May 2001 - Air-L - lists.aoir.org

flocking to the Web (Washington Post article)
by J. Sternberg 21 May '01

21 May '01

http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1132-2001May8.html Flocking Together Through the Web By Joel Garreau Suppose the Earth is all one big single living organism, with all the elements of it -- from the people to the birds -- connected like cells in a body. Suppose the goal of evolution is to link up individual human minds, bringing an explosion of intelligence and even global consciousness to this mammoth being. For half a century, this idea has been batted around, much spurred by the writings of the late French Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. But the attention the notion received, especially in the '60s, was of an airy, hand-waving, late-night-dorm-session sort. It was hard for serious people to imagine how such a global consciousness would ever be wired up in any practical way, and even harder to observe any concrete evidence of its existence. Until now. It seems that the fastest-growing outdoor activity in North America by far is bird watching, according to the National Survey on Recreation and the Environment. More than 71 million Americans -- one in four ! -- watch birds, according to the NSRE. For 101 years, the most devoted of these citizen scientists have been conducting annual bird censuses at Christmas. But the friction in the system, even for the most dedicated birders, was enormous. They had to count their sparrows, fill out a form, put it in an envelope, mail it to a compiler and wait a full year for publication in an obscure journal. Four years ago the National Audubon Society and the nation's foremost ornithology lab at Cornell University started moving this process to the Web. You can now count birds without leaving your back yard and drop the numbers into sites such as Bird Source or Journey North. In short order you will see updated maps and numbers that show you how bird populations are rising, falling and changing all over North America, right now. The projects are still embryonic -- perhaps 70,000 people contributed this year. But those numbers are vastly greater than in the days of paper and pen and have been doubling every year. The resulting picture of the natural world is consequently becoming richer and more complex. That's not the earth-moving part, however. The earth-moving part -- literally -- is that, as a result, a movement is spontaneously emerging that alters the physical nature of the planet so as to make it more amenable to the birds that are indicator species of global environmental health. Some of this is as simple as town-house owners deciding to plant lobelia in their back yards because these flowers please hummingbirds. But others are more ambitious. One Fairfax County youth had his back yard certified as a wildlife habitat by the National Wildlife Federation, one of 600 such designated refuges in Fairfax County alone. Activists in Columbia, meanwhile, are spending this spring uprooting some of the Rouse Corp.'s well-meant ornamental plantings to replace them with habitat that woodcocks view as more homelike. A 5,600-acre farm in Chestertown is replanting grassland to nurture the dickcissel so that the bird, which had been nonexistent on the Eastern Shore for decades, suddenly has eight breeding pairs there. International Paper Co. -- the largest private landowner in the United States -- has revamped forestry practices in South Carolina to create a population explosion of the rare Swainson's warbler. The Department of Defense, with its 25 million acres, has launched initiatives that range from burning grasslands in Fort Riley, Kan., so as to encourage native prairie and the Henslow's sparrow, to having Seabees construct wetlands in Hawaii for the Hawaiian stilt, Hawaiian coot and the Hawaiian moorhen. All of these actions have roots in the new ease with which ordinary individuals now find it natural to come together swiftly, unceremoniously and improvisationally on the Net to create measurable change. These changes, in turn, have encouraged a "virtuous circle" in which people are having their appetites whetted for more data about birds. Pioneering volunteers are putting on their roofs microphones that are attached to their home computers that are attached to Cornell. These microphones pick up "chip calls," which are the beeps many birds make when they migrate in order to keep in touch with the flock. The big computers in Ithaca, N.Y., can take these remote recordings and figure out how many white-throated sparrows flew over which house. At night. Meanwhile, the Doppler radar so ubiquitous on TV weather picks up signals that have long been misidentified as scattered showers in a clear sky. No -- it's birds. Researchers at Clemson University can now take the Doppler signals from some 150 installations continent-wide and focus on the bird signals. With this vast array they can, for example, track birds migrating up from South America across the Gulf of Mexico. On a single autumn night several years ago, radar on Cape Cod revealed 12 million songbirds passing overhead. In Florida, a company called Geo-Marine Inc. is developing the technology to provide daily bird forecasts and hourly updates for the U.S. Air Force, a client that values both flying close to the ground and not sucking 12-pound geese into expensive jet engines. Other enthusiasts are wiring birds with devices the weight of a nickel that connect directly to orbiting satellites. These record the birds moving from, say, Canada to New Jersey. Such migrations are displayed on the Web for everyone to watch. The devices are getting so small and cheap that scientists hope eventually to wire entire flocks of Neotropical songbirds -- those that summer in the States but winter in the tropics -- to the satellites. Because bird watchers are such an enormous portion of the population in rich and powerful nations -- such as those of North America and Europe -- this is leading to modification of the terrain itself by an unprecedented number of individuals, corporations and governments with global reach. No one knows if poorer nations will follow their lead, or when. But emerging countries are where the Web is growing fastest, and environmentalists know that increased prosperity, as a rule, brings with it environmental improvements like cleaner air and water. In his 1940 magnum opus, "The Phenomenon of Man," Teilhard said that someday our technology would allow us to create a web of thought and action that would make the world more complex, diverse and alive, moving mankind toward ultimate evolution. In the mid-'90s, with the arrival of the World Wide Web, technos started pointing to his ideas again, with computer designer Danny Hillis saying in Wired magazine, "Now evolution takes place in microseconds. . . . We're taking off. We're at that point analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multicelled organisms. . . . We are not evolution's ultimate product. There's something coming after us, and I imagine it is something wonderful." In the past decade, of course, such predictions seemed hypothetical or even delusional. What's new is that some scientists think they are looking now at first evidence that maybe Teilhard was right. Count, Care and Act Humans have been changing the environment at least since man learned to eat other animals faster than they could eat him. For the other species -- including those that early humans drove to their slaughter by deliberately setting forest fires -- this has not always been a picnic. "We typically think of humans as hellbent on ecosystem destruction," notes John W. Fitzpatrick, director of the Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell. Evidence, of course, abounds -- from clear-cutting of the Amazon rain forest to the advance of global warming. What's new is the rise of humans connected by the Internet, acting like a flock without leaders, changing the physical planet a fraction of an acre at a time, for the<em> benefit</em> of the other species and thus the entire world. "I think we're seeing history in the making," says Fitzpatrick. "People are now noticing change, searching for bio-indicators and then fixing the problem. What we're just beginning to realize is that humans represent the internal control mechanism the Earth has long sought. They're bringing feedback into the system, changing the management of the system." "You're gardening the planet for birds," says Frank Gill, senior vice president for science of the National Audubon Society and author of "Ornithology," the most widely used text in the field. "If you count things, you care for them. If you care for them, you act. It's a counting, caring and acting system. You make fields, manage forests in certain ways. Even industrial forests are just gardens with woody sticks coming out of them. You fix things up in the back yard. The whole landscape becomes human-dominated and managed. That's just gardening on a planetary scale. The whole restoration-ecology world is now moving toward some ability to do that." "Our long-term hope is that instead of the Weather Channel, you could turn to the Bird Channel," says Fitzpatrick. "We'll be able to count them, monitor them, observe their population crashes, on a continental scale. We're preparing the world for times after I'm gone. If this had been available in the 1800s, we'd still have passenger pigeons flying over us by the billions. "Global consciousness?" continues Fitzpatrick. "It's true. It is exactly what we have been after. Our thesis is that the Internet is the first point in human history in the creation of consciousness at a massive and biologically meaningful scale. We've been trying to do that with paper" -- the old-fashioned way of trying to link data to action -- "but it's too damned expensive and lethargic. "This is a fundamental power of the Internet," he says. "It drives a huge growth in citizen engagement. We're definitely feeling the power. It's the greatest thing. All of this is being done by school kids, families, retired folks." "If you look at the conservation of birds, you're really looking at the stewardship of the landscape, using birds as indicators," says Gill. "We're starting to manage the landscape in real time. What the Web does is transform this into a global community on a local scale. That ranges from rain forests in Guyana to urban America and everything in between." Audubon just sent a team to Guyana, setting up a project with the Makushi Indians -- hunters and gatherers in the rain forest. The Makushi "have discovered the Internet," says Gill. "Our goal is to develop this count-care-and-act program so that it works for them. They count things useful to them -- turtles, parrots. At the same time, they share that monitoring with other communities across the globe. "It's closing the circle, changing their lives. Our goal is to change the world. One place at a time. "This is much more complicated than rocket science." The Mating Fields The woodcocks have returned to the singing grounds. Less than three miles west of the Mall in Columbia, the show is about to begin. Before a full moon, the quail-size males start their mating ritual, sounding "peents" and then exploding up from the tufty grassland, the wind through their feathers creating a whistling sound. The woodcocks climb to great heights and then start their crowd-pleasing gymnastics. They fall like autumn leaves, in spectacular swoops with enticing chirps and whistles. Then they land and do it again. And again. The female woodcocks are deeply impressed. So are the humans who come to watch them. The mating fields are called "singing grounds." Brought together one recent Saturday afternoon by a flurry of e-mail among their peers, seven volunteers from the Columbia area were creating more singing grounds. "We used the historical records we had," says Jeff Schwierjohann (pronounced SWEER-john), the 32-year-old wildlife biologist who manages the 1,000-acre Middle Patuxent Environmental Area just west of Columbia. "When woodcocks were very dense, their singing grounds were right in the areas where we're re-creating them now. "The reason we manage for woodcocks is that they require a lot of different habitats. If you manage for them, you manage for diversity of wildlife and vegetation. Males will roost at night in tall meadow and grassland. Females require young early forests -- saplings -- for cover and food. It's important to have good soil because 90 percent of their diet is earthworms." The population of the woodcocks in Howard County had been declining since the 1960s, says Schwierjohann, not so much because of the disappearance of wild areas as because of the end of farming, with its complex and man-made pattern of open land and forests, fallow fields and crops. The Rouse Corp., which developed Columbia and deeded to Howard County the land that became the Middle Patuxent Environmental Area, several decades ago carefully planted much of the area with ornamental autumn olive trees and lawnlike fescue. This recent Saturday, the volunteers from the Howard County Bird Club, the Sierra Club and the League of Women Voters were taking lopping pruners and pickaxes to the suburban growth. They were restoring the land to tufts and open patches of native warm-season grasses that offer cover for the wildlife, openings for small animals to move around, and nesting areas. "There were no recorded nests or displays of woodcocks here for years," says Schwierjohann. "This year, there are more displays and more singing than in the past several years combined." This is hardly the first instance of mankind restoring bird species, of course. Ending the use of DDT contributed to such famous success stories as the return of the bald eagle and the peregrine falcon. Those early successes, however, were a result of massive top-down federal action, prompted by the Endangered Species Act of 1973. At the Middle Patuxent Environmental Area, by contrast, initiatives like the woodcock effort were generated by hundreds of volunteers from the Scouts to the sheriff's office, self-organizing at the grass-roots level with the kind of speed, fluidity and informality that was simply too hard before the Internet. Among the people who think that technology is allowing humankind to evolve a global consciousness as a result of its new complex adaptive systems is Murray Gell-Mann, winner of the Nobel prize in physics and a pioneer in the study of complex systems at the Santa Fe Institute. Gell-Mann is also a fanatic birder, the sort of person who flies off to Madagascar to bird-watch, a man who took part in his first Christmas bird count in 1940, when he was 11. "The Internet has accelerated a phenomenon of people finding one another with all sorts of consequences, some wonderful and some terrifying," he says. "It's always been true that birdwatchers and other amateur naturalists were very much concerned about the issues directly related to nature conservation. Lately they've understood the links to a much wider spectrum of issues, such as energy, air and water pollution, a whole range of population issues, and even problems posed by rural poverty. "There has been an explosion of interest in the conservation of nature as the number of amateur naturalists has grown fantastically, and their awareness of interlinking, likewise. All of this is growing." A most literal form of grass-roots work is taking place on the Eastern Shore at Chino Farms, a 5,630-acre Queen Anne's County spread planted primarily in row crops. Its owner, Henry Sears, a Massachusetts cancer surgeon and amateur birder, decided to start restoring native Eastern prairie. He got in touch with Douglas Gill, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Maryland, and two springs ago set aside 230 acres to rebuild, re-create and restore native coastal warm-season grassland comparable to what the first Europeans in America found. The results have been "oh my God, phenomenal," says ecologist Gill. "Within one month of planting, in came one of our target birds, the grasshopper sparrow. It's in sharp decline nationwide, but they just poured in. God knows where they came from. But boy did they find it. We banded nearly 400 grasshopper sparrows. In the prairie's second year another target species, the dickcissel, which migrates to Venezuela and is on the watch list, showed up and there were eight nesting pairs. It's unbelievable. We didn't expect to see those for years." More remarkable is how easily news of success now reverberates throughout our wired world -- and to what effect. "What was a novel initiative two years ago is now being copied all over the country," Gill says. "There are Web sites for grasslands restorers. It's serving as a model. People are calling me up all the time, asking what I've found. Managers of national wildlife refuges have been given their marching orders -- manage not only for waterfowl, but for grasslands. We're gardening grassland for the birds. "The virtuous circle," says Gill -- citing the exact opposite of a vicious circle, in which positive action leads to more positive action in an ever-increasing spiral -- "is definitely there." At the confluence of the Great and Little Pee Dee rivers in South Carolina, in a 30,000-acre forest called the Woodbury Tract, is another striking example of the emergent power of the Web. It is part of a sustainable forestry initiative by International Paper, the forest products behemoth. "For the last 15 to 20 years, we have been concerned about the declining populations of Neotropical birds," says Jimmy Bullock, the company's manager for sustainable forestry and wildlife. "The Swainson's warbler has been a particular species of concern. It's a pretty rare species. We have found that if we make small clear-cuts -- 30, 40 acres -- and distribute the cuts across the landscape instead of having just a few large cuts, it performs like a natural disturbance. "The warbler apparently likes the type of hardwood habitat that comes back 12 to 15 years after harvesting. Once the tree gets up to a certain age, for whatever reason, it is not as attractive to the warbler. So if we can get a mosaic of different age classes, the birds can find optimal nesting and breeding habitat. We have 56 active nests that we've found since 1997. That's unprecedented in the annals of Swainson's warbler research." In part, says Sharon Haines, manager of sustainable forestry and forest policy for International Paper, this concern is reinforced by a feedback loop. "Of late, we've had to answer questions from our customers about our sustainable forest activities. Some of the best information we have to share with them are the things that we are doing with bird species." Here's how an increasingly fast and frictionless virtuous circle works: "The customers' questions probably began about four to five years ago," says Haines. "Might be a producer of lumber -- a Lowe's or someone like that -- concerned about where their product is coming from. It also can be an office products company like Staples. They're getting questions, pressures, from their customers, from environmental organizations. We're actually putting people on full time, dealing with them. "It's definitely the grass-roots community types. Now, because of the Internet, they are much better able to share information." "It's safe to say they are demanding more," acknowledges Haines. "I'm not sure they understand what they are demanding." Wiring the Planet "This is just an example where the Web is mediating a collective thought process that has feedback effects. It is affecting the distribution of the species," says Robert Wright, author of "The Moral Animal." It is reminiscent, Wright says, of Teilhard's idea that technology would connect minds into a "brain for the biosphere as the human species consciously assumes stewardship of the planet." It explains, he says, why "serious people take Teilhard seriously." "The bird-watching, Step 1, brings an increased sensitivity to the role of the environment in the health and happiness of birds," says Ralph H. Abraham, one of the progenitors of complex systems theory who is a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "Then Step 2 is an extension of this sensitivity to the happiness of the entire biosphere, including the living conditions for the human species themselves. The emergent property is this global consciousness. "Before the World Wide Web, the bird watchers were a bunch of independent agents. After, the emergent behavior is in the increase in the connectivity between them, as in a neural net" -- the industry term for advanced computers that can see patterns and learn from them. "When you increase the connectivity, new intelligence emerges," Abraham says. "The World Wide Web makes the consciousness of birders akin to a flock of birds, or a termite colony in which the individuals act in harmony. A consensus emerges on what to do. The behavior of the whole thing changes. "The reason this is so exciting is that it is totally grass-roots, bottom-up emergent behavior. The World Wide Web increases the connectivity between individual birders into a kind of global consciousness," Abraham concludes. "It cares in its altruistic loving soul for the interest of the birds. "What we're hoping for is a global increase in the collective intelligence of the human species, without which we cannot survive on this planet. All who dream of a sustainable future for their children and grandchildren are begging for a quantum leap in the consciousness of the human species. If that happens, it is the best and most important thing to happen to the environment." Although he died before the invention of the microchip, "Teilhard was incredibly prescient," says Thomas M. King, the Jesuit theologian at Georgetown University who has written or edited three books on the paleontologist who strove to connect science to theology. "A global culture is forming, as opposed to national cultures," King believes. John Perry Barlow, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet civil liberties organization, goes further: "We're not just wiring our consciousness, we're wiring the planet and all its biological activity. Teilhard was talking about not simply our consciousness, but evolution in its totality. "The changing patterns of the birds are the consequence of their consciousness interacting with our consciousnesses, being mediated by the neuro-system of the Web. Previously there hasn't been a good method for large-scale interaction between the greater 'us' and the greater 'them.' Now there is a method for remediating. We can watch what they're doing and they can watch what we're doing and respond to it. "It means that we're all just a little bit smarter, and the planet itself is a little bit smarter. There is an increased likelihood that a symbiosis is formed. "Sounds good to me. Very promising. Speaking as a human being, and also speaking as a friend of the birds." BirdSource and its projects, such as the Christmas Bird Count and the Great Backyard Bird Count, can be found at <a href="http://birdsource.cornell.edu ">birdsource.cornell.edu</a>; Journey North at <a href=" http://www.learner.org/jnorth">www.learner.org/jnorth</a>; BirdCast -- including Doppler radar images of birds -- at <a href=" http://www.birdcast.com">www.birdcast.com</a> and <a href=" http://www.birdcast.com/home.html">www.birdcast.com/home.html</a>; and a satellite map of a migrations at <a href=" http://www.learner.org/jnorth/images/graphics/d-e/eagle_e_map040301.html ">www.learner.org/jnorth/images/graphics/d-e/eagle_e_map040301.html</a>

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NPR: VIRAL MARKETING FOR MOVIES
by Ken Friedman 20 May '01

20 May '01

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2001 National Public Radio (R) -- National Public Radio (NPR) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- May 18, 2001, Friday SHOW: ALL THINGS CONSIDERED (8:00 PM ET) VIRAL MARKETING FOR MOVIES ANCHOR: SCOTT SIMON SCOTT SIMON, host: Now whether a movie succeeds or not at the box office often has little to do with what we identify as quality. It can come up or down to word-of-mouth recommendation, what one friend tells another. Buzz might be the other word. Most famous example in recent years is probably "The Blair Witch Project." That was a small-budget project which became a hit based largely on the traffic of its Web site. Now that kind of publicity has a name. It's called viral marketing, and it's most successful, as you may expect, with the 18- to 24-year-old age group. Viral marketing works by drawing people in by creating a cyberworld that is related to the film but not explicitly so. It's advertising but not obviously so. Amorette Jones is executive vice president of worldwide marketing for Artisan Entertainment, a pioneer of viral marketing. She insists that viral marketing is immensely successful. Ms. AMORETTE JONES (Executive Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Artisan Entertainment): It absolutely works. A lot of people have talked about "The Blair Witch Project" Web site. SIMON: Mm-hmm. Ms. JONES: And I think what was so fantastic about that is that we really recognized the power of the Web, how wide-reaching things happen and how quickly you get the word out. You build that urgency and build the buzz and enormous traffic. Since we had the experience with "Blair Witch Project," we've followed up with several other Web sites that have had that viral component... SIMON: Mm-hmm. Ms. JONES: ...that is all important in a campaign. SIMON: Question of the day in these economic times: How do you get people to visit a Web site? Ms. JONES: Our first goal is to work with the filmmakers in a collaborative effort to put together something incredibly creative and original online. And we start out with that, and we then develop a campaign that specifically targets users to develop that traffic. So in the same way that we develop an overall marketing campaign for a theatrical release, we also develop a campaign for the Web site launch. What our goal is, is with these Web sites that don't necessarily have the banner across the top, 'The movie's coming to your market on this date; go buy your ticket,' we try and develop a site that's going to feel authentic to the film, so it's going to feel that they worked together in complement, although it's not necessarily a straightforward promotional push. SIMON: Mm-hmm. What were you trying to do with the "Center of the World" Web site? Ms. JONES: We have a film that was shot entirely on digital, picture directed by Wayne Wang, and Wayne had decided within the body of this film that he was really going to push the envelope and to develop a picture that spoke to a lot of what's happening today in society. What our goal was with the Web site is to work with Wayne and again... SIMON: Let me interrupt you. You get to put some naughty pictures in this, don't you? Ms. JONES: Yeah, absolutely. We did. It wasn't for the sake of putting naughty pictures up on the Web. What we attempted to do with the sites, and I think what we successfully did, is we were able to develop a provocative piece of advertising, of promotion. SIMON: Mm-hmm. Ms. JONES: You know, in this site, as you go into the site, you go through the rules, you go into a strip club, you participate in a striptease. You then, as the user, can choose to have a lap dance. You then take the next step and you go behind the scenes and have this very voyeuristic experience in a dressing room with the dancer. And then, at the end of the site, you have a one-on-one interaction with the dancer in a very intimate setting, and there is a chat function in which the user is able to communicate with this dancer. As the user, you're in this very intimate setting and you're in this very provocative arrangement, yet it's so not intimate. And that was one of the points that Wayne was trying to make in the picture, and that's one of the points that we were making with this Web site. SIMON: Ms. Jones, thanks very much for speaking with us. Ms. JONES: Absolutely. Thank you. SIMON: Amorette Jones is executive vice president of worldwide marketing for Artisan Entertainment. And this is NPR, National Public Radio. May 19, 2001 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2001 National Public Radio (R) -- National Public Radio (NPR) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

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From NYT: HE-MAILS, SHE-MAILS: WHERE SENDER MEETS GENDER
by Ken Friedman 20 May '01

20 May '01

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company --------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/17/technology/17TALK.html May 17, 2001 HE-MAILS, SHE-MAILS: WHERE SENDER MEETS GENDER By JOYCE COHEN WITH their wedding party scattered across 3,000 miles, Gladys We and Tony Nathan did much of their wedding planning by e-mail. For their first-anniversary gift last September, their bridesmaid Grace Cheng compiled all the wedding correspondence into a handmade book. About 90 percent of the book consisted of messages sent among the bride and her bridesmaids. A paltry 10 percent was messages among the men. The women held forth not just on wedding minutiae like heel height and earring style, but also on a whole lot more -- "stories about our days, support over little frustrations, congratulations on little triumphs," said Ms. We, a graphic designer in Vancouver, British Columbia. "The groomsmen sent a couple of wedding jokes and reminded each other of the tux fitting." Ms. We continues to exchange e-mail daily with her female friends. "A message is a bright spot in the day," she said. "It's like a kaffeeklatsch of girlfriends getting together to talk." She added, "My husband finds it odd." Of course he does. He's a guy. But it does not seem at all odd to many e-mail users, who can't help noticing that women are so often voluble and open on screen, while men are terse and tight-lipped. "My female friends write huge, long things -- the latest gossip and every little, minute detail of what's going on, and really specific stuff about school and social life and everything," said Leslie Wright, a student at Barnard College. "With guys, it's more like an outline." Indeed, communication researchers who are beginning to study the e-mail behavior of men and women say they are finding real differences. But they are also finding some surprises in how those differences are expressed. In general, they say, women tend to use the electronic medium as an extension of the way they talk -- lavishly and intimately, to connect with people and build rapport. Men, in both speech and text, incline toward a briefer, more utilitarian style, the researchers say -- a style they variously term instrumental, functional or transactional. But some researchers have detected something else going on. The disinhibiting effect of e-mail, they say, makes it possible for people of few words -- men, usually -- to convey thoughts and feelings that they would find nearly impossible to say aloud. David Becker, a Manhattan lawyer, fits the pattern of the taciturn male. He uses e-mail often with a group of male friends from college and said that "95 percent of the messages are coordinating stuff to do with our free time." He added, "There's usually a practical reason for the e-mail, like, `What are we doing tonight?' or `Can you get out of work early?' not, `Let's catch up.' " The replies are short and informational, he said, though they sometimes include insults and clowning around. E-mail messages from his former girlfriend, however, "read like a one- sided phone conversation," Mr. Becker said. "She would send me, literally, thousand-word e-mails with questions and thoughts and all this stuff." Though he would not always read the message immediately, "I would never delete one without reading it," he said. "If I replied at all, it would be, `My day is going fine, I'll talk to you later.' " There are more subtle differences, as well. Ms. Wright and her female friends tend to read their e-mail as soon as they receive it and reply at once. "Even if I don't have a lot of time, I will respond right away and be, like, `I don't have time now, but will write a longer e-mail later,' "she said. "If I e-mail a guy, I have to wait a few days to get a response. Guy friends are horrible that way, but guys who are interested in you are better." Dr. Linnda Caporael said she felt obligated to humanize her messages. Not only does she answer her e-mail promptly, but she adds detail, even when her correspondents are seeking a one-word answer. "I say, `Yes, that's fine,' or `Yes, that's O.K.,' " said Dr. Caporael, who teaches social science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. A "no" answer gets a more elaborate explanation. "Why can't I just say no?" she said. "If I know someone, I will answer even longer." Of course, many factors besides sex -- including age, income, education and status -- influence what is said, and there are many forms of electronic communication. There are private messages and public ones; e- mail messages sent for social, business or romantic reasons; those traded within single-sex or mixed groups; and notes between people who know each other well, a bit, or not at all. "No generalization applies to all forms of computer-mediated communication," said Dr. Susan C. Herring, associate professor of information science and linguistics at Indiana University at Bloomington. "The key word is context." Still, when it comes to public e-mail -- message boards, mailing lists and chat rooms -- Dr. Herring and other researchers have noted how typical speech patterns translate into online text. Her research shows that in online groups, "men tend to make strong assertions," disagree with others and use profanity, insults and sarcasm. By contrast, women tend to use mitigated assertions along with questions, offers, suggestions and polite expressions, she said. They are supportive and agreeable, peppering their messages with more emoticons and representations of laughter, like "haha," "heehee" and "lol," for "laughing out loud." Except for an inclination to start or fan flame wars, men in online groups tend to limit the interaction, while women encourage others to engage, said Dr. David Silver, an assistant professor at the University of Washington and the director of the online Resource Center for Cyber Culture Studies (www.otal.umd.edu /~rccs). "Men come online to give information or give an answer, and in essence stop the conversation," he said. "Women add a question, tweak a thread or make things more complicated. I have found mailing lists dominated by women to be much more interesting, collegial and communitarian." Still, the loose-lips effect of e-mail, which leads people to write as candidly as if they were writing in a diary, despite knowing their words will be read on the other end, is especially powerful for some men. Those who are usually reluctant to divulge personal information or betray emotion often find that e-mail provides a layer of distance they find liberating. "The electronic distance that lets men write so freely is akin to their preferred way of speaking -- without a direct face-to-face alignment that makes a lot of men uncomfortable," said Dr. Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and a pioneer in the field of sex differences in language. E-mail can impose a "beneficial distance" that is useful for times when verbal communication is "too rich," Dr. Herring added. "For many men, e-mail may take some of the emotional charge off loaded emotional situations." For example, Mike Murnane, a real estate broker in Palo Alto, Calif., finds it much easier to express his affection for his grown children -- three daughters and a son -- through e-mail. "In person, my girls and my wife talk frequently and rapidly, and I don't get a chance to say much," Mr. Murnane said. "With the phone, at least for me, there has to be some reason to call. But with e-mail you can say any random thing -- a thought or something that happened -- and send it off quickly. It's easy for me to acknowledge what my children do in a very loving way." His middle daughter, Maria Murnane, keeps a computer file of her father's e-mail messages. "I cherish them, because he is so shy and nonexpressive," she said. "I get the sweetest e-mails and he says things he never says in person." E-mail works well, too, when it comes to conflict. Martin Ogawa, who works at an online directory service in San Francisco, prefers e-mail for difficult discussions with his fiancée, Cheryl Kaplan. "When I know she is upset with me, I will send her an e-mail instead of calling," Mr. Ogawa said. "It's less confrontational. It makes it easier to resolve the issue and move forward." Whatever the difficult subject -- a concrete one like finances or a murky one like their relationship, "e-mail helps me approach the subject in a less aggressive manner," said Ms. Kaplan, a lawyer. "On the phone, I don't give Martin enough time to give his side because I'm too busy giving him my version." Still, she would always prefer a real conversation. "If I wrote a response, I'd be typing for days," she said. "A million things are going through my head, and all I want to do is pick up the phone and talk about it." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/17/technology/17TALK.html --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

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DAILY NEWS, ETERNAL STORIES
by World Wide Web 19 May '01

19 May '01

Dear Friends, I found the first story in here truly frightening -- and alas, fitting some of the things I encounter around students (none working with me, fortunately). The other stories are interesting too. This is the list of the Assoc of Internet Researchers. Barry -------------------------------------------------------------------- Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman(a)chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 -------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Received: from localhost (wellman@localhost) by origin.chass.utoronto.ca (980427.SGI.8.8.8/980728.SGI.AUTOCF) via ESMTP id KAA66893; Sat, 19 May 2001 10:00:01 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 15:09:18 +0200 Message-ID: <Pine.SGI.4.10.10105190956530.60811-100000(a)origin.chass.utoronto.ca> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII From: Ken Friedman <ken.friedman(a)bi.no> Reply-To: air-l(a)aoir.org DAILY NEWS, ETERNAL STORIES Jack Lule uncovers seven myths that shape journalism. He uses the example of Haiti to explain the unconscious racism of the U.S. press The Myth In Journalism 05/16/01 http://www.mediachannel.org/views/oped/lule.shtml Jack Lule's book, "Daily News, Eternal Stories: The Mythological Role of Journalism" examines the difference between news as "information" and news as "story" with characters, plot and theme. For Lule, myth does not mean untrue tales, but rather great stories emphasizing "archetypal figures and forms" and "exemplary models" that play crucial social roles for humankind. In this definition, such figures, forms and models represent shared values and help people better understand the complexities, good and bad, of human life. By analyzing case studies involving Black Panther Huey Newton, Mother Teresa, baseball player Mark McGuire and Hurricane Mitch, among others, Lule a great storyteller himself demonstrates seven master myths in the news that shape our thinking about foreign policy, terrorism, race relations, political dissent and other issues. He calls them The Victim, The Scapegoat, The Hero, The Good Mother, The Trickster, The Other World and The Flood. As Lule writes in this selection, digital technology may either nourish "a far-reaching medley of voices and stories" or else impose "the crushing conformity of a few global scribes." He uses Haiti to illustrate the latter, perceiving an unconscious racism in the coverage of Haitian politics by The New York Times. Lule's reading is neither academic nor literary but an insistence that storytelling, including its cultural and social role, is crucial to the revitalization and survival of journalism. Andrew Levy, ( Andrew(a)mediachannel.org) Editor =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D As Myth, News Will Be Crucial But Conflicted In An Online World Myth and the new technology may seem to be an unlikely pair. But we have already seen that myth has adapted to every storytelling medium from tribal tales to cable television. The new technology is no different. The combination of myth and online news, though, will produce intriguing, paradoxical, perhaps ominous, results. The information model of journalism, already in great disrepair, will be dismantled by the marriage of myth and new media. News is losing whatever franchise it had on whatever information is. Information is no longer some scarce resource, a commodity that newspeople can cull and sell. Our society rapidly moved from information explosion to information overload. Information is everywhere. From online events calendars to live, continuous congressional coverage, anyone can give and get information online. If news is only information, news is nothing. Yet information overload offers opportunities to news: as myth. In the throes of all this information, the need for myth increases. People grapple with the meaning of rapidly changing times. People seek out ways in which they can organize and explain the world. People need stories. Myth has long played these roles. Myth has identified and organized important events in the lives of individuals and societies. Myth has interpreted and explained the meaning of the past, the portents of the future. Myth has offered the stability of story in unstable times. Decades ago, Marshall McLuhan foresaw the increasing need for myth to organize experience in the face of information overload. "You cannot cope with vast amounts of information in the old fragmentary classified patterns," he told literary critic Frank Kermode in a 1964 interview. "You tend to go looking for mythic and structural forms in order to manage such complex data, moving at very high speeds." "So the electric engineers often speak of pattern recognition as a normal need of people processing data electrically and by computers and so on the need for pattern recognition," McLuhan said. "It's a need which the poets foresaw a century ago in their drive back to mythic forms of organizing experience." And so myth and new technology offer opportunities to one another. In a modern, wired world, the news provides pattern recognition mythic forms of organizing experience. State scribes stand poised to exploit these opportunities perhaps to the detriment of society. Amid the chaos of the information explosion, the authority of the storyteller seems likely to increase. In the din of a million voices, the voice of an established storyteller, for better or worse, attains even more status. We have already seen evidence of this power in the infancy of online news. Dramatic events the election of a president, a terrorist killing, a celebrity trial, a devastating flood bring a rush of readers to the Web sites of traditional news outlets, the established "brands," the state scribes. And the power of the state scribes is being enhanced, politically and economically, as they join together in huge global conglomerates. As previous propositions affirmed, it's always been dangerous to have storytelling power invested in a select social few. Power corrupts. And in our times of consolidation of new and news media, the danger looms larger. State scribes, long beholden to privileged and powerful rulers, now are also compromised by their responsibilities to stockholders, corporate owners, and even to other scribes to whom they have been married and merged. It is a perilous world in which a very few voices, so compromised, can signal to society what is important and what is not, how to act and how not, who is worthy and who is not. The Web, though, is terribly tangled. Myth and new technology may actually pose threats to the state scribes as well. People are increasingly able to seek out stories and storytellers who challenge and reject views of the state scribes. People have the ability to find others who share and confirm their views of the world, bypassing the communication of the scribes. =46or example, people with disabilities can find each other online and organize to challenge their exclusion from positions, power, and print. Political candidates unaffiliated with the two major parties have a means to reach a larger audience. Hate groups, isolated in their own communities, can seek support from around the world. What happens online in all these different connections? People share stories. They sustain each other with stories that draw from archetypal figures and forms to offer exemplary models and meaning for human life. They tell each other news as myth. Through these disparate online stories, the status of state scribes quite possibly can be challenged. Digital technology thus has the possibility to nourish a far-reaching medley of voices and stories or to impose the crushing conformity of a few global scribes. Myth, News Values And A New World With the end of the cold war and the beginning of a new century, U.S. news coverage of international affairs finds itself at a crossroads. For previous generations of reporters and editors, the world could be organized and explained in relation to the political, military, economic and cultural rivalry of two superpowers. News values the criteria by which the news media select, order, report and give meaning to events were structured by this one dominant model, a model that has tumbled with the stones from the Berlin Wall. Today, the questions facing [The New York] Times and other news organizations include: How is international news to be defined in this new era? What news values will guide the selection and shaping of events? As we have seen, two models have emerged. One model has embraced the era as a time of promise for journalism. This model valorizes aggressive, progressive news values that promote social justice, and might be called the model of "a new global and human journalism." Other scholars have offered a more pessimistic model, a model of international news dictated by the actions and initiatives of U.S. foreign policy. This model might be described as promoting "Fortress America" in a world of chaos. This chapter has offered a preliminary assessment of the prospects for each model through a case study: the work of one Times correspondent, the reporting of Larry Rohter from Haiti. Analysis of that reporting supports the most cheerless view of post-Cold War news values. In the amount of coverage, the nature of the content, and the strategies offered, Rohter's reporting for [The New York] Times can be seen as working in concert with U.S. foreign policy. Even as that policy shifted course rejecting the junta, warily restoring Aristide, but insisting that he accept U.S. policy so too did the reporting. Fears that U.S. foreign correspondence would become captive to U.S. foreign policy were realized in Rohter's reports. To restate the particulars: The influence of U.S. foreign policy can be seen quite readily in the sheer amount of Rohter's Haitian coverage. As the Clinton administration made Haiti one of its first major foreign policy campaigns, Rohter gave over most of his work for almost two years to following Haiti. The Caribbean correspondent of the Times over some 20 months [from July 1994 through February 1996] filed, for example, five stories from El Salvador, three stories from Colombia, three stories from Honduras, two stories from Trinidad and none from the Dominican Republic. From Haiti, as previously noted, Rohter filed 120 stories. The themes of Rohter's reporting also worked in concert with U.S. policy. Rohter's reporting did not stray far from U.S. policy perspectives. As the United States prepared for an invasion to remove Cedras, U.S. officials postured mightily through Rohter's reporting. Rohter's denunciations of the regime and his chronicling of the junta's repression made a case for U.S. intervention. At the same time, his depictions of Aristide as the rightful leader, whose return would bring peace and reconciliation, also bolstered the U.S. case. When Aristide and U.S. policy soon began to conflict, Rohter's themes shifted. The uplifting portrayals of Aristide and the lavalas movement segued to critical accounts of intransigent ideology and radical leftist politics. As FRAPH continued to terrorize the population and U.S. forces refused to move against them, Rohter's avoidance of the U.S.-FRAPH relationship shielded Times readers from the U.S. establishment of a conservative "counterweight" to Aristide's progressive politics. And Rohter's depiction of Haiti as an "ungovernable" place whose people were not "culturally or psychologically" equipped for the demands of democracy captured the patronizing and paternalistic attitudes that have driven U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean for decades. Haiti As The Other World Myth provides another, complementary way to understand Rohter's coverage. Like all reporters, Rohter did not have to create brand-new story forms to report events from Haiti. He, his editors and his sources consistently drew upon an established narrative an eternal story that helped shape coverage even as it explained and justified U.S. policy. In Rohter's reports, we can see the unmistakable structure of the myth of the Other World. Underlying the reporting of Haiti's political turmoil turmoil orchestrated often by U.S. policies is a classic portrayal. Haiti is rendered as a primitive land, filled with danger and chaos, and ruled by death squads and paramilitary patrols who leave the streets littered with corpses. Its helpless people perversely admire bloody shows of force as they engage in animal sacrifice and bone-stealing voodoo rituals, even on Christmas. And they passively remain under the sway of rogue leaders and psychotic priests with no respect for order or reason or privatizing industry. It's a nightmare world. Rohter provides us with a modern depiction of the Other World, one that also seeks to define our society in relation to other societies. As [Jean-Pierre] Vernant argued [in "Myth and Society in Ancient Greece"], myth "expresses how a group of people in particular historical circumstances sees itself." The myth expressed in Rohter's reporting portrays a mighty and superior people descending with fascination and disgust into a primitive place on the globe. The Other World is a world to be feared and perhaps someday avoided. But for now it's a world in desperate need of U.S. guidance and military might. The Other World In U.S. International News The Other World is not a rare portrayal in U.S. news. Close reading of the Times and other newspapers shows that reporting of international affairs often relies on the myth of the Other World. In fact, many nations do not appear in U.S. news unless and until they provide stories that allow the myth to be told. From around the world, U.S. reporters and editors apply news values that judge other nations newsworthy when they provides stories of bloody coups, tribal warfare, perverse politics, strange customs and other tales of the underworld for the U.S. audience back home. Even a cursory reading of international news shows the influence of the myth of the Other World on news values. We find stories about animal sacrifice in Taiwan; female genital cutting in Africa; the stoning of the devil at Mecca; a thwarted coup in Qatar; Central American drug warlords; a military junta in Sierra Leone; genocide in Rwanda; ethnic cleansing in Kosovo; stolen Aboriginal children in Australia; and many other dark tales. Once again, we can marvel at the durability of myth. A tale told for centuries is told to usher the United States into the 21st century. Modern mythology, Joseph Campbell said, confronts an enormously complex "fact-world that now has to be recognized, appropriated and assimilated." U.S. society today faces an enormously complex "fact-world," a post-Cold War world in which the United States is the lone superpower on the world stage. U.S. international news confronts that world through tales of the Other World. It offers coverage that affirms U.S. superiority and other nations' inferiority. It provides scary, fantastic stories of a world beset by anarchy and chaos. It promotes the "image of 'Fortress America,' an island of civilization in a sea of political barbarism." It does all this with a myth as old as Odysseus. ------------- Jack Lule is a professor of journalism and chair of the Department of Journalism and Communication at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. He has published widely and has won numerous awards for excellence in research and teaching. A former bartender, truck driver and reporter, Lule continues to be an avid observer of the American scene and a frequent contributor to newspapers and periodicals. ------- This essay was excerpted from the book "Daily News, Eternal Stories: The Mythological Role of Journalism," by Jack Lule (New York: The Guilford Press, 2001). Copyright =A9 2001. Reprinted with permission of The Guilford Press. -- Ken Friedman, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design Department of Knowledge Management Norwegian School of Management School +47 22.98.50.00 Telephone +47 22.98.51.11 Telefax Home office +46 (46) 53.245 Telephone +46 (46) 53.345 Telefax Message: 4 email: ken.friedman(a)bi.no -- --__--__-- _______________________________________________ Air-l mailing list Air-l(a)aoir.org http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l End of Air-l Digest Dear Friends, I found the first story in here truly frightening -- and alas, fitting some of the things I encounter around students (none working with me, fortunately). The other stories are interesting too. This is the list of the Assoc of Internet Researchers. Barry -------------------------------------------------------------------- Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman(a)chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 -------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 09:11:01 -0400 (EDT) From: air-l-request(a)aoir.org Reply-To: air-l(a)aoir.org To: air-l(a)aoir.org Subject: Air-l digest, Vol 1 #10 - 4 msgs Send Air-l mailing list submissions to air-l(a)aoir.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to air-l-request(a)aoir.org You can reach the person managing the list at air-l-admin(a)aoir.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Air-l digest..." Today's Topics: 1. The No-Book Report: Skim It and Weep (Ken Friedman) 2. Authors in their Sites (Ken Friedman) 3. Re: The No-Book Report: Skim It and Weep (Steve Jones) 4. DAILY NEWS, ETERNAL STORIES (Ken Friedman) --__--__-- Message: 1 Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 07:05:29 +0200 To: <air-l(a)aoir.org> From: Ken Friedman <ken.friedman(a)bi.no> Subject: [Air-l] The No-Book Report: Skim It and Weep Reply-To: air-l(a)aoir.org --------------------------------------------------------------------------- (C) 2001 The Washington Post Company --------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23370-2001May13.html Monday, May 14, 2001; Page C01 The No-Book Report: Skim It and Weep More and More Americans Who Can Read Are Choosing Not To. Can We Afford to Write Them Off? By Linton Weeks Washington Post Staff Writer Jeremy Spreitzer probably wouldn't read this story if it weren't about him. He is an aliterate -- someone who can read, but chooses not to. A graduate student in public affairs at Park University in Kansas City, Mo., Spreitzer, 25, gleans most of his news from TV. He skims required texts, draws themes from dust jackets and, when he absolutely, positively has to read something, reaches for the audiobook. "I am fairly lazy when it comes to certain tasks," says Spreitzer, a long-distance runner who hopes to compete in the 2004 Olympics. "Reading is one of them." As he grows older, Spreitzer finds he has less time to read. And less inclination. In fact, he says, if he weren't in school, he probably wouldn't read at all. He's not alone. According to the survey firm NDP Group -- which tracked the everyday habits of thousands of people through the 1990s -- this country is reading printed versions of books, magazines and newspapers less and less. In 1991, more than half of all Americans read a half-hour or more every day. By 1999, that had dropped to 45 percent. A 1999 Gallup Poll found that only 7 percent of Americans were voracious readers, reading more than a book a week, while some 59 percent said they had read fewer than 10 books in the previous year. Though book clubs seem popular now, only 6 percent of those who read belong to one. The number of people who don't read at all, the poll concluded, has been rising for the past 20 years. The reports on changes in reading cut to the quick of American culture. We pride ourselves on being a largely literate First World country while at the same time we rush to build a visually powerful environment in which reading is not required. The results are inevitable. Aliteracy is all around. Just ask: * Internet developers. At the Terra Lycos portal design lab in Waltham, Mass., researcher William Albert has noticed that the human guinea pigs in his focus groups are too impatient to read much. When people look up information on the Internet today, Albert explains, they are "basically scanning. There's very little actual comprehension that's going on." People, Albert adds, prefer to get info in short bursts, with bullets, rather than in large blocks of text. * Transportation gurus. Chandra Clayton, who oversees the design of road signs and signals for the Virginia Department of Transportation, says, "Symbols can quickly give you a message that might take too long to read in text." The department is using logos and symbols more and more. When it comes to highway safety and getting lifesaving information quickly, she adds, "a picture is worth a thousand words." * Packaging designers. "People don't take the time to read anything," explains Jim Peters, editor of BrandPackaging magazine. "Marketers and packagers are giving them colors and shapes as ways of communicating." For effective marketing, Peters says, "researchers tell us that the hierarchy is colors, shapes, icons and, dead last, words." Some of this shift away from words -- and toward images -- can be attributed to our ever-growing multilingual population. But for many people, reading is passe or impractical or, like, so totally unnecessary in this day and age. To Jim Trelease, author of "The Read-Aloud Handbook," this trend away from the written word is more than worrisome. It's wicked. It's tearing apart our culture. People who have stopped reading, he says, "base their future decisions on what they used to know. "If you don't read much, you really don't know much," he says. "You're dangerous." Losing a Heritage "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them." -- Mark Twain One thing you can say for illiteracy: It can be identified, nailed down. And combated. Scores of programs such as the Greater Washington Literacy Council and the International Reading Association are geared toward fighting readinglessness in the home, the school and the workplace. Aliteracy, on the other hand, is like an invisible liquid, seeping through our culture, nigh impossible to pinpoint or defend against. It's the kid who spends hours and hours with video games instead of books, who knows Sim Cities better than "A Tale of Two Cities." It's the thousands of business people who subscribe to executive book summaries -- for example, Soundview's easy-to-swallow eight-page pamphlets that take simply written management books such as "Secrets of Question-Based Selling" by Thomas A. Freese and make them even simpler. It's the parent who pops the crummy movie of "Stuart Little" into a machine for his kid instead of reading E.B. White's marvelous novel aloud. Or the teacher who assigns the made-for-TV movie "Gettysburg" instead of the book it was based on, "The Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara. There may be untold collateral damage in a society that can read but doesn't. "So much of our culture is embedded in literature," says Philip A. Thompsen, professor of communications at West Chester University in West Chester, Pa. Thompsen has been watching the rise of aliteracy in the classroom for 20 years, and "students today are less capable of getting full value from textbooks than they were 10 years ago." He adds that these aliterate students are "missing out on our cultural heritage." That literature-based past included a reverence for reading, a celebration of the works and a worshipful awe of those who wrote. To draw you a picture: Where we once deified the lifestyles of writers such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, we now fantasize about rock-and-roll gods, movie starlets or NBA super-studs (e.g. MTV's "Cribs"). The notion of writer-as-culture-hero is dead and gone. Comedic monologuists such as Jay Leno or David Letterman have more sex appeal than serious fiction writers. The grail quest for the Great American Novel has ended; it was a myth after all. Where we once drew our mass-cult references from books ("He's a veritable Simon Legree"), we now allude to visual works -- a Seinfeld episode (not there's anything wrong with that . . .) or "The Silence of the Lambs" (the movie, not the book). A recent story in Salon speaks of "learning to read a movie." Where we once believed that a well-read populace leads to a healthy democracy, many people now rely on whole TV broadcast operations built around politics and elections. Quick, name a Wolf Blitzer book. Non-readers abound. Ask "Politically Incorrect" talk show host Bill Maher, who once boasted in print that he hadn't read a book in years. Or Noel Gallagher of the rock band Oasis, who has been quoted as saying he'd never read a book. You can walk through whole neighborhoods of houses in the country that do not contain books or magazines -- unless you count catalogues. American historian Daniel Boorstin saw this coming. In 1984, while Boorstin was serving as librarian of Congress, the library issued a landmark report: "Books in Our Future." Citing recent statistics that only about half of all Americans read regularly every year, he referred to the "twin menaces" of illiteracy and aliteracy. "In the United States today," Boorstin wrote, "aliteracy is widespread." Several of the articles in the report alluded to the growing number of non-readers. In one essay, "The Computer and the Book," Edmund D. Pellegrino, a former president of Catholic University who is now a bioethicist at Georgetown University, observed: "The computer is simply the most effective, efficient and attractive form for transmittal of processed information. Added to the other nonbook devices like films, tapes, television and the popular media, the computer accelerates the atrophy of the intellectual skills acquired for personally reading the books from which the information is extracted." Reading for Bliss Kylene Beers has talked about the evils of aliteracy for so long and so loud, she's losing her voice. Today she's in the lecture hall of Oakton High School bending the ears of 100 or so middle school teachers. If someone graduates from high school and is aliterate, Beers believes, that person will probably never become a habitual reader. One of the few academics who have written about the phenomenon, Beers, a professor of reading at the University of Houston, says there are two types of reading: efferent and aesthetic. Efferent, which comes from the Latin word efferre (meaning to carry away), is purposeful reading, the kind students are taught day after day in schools. Efferent readers connect cognitively with the words and plan to take something useful from it -- such as answers for a test. Aesthetic is reading for the sheer bliss of it, as when you dive deep into Dostoevski or get lost in Louisa May Alcott. Aesthetic readers connect emotionally to the story. Beers believes that more students must be shown the marvels of reading for pleasure. On this late afternoon, she is mapping out strategies for teachers who hope to engage reluctant middle school readers. Teaching grammar and parts of speech, such as dangling participles, is the kiss of death, she says. "You don't want to talk about dangling anythings with middle-schoolers," she says in her Texas drawl. And the room laughs. Aliteracy, she continues, is no laughing matter. Using an overhead projector, she explains that aliterate people just don't get it. Unlike accomplished readers, aliterates don't understand that sometimes you have to read efferently and sometimes you have to read aesthetically; that even the best readers occasionally read the same paragraph over and over to understand it and that to be a good reader you have to visualize the text. To engage non-reading students -- and adults -- she proposes reading strategies, such as turning a chapter of a hard book into a dramatic production or relating tough words to easier words. She writes the word "tepid" on the acetate sheet. Then she asks the audience to supply other words that describe water temperature. "Hot," someone calls out. "Freezing," somebody else says. Others suggest: cold, warm and boiling. Beers arranges the words in a linear fashion, from the coldest word, "freezing," to the hottest, "boiling." "Tepid" falls in the middle of the list. This method, she says, will help reluctant readers to connect words they don't know to words they do know. "Aliterates," she tells the teachers, "don't see relationships." Apparently, teachers don't always see the relationships either. Jim Trelease is concerned that teachers do not read. The aliteracy rate among teachers, he says, is about the same, 50 percent, as among the general public. There is some good news on the reading front, according to Trelease and others. The Harry Potter series has turned on a lot of young readers and megabookstores, such as Barnes & Noble and Borders, are acrawl with people. But there is plenty of bad news, too. Lots of aliterates, according to Trelease, say they just don't have time to read anymore. "The time argument is the biggest hoax of all," he says. According to time studies, we have more leisure time than ever. "If people didn't have time, the malls would be empty, cable companies would be broke, video stores would go out of business. It's not a time problem, it's a value problem. You have 50 percent in the country who don't value reading." Like Beers, Trelease believes that youngsters should be encouraged to read aesthetically. Reading aloud to children, according to Trelease and other reading specialists, is the single best way to ensure that someone will become a lifelong reader. "Even Daniel Boorstin wasn't born wanting to read," Trelease says. "Michael Jordan wasn't born wanting to play basketball. The desire has to be planted." Surfing Through Grad School Trelease and Beers and others are scrambling for ways to engage aliterates. For all kinds of reasons. "What aliteracy does is breed illiteracy," Beers explains. "If you go through school having learned to read and then you leave school not wanting to read, chances are you won't put your own children into a reading environment." "What you have to do is play hardball," says Trelease. He suggests running public awareness campaigns on TV. "That's where the aliterates are." Trelease says we should try to eradicate aliteracy in the way we went after tobacco. We should let people know, Trelease says, "what the consequences are to your family and children if you don't read." "Aliteracy may be a significant problem today," says Philip Thompsen. "But on the other hand, a narrow view of literacy -- one that defines literacy as the ability to read verbal texts -- may be a significant problem as well." Many of the messages that we have to interpret in day-to-day life, Thompsen says, "use multiple communication media. I think it is important to realize that as our society becomes more accustomed to using multimedia messages, we must also expand our thinking about what it means to be 'literate.' " Olympic hopeful Jeremy Spreitzer plans to become a teacher and maybe go into politics someday. For now, he's just trying to get through graduate school. He watches a lot of television. "I'm a major surfer," he says. He watches the History Channel, A&E, Turner Classic Movies and all of the news stations. "I'm required to do a lot of reading," he says. "But I do a minimum of what I need to do." But how do you get through grad school without reading? Spreitzer is asked. He gives an example. One of his required texts is the recently published "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community" by Robert Putnam. In the book, Putnam argues, among other things, that television has fragmented our society. Spreitzer thumbed through the book, dipped into a few chapters and spent a while "skipping around" here and there. He feels, however, that he understands Putnam and Putnam's theories as well as if he had read the book. How is that? he is asked. Putnam, he explains, has been on TV a lot. "He's on the news all the time," Spreitzer says. "On MSNBC and other places. Those interviews with him are more invaluable than anything else." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23370-2001May13.html --------------------------------------------------------------------------- (C) 2001 The Washington Post Company --------------------------------------------------------------------------- --__--__-- Message: 2 Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 07:05:36 +0200 To: <air-l(a)aoir.org> From: Ken Friedman <ken.friedman(a)bi.no> Subject: [Air-l] Authors in their Sites Reply-To: air-l(a)aoir.org --------------------------------------------------------------------------- (C) Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company -- The Boston Globe --------------------------------------------------------------------------- www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/134/living/Authors_in_their_SitesP.shtml 5/14/2001 Authors in their Sites Fans turned archivists use the Web to honor their favorite writers By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff The Web is the ultimate library, an assemblage of texts unprecedented in human history. Within its virtual confines, one can even occasionally find good, old, honest-to-Gutenberg authors - the kind who put words on paper as well as screen. There's one big difference, of course: On the Web, authors' writings aren't found on shelves but at sites devoted to their lives and works. The individuals who tend such sites may be the closest thing this global library has to librarians. Actually, as the three individuals profiled here demonstrate, "librarian" doesn't begin to do their self-appointed vocation justice. Each is part fan, part archivist, part technician, using the resources of the Web to pay tribute to an author he or she loves. It's a unique joining of the old fashioned with the up to the minute: for with these sites, as with creation itself, in the beginning was the word. Proprietor: Curt Gardner, 39 Home: San Francisco Work: software implementer Author: Don DeLillo Address: www.perival.com/delillo Began: early 1996 It was in college, as a computer-science major at Wesleyan, that Curt Gardner first heard of Don DeLillo. Surfing the Web some 15 years later, he was dismayed by how little he could find about the author. So Gardner decided to try to come up with a site like the one he'd hoped to come across. ''My vision was to create a place where the average DeLillo reader would feel at home,'' he says. Gardner also had an aim that he describes as ''fairly grandiose,'' which is ''to essentially document everything known about DeLillo.'' The contents of his site include what one might expect (reviews of DeLillo's books, interviews with him) as well as what one might not (the novelist Salman Rushdie reports on attending a Yankees game with DeLillo: ''He goes there with his mitt. He's up there for every fly ball.''). Gardner doesn't find running the site to be at all onerous. During its first year of operation, he recalls, he haunted the University of California at Berkeley library system, tracking down material. Since then, he estimates he's spent no more than two hours a week working on it. ''It's a fun pastime,'' he says, ''and it puts me in touch with DeLillo fans from all over. Almost daily I get e-mail from an appreciative visitor, and I also get many postable items from people who send me links.'' Gardner met DeLillo at a San Francisco reading in 1997 and sent him printouts from the page. ''I respect his wishes to keep some things private,'' Gardner says. ''But let's just say he gave his blessing to the site.'' Proprietor: Richard Lane, 33 Home: New York Work: editor, ''Dateline NBC'' Author: Thomas Pynchon Address: www.pynchonfiles.com Began: May 31, 1998 ''I created the site out of a jaw-dropping admiration for the man,'' says Richard Lane. Thomas Pynchon is an ideal subject for a Web site: a famously reclusive author who has many fanatical readers interested in any scrap of information about him they can come by. In addition, Lane points out, ''The encyclopedic content of Pynchon's work lends itself perfectly to the hyperlink format.'' Site contents range from photos of Pynchon as an 18-year-old Navy seaman (and of the destroyer he served on) to the complete text of an obscure report on public disturbances in Malta in 1919 that helped inspire the epilogue to Pynchon's first novel, ''V.'' Lane sees his mission as ''providing a conduit for information that the novelist isn't providing.'' Sometimes that can lead to a certain strain on the conduit. ''There are foreign visitors who assume I'm [Pynchon], others who wanted all his books and critical work sent along, gratis. And soon.'' There was also a recent query from a prominent Web site wondering how to get Pynchon to review restaurants. Lane, who has had no contact with the author, could offer no help. Such distractions are a small price to pay for the site, Lane feels. ''I've learned more by stepping on Pynchon's shadow than I ever could have imagined from a novelist. The confluence of ideas and tangents that merely thinking about his work induces is a great gift of which he should be justly proud.'' Proprietor: Sandye Utley, 49 Home: Cincinnati Work: administrative assistant, WCET-TV Author: T. Coraghessan Boyle Address: www.tcboyle.net Began: Feb. 21, 2000 ''There's such joy in his writing,'' Sandye Utley says. She was already a fan of his novels and short stories when she met T. Coraghessan Boyle at an award ceremony in Washington, D.C., 16 months ago. He accepted her offer to set up a FAQ (frequently asked questions) page for the site Boyle runs, www.tcboyle.com. Utley came up with so many references to Boyle-related articles and reviews she decided to set up a free-standing site. ''It could easily be a full-time job,'' she says, describing the site as ''a never-ending proposition.'' Contents run the gamut from audio clips of Boyle interviews and readings to listings of his public appearances to a recipe (in Dutch, no less) for Baked Camel With Filling, a dish that figures in Boyle's novel ''Water Music.'' Utley estimates she spends $300 a year on tcboyle.net. The biggest expense isn't financial, however, but temporal: the hundreds of hours she has put into site construction and doing Boyle research. She doesn't begrudge the commitment, though. She exchanges e-mail with Boyle, and it gratifies her that he approves of the site (he described a recent redesign as ''Molto cool. Very classy.''). Even more important, perhaps, there's the sense of camaraderie the site inspires. ''The people I hear from are an intelligent, witty band of readers (some of them Tom's own friends) who love the work. In sharing that common bond, they all feel like my friends, too.'' www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/134/living/Authors_in_their_SitesP.shtml --------------------------------------------------------------------------- (C) Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company -- The Boston Globe --------------------------------------------------------------------------- --__--__-- Message: 3 Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 00:16:36 -0600 To: air-l(a)aoir.org From: Steve Jones <sjones(a)uic.edu> Subject: Re: [Air-l] The No-Book Report: Skim It and Weep Reply-To: air-l(a)aoir.org Interesting coincidence, this story, given this obituary from last week: CLIFF HILLEGASS, 83, founder and former president of "Cliffs Notes," whose study guides helped generations of students through literature classes; he founded "Cliffs Notes" in 1958 with a $4,000 loan and wrote the guides in the basement of his home; in 1999, he sold "Cliffs Notes" to IDG Books Worldwide for $14 million; May 5, in Lincoln, Neb. Sj At 7:05 AM +0200 5/19/01, Ken Friedman wrote: >--------------------------------------------------------------------------- > (C) 2001 The Washington Post Company >--------------------------------------------------------------------------- > http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23370-2001May13.html > > Monday, May 14, 2001; Page C01 > > > The No-Book Report: Skim It and Weep > > More and More Americans Who Can Read Are Choosing Not To. > Can We Afford to Write Them Off? > > By Linton Weeks > Washington Post Staff Writer [stuff deleted] --__--__-- Message: 4 Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 15:09:18 +0200 To: <air-l(a)aoir.org> From: Ken Friedman <ken.friedman(a)bi.no> Subject: [Air-l] DAILY NEWS, ETERNAL STORIES Reply-To: air-l(a)aoir.org DAILY NEWS, ETERNAL STORIES Jack Lule uncovers seven myths that shape journalism. He uses the example of Haiti to explain the unconscious racism of the U.S. press The Myth In Journalism 05/16/01 http://www.mediachannel.org/views/oped/lule.shtml Jack Lule's book, "Daily News, Eternal Stories: The Mythological Role of Journalism" examines the difference between news as "information" and news as "story" with characters, plot and theme. For Lule, myth does not mean untrue tales, but rather great stories emphasizing "archetypal figures and forms" and "exemplary models" that play crucial social roles for humankind. In this definition, such figures, forms and models represent shared values and help people better understand the complexities, good and bad, of human life. By analyzing case studies involving Black Panther Huey Newton, Mother Teresa, baseball player Mark McGuire and Hurricane Mitch, among others, Lule a great storyteller himself demonstrates seven master myths in the news that shape our thinking about foreign policy, terrorism, race relations, political dissent and other issues. He calls them The Victim, The Scapegoat, The Hero, The Good Mother, The Trickster, The Other World and The Flood. As Lule writes in this selection, digital technology may either nourish "a far-reaching medley of voices and stories" or else impose "the crushing conformity of a few global scribes." He uses Haiti to illustrate the latter, perceiving an unconscious racism in the coverage of Haitian politics by The New York Times. Lule's reading is neither academic nor literary but an insistence that storytelling, including its cultural and social role, is crucial to the revitalization and survival of journalism. Andrew Levy, ( Andrew(a)mediachannel.org) Editor =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D As Myth, News Will Be Crucial But Conflicted In An Online World Myth and the new technology may seem to be an unlikely pair. But we have already seen that myth has adapted to every storytelling medium from tribal tales to cable television. The new technology is no different. The combination of myth and online news, though, will produce intriguing, paradoxical, perhaps ominous, results. The information model of journalism, already in great disrepair, will be dismantled by the marriage of myth and new media. News is losing whatever franchise it had on whatever information is. Information is no longer some scarce resource, a commodity that newspeople can cull and sell. Our society rapidly moved from information explosion to information overload. Information is everywhere. From online events calendars to live, continuous congressional coverage, anyone can give and get information online. If news is only information, news is nothing. Yet information overload offers opportunities to news: as myth. In the throes of all this information, the need for myth increases. People grapple with the meaning of rapidly changing times. People seek out ways in which they can organize and explain the world. People need stories. Myth has long played these roles. Myth has identified and organized important events in the lives of individuals and societies. Myth has interpreted and explained the meaning of the past, the portents of the future. Myth has offered the stability of story in unstable times. Decades ago, Marshall McLuhan foresaw the increasing need for myth to organize experience in the face of information overload. "You cannot cope with vast amounts of information in the old fragmentary classified patterns," he told literary critic Frank Kermode in a 1964 interview. "You tend to go looking for mythic and structural forms in order to manage such complex data, moving at very high speeds." "So the electric engineers often speak of pattern recognition as a normal need of people processing data electrically and by computers and so on the need for pattern recognition," McLuhan said. "It's a need which the poets foresaw a century ago in their drive back to mythic forms of organizing experience." And so myth and new technology offer opportunities to one another. In a modern, wired world, the news provides pattern recognition mythic forms of organizing experience. State scribes stand poised to exploit these opportunities perhaps to the detriment of society. Amid the chaos of the information explosion, the authority of the storyteller seems likely to increase. In the din of a million voices, the voice of an established storyteller, for better or worse, attains even more status. We have already seen evidence of this power in the infancy of online news. Dramatic events the election of a president, a terrorist killing, a celebrity trial, a devastating flood bring a rush of readers to the Web sites of traditional news outlets, the established "brands," the state scribes. And the power of the state scribes is being enhanced, politically and economically, as they join together in huge global conglomerates. As previous propositions affirmed, it's always been dangerous to have storytelling power invested in a select social few. Power corrupts. And in our times of consolidation of new and news media, the danger looms larger. State scribes, long beholden to privileged and powerful rulers, now are also compromised by their responsibilities to stockholders, corporate owners, and even to other scribes to whom they have been married and merged. It is a perilous world in which a very few voices, so compromised, can signal to society what is important and what is not, how to act and how not, who is worthy and who is not. The Web, though, is terribly tangled. Myth and new technology may actually pose threats to the state scribes as well. People are increasingly able to seek out stories and storytellers who challenge and reject views of the state scribes. People have the ability to find others who share and confirm their views of the world, bypassing the communication of the scribes. =46or example, people with disabilities can find each other online and organize to challenge their exclusion from positions, power, and print. Political candidates unaffiliated with the two major parties have a means to reach a larger audience. Hate groups, isolated in their own communities, can seek support from around the world. What happens online in all these different connections? People share stories. They sustain each other with stories that draw from archetypal figures and forms to offer exemplary models and meaning for human life. They tell each other news as myth. Through these disparate online stories, the status of state scribes quite possibly can be challenged. Digital technology thus has the possibility to nourish a far-reaching medley of voices and stories or to impose the crushing conformity of a few global scribes. Myth, News Values And A New World With the end of the cold war and the beginning of a new century, U.S. news coverage of international affairs finds itself at a crossroads. For previous generations of reporters and editors, the world could be organized and explained in relation to the political, military, economic and cultural rivalry of two superpowers. News values the criteria by which the news media select, order, report and give meaning to events were structured by this one dominant model, a model that has tumbled with the stones from the Berlin Wall. Today, the questions facing [The New York] Times and other news organizations include: How is international news to be defined in this new era? What news values will guide the selection and shaping of events? As we have seen, two models have emerged. One model has embraced the era as a time of promise for journalism. This model valorizes aggressive, progressive news values that promote social justice, and might be called the model of "a new global and human journalism." Other scholars have offered a more pessimistic model, a model of international news dictated by the actions and initiatives of U.S. foreign policy. This model might be described as promoting "Fortress America" in a world of chaos. This chapter has offered a preliminary assessment of the prospects for each model through a case study: the work of one Times correspondent, the reporting of Larry Rohter from Haiti. Analysis of that reporting supports the most cheerless view of post-Cold War news values. In the amount of coverage, the nature of the content, and the strategies offered, Rohter's reporting for [The New York] Times can be seen as working in concert with U.S. foreign policy. Even as that policy shifted course rejecting the junta, warily restoring Aristide, but insisting that he accept U.S. policy so too did the reporting. Fears that U.S. foreign correspondence would become captive to U.S. foreign policy were realized in Rohter's reports. To restate the particulars: The influence of U.S. foreign policy can be seen quite readily in the sheer amount of Rohter's Haitian coverage. As the Clinton administration made Haiti one of its first major foreign policy campaigns, Rohter gave over most of his work for almost two years to following Haiti. The Caribbean correspondent of the Times over some 20 months [from July 1994 through February 1996] filed, for example, five stories from El Salvador, three stories from Colombia, three stories from Honduras, two stories from Trinidad and none from the Dominican Republic. From Haiti, as previously noted, Rohter filed 120 stories. The themes of Rohter's reporting also worked in concert with U.S. policy. Rohter's reporting did not stray far from U.S. policy perspectives. As the United States prepared for an invasion to remove Cedras, U.S. officials postured mightily through Rohter's reporting. Rohter's denunciations of the regime and his chronicling of the junta's repression made a case for U.S. intervention. At the same time, his depictions of Aristide as the rightful leader, whose return would bring peace and reconciliation, also bolstered the U.S. case. When Aristide and U.S. policy soon began to conflict, Rohter's themes shifted. The uplifting portrayals of Aristide and the lavalas movement segued to critical accounts of intransigent ideology and radical leftist politics. As FRAPH continued to terrorize the population and U.S. forces refused to move against them, Rohter's avoidance of the U.S.-FRAPH relationship shielded Times readers from the U.S. establishment of a conservative "counterweight" to Aristide's progressive politics. And Rohter's depiction of Haiti as an "ungovernable" place whose people were not "culturally or psychologically" equipped for the demands of democracy captured the patronizing and paternalistic attitudes that have driven U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean for decades. Haiti As The Other World Myth provides another, complementary way to understand Rohter's coverage. Like all reporters, Rohter did not have to create brand-new story forms to report events from Haiti. He, his editors and his sources consistently drew upon an established narrative an eternal story that helped shape coverage even as it explained and justified U.S. policy. In Rohter's reports, we can see the unmistakable structure of the myth of the Other World. Underlying the reporting of Haiti's political turmoil turmoil orchestrated often by U.S. policies is a classic portrayal. Haiti is rendered as a primitive land, filled with danger and chaos, and ruled by death squads and paramilitary patrols who leave the streets littered with corpses. Its helpless people perversely admire bloody shows of force as they engage in animal sacrifice and bone-stealing voodoo rituals, even on Christmas. And they passively remain under the sway of rogue leaders and psychotic priests with no respect for order or reason or privatizing industry. It's a nightmare world. Rohter provides us with a modern depiction of the Other World, one that also seeks to define our society in relation to other societies. As [Jean-Pierre] Vernant argued [in "Myth and Society in Ancient Greece"], myth "expresses how a group of people in particular historical circumstances sees itself." The myth expressed in Rohter's reporting portrays a mighty and superior people descending with fascination and disgust into a primitive place on the globe. The Other World is a world to be feared and perhaps someday avoided. But for now it's a world in desperate need of U.S. guidance and military might. The Other World In U.S. International News The Other World is not a rare portrayal in U.S. news. Close reading of the Times and other newspapers shows that reporting of international affairs often relies on the myth of the Other World. In fact, many nations do not appear in U.S. news unless and until they provide stories that allow the myth to be told. From around the world, U.S. reporters and editors apply news values that judge other nations newsworthy when they provides stories of bloody coups, tribal warfare, perverse politics, strange customs and other tales of the underworld for the U.S. audience back home. Even a cursory reading of international news shows the influence of the myth of the Other World on news values. We find stories about animal sacrifice in Taiwan; female genital cutting in Africa; the stoning of the devil at Mecca; a thwarted coup in Qatar; Central American drug warlords; a military junta in Sierra Leone; genocide in Rwanda; ethnic cleansing in Kosovo; stolen Aboriginal children in Australia; and many other dark tales. Once again, we can marvel at the durability of myth. A tale told for centuries is told to usher the United States into the 21st century. Modern mythology, Joseph Campbell said, confronts an enormously complex "fact-world that now has to be recognized, appropriated and assimilated." U.S. society today faces an enormously complex "fact-world," a post-Cold War world in which the United States is the lone superpower on the world stage. U.S. international news confronts that world through tales of the Other World. It offers coverage that affirms U.S. superiority and other nations' inferiority. It provides scary, fantastic stories of a world beset by anarchy and chaos. It promotes the "image of 'Fortress America,' an island of civilization in a sea of political barbarism." It does all this with a myth as old as Odysseus. ------------- Jack Lule is a professor of journalism and chair of the Department of Journalism and Communication at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. He has published widely and has won numerous awards for excellence in research and teaching. A former bartender, truck driver and reporter, Lule continues to be an avid observer of the American scene and a frequent contributor to newspapers and periodicals. ------- This essay was excerpted from the book "Daily News, Eternal Stories: The Mythological Role of Journalism," by Jack Lule (New York: The Guilford Press, 2001). Copyright =A9 2001. Reprinted with permission of The Guilford Press. -- Ken Friedman, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design Department of Knowledge Management Norwegian School of Management School +47 22.98.50.00 Telephone +47 22.98.51.11 Telefax Home office +46 (46) 53.245 Telephone +46 (46) 53.345 Telefax email: ken.friedman(a)bi.no -- -- Ken Friedman, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design Department of Knowledge Management Norwegian School of Management School +47 22.98.50.00 Telephone +47 22.98.51.11 Telefax Home office +46 (46) 53.245 Telephone +46 (46) 53.345 Telefax email: ken.friedman(a)bi.no -- --__--__-- _______________________________________________ Air-l mailing list Air-l(a)aoir.org http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l End of Air-l Digest

1 0

Re(2): Literacy Issues
by Wendy Robinson 19 May '01

19 May '01

Spate. Drat! Distracted while hitting "send" and what does spell-check know? >There have been a slate of recent articles

1 0

Re: Literacy Issues
by Wendy Robinson 19 May '01

19 May '01

But perhaps there is increased visual literacy? Obviously computer fluency. The longtime success of radio to MP3 players and cell phones suggests that the audio channel remains important. The pedagogical challenge is to make textual literacy compelling for audio/visual learners and those who are trained to skim a few lines, get the gist and move on -- necessary skills in the face of info overload, not to mention incessant advertising, which requires critical thinking to filter out? This is well trodden Postman territory for which the Net is only the latest pop culture/media/tech culprit. There have been a slate of recent articles, which I don't believe have shown up on AoIR, about information deficit and multitasking to the extent that concentration in general suffers. Not only is sustained reading difficult, but any task that requires doing or listening for a prolonged period of time is tough to sustain. The media spin on this one is that we're becoming an ADD society. We're losing permanence. Relationships are suffering, the environment isn't a serious concern, jobs are taken on a free-agent basis without consideration for long term corporate or customer outcomes, et al.

1 0

DAILY NEWS, ETERNAL STORIES
by Ken Friedman 19 May '01

19 May '01

DAILY NEWS, ETERNAL STORIES Jack Lule uncovers seven myths that shape journalism. He uses the example of Haiti to explain the unconscious racism of the U.S. press The Myth In Journalism 05/16/01 http://www.mediachannel.org/views/oped/lule.shtml Jack Lule's book, "Daily News, Eternal Stories: The Mythological Role of Journalism" examines the difference between news as "information" and news as "story" with characters, plot and theme. For Lule, myth does not mean untrue tales, but rather great stories emphasizing "archetypal figures and forms" and "exemplary models" that play crucial social roles for humankind. In this definition, such figures, forms and models represent shared values and help people better understand the complexities, good and bad, of human life. By analyzing case studies involving Black Panther Huey Newton, Mother Teresa, baseball player Mark McGuire and Hurricane Mitch, among others, Lule a great storyteller himself demonstrates seven master myths in the news that shape our thinking about foreign policy, terrorism, race relations, political dissent and other issues. He calls them The Victim, The Scapegoat, The Hero, The Good Mother, The Trickster, The Other World and The Flood. As Lule writes in this selection, digital technology may either nourish "a far-reaching medley of voices and stories" or else impose "the crushing conformity of a few global scribes." He uses Haiti to illustrate the latter, perceiving an unconscious racism in the coverage of Haitian politics by The New York Times. Lule's reading is neither academic nor literary but an insistence that storytelling, including its cultural and social role, is crucial to the revitalization and survival of journalism. Andrew Levy, ( Andrew(a)mediachannel.org) Editor ======================================= As Myth, News Will Be Crucial But Conflicted In An Online World Myth and the new technology may seem to be an unlikely pair. But we have already seen that myth has adapted to every storytelling medium from tribal tales to cable television. The new technology is no different. The combination of myth and online news, though, will produce intriguing, paradoxical, perhaps ominous, results. The information model of journalism, already in great disrepair, will be dismantled by the marriage of myth and new media. News is losing whatever franchise it had on whatever information is. Information is no longer some scarce resource, a commodity that newspeople can cull and sell. Our society rapidly moved from information explosion to information overload. Information is everywhere. From online events calendars to live, continuous congressional coverage, anyone can give and get information online. If news is only information, news is nothing. Yet information overload offers opportunities to news: as myth. In the throes of all this information, the need for myth increases. People grapple with the meaning of rapidly changing times. People seek out ways in which they can organize and explain the world. People need stories. Myth has long played these roles. Myth has identified and organized important events in the lives of individuals and societies. Myth has interpreted and explained the meaning of the past, the portents of the future. Myth has offered the stability of story in unstable times. Decades ago, Marshall McLuhan foresaw the increasing need for myth to organize experience in the face of information overload. "You cannot cope with vast amounts of information in the old fragmentary classified patterns," he told literary critic Frank Kermode in a 1964 interview. "You tend to go looking for mythic and structural forms in order to manage such complex data, moving at very high speeds." "So the electric engineers often speak of pattern recognition as a normal need of people processing data electrically and by computers and so on the need for pattern recognition," McLuhan said. "It's a need which the poets foresaw a century ago in their drive back to mythic forms of organizing experience." And so myth and new technology offer opportunities to one another. In a modern, wired world, the news provides pattern recognition mythic forms of organizing experience. State scribes stand poised to exploit these opportunities perhaps to the detriment of society. Amid the chaos of the information explosion, the authority of the storyteller seems likely to increase. In the din of a million voices, the voice of an established storyteller, for better or worse, attains even more status. We have already seen evidence of this power in the infancy of online news. Dramatic events the election of a president, a terrorist killing, a celebrity trial, a devastating flood bring a rush of readers to the Web sites of traditional news outlets, the established "brands," the state scribes. And the power of the state scribes is being enhanced, politically and economically, as they join together in huge global conglomerates. As previous propositions affirmed, it's always been dangerous to have storytelling power invested in a select social few. Power corrupts. And in our times of consolidation of new and news media, the danger looms larger. State scribes, long beholden to privileged and powerful rulers, now are also compromised by their responsibilities to stockholders, corporate owners, and even to other scribes to whom they have been married and merged. It is a perilous world in which a very few voices, so compromised, can signal to society what is important and what is not, how to act and how not, who is worthy and who is not. The Web, though, is terribly tangled. Myth and new technology may actually pose threats to the state scribes as well. People are increasingly able to seek out stories and storytellers who challenge and reject views of the state scribes. People have the ability to find others who share and confirm their views of the world, bypassing the communication of the scribes. For example, people with disabilities can find each other online and organize to challenge their exclusion from positions, power, and print. Political candidates unaffiliated with the two major parties have a means to reach a larger audience. Hate groups, isolated in their own communities, can seek support from around the world. What happens online in all these different connections? People share stories. They sustain each other with stories that draw from archetypal figures and forms to offer exemplary models and meaning for human life. They tell each other news as myth. Through these disparate online stories, the status of state scribes quite possibly can be challenged. Digital technology thus has the possibility to nourish a far-reaching medley of voices and stories or to impose the crushing conformity of a few global scribes. Myth, News Values And A New World With the end of the cold war and the beginning of a new century, U.S. news coverage of international affairs finds itself at a crossroads. For previous generations of reporters and editors, the world could be organized and explained in relation to the political, military, economic and cultural rivalry of two superpowers. News values the criteria by which the news media select, order, report and give meaning to events were structured by this one dominant model, a model that has tumbled with the stones from the Berlin Wall. Today, the questions facing [The New York] Times and other news organizations include: How is international news to be defined in this new era? What news values will guide the selection and shaping of events? As we have seen, two models have emerged. One model has embraced the era as a time of promise for journalism. This model valorizes aggressive, progressive news values that promote social justice, and might be called the model of "a new global and human journalism." Other scholars have offered a more pessimistic model, a model of international news dictated by the actions and initiatives of U.S. foreign policy. This model might be described as promoting "Fortress America" in a world of chaos. This chapter has offered a preliminary assessment of the prospects for each model through a case study: the work of one Times correspondent, the reporting of Larry Rohter from Haiti. Analysis of that reporting supports the most cheerless view of post-Cold War news values. In the amount of coverage, the nature of the content, and the strategies offered, Rohter's reporting for [The New York] Times can be seen as working in concert with U.S. foreign policy. Even as that policy shifted course rejecting the junta, warily restoring Aristide, but insisting that he accept U.S. policy so too did the reporting. Fears that U.S. foreign correspondence would become captive to U.S. foreign policy were realized in Rohter's reports. To restate the particulars: The influence of U.S. foreign policy can be seen quite readily in the sheer amount of Rohter's Haitian coverage. As the Clinton administration made Haiti one of its first major foreign policy campaigns, Rohter gave over most of his work for almost two years to following Haiti. The Caribbean correspondent of the Times over some 20 months [from July 1994 through February 1996] filed, for example, five stories from El Salvador, three stories from Colombia, three stories from Honduras, two stories from Trinidad and none from the Dominican Republic. From Haiti, as previously noted, Rohter filed 120 stories. The themes of Rohter's reporting also worked in concert with U.S. policy. Rohter's reporting did not stray far from U.S. policy perspectives. As the United States prepared for an invasion to remove Cedras, U.S. officials postured mightily through Rohter's reporting. Rohter's denunciations of the regime and his chronicling of the junta's repression made a case for U.S. intervention. At the same time, his depictions of Aristide as the rightful leader, whose return would bring peace and reconciliation, also bolstered the U.S. case. When Aristide and U.S. policy soon began to conflict, Rohter's themes shifted. The uplifting portrayals of Aristide and the lavalas movement segued to critical accounts of intransigent ideology and radical leftist politics. As FRAPH continued to terrorize the population and U.S. forces refused to move against them, Rohter's avoidance of the U.S.-FRAPH relationship shielded Times readers from the U.S. establishment of a conservative "counterweight" to Aristide's progressive politics. And Rohter's depiction of Haiti as an "ungovernable" place whose people were not "culturally or psychologically" equipped for the demands of democracy captured the patronizing and paternalistic attitudes that have driven U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean for decades. Haiti As The Other World Myth provides another, complementary way to understand Rohter's coverage. Like all reporters, Rohter did not have to create brand-new story forms to report events from Haiti. He, his editors and his sources consistently drew upon an established narrative an eternal story that helped shape coverage even as it explained and justified U.S. policy. In Rohter's reports, we can see the unmistakable structure of the myth of the Other World. Underlying the reporting of Haiti's political turmoil turmoil orchestrated often by U.S. policies is a classic portrayal. Haiti is rendered as a primitive land, filled with danger and chaos, and ruled by death squads and paramilitary patrols who leave the streets littered with corpses. Its helpless people perversely admire bloody shows of force as they engage in animal sacrifice and bone-stealing voodoo rituals, even on Christmas. And they passively remain under the sway of rogue leaders and psychotic priests with no respect for order or reason or privatizing industry. It's a nightmare world. Rohter provides us with a modern depiction of the Other World, one that also seeks to define our society in relation to other societies. As [Jean-Pierre] Vernant argued [in "Myth and Society in Ancient Greece"], myth "expresses how a group of people in particular historical circumstances sees itself." The myth expressed in Rohter's reporting portrays a mighty and superior people descending with fascination and disgust into a primitive place on the globe. The Other World is a world to be feared and perhaps someday avoided. But for now it's a world in desperate need of U.S. guidance and military might. The Other World In U.S. International News The Other World is not a rare portrayal in U.S. news. Close reading of the Times and other newspapers shows that reporting of international affairs often relies on the myth of the Other World. In fact, many nations do not appear in U.S. news unless and until they provide stories that allow the myth to be told. From around the world, U.S. reporters and editors apply news values that judge other nations newsworthy when they provides stories of bloody coups, tribal warfare, perverse politics, strange customs and other tales of the underworld for the U.S. audience back home. Even a cursory reading of international news shows the influence of the myth of the Other World on news values. We find stories about animal sacrifice in Taiwan; female genital cutting in Africa; the stoning of the devil at Mecca; a thwarted coup in Qatar; Central American drug warlords; a military junta in Sierra Leone; genocide in Rwanda; ethnic cleansing in Kosovo; stolen Aboriginal children in Australia; and many other dark tales. Once again, we can marvel at the durability of myth. A tale told for centuries is told to usher the United States into the 21st century. Modern mythology, Joseph Campbell said, confronts an enormously complex "fact-world that now has to be recognized, appropriated and assimilated." U.S. society today faces an enormously complex "fact-world," a post-Cold War world in which the United States is the lone superpower on the world stage. U.S. international news confronts that world through tales of the Other World. It offers coverage that affirms U.S. superiority and other nations' inferiority. It provides scary, fantastic stories of a world beset by anarchy and chaos. It promotes the "image of 'Fortress America,' an island of civilization in a sea of political barbarism." It does all this with a myth as old as Odysseus. ------------- Jack Lule is a professor of journalism and chair of the Department of Journalism and Communication at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. He has published widely and has won numerous awards for excellence in research and teaching. A former bartender, truck driver and reporter, Lule continues to be an avid observer of the American scene and a frequent contributor to newspapers and periodicals. ------- This essay was excerpted from the book "Daily News, Eternal Stories: The Mythological Role of Journalism," by Jack Lule (New York: The Guilford Press, 2001). Copyright © 2001. Reprinted with permission of The Guilford Press. -- Ken Friedman, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design Department of Knowledge Management Norwegian School of Management School +47 22.98.50.00 Telephone +47 22.98.51.11 Telefax Home office +46 (46) 53.245 Telephone +46 (46) 53.345 Telefax email: ken.friedman(a)bi.no -- -- Ken Friedman, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design Department of Knowledge Management Norwegian School of Management School +47 22.98.50.00 Telephone +47 22.98.51.11 Telefax Home office +46 (46) 53.245 Telephone +46 (46) 53.345 Telefax email: ken.friedman(a)bi.no --

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The No-Book Report: Skim It and Weep
by Ken Friedman 19 May '01

19 May '01

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- (C) 2001 The Washington Post Company --------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23370-2001May13.html Monday, May 14, 2001; Page C01 The No-Book Report: Skim It and Weep More and More Americans Who Can Read Are Choosing Not To. Can We Afford to Write Them Off? By Linton Weeks Washington Post Staff Writer Jeremy Spreitzer probably wouldn't read this story if it weren't about him. He is an aliterate -- someone who can read, but chooses not to. A graduate student in public affairs at Park University in Kansas City, Mo., Spreitzer, 25, gleans most of his news from TV. He skims required texts, draws themes from dust jackets and, when he absolutely, positively has to read something, reaches for the audiobook. "I am fairly lazy when it comes to certain tasks," says Spreitzer, a long-distance runner who hopes to compete in the 2004 Olympics. "Reading is one of them." As he grows older, Spreitzer finds he has less time to read. And less inclination. In fact, he says, if he weren't in school, he probably wouldn't read at all. He's not alone. According to the survey firm NDP Group -- which tracked the everyday habits of thousands of people through the 1990s -- this country is reading printed versions of books, magazines and newspapers less and less. In 1991, more than half of all Americans read a half-hour or more every day. By 1999, that had dropped to 45 percent. A 1999 Gallup Poll found that only 7 percent of Americans were voracious readers, reading more than a book a week, while some 59 percent said they had read fewer than 10 books in the previous year. Though book clubs seem popular now, only 6 percent of those who read belong to one. The number of people who don't read at all, the poll concluded, has been rising for the past 20 years. The reports on changes in reading cut to the quick of American culture. We pride ourselves on being a largely literate First World country while at the same time we rush to build a visually powerful environment in which reading is not required. The results are inevitable. Aliteracy is all around. Just ask: * Internet developers. At the Terra Lycos portal design lab in Waltham, Mass., researcher William Albert has noticed that the human guinea pigs in his focus groups are too impatient to read much. When people look up information on the Internet today, Albert explains, they are "basically scanning. There's very little actual comprehension that's going on." People, Albert adds, prefer to get info in short bursts, with bullets, rather than in large blocks of text. * Transportation gurus. Chandra Clayton, who oversees the design of road signs and signals for the Virginia Department of Transportation, says, "Symbols can quickly give you a message that might take too long to read in text." The department is using logos and symbols more and more. When it comes to highway safety and getting lifesaving information quickly, she adds, "a picture is worth a thousand words." * Packaging designers. "People don't take the time to read anything," explains Jim Peters, editor of BrandPackaging magazine. "Marketers and packagers are giving them colors and shapes as ways of communicating." For effective marketing, Peters says, "researchers tell us that the hierarchy is colors, shapes, icons and, dead last, words." Some of this shift away from words -- and toward images -- can be attributed to our ever-growing multilingual population. But for many people, reading is passe or impractical or, like, so totally unnecessary in this day and age. To Jim Trelease, author of "The Read-Aloud Handbook," this trend away from the written word is more than worrisome. It's wicked. It's tearing apart our culture. People who have stopped reading, he says, "base their future decisions on what they used to know. "If you don't read much, you really don't know much," he says. "You're dangerous." Losing a Heritage "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them." -- Mark Twain One thing you can say for illiteracy: It can be identified, nailed down. And combated. Scores of programs such as the Greater Washington Literacy Council and the International Reading Association are geared toward fighting readinglessness in the home, the school and the workplace. Aliteracy, on the other hand, is like an invisible liquid, seeping through our culture, nigh impossible to pinpoint or defend against. It's the kid who spends hours and hours with video games instead of books, who knows Sim Cities better than "A Tale of Two Cities." It's the thousands of business people who subscribe to executive book summaries -- for example, Soundview's easy-to-swallow eight-page pamphlets that take simply written management books such as "Secrets of Question-Based Selling" by Thomas A. Freese and make them even simpler. It's the parent who pops the crummy movie of "Stuart Little" into a machine for his kid instead of reading E.B. White's marvelous novel aloud. Or the teacher who assigns the made-for-TV movie "Gettysburg" instead of the book it was based on, "The Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara. There may be untold collateral damage in a society that can read but doesn't. "So much of our culture is embedded in literature," says Philip A. Thompsen, professor of communications at West Chester University in West Chester, Pa. Thompsen has been watching the rise of aliteracy in the classroom for 20 years, and "students today are less capable of getting full value from textbooks than they were 10 years ago." He adds that these aliterate students are "missing out on our cultural heritage." That literature-based past included a reverence for reading, a celebration of the works and a worshipful awe of those who wrote. To draw you a picture: Where we once deified the lifestyles of writers such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, we now fantasize about rock-and-roll gods, movie starlets or NBA super-studs (e.g. MTV's "Cribs"). The notion of writer-as-culture-hero is dead and gone. Comedic monologuists such as Jay Leno or David Letterman have more sex appeal than serious fiction writers. The grail quest for the Great American Novel has ended; it was a myth after all. Where we once drew our mass-cult references from books ("He's a veritable Simon Legree"), we now allude to visual works -- a Seinfeld episode (not there's anything wrong with that . . .) or "The Silence of the Lambs" (the movie, not the book). A recent story in Salon speaks of "learning to read a movie." Where we once believed that a well-read populace leads to a healthy democracy, many people now rely on whole TV broadcast operations built around politics and elections. Quick, name a Wolf Blitzer book. Non-readers abound. Ask "Politically Incorrect" talk show host Bill Maher, who once boasted in print that he hadn't read a book in years. Or Noel Gallagher of the rock band Oasis, who has been quoted as saying he'd never read a book. You can walk through whole neighborhoods of houses in the country that do not contain books or magazines -- unless you count catalogues. American historian Daniel Boorstin saw this coming. In 1984, while Boorstin was serving as librarian of Congress, the library issued a landmark report: "Books in Our Future." Citing recent statistics that only about half of all Americans read regularly every year, he referred to the "twin menaces" of illiteracy and aliteracy. "In the United States today," Boorstin wrote, "aliteracy is widespread." Several of the articles in the report alluded to the growing number of non-readers. In one essay, "The Computer and the Book," Edmund D. Pellegrino, a former president of Catholic University who is now a bioethicist at Georgetown University, observed: "The computer is simply the most effective, efficient and attractive form for transmittal of processed information. Added to the other nonbook devices like films, tapes, television and the popular media, the computer accelerates the atrophy of the intellectual skills acquired for personally reading the books from which the information is extracted." Reading for Bliss Kylene Beers has talked about the evils of aliteracy for so long and so loud, she's losing her voice. Today she's in the lecture hall of Oakton High School bending the ears of 100 or so middle school teachers. If someone graduates from high school and is aliterate, Beers believes, that person will probably never become a habitual reader. One of the few academics who have written about the phenomenon, Beers, a professor of reading at the University of Houston, says there are two types of reading: efferent and aesthetic. Efferent, which comes from the Latin word efferre (meaning to carry away), is purposeful reading, the kind students are taught day after day in schools. Efferent readers connect cognitively with the words and plan to take something useful from it -- such as answers for a test. Aesthetic is reading for the sheer bliss of it, as when you dive deep into Dostoevski or get lost in Louisa May Alcott. Aesthetic readers connect emotionally to the story. Beers believes that more students must be shown the marvels of reading for pleasure. On this late afternoon, she is mapping out strategies for teachers who hope to engage reluctant middle school readers. Teaching grammar and parts of speech, such as dangling participles, is the kiss of death, she says. "You don't want to talk about dangling anythings with middle-schoolers," she says in her Texas drawl. And the room laughs. Aliteracy, she continues, is no laughing matter. Using an overhead projector, she explains that aliterate people just don't get it. Unlike accomplished readers, aliterates don't understand that sometimes you have to read efferently and sometimes you have to read aesthetically; that even the best readers occasionally read the same paragraph over and over to understand it and that to be a good reader you have to visualize the text. To engage non-reading students -- and adults -- she proposes reading strategies, such as turning a chapter of a hard book into a dramatic production or relating tough words to easier words. She writes the word "tepid" on the acetate sheet. Then she asks the audience to supply other words that describe water temperature. "Hot," someone calls out. "Freezing," somebody else says. Others suggest: cold, warm and boiling. Beers arranges the words in a linear fashion, from the coldest word, "freezing," to the hottest, "boiling." "Tepid" falls in the middle of the list. This method, she says, will help reluctant readers to connect words they don't know to words they do know. "Aliterates," she tells the teachers, "don't see relationships." Apparently, teachers don't always see the relationships either. Jim Trelease is concerned that teachers do not read. The aliteracy rate among teachers, he says, is about the same, 50 percent, as among the general public. There is some good news on the reading front, according to Trelease and others. The Harry Potter series has turned on a lot of young readers and megabookstores, such as Barnes & Noble and Borders, are acrawl with people. But there is plenty of bad news, too. Lots of aliterates, according to Trelease, say they just don't have time to read anymore. "The time argument is the biggest hoax of all," he says. According to time studies, we have more leisure time than ever. "If people didn't have time, the malls would be empty, cable companies would be broke, video stores would go out of business. It's not a time problem, it's a value problem. You have 50 percent in the country who don't value reading." Like Beers, Trelease believes that youngsters should be encouraged to read aesthetically. Reading aloud to children, according to Trelease and other reading specialists, is the single best way to ensure that someone will become a lifelong reader. "Even Daniel Boorstin wasn't born wanting to read," Trelease says. "Michael Jordan wasn't born wanting to play basketball. The desire has to be planted." Surfing Through Grad School Trelease and Beers and others are scrambling for ways to engage aliterates. For all kinds of reasons. "What aliteracy does is breed illiteracy," Beers explains. "If you go through school having learned to read and then you leave school not wanting to read, chances are you won't put your own children into a reading environment." "What you have to do is play hardball," says Trelease. He suggests running public awareness campaigns on TV. "That's where the aliterates are." Trelease says we should try to eradicate aliteracy in the way we went after tobacco. We should let people know, Trelease says, "what the consequences are to your family and children if you don't read." "Aliteracy may be a significant problem today," says Philip Thompsen. "But on the other hand, a narrow view of literacy -- one that defines literacy as the ability to read verbal texts -- may be a significant problem as well." Many of the messages that we have to interpret in day-to-day life, Thompsen says, "use multiple communication media. I think it is important to realize that as our society becomes more accustomed to using multimedia messages, we must also expand our thinking about what it means to be 'literate.' " Olympic hopeful Jeremy Spreitzer plans to become a teacher and maybe go into politics someday. For now, he's just trying to get through graduate school. He watches a lot of television. "I'm a major surfer," he says. He watches the History Channel, A&E, Turner Classic Movies and all of the news stations. "I'm required to do a lot of reading," he says. "But I do a minimum of what I need to do." But how do you get through grad school without reading? Spreitzer is asked. He gives an example. One of his required texts is the recently published "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community" by Robert Putnam. In the book, Putnam argues, among other things, that television has fragmented our society. Spreitzer thumbed through the book, dipped into a few chapters and spent a while "skipping around" here and there. He feels, however, that he understands Putnam and Putnam's theories as well as if he had read the book. How is that? he is asked. Putnam, he explains, has been on TV a lot. "He's on the news all the time," Spreitzer says. "On MSNBC and other places. Those interviews with him are more invaluable than anything else." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23370-2001May13.html --------------------------------------------------------------------------- (C) 2001 The Washington Post Company ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Authors in their Sites
by Ken Friedman 19 May '01

19 May '01

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- (C) Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company -- The Boston Globe --------------------------------------------------------------------------- www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/134/living/Authors_in_their_SitesP.shtml 5/14/2001 Authors in their Sites Fans turned archivists use the Web to honor their favorite writers By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff The Web is the ultimate library, an assemblage of texts unprecedented in human history. Within its virtual confines, one can even occasionally find good, old, honest-to-Gutenberg authors - the kind who put words on paper as well as screen. There's one big difference, of course: On the Web, authors' writings aren't found on shelves but at sites devoted to their lives and works. The individuals who tend such sites may be the closest thing this global library has to librarians. Actually, as the three individuals profiled here demonstrate, "librarian" doesn't begin to do their self-appointed vocation justice. Each is part fan, part archivist, part technician, using the resources of the Web to pay tribute to an author he or she loves. It's a unique joining of the old fashioned with the up to the minute: for with these sites, as with creation itself, in the beginning was the word. Proprietor: Curt Gardner, 39 Home: San Francisco Work: software implementer Author: Don DeLillo Address: www.perival.com/delillo Began: early 1996 It was in college, as a computer-science major at Wesleyan, that Curt Gardner first heard of Don DeLillo. Surfing the Web some 15 years later, he was dismayed by how little he could find about the author. So Gardner decided to try to come up with a site like the one he'd hoped to come across. ''My vision was to create a place where the average DeLillo reader would feel at home,'' he says. Gardner also had an aim that he describes as ''fairly grandiose,'' which is ''to essentially document everything known about DeLillo.'' The contents of his site include what one might expect (reviews of DeLillo's books, interviews with him) as well as what one might not (the novelist Salman Rushdie reports on attending a Yankees game with DeLillo: ''He goes there with his mitt. He's up there for every fly ball.''). Gardner doesn't find running the site to be at all onerous. During its first year of operation, he recalls, he haunted the University of California at Berkeley library system, tracking down material. Since then, he estimates he's spent no more than two hours a week working on it. ''It's a fun pastime,'' he says, ''and it puts me in touch with DeLillo fans from all over. Almost daily I get e-mail from an appreciative visitor, and I also get many postable items from people who send me links.'' Gardner met DeLillo at a San Francisco reading in 1997 and sent him printouts from the page. ''I respect his wishes to keep some things private,'' Gardner says. ''But let's just say he gave his blessing to the site.'' Proprietor: Richard Lane, 33 Home: New York Work: editor, ''Dateline NBC'' Author: Thomas Pynchon Address: www.pynchonfiles.com Began: May 31, 1998 ''I created the site out of a jaw-dropping admiration for the man,'' says Richard Lane. Thomas Pynchon is an ideal subject for a Web site: a famously reclusive author who has many fanatical readers interested in any scrap of information about him they can come by. In addition, Lane points out, ''The encyclopedic content of Pynchon's work lends itself perfectly to the hyperlink format.'' Site contents range from photos of Pynchon as an 18-year-old Navy seaman (and of the destroyer he served on) to the complete text of an obscure report on public disturbances in Malta in 1919 that helped inspire the epilogue to Pynchon's first novel, ''V.'' Lane sees his mission as ''providing a conduit for information that the novelist isn't providing.'' Sometimes that can lead to a certain strain on the conduit. ''There are foreign visitors who assume I'm [Pynchon], others who wanted all his books and critical work sent along, gratis. And soon.'' There was also a recent query from a prominent Web site wondering how to get Pynchon to review restaurants. Lane, who has had no contact with the author, could offer no help. Such distractions are a small price to pay for the site, Lane feels. ''I've learned more by stepping on Pynchon's shadow than I ever could have imagined from a novelist. The confluence of ideas and tangents that merely thinking about his work induces is a great gift of which he should be justly proud.'' Proprietor: Sandye Utley, 49 Home: Cincinnati Work: administrative assistant, WCET-TV Author: T. Coraghessan Boyle Address: www.tcboyle.net Began: Feb. 21, 2000 ''There's such joy in his writing,'' Sandye Utley says. She was already a fan of his novels and short stories when she met T. Coraghessan Boyle at an award ceremony in Washington, D.C., 16 months ago. He accepted her offer to set up a FAQ (frequently asked questions) page for the site Boyle runs, www.tcboyle.com. Utley came up with so many references to Boyle-related articles and reviews she decided to set up a free-standing site. ''It could easily be a full-time job,'' she says, describing the site as ''a never-ending proposition.'' Contents run the gamut from audio clips of Boyle interviews and readings to listings of his public appearances to a recipe (in Dutch, no less) for Baked Camel With Filling, a dish that figures in Boyle's novel ''Water Music.'' Utley estimates she spends $300 a year on tcboyle.net. The biggest expense isn't financial, however, but temporal: the hundreds of hours she has put into site construction and doing Boyle research. She doesn't begrudge the commitment, though. She exchanges e-mail with Boyle, and it gratifies her that he approves of the site (he described a recent redesign as ''Molto cool. Very classy.''). Even more important, perhaps, there's the sense of camaraderie the site inspires. ''The people I hear from are an intelligent, witty band of readers (some of them Tom's own friends) who love the work. In sharing that common bond, they all feel like my friends, too.'' www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/134/living/Authors_in_their_SitesP.shtml --------------------------------------------------------------------------- (C) Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company -- The Boston Globe ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

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May 2001 report
by Steve Jones 17 May '01

17 May '01

May 17, 2001 Report of the a(o).i.r. executive committee Prepared by Steve Jones AoIR Executive Committee President: Steve Jones Vice-President: Nancy Baym Secretary: Matt Stoner Treasurer (on leave): Benjamin Bates Interim Treasurer: Wes Shrum Open Seats: Beth Kolko and Sean Cubitt Appointed Seats: Diane Witmer and Fay Sudweeks Student Seat: Matt Williams Publications Officers: Jeremy Hunsinger and Charlie Breindahl 2001 Conference Coordinator: John Logie 2001 Conference Program Chair: Leslie Shade Ethics Working Group Chair: Charles Ess 1. Introduction & General (Jones) Below is the monthly report from AoIR executive committee members. 2. Executive Officers' Reports 2.1 President (Jones) 2.1.1. Kagi works, and we've heard far better reports about it than about PayPal, so that migration has been successful. 2.1.2. Speaking of migrations, hats off to Jeremy for getting us moved onto our own server! 2.1.3. The executive committee will be drafting descriptions of the roles they've played in AoIR and making recommendations about the association's structure, in advance of upcoming elections. It is likely that such activity will also involve revision to the AoIR bylaws. Keep an eye out for information and announcements, and please, participate, volunteer, stand for election, etc.! 2.2 Vice President (Baym) 2.2.1 Nothing to report. 2.3 Secretary (Stoner) 2.3.1 Nothing to report. 2.4 Treasurer (Shrum - interim) 2.4.1 Nothing to report. 2.5 Open Seats (Kolko, Cubitt) 2.5.1 Kolko: No report. 2.5.2 Cubitt: No report. 2.6 Appointed Seats (Witmer, Sudweeks) 2.6.1 Witmer: Nothing to report. 2.6.2 Sudweeks: No report. 2.7 Student Seat (Williams) 2.7.1 No report. 2.8 Publications Officers (Hunsinger, Breindahl) 2.8.1 Hunsinger: 2.8.1.1. april was very busy, in order of time in some manner. I spent time with Leslie and the program committee. I spent time migrating systems. I spent time with John getting him set up for posting stuff on the webpage. I spent time on various and sundries. 2.8.2 Breindahl: Business as usual. Jeremy did all the work and left me to twiddle my thumbs :) After the server move, I am trying to take over after Steve as list manager of air-l. 2.9 2001 Conference (John Logie, Coordinator and Leslie Shade, Program Chair) 2.9.1 Logie: This month the local team was focused on establishing a reasonably complete website << http://www.cddc.vt.edu/aoir/local.html >> designed to address the questions which have been repeatedly e-mailed to the Conference Coordinator and Program Chair. This work was completed in concert with U of MN's Professional Education and Conference Planning office, which has established a website for conference registration <<http://pware.com/index.cfm?eventdisp=02%2D2703&clientid=2383>>. With the assistance of "beta testers" Jeremy Hunsinger and Steve Jones, these sites are now up and running, and as of today, 11 attendees have successfully registered and paid. Speaking of payment, the IR 2.0 account within the Rhetoric Department is, at long last, fully functional, and it will serve as the core fund for deposits and budgeted expenses between now and October. Not all of the pledged funds have yet arrived, but there is enough funding within this core account for all major expenses between now and the concert, and additional gentle nudges will likely produce the remainder in the coming weeks. Negotiations with potential food providers are ongoing, but so far the options seems reasonable. We have been considering the posssibility of securing sponsorship for the Thursday night reception and/or the Friday night banquet. Once the budget numbers are finalized, we will take this matter up with AoIR-Meet and/or AoIR-Exec. More generally, I am working to finalize a core team of graduate students and colleagues to take on management of book exhibits, tech support, website maintenance, and the like. In the coming weeks, I will be introducing you all to the "point people" on these issues, and improving the overall routing of questions and tasks. 2.9.2 Shade: Paper acceptances have been going out - so far the number of people who are saying they are coming has far exceeded the number that say they can't attend (2). Here are the stats, with many thanks to Jeremy: current stats type accept reject rate papers 230 135 63% panels 28 5 84% Art 2 4 33% workshop 0 9 0% about 85 - 90 sessions compared with about 60 last year 1/3 more about 330 people on panels compared with about 220 last year about 1/3 more again 2.10 AoIR Ethics Working Group (Charles Ess, Chair) 2.10.1 No report.

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