Stateside With Rosalea: Internet 20.NZ

Well, you gets what you pays for, I suppose, as this screen shot of the ad that appeared alongside Media7’s latest post on YouTube. Sure, let’s join the conversation about Clean Coal... Codswallop!

Click for big version

But I digress. I want to elaborate on two developments made possible by the Internet that impact my life greatly.

::Goowiki journalism::
I’m about as goowiki as they come. In fact, the entire series I’m currently writing about the 50 states originates from a Wikipedia page that lists the order in which those states ratified the US Constitution. From internal Wikipedia links, I branch out using Google to search on key concepts and names I find in the W articles.

Of course, there are those who question the value of Wikipedia as a research tool, as this discussion between Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet Is Killing our Culture, and Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, shows. (In writing the previous sentence, I had to google “wales keen” in order to find a link that worked, because the original link I had saved—to a site called podnova—returned a 404 File Not Found error.)

Which reminds me of two things that can be frustrating about the Internet—its unreliability in terms of the amount of linkrot it spawns, and the infinite ways in which you can be diverted from your original search. Happily, I’m a fan of serendipity, and the fact that my search also returned articles about how “New South Wales is keen to install ETRMS” just meant I had another bookmark to add to my folder about railways. (Internet bookmarks—god bless ’em!)

Google searches can be refined in many ways. Recently, in response to correspondents’ interest in the topic, the Foreign Press Center in Washington DC set up a briefing by Adam Kovacevich, Google Senior Manager, Global Communications and Public Affairs on “Expert Google Web Searching – Tools and Tips” to familiarize reporters with some of them. The Google website itself provides this cheatsheet.

And there are many organizations that attempt to either index the Internet—such as the Librarian’s Internet Index—or contextualize it by using human editors, such as Finding Dulcinea. Journalism schools and professional organizations also provide resources that aid reporters—the Investigative Reporters and Editors website, for example, provided a list of topical websites on its Election 2008 webpage.

But, like I said earlier, I’m a fan of serendipity, and despite subscribing to email updates from the LII, Finding Dulcinea, the National Security Archive, and other sources, I’m still steadfastly goowiki in my searches. With the one proviso that I’ll try to arrive finally at a primary source, as any good researcher would and every good reporter should.

That is, unless I find something so completely wackydoodle that I can’t resist it, such as this website got to via a Google search on “Cherokee”, which turned up the information that the Cherokee calendar ends in 2012—a debatable proposition that is dear to the hearts of those who believe the world will end on December 20, 2012.

::Surfpotatoes::
AKA youtubers. The Urban Dictionary gives as its second definition of youtuber, “A couch potato of the new millenium”, and that is the sense in which I mean surfpotatoes. I’m not really one of those who spends hours on line watching videos, but the fact that I can if I want to is of great significance to me. I regularly watch Media7, for example, because the topics interest me, even after nearly 10 years away from the country of my—and the program’s—origin.

The availability of video online has fundamentally changed my relationship to television in the same way that the wordy parts of the Internet have changed my relationship to newspapers. I was never one to timeshift my TV viewing by recording it to watch later, and here in the States, the amount of what might be termed “recreational” television I watch is very low, simply because I’m not interested in the type of programming on offer—most of which sets out to either terrify people or confirm them in their prejudices.

(An aside: It’s one of the weird things about the US that I can live here in the Bay Area—with a population of over 6.7 million people in nine counties and 101 cities—and not see one locally produced show other than news, sports, and magazine-style programs. Where are the local dramas? Soap operas, even? Perhaps there’s a place on the Internet for them.)

Just knowing that I can watch—or watch again—a television program on the Internet is a boon to me. Sucked into watching this season of 24 by my curiosity after having been trapped inside an office building while filming for the series was going on out in the street back in DC in November 2007, I find I don’t have to spoil my Monday evening mellow by watching the broadcast that night, but can instead watch it on Hulu at the weekend.

And it’s not just the viewers’ relationship to television that has been changed by the Internet. It’s now routine for newscasters to present the bare bones of a story on television and refer viewers to the station’s website for more background information—including raw video of interviews. Which is a resource of use not just to viewers but to other reporters and commentators as well. Talking head shows also routinely invite viewers to interact with their guests in various versions of a “green room”, and on Facebook and Twitter.

Neither of which Internet phenomenon I will write about here, except to say that social media are increasingly mined for source material by journalists, besides being used by them to expand their audience. This recent webinar from the Poynter Institute’s News University, for example, teaches, among other things, how to find sources on Twitter.

Finally, my favorite Internet moment for the past week was the serendipitous arrival of a wifi-enabled bus to take me home from work, on a route that doesn’t usually sport such creatures. I figured I’d download a podcast to my Mylo to listen to on my way, and what should I find but Michael Cullen’s valedictory speech on Scoop. Again serendipitously, Cullen—then Deputy Leader of the Opposition in NZ—was the last politician I set eyes on before leaving for the US.

Michael Cullen was one of the funniest speakers in the House of Representatives—a torture for parliamentary staff sitting in the debating chamber because it is unseemly for them to show any reaction to what is being said. It was great to hear his incisive wit again, and astonishing to think just how impossible to imagine in 1999 that I’d be sitting on a bus in Oakland, California, pulling his voice out of thin air when I next heard it again.

Here’s to the next 20!

© Scoop Media