- Air-L - lists.aoir.org

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 --

1 0

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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

2 1

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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 0

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.

1 0

Preserving the present for the future Strategies for the Internet
by Niels Brügger 17 May '01

17 May '01

Preserving the present for the future Strategies for the Internet, The Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark, June 18-19 2001 Together with The Royal Library (Copenhagen), The State and University Library (Aarhus) and The Danish Electronic Research Library the Center for Internet Research organises the conference "Preserving the present for the future Strategies for the Internet". The objective of this conference is to address strategies and methodologies for preserving the activities on the Internet for future generations. Read more about the conference and the programme on http://imv.au.dk/cfi/arr/ekst/0106/preserv.html Niels Brügger Centre for Internet Research, Denmark -- __________________________________________________ NIELS BRÜGGER, Associate Professor, Ph.D. Dept. of Information and Media Studies University of Aarhus Niels Juels Gade 84 8200 Aarhus N Denmark Phone (switchboard) +45 89 42 11 11 Phone (direct) +45 89 42 19 76 Telefax + 45 89 42 19 52 E-mail nb(a)imv.au.dk Homepage www.imv.au.dk/nb Center for Internet Research http://imv.au.dk/cfi/

1 0

NSF research support opportunity
by Ken Friedman 17 May '01

17 May '01

Program Announcement NSF 01-113 DIRECTORATE FOR SOCIAL, BEHAVIORAL, AND ECONOMIC SCIENCES DIVISION OF BEHAVIORAL AND COGNITIVE SCIENCES DIVISION OF SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SCIENCES FULL PROPOSAL DEADLINE(S) : Due dates vary across programs. Please consult the relevant program's website and contact the program assistant or director if necessary regarding proposal target dates and deadlines. NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION The National Science Foundation promotes and advances scientific progress in the United States by competitively awarding grants and cooperative agreements for research and education in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering. To get the latest information about program deadlines, to download copies of NSF publications, and to access abstracts of awards, visit the NSF Web Site at: <http://www.nsf.gov <http://www.nsf.gov> - Location: 4201 Wilson Blvd. Arlington, VA 22230 - For General Information (NSF Information Center): (703) 292-5111 - TDD (for the hearing-impaired): (703) 292-5090 - To Order Publications or Forms: Send an e-mail to: pubs(a)nsf.gov <mailto:pubs@nsf.gov> or telephone: (301) 947-2722 - To Locate NSF Employees: (703) 292-5111 I. INTRODUCTION The National Science Foundation's Division of Social and Economic Sciences and Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences award grants to doctoral students to improve the quality of dissertation research. These grants provide funds for items not normally available through the student's university. Additionally, these grants allow doctoral students to undertake significant data-gathering projects and to conduct field and archival research in settings away from their campus that would not otherwise be possible. Funds may be used for valid research expenses which include, but are not limited to, conducting field research in settings away from campus that would not otherwise be possible, data collection and sample survey costs, payments to subjects or informants, specialized research equipment, analysis and services not otherwise available, supplies, travel to archives, travel to specialized collections and facilities or field research locations, and partial living expenses for conducting necessary research away from the student's university. II. PROGRAM DESCRIPTION In an effort to improve the quality of dissertation research, many programs in the Division of Social and Economic Sciences and the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences accept doctoral dissertation improvement grant proposals. The following Programs are most active in support of dissertation research: Archaeology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Cultural Anthropology, Decision, Risk & Management Science, Geography and Regional Science, Law and Social Science, Linguistics, Physical Anthropology, Political Science, Science and Technology Studies, Sociology, and Societal Dimensions of Engineering, Science, and Technology. In addition, the following Programs also support doctoral dissertation research when especially appropriate: Economics and Human Cognition & Perception. Items such as budget limitations, target dates and/or deadlines, page length restrictions, and review procedures vary widely across programs. Please consult the relevant program's website for specific information and contact the program assistant or director if necessary. While the Foundation provides support for doctoral dissertation research, the awardee is solely responsible for the conduct of such research and preparation of results for publication. The Foundation, therefore, does not assume responsibility for such findings and their interpretation. This program does not support research with disease-related goals, including research on the etiology, diagnosis, or treatment of physical or mental disease, abnormality, or malfunction of human beings, animals, or plants. III. ELIGIBILITY INFORMATION The proposal must be submitted through regular university channels by the dissertation advisor(s) on behalf of the graduate student who is at the point of initiating or already conducting dissertation research. The student must be enrolled at a U.S. institution, but need not be a U.S. citizen. Proposals from women, minorities, and persons with disabilities are strongly encouraged. IV. AWARD INFORMATION Due to the variation in research techniques and needs across the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, individual programs vary widely in award sizes; please consult the program's webpage or program director for specific information. Applicants may concurrently submit a doctoral dissertation proposal to other funding organizations; please indicate this in the "Current and Pending Support" section of the NSF proposal, so that NSF may coordinate funding with the other organizations. For the full call, see <http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2001/nsf01113/nsf01113.txt>

1 0

Ph.D. Scholarship: digital discussions & political participation
by Nicholas Jankowski 16 May '01

16 May '01

Ph.D. Scholarship Digital discussions and political participation Short description This research project aims to distinguish which features of public discussions conducted with the aid of Internet-based communication facilities contribute to an increased political awareness and action on the part of participants in the discussions. The project also aims to assess whether and how different forms of communicative exchange, initiated from 'above' and from 'below', create different types, qualities and effects of political participation. Requirements * MA in communication studies or other relevant study; * knowledge of and preferably experience with Internet-based discussions; * knowledge of and preferably experience with research into political communication processes; * knowledge of quantitative and qualitative methods on content analysis and user research; * fluency in Dutch or ability to gain working competence in the language in a short period of time. Position The candidate selected to participate in this research project will be expected to complete a Ph.D. dissertation within four years. During that period the selected candidate will receive a stipend of minimally 3700 NLG (1681 Euro) per month. Additional funds are available for attending international conferences, special courses and computer facilities. Further Information The research will be supervised by: Prof.Dr. Kees Brants, <Brants(a)pscw.uva.nl>, phone: +31 20 525 3995 Dr. Nicholas Jankowski, <nickjan(a)xs4all.nl>, phone: +31 24 361 2372 Persons interested in further information are requested to contact either of the project supervisors. A more extensive description of the project can be found on the web site of the Amsterdam School of Communication Research: http://www.pscw.uva.nl/ascor/frame.htm How to apply Applications should contain: *A letter of motivation *CV *Copies of diplomas (including lists of courses attended and grades received. If not in English or Dutch, please append translations) *Copy of the Master thesis Applications should be sent by May 28, 2001, to: ASCoR, Dr. S. Zwier, researchmanager ASCoR, Oude Hoogstraat 24, 1012 CE Amsterdam The Netherlands

2 1