy, says she clicked on a forum post with a legitimate-sounding title on Sunday. Her browser window resized to fill her screen, which was then taken over by a pattern of squares rapidly flashing in different colors.

Fultz says she “locked up.”

“I don’t fall over and convulse, but it hurts,” says Fultz, an IT worker in Coeur d’Alene, Ohio. “I was on the phone when it happened, and I couldn’t move and couldn’t speak.”

The Wired article points a circumstantial finger at Anonymous, whose most recent claim to fame has been an attack against the Church of Scientology. As much as I detest what’s happened here, this just doesn’t seem to carry the mark of Anonymous, and if it turns out that the group truly is responsible, we may see the Feds step in. I mean, why deliberately hurt epileptics?

There may be a fine line between pranks and terrorism, but this one isn’t even close. What’s wrong with us anyway?

As we drift farther downstream into the postmodern era, the battle between the elite institutions of modernism and the culture will intensify. The culture is on the offensive, forcing the establishment to defend itself, and that is already underway. On the modernist side, the war will be fought by the keepers of the status quo — the lawyers of the land. On the culture’s side will be technology and the participatory nature that it brings with it.

The defenders know this and will do everything they can to prevent it, trying to use the courts and the legal system in attempts to rope the wild stallion and return it to their barn.

In the last few days, a plan that can only be described as sinister from our friends in the recording industry is being exposed. The idea is right out of the Sopranos — use the threat of lawsuits to force ISPs into “taxing” every user $5 to download music via the Internet. TechCrunch is on top of the story.

The tax will not, in fact, be mandatory. But that is misleading - it won’t be mandatory for ISPs who provide Internet access to actual users. But if ISPs join the scheme, it will apply to all of their customers and be added to their bill as a surcharge.

Why will ISP’s agree to this? Mainly to avoid liability. The core of the plan is a covenant not to sue anyone who pays the fee. (industry insider Jim) Griffin touched on this in the article, saying ISPs will want to “discharge their risk” around file sharing that occurs over their networks.

The rollout plan will hit colleges and universities first, who will simply add the fee to tuition bills so they won’t have to worry about getting dragged into lawsuits. Then Griffin will approach consumer ISPs. If an ISP joins, their users will not have the option of not paying, even if they don’t download music from the Internet. So, basically, the tax is only voluntary if you define avoiding it as not going to college, or using the Internet.

TechCrunch calls it “government endorsed extortion, nothing more and nothing less,” and I couldn’t agree more. While the record companies would find relief from such a plan, imagine what it would do to stifle innovation and creativity.

Meanwhile, the RIAA is lobbying Congress hard to explore the idea of universities “filtering” their networks to stop allegedly illegal downloading. What would you do, if you ran a big school, install filtering applications or simply pass along the $5 “tax” to students. No brainer.

But other battles waging — in the form of lawsuits — in the fight by institutional modernism to reclaim territory it feels belongs to them. To see these suits for what they are, we must examine one of the core philosophies of the modern culture — that everything is cause and effect and, therefore, there’s always somebody to blame (usually the one with the deepest pockets) when something goes wrong. We will never have tort reform in this country as long as the people creating the laws (read: Congress) is made up of trial lawyers, who exploit this blame game to serve themselves, but I digress. As long as “the law” is god in the culture (as it is with the modernist belief), there will always be lawyers ready to take on any cause in the name of blame.

The reason this is on my mind is the strange case in Jacksonville, Oregon, involving Robert Salisbury and Craigslist. Somebody — either maliciously or on a lark — posted ads on Craigslist saying that Salisbury had to leave town suddenly and that everything at his home was free for the taking, even his horse.

As Salisbury was driving home, he noticed truck after truck going the other direction carrying his stuff. All his possessions were gone, and while authorities were able to get some things back, the question remains as to who did this to him.

The case is identical to one earlier from Tacoma, and it’s got people asking questions about, you guessed it, liability. After all, these people were wronged, and victims in our culture are entitled to compensation for their losses, right? So speculation is aimed at Craigslist. They ran the ad. This wouldn’t have happened without them. Hence, it’s their fault.

Along comes Michael Arrington from TechCrunch to make a remarkable statement: Craigslist Is Our Mirror, Nothing Better (Or Worse).

Could a litigiously minded individual find a winning argument to get Craigslist to pay for the damages? Perhaps…And there are certainly plenty to lawyers who’d consider taking the case on contingency, hoping for a quick settlement/shake down to keep PR exposure over this to a minimum.

But what I really think is that Craigslist is just a mirror, and we have to take the good with the bad. Countless connections and transactions are made on the site, and the vast majority are of benefit to everyone involved.

Sure, mainstream press feasts on the occasional accident scene, making it seem like the site is a den of predators waiting to strike at anyone who drops by. Craigslist has it all - Sex, drugs, humiliation and more.

But for the most part Craigslist is just a really good place to find a job, or a boyfriend, or buy cheap furniture for your dorm room. The situation today is simply an exception that proves what an important place Craigslist has taken in our culture. I feel bad for Mr. Salisbury and I hope he gets all his stuff back (especially his horse). But pointing the finger of accusation at Craigslist for what happened is not what should happen next.

Arrington is making a postmodern argument that is foreign to the concept of blame assessment, and I fully support it. Others have come to Craigslist’s defense in this matter, saying that if the company was a profit-hungry corporation, they might deserve a lawsuit, but that Craigslist is more public service than profit-motivated, and thus, shouldn’t be touched.

I don’t like this argument, because I think we’ve gone way overboard in the culture and that any company functioning as a conduit for the actions of people — profit-driven or not — ought to be protected from the shenanigans of the few. We’re a society that supposedly believes in personal responsibility, but every day, I see evidence that this is not so. This is why we have section 230 of the CDA, which classifies such web applications as “common carriers,” similar to telephone companies. You can’t sue the phone company if somebody plans a terrorist attack over the phone, and you shouldn’t be able to sue Craigslist — or anybody else — if bad people do bad things online either.

But somebody will sue Craigslist; I’m convinced of that, and then we’ll see how strongly we feel about such protection.

And there’s one other matter here that must not be overlooked. Media companies who cover this issue must tread very, very carefully, especially the newspaper business, for Craigslist gets the blame (there’s that word again) for the financial woes of the industry.

I’m just sayin’…