Group items tagged

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

We might like to think that information-sharing is intrinsic to academic work, especially academic work that is publicly funded. However we also place many restrictions on publishing, like peer review, and I imagine there are still academics who try to keep their work secret until it is ready for any number of semi-paranoid reasons. I'm not going to say we shouldn't do these things, but we need to recognize that the discipline works by controlling the production and distribution of disciplinary knowledge.

The publicity about online"predators" who prey on naive children using trickery and violence is largely inaccurate.

adult offenders who meet, develop relationships with, and openly seduce underage teenagers

In the great majority of cases, victims are aware they are conversing online with adults. In the N-JOV Study, only 5% of offenders pretended to be teens when they met potential victims online. (112)

Bloggers are not competition to the traditional media -- though they do, hopefully, act as an occasional check on its excesses.  However, even if the Internet were entirely dedicated to the downfall of existing media, it would be only one popgun in a chorus of cannons.  A large part of the traditional media is dedicated to nothing less than making war on the rest.