Garrett M. Vonk

If your kid has a cell phone, you need to crush it into a 2-inch cube as soon as you can, before it leads them into a life of evil.

Or at least that’s the gist of this CNN story. This type of article reminds me of Drew Curtis’s words as I’m slowly making my way through the Fark book that my sister-in-law got me for Christmas. There’s a whole section on this type of fear-mongering, alarmist, non-stories that are all too common in the current media landscape. This is the easy three-step process that most media outlets follow to create their own alarmist stories:

1. Find something that has been a legitimate danger to a very small number of people. Let’s say, the “choking game“.
2. Interview people who have suffered some personal harm or loss from this danger, and thus are likely to drum up as much emotion as possible in your readers/viewers.
3. Blow the idea completely out of proportion, preying on your audience’s fears that–gasp–it could happen to them!
4. Try to find some new material for another story on Natalee Holloway.

So, cell phones are evil. These one or two times, a teacher used a cell phone to build an inappropriate relationship their student. And you probably have one in your home!!!!! Film at 11. The story goes on to detail exactly how predators will “groom” your kids for an encounter via their cell phone, and even includes this chilling story:

A recent case involves Kelsey Peterson, a 25-year-old Nebraska teacher accused of having sex with a 13-year-old former student. She faces federal charges for allegedly kidnapping the teen and taking him to Mexico to have sex.

An Associated Press reporter, Elliott Spagat, interviewed the boy while he was in Mexico and told CNN about it. The boy recounted being groomed, telling Spagat that Peterson “was his best friend. He was having problems with gangs … and he said she would lend an ear whenever he needed it,” Spagat said.

That does sound like a pretty terrible situation, but why did CNN use it to demonize cell phones? In the Peterson case, this teacher used email messages and handwritten letters to build the relationship. Lock up your pencils and paper, parents, for they are the tools of predators.

Of course, buried in the article is the, you know, sensible advice that perhaps you should just be more involved with your kid and make sure you know where they are going and who they are talking to on the phone. I suppose that “Parents Who Are More Involved in their Kids’ Lives Better Able to Protect Them” would be a far more appropriate headline for the article, but that’s not threatening enough.

By the way, if you have kids, watch out; the internet is trying to MURDER THEIR TOYS.

In an interview that is reminiscent of Amber and Rusty’s encounter with the Traditional Media last June, NPR’s Daniel Schorr expounds on his disdain for new media in the Sacramento Bee:

[...B]logs and citizen journalism. Is this a form of news gathering that you embrace?

A: I can’t embrace it. Not after what I’ve been through at the hands of the copy editors’ desks. I have suffered many, many arguments about what I’ve wanted to say – whether it was grammatically correct, factually correct and all of that – and I want everybody to have to experience what I experienced. But today, your blogger is totally free. He is his own reporter, his own editor, his own publisher, and he can do whatever he wants.

A person like me who believes in the tradition of a discipline in journalism can only rue the day we’ve arrived at where we don’t need discipline or anything. All you need is a keyboard.

Ah, yes, the tradition of discipline in journalism. I understand completely the criticism that the democratization of the media has resulted in an overall decline in truly newsworthy news in the mainstream journalism. But the brave new world of blogs, podcasts, social networks, video sharing, and mobile communication has created unprecedented opportunities to broaden the horizons of the media one consumes and the awareness one achieves of the world around us.

Schorr’s main argument seems to rest on the idea that citizen journalism suffers from the inaccuracy and lack of polish inherent in its low barriers to entry. But many have argued quite the opposite. To paraphrase Jimmy Wales, if someone makes a mistake on a heavily-trafficked Wikipedia article, it’s often corrected in a matter of minutes, whereas an error in a popular Encyclopedia Brittanica article will remain in that book forever. The same is true for popular blogs and other sources of citizen journalism… The more popular–and thus influential–a given source becomes, the more readers are exposed to it and have the opportunity to correct it. Which do you see more: blogs fact-checking traditional media or vice versa?

There are two other huge advantages to citizen journalism/new media that desperately need to be considered.

A. Immediacy/access-
When everyone has the ability to report the news, even in what Mr. Schorr would decry as a pathetically amateurish effort, everyone has access to information that is both up to date and more thorough than the establishment has ever been capable of. Two examples immediately come to mind: interdictor and Jamal Al Barghouti. The Wikipedia (heh) article on interdictor’s coverage of Katrina sums up its impact nicely:

The Interdictor blog quickly became a widely recognized and cited source from inside New Orleans. Sources such as CNN even read directly from the blog on the air, putting its contents on-screen. Even after the media arrived, the Interdictor blog was still commonly cited as a reference to the events ongoing in New Orleans. When a police-enforced evacuation of New Orleans was ordered by Mayor Ray Nagin, the Interdictor bloggers were exempted from the mandatory evacuation. The blog’s debut and rise to prominence during the hurricane and its aftermath was listed in an MSN/PC World article as number 14 on a list of “The 16 Greatest Moments in Web History.”

What ever could CNN have been thinking, reading a blog on live television??? Why, some nutjob could have been making the whole thing up, what with the internet and all its inherent lack of credibility. Why couldn’t they have just waited until New Orleans was fixed up and the infrastructure was rebuilt so that they could have fully vetted Mssr. Interdictor themselves?

B. Specialization
In J-school, they called it fragmentation, and the concept got a good bit of buzz a few years ago as The Long Tail:

An average movie theater will not show a film unless it can attract at least 1,500 people over a two-week run; that’s essentially the rent for a screen. An average record store needs to sell at least two copies of a CD per year to make it worth carrying; that’s the rent for a half inch of shelf space. And so on for DVD rental shops, videogame stores, booksellers, and newsstands.

…And the average newspaper needs X number of people to read a given story in order for advertisers to buy the space next to it. And on and on it goes. But a funny thing happens when space and leverage become free. Niche sources become must-see, everyday reading for some people. Understand that more than half of Amazon’s book sales are books that aren’t even available in a Barnes and Noble store, and you’ll understand the mind-blowing effect that this democratization of ideas has had on the diversity of content available.

Media Savvy: NPR’s Schorr vital link to ‘responsible journalism’[warning - tries to auto-print] (via Kottke)

Traffic politics are a major point of contention for me, encompassing a huge range of issues from red light cameras to random checkpoints. For this reason, I’ll probably check out Parking Wars on A&E as long as I can take it without changing the channel in frustration.

A blog I found last year, ambiguously named The Newspaper, does a fantastic job of rounding up the “politics of driving” stories. Here’s a sampling of the stories they covered this year:

In September, motorist Brett Darrow’s videotaped harassment during a traffic stop in a small Saint Louis city became international news. Our follow-up coverage showed area police continued to harass the young motorist, and even threaten him, over the publicity.

We also helped spread the word in June about the Virginia’s so-called abuser fees that turned what other states treat as an ordinary speeding ticket for driving as little as 15 MPH over the limit in a 65 zone (or 10 MPH over on sections of Interstate 85) into an offense carrying a maximum penalty of $3550. [...] Many motorists in the same state were surprised to learn in October that they faced a $2500 fine for not making a lane change away from a police officer stopped on the side of the road.

[...]

In April, we broke the news that a little known California agency intended to install speed cameras and the first-ever stop sign — not stoplight — camera, in violation of state law. We followed up with a report on the stop sign camera’s activation in July. But the news was not good for the ticketing industry in Minnesota. The state’s supreme court struck down of the legality of red light cameras with a strongly worded decision in April. In Kansas, ticketing picked up as police struck deals to hide video cameras in commercial big rig trucks to issue tickets to passing motorists.

Some UK motorists discovered ways to prove speed camera tickets inaccurate, including the use of a cell phone’s GPS readings as evidence.

Some of that stuff is pretty infuriating. (stop sign cameras?)

It’s exciting to read that the Airbus A380 may be offered in a configuration with bunkbeds as an option rather than the typical seating layout. For any flight over an hour or two, I’d much prefer a cot, even an only mildly comfortable one, over a seat that just reclines a few inches.

Sure, meals and movies are pretty much out of the question, but depending on how much space the airline saves, and after seeing the posh common areas they have planned on some of these jets, I bet they can still come up with something creative.

Somehow, the story of the Geico Cavemen getting a sitcom deal on ABC flew around the blogosphere under my radar last week. So, when Heather clued me in while we were on vacation in Florida over the weekend, I absolutely didn’t believe her. No way, I protested; despite the nagging feeling that we live in a time where originality is at an all-time low on television, I still couldn’t believe that a major network would seriously discuss airing a half-hour sitcom based on the cavemen from the Geico commercials.

Yet here I sit eating lunch, watching the teaser for Cavemen, actually set to air this fall, in which the Cro-Magnon lead characters will “struggle with prejudice on a daily basis [and] strive to live the lives of normal thirty-somethings in 2007 Atlanta.”

I suppose that the mixed reactions around the web indicate that I’m wrong to imagine that a show like this should be universally panned before it even makes it to air. For example, as far as I can tell, one film blogger seems to be totally serious when she calls the premise “can’t-miss-funny“. Still, Ain’t It Cool News called the yet-to-be-leaked pilot episode “astoundingly awful”, and there are those who even find the concept quasi-racist.

I know I’ll be on the edge of my seat this fall, if only to see how the caveman prosthetics hold up in high definition.

I just saw this quote in an article about the Virginia Tech shootings. Does this send chills down anyone else’s spine?

Some news accounts have suggested that Cho had a history of antidepressant use, but senior federal officials tell ABC News that they can find no record of such medication in the government’s files. This does not completely rule out prescription drug use, including samples from a physician, drugs obtained through illegal Internet sources, or a gap in the federal database, but the sources say theirs is a reasonably complete search.

It doesn’t really surprise me that they have a huge, privacy-invading database of our prescriptions, but what is unnerving to me is how definitive they consider it. I can just picture a Shadowy Government Official at his computer… “Why, he must not have been on antidepressants,” *clickety-clackety* “I don’t see it anywhere in our records.”

Edit: Someone at Boing Boing noticed the quote too and has a little more information on this database.

So, the big story today is the traffic, traffic, traffic. While my train ride took the same seven minutes it always takes, I can sympathize with the commuters’ horror stories of 2+ hour drives from 285 to downtown. However, some of the comments at the AJC blog seem to completely miss the point of the HOV lanes…

“Jane” writes…

In a traffic situation like the one we had today, I think it would REALLY help to open the HOV lanes, just to get the traffic moving a little better. I know that’s not fair to the carpoolers, but in an extraordinary situation like today, it would help the 98% of the rest of us.

D. Potter:

Took 2 hrs. 45 min from E. Cobb - open up the HOV lanes to all traffic when these horrendous conventions take place & keep Williams St. moving for god sake.

I’m not sure what these people think the HOV lane is for. Here’s a hint: It’s not a super-special red carpet so that carpoolers can feel better about themselves. It’s an incentive to get cars off the road. And if you removed that incentive, those cars would no longer be off the road. You’re already benefitting from the HOV lane in the form of decreased traffic overall, and we’d negate that benefit if the HOV lanes were to be used by everyone. It’s not that it would be “unfair” to the carpoolers, though it would. It would simply cause less people to carpool in the first place. I don’t know what the statistics are on the effectiveness of the HOV lane at reducing overall traffic, but I imagine it’s a net traffic loss even when you consider that the lane can’t be used by normal commuters.

This morning, I read a photoessay on Chittagong, a Bangladeshi beach that is one of the world’s longest. It’s not your typical beach: this is where half of the world’s tankers go to die.

When the tide is high, vessels are driven at full speed toward the shore. Once the water recedes and the ships rest along the muddy beach, the salvage crews move in, emptying the vessels of everything on board.

There are some incredible photos in this essay, but the data are equally fascinating and startling:

• The work employs over 200,000 Bangladeshis
• The scrap metal from the scavenged ships provides 80% of Bangladesh’s steel
• Most of the workers working on this toxic, dangerous site with sharp metals and unknown chemicals do so without gloves or shoes
• It is estimated that one worker is killed each day

The economics behind two hundred thousand people making their living handling titanic cast-off detritus is mind-boggling to me. What a huge, strange world we live in.

link: Foreign Policy: End of the Line
(via mental_floss)


There’s a lot more info on this phenomenon known as shipbreaking over at Google Sightseeing.

Monday, July 10th, was our second wedding anniversary. It seems like the human tendency is to use anniversaries as a kind of yardstick. Has it really been two years? That one feels about right. It’s been an eventful two years–since July 2004, I’m on my third job (and third home).

But in the grand scheme of things, it’s a pretty short time. While many marriages are shorter, my parents hit 31 years in January. I’ve had cell phone contracts that lasted 2 years. We’ve had our cat for longer than that. Yes, in terms of yardsticks, while I’m happy to have hit this milestone, and I’m even more excited about the years ahead of us, it doesn’t seem like very long.

More striking, I think, is that as of July 17th, I’ve been with Heather for 10 years. We began our relationship in July of 1996, when the Olympics were in town. The newspaper last weekend read “Games Changed Everything”, with the expected retrospective pieces on the commercial and cultural growth Atlanta experienced during the years on either side of 1996. Somewhere in my closet, I have the newspaper from the Opening Ceremonies, 10 years ago. Metaphorically, it’s as if these two papers are the coming and going of a comet, a steadfast chronological ticker that returns to earth after a decade and finds that much has changed.

And yet, you could throw both newspapers in the same pile in the closet because they both represent that which is finished. Heather and I have laughed and cried for these 10 years together, and have shared our lives in ways that are always intensifying in an exciting manner. It’s invigorating to pass the 10-year mark, and it makes me a little nostalgic.

Anyway, as I’ve said many times, I love you, Heather. Thanks for the best 10 years of my life.

Background, if you didn’t know: The Slingbox is a <$200 device that sits in your entertainment center at home, connects to your broadband internet, and streams video and audio to yourself, on the road. The idea is that you can watch your home TV system components (Cable Box, Tivo, DVD, whatever) from anywhere in the world with a ‘net connection. It’s neat “place-shifting” technology, and if I ever have to travel for my job, it’ll be at the top of my short list for must-haves.

This technology is very cool, but also has pretty strict precautions against piracy. You can only stream the video to one person: yourself. This is the equivalent of taping a TV show and bringing the tape with you on vacation, just sped up in the internet age. In other words, the courts affirmed rights like these ages ago.

But that won’t stop Major League Baseball, Inc. from getting all huffy about the technology:

At the heart of the issue is that Sling Media, Orb Networks and similar companies cut out cable and satellite operators who pay great sums for transmission rights in their areas, according to Kliavkoff. Baseball sells transmission rights to specific geographical locations. So, a cable subscriber in San Francisco who watches a Giants baseball game from his or her laptop during a visit to Chicago is stealing from the Chicago cable operator who paid to transmit MLB games in that city.

Yes, he said stealing. This is a much more cut-and-dried case than music piracy. It’s my TV signal. I’ve already paid good money for it. If a kid wants to run a coax cable out to his treehouse so that he can secretly watch Nickelodeon (I can only assume that’s what the kids are still watching) 20 feet off the ground, he has every right to do that.

What if I want to watch TV in a mirror, so everything appears backward? Am I “rebroadcasting” the signal without permission, and therefore stealing? What if I call home to ask Heather how the game’s going? Is she rebroadcasting, too, by describing the MLB-licensed content she’s lawfully watching? I happen to place-shift and time-shift episodes of The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Glenn Beck to my iPod so that I can watch them on the train. (They’re automagically downloaded from my Tivo -> PC and transcoded to iPod format overnight.) I pay Comcast for the right to this content, and innovative and cool technologies make it very easy for me to enjoy said content in more places and situations than ever.

You’d think that any industry that depends on a captive, fanatic audience would be overjoyed that people are finding new and improved ways to consume the industry’s product in their manner of choosing. You’d think that in the era of an increasingly-segmented marketplace, content providers would trip over themselves to get a chance to reach more eyeballs, even when traveling. Not least of all, you’d think that after media giants have failed, over and over and over again, to stem the tide of digital distribution, they’d realize that embracing this flexibility and giving your customers what they want is the best way to get a cut.

“The bottom line,” [Buchanan] said, “is I’d hate to be a lawyer arguing that I want consumers to pay twice for content.”

If the entertainment lawyers had their way, we’d have to pay for everything we watched, every time and manner we watched it.

From Cnet [via Boing Boing]

Hilarious tangentially-related Onion article: Area Man Won’t Do Anything Without Express Written Consent Of NFL