Breathe In, Breathe Out

Waste Time Watching TV - Again

863707228Here's something related to yesterday's post about television soaking up the free time that came with the 5-day work week. All those hours we pissed away watching inane episodic television? We can waste even more time with the same shows, according to this article in the New York Times. Only this time they won't strictly be on any broadcast or cable channel; they'll be streamed in the internet. And supported with advertising, of course.

This all assumes us passively watching all this dreck, and that's hard to do on a computer screen - at least for most of us. Better, maybe some will remix or mash them up and then share them. Now that might be fun!

Less Television, More Media

Image by gbaku, via Flickr (CC license)

With nothing else to do with it, lots of us veged out in front of the tube.

Much of the useless information I know came from watching television. I know who shot JR, for example. Or, McDreamy and McSteamy used to live in New York, and McSteamy slept with McDreamy's wife.

Yep, I've pissed away a lot of hours in front of the boob tube. But not nearly so much in the last couple of years. There are plenty of other ways to consume media time - blogging, twittering, sharing stuff with friends and family. What? You thought I was going to talk about using the time to read or exercise?)

Oh, we still watch a few favorites, whenever we want, thanks to TIVO. But consuming media - maybe better put as using media like television - isn't the same as it was and never will be, thank goodness.

Author Clay Shirky has made a career out of talking about this kind of stuff. His book Here Comes Everybody will give you a clear view of what's going on with media and society. And a transcript of his speech at the Web 2.0 Conference puts it in a little more perspective.

Society's television viewing bender came not from the invention of television, but was a kind of side effect from adopting the 5-day work week in the 20th century. That change created a big dab of free time, and Philo T Farnesworth, David Sarnoff, William Paley, et al were happy to fill it.

Shirky calls the free time a cognitive surplus, time you brain doesn't have to think about work. With nothing else to do with it, lots of us veged out in front of the tube. The tube produced, and we consumed; a classic one-way interaction.

But the internet and social media have changed all that. We can still consume media, but we can also produce out own content and share it with whomever we please quite easily and cheaply.

And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer. It doesn't mean that we'll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we'll do it less.

And that's making for a big change that will be even bigger when today's toddlers grow up:

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.

That all sounds like the most wonderful thing - and it is. But I think there are going to be some side effects that aren't necessarily good ones.

Increasingly we can consume, produce and share media on the go with mobile devices like iPhones, Blackberries, or whathaveyou. And we've probably all experienced trying to hold a conversation with someone who's preoccupied with reading email or looking something up on one of those mobile devices.

I've referred to this continuous partial attention syndrome previously. I expect it will get a lot worse as things unfold.

But at least we won't spend enormous amounts of time watching and wondering who shot JR.

Seesmic Widget

I've signed up for Seesmic, a kind of micro video blogging site. It kind of goes along with the current Twitter craze. In fact, the Seesmic company has bought Twhirl, a Twitter posting and reading application. I expect a tight integration between them very soon.

(My Twitter name is tommyl if you'd like to follow me there.

Anyway, here's a widget with my most recent Seesmic posts. Curiously, I haven't been able to get it working in the sidebar, but it does seem to work in a post. Anybody have any idea what's going on?

Seesmic Updates

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Trying out Sprout

Where Do Comments Belong?

Slow Saturday, so there's a kind of tempest in a teapot about blog comments and where they belong. Louis Gray started it out by asking Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners Ire? He's talking about the increasingly available option of posting comments about a blog post on social bookmarking sites (Friendfeed, for example). One of the problems with this practice is that the comments don't show up on the blog, and so the author might never see them.

Divorcing comments from the post they're commenting on doesn't make a lot of sense to me. On the other hand, social bookmarking sites are their own feed aggregators and take advantage of the connections in the networks of people using them.

Dave Winer wrote a little bit about this on his blog today. But he also mentioned a way the RSS 2.0 standard can support direct comments to the blog. And he demonstrated with a screenshot of one that does.

I tried it out, and lo and behold, it does. And I wondered if other aggregators offered a similar feature. The only one I could find was NetNewsWire. If you right click on a headline in NNW's headline list one of the contextual menu options is "open comments." At least it is on some blogs, but not all. So NNW must be using the RSS 2.0 tag that Winer talked about.

I think this would be a useful option for any aggregator, desktop or web-based. In the meantime, I've signed up for Disqus comments hosting that offers a way of coordinating comments.

What do you think?

TWIT on Journalism, Twitter

This Week in Tech or TWIT as it's known, is a podcast focused on, well, technical news of the week. As such, it's usually not that exiciting, though it does serve a purpose.

image by chodhound, via Flickr (CC license)

But the episode I listened to today broke the pattern. Host Leo Laporte and guests discussed the future of journalism, online and traditional. What made this stand out for me was the discussion wasn't coming from the usual suspects, traditional journalists. Instead, it was veteran content providers from he online information flood that continues to flow over the banks.

Stating the obvious usually doesn't count for much, but I found it refreshing when the panel agreed that most blogs are, at best, secondary sources of news. They are simply commenting or expanding upon the stuff uncovered by primary journalists - the men and women who dig up topics, research and filter them before presenting them to the public. So if the flow of financing for traditional journalism switches to secondary online sources, where does that leave us? Don't know about you, but I don't want to depend on Huffington Post as my primary source of news.

There were other discussions on meat and potatoes reporting subdizing stuff like international news: think New York Times. And of course recognizing how much times goes down the drain as the Twitter stream flows by. I'm starting to see a really big ratio of 'stuff I can't use' to 'stuff I can use.' Still, it's fun to watch the flow - sometimes.

As I think about this stuff, I'm leaning toward the idea of online delivery mainly supplementing local news. Let's face it, most local news doesn't take Woodward and Bernstein to report it.

If you are at all interested in online and traditional news, I wouldn't hestiate recommending a download and listen. I hope to see more TWITs like this in the future.

Sure Cure for Email Apnea

Image by Looking Glass, via Flickr (CC license)

I was just rereading yesterday's post when a blinding flash of the obvious hit me. That post was based on Linda Stone's notion of email apnea, or holding your breath while you're reading email. If someone holds their breath while reading email or whatever on a screen, there's one sure way to stop holding and start breathing. And it has nothing to do with breathing exercises or directing attention.

That is, read the email aloud. You simply can't hold your breath and read or speak aloud. That solves that problem.

But it may create another one - what will people around you make of the person muttering as they peer intently at their Blackberry's tiny screen? That's another problem, but at least you won't be holding your breath.

Seriously, though, a great source of information on breathing can be found in Dr. Breath, a book by former Olympic breathing coach Carl Stough. Unfortunately, the book's out of print. Worth a check of the used book sites.