Gatekeepers and publishing

This weekend, I co-presented a workshop with Assistant Professor Judith Anderson at Columbus State Community College's annual creative writing conference, this one titled "Genres and Generations." Our workshop dealt with the opportunities Web 2.0 has opened to artists, and how writers can use blogs and social networking to attract and build an audience for their printed work.

During an afternoon panel discussion on creative nonfiction, someone in the audience raised a question about blogging as a form of the essay. The panelists answered that bloggers were, essentially, narcissists, a waste of bandwidth and of time. This judgment drew sharp objections from the floor, including several from participants in our morning workshop. They countered the stereotype, arguing that many bloggers are intensely aware of and involved with the world around them, linked in a network of communications with others who were often passionately committed to issues, interests and causes.

The keynote speaker for the conference had been Walter Mosley, who on Friday night read from his book This Year You Write Your Novel. Mosley encouraged the audience to invest the time and effort in attempting to write their own stories. One audience member asked Saturday's panel how Mosley's injunction squared with their condemnation of earnest bloggers who are dedicated to writing. The response was that bloggers are certainly permitted to write, but they're wrong to publish.

Publishing, the panelists agreed, requires gatekeepers, to minimize the dangers that unmonitored publishing might pose to society and to individuals. The discussion then switched to the topic of fraudulent material that had been posted on Wikipedia. (Never mind that Wikipedia isn't a blog. All hypertext is equally suspect.)

The panel was composed of people whose wit and judgment I hold immense respect for, but I must disagree with them on this point. I believe they view the Internet simply as simply a different delivery method for the printed word, rather than as an entirely new medium. But the two are different. Print, as McLuhan pointed out decades ago, is mechanical and explosive. It fragments the audience into individual, specialized readers. Hypertext is electric and implosive. It tends toward a tribal structure of deep involvement, a breakdown of barriers.

Print-oriented academics, I believe, see the blog as a private journal (including all the form's associations with paper, ink and handwriting) that has been posted online merely for the sake of the writer’s vanity. A small percentage may, in fact, be that.

The true blog, though, begins as unmediated electronic text, posted as a statement in an ongoing conversation. It's not a matter of isolated words designed to be contemplated in tranquility. It's a voice speaking in a village, in a chorus or babble of other voices. As long as the social structure of the village is healthy, the service of a gatekeeper, deciding who may or may not speak, is not required.

Keyboarding or handwriting?

CNet's Candace Lombardi has an interesting article on the teaching of handwriting skills in the computer age. In the fall of 2007, Virginia Tech will issue tablet pc's to students and require students to use them in classes. At Memphis State, however, Professor June Entman banned her law students from bringing laptops to class. The speed of the keyboard enables students to transcribe her lecture. Taking notes by hand, she contends, requires independent, active thought, interpretation and analysis.

Is she right? One's answer to that question may be determined by his or her age.

In my generation, handwriting and keyboarding skills were taught at different stages of the educational process. In fact, it was primarily women who learned to type, in training for future secretarial roles. My junior year of high school, I was the sole boy in the second-period typing class, in a room with 23 teenage girls. Those were some of my happiest adolescent days.

For those of us who developed these skills separately, I think, typing is a distinctly different experience from writing by hand. I still compose poetry and fiction with a pen and a notebook, waiting to commit anything to the computer until it's pretty much in a final form. This isn't a Luddite resistance to technology, only an acknowledgement that my thought process is different when I'm on the keyboard. My words seem to arrive through a different route, the style is altered, and I'm paradoxically less inclined to edit and revise on the screen than I am on a sheet of paper.

Most of Professor Entman's students are unhappy over the ban. As a teacher, I fully support her right to dictate the rules governing her classroom. But I wonder about her assumption that younger students may be processing information differently if they bring laptops to her lecture. For them, the experience of typing may be the same as that of writing by hand.

Tragedy, news, and social networking

As students at Virginia Tech cope with this week's tragedy on their campus, and attempt to return to a normal life, many of them are expressing anger at the press for creating a state of siege on their campus. "You've got your story. Now go home," one young woman said this morning during a story on National Public Radio's Morning Edition.

One grievance that students have raised -- and it's a legitimate one -- is over the way that reporters from wire services, newspapers, television and radio raided their LiveJournal, Facebook and MySpace pages hoping to contact witnesses to the shootings, urgent for interview time. Robin Hamman at cybersoc.com has compiled a catalog of requests students received from ABC, the LA Times, CBC, CNN and others. Some display sensitivity to what the students' emotional turmoil, but others lived up to the mainstream media's image as crass, heartless purveyors of suffering.

Slate's Michael Agger reports that a number of students, realizing they were drawing media attention "rapidly set their journals and MySpace pages to friends-only," to block unwelcome demands for details and emotional reactions that one anonymous poster satirized with the words: "Please let us exploit your grief. ASAP THANKS!"

That was the right decision, but the fact that it needed to be made points out the dilemma of social networking, that it erases the distinction between public and private. By posting personal messages to their network of friends, on a public site, the students opened themselves to this kind of unwanted attention, at a moment when tragedy drew the eyes of the media to their campus.

Robin Hamman urges the news media to "Think before you link. Understand that some content published in public was never intended to be seen by a mass audience." He's drawing an intriguing and subtle distinction between the "public" and the "mass" -- probably too subtle for anyone to expect a reporter hot on the trail of a breaking story to observe, though.

Sadly, this issue will come up again, during some future crisis or catastrophe when social networking once more becomes citizen journalism. But a richness will result from the ability of individuals to tell their stories at first hand, unmediated, and for those stories to link organically, for a fuller picture to emerge.

As TextualDeviance has pointed out of the Virginia Tech tragedy, "the students and student journalists at this school have done a better job of covering it than the mainstream media have, by not only being more on top of it, but by integrating content from multiple sources into a cohesive, continually updated story that still manages to be journalistic despite much of its amateur origins."

The price of that richness will be a further sacrifice of the personal and the private.

Dionysos, Apollo and the Blogosphere

I've been following the debate this week over Tim O'Reilly's call for civility in the blogosphere and his suggestions for a code of conduct governing what kinds of behavior will or won't be permitted on individual sites. Included in the program is the elimination of anonymous posts.

Online response has been, overwhelmingly, negative. So I find myself on the minority side of an issue -- certainly not for the first time in my life. I fundamentally agree with O'Reilly and with Tony Long's tongue-in-cheek challenge on Wired to anonymous posters:

If you're going to fire a rocket at someone in a blog post, or anywhere else, at least have the class to use your real name and stand behind your vitriol. Anything less makes you a coward and invalidates whatever bile you've spewed. My name is on this, and I'm calling you gutless if you don't sign yours. What are you going to do about it, blogger boy?

The arguments in defense of anonymous posts, which I admit have some merit, include contentions that anonymity encourages more people to join an open discussion, and that it minimizes the ego battles that interfere with fair debate when the identities of the parties are known.

But I suspect that something more fundamental is at stake here than online manners, or even morality. This is an issue about the fundamental character of the medium, whether it will be Apollonian or Dionysian.

The O'Reilly camp upholds Apollonian ideals of order and reason in the quest for idealized truth. Apollo was the god of cognition, individuation and civilization, core qualities of Western culture. In addition, he was the symbol of "ethical" conduct, in the root sense of that word: the idea that what was permitted to and what was expected of the individual was a product of his or her public character. In the Apollonian view, civic order depends on everyone possessing a known and fixed identity. Anonymity or the possibility of shifting identities leads to chaos.

Dionysos is thought of today as the god of wine, but that's simply a shorthand notation for his true significance, which was the power of intoxication in various forms. Intoxication destabilizes fixed identity, leading to a merging with the "other" and a widening of possible experiences. He was also patron of the Greek theater, where actors publicly presented themselves as characters who they weren't. The Dionysian experience is tribal, mythic and communal. It was, in addition, "ecstatic" (again, in the root meaning of the word). Ecstasy is the state of "standing outside" the self, of temporarily setting aside the burden of your quotidian identity, liberating you from yourself.

If this past week's response to O'Reilly's code of conduct is a reliable indication, it appears the blogosphere has a strong Dionysian current that will resist ethical reform -- not because bloggers support hate speech, but because those ecstatic possibilities are a key feature of the medium.

Free speech, hate and accountability

The shameful treatment that Kathy Sierra has recently suffered in the blogosphere has stimulated debate on topics ranging from misogyny to hate speech, anonymous postings, and censorship. The death threats made against Ms. Sierra for her unforgivable act of being a woman with opinions reminded me of a study about what has happened to human decency online.

Psychologist John Suler speculated in CyberPsychology & Behavior that flaming and other forms of anti-social behavior may be caused by a disconnect of "the brain's social circuitry" in the online environment, resulting in a loss of empathy with the person on the receiving end of the message.

Angela Rozas of the Chicago Tribune laments that "The Internet was supposed to revolutionize the way we communicate: information at our fingertips, global discourse, every man's opinion could be heard. But 12 years after I opened my first e-mail account, I have grown weary of the hate littering our e-world. Perhaps it's time we start policing ourselves. No more hate messages by anonymous posters. Every posting should require a name, address and telephone number. That information could be shielded from public view, and though some people might make up names and phone numbers, the requirement for submitting them might reduce the number of hate-filled messages left online."

It would seem that a code of conduct is sorely needed. Some have been offered already, by BlogHer for example. Now, as reported in the New York Times, Tim O'Reilly and Jimmy Wales have joined the call for greater civility and perhaps "several sets of guidelines for conduct" on different blogs and sites.

The counter argument to this proposal is that limiting visitors to a site in what they may or may not say, or removing comments that violate a site's specific code of conduct, amounts to censorship. Free speech, after all, is the essence of the blogosphere. How do you balance one person's right to express himself or herself, and another person's wish not to become a target of abuse, slander and threats?

Blogs and social networking sites may not be legally responsible for remarks posted on them by visitors. Nevertheless, we're still ethically responsible for safeguarding the rights of everyone who visits our sites. Having grown up at a time and a place where hate speech was all too common -- practically the norm, in many circles -- I can testify that threats and abuse aren't used to stimulate a lively debate or promote the free exchange of opinions. The only purpose of hate speech is to isolate and silence its target.

As a policy for open communication, "Free Speech for Me, but I'm Going to Make You Shut Up" seems questionable. Site owners have a duty to monitor their sites, and people who post comments should be accountable for their words. Abusive anonymous postings are an exercise in cowardice, not free speech.

I'll admit that it's going to be devilishly hard to devise a code that equitably distinguishes hate and abuse from legitimate, reasoned expressions of opinion. But if we're serious about the growth of the blogosphere as an open forum, it's worth the effort to try. I agree with Tim O'Reilly's remark, "one of the mistakes a lot of people make" is "believing that uncensored speech is the most free, when in fact, managed civil dialogue is actually the freer speech. Free speech is enhanced by civility."

The future of newspapers

A recent blog from Arianna Huffington about News 2.0 presents an optimistic vision of papers like the Washington Post starting to successfully embrace the digital age. The Post, for example, has "gone from a largely local paper with a print circulation around 656,000, to an international paper attracting eight million unique online readers a month."

But I began growing nervous as the article continued in its rosy assessment for the future of hybrid digital-and-paper delivery system like NewspaperDirect. The debate over the merits of the printed page vs. the computer screen has been continued too long. This old debate is wrongheaded in its approach, obscuring how dynamically different hypertext is from hard copy, consumed in tedious discussion about which is more convenient or more aesthetically pleasing.

So I was relieved when Huffington at last turned to a more vital issue, how new media is beginning to affect journalism in its substance, rather than in its delivery methods. She praises, rightfully, sites like Talking Points Memo and TMPmuckracker for bringing together "journalistic doggedness and reader interactivity" in breaking the recent Justice Department scandal involving the fired U.S. attorneys.

It's beyond question that the mainstream media has, for the past decade, failed the public miserably in its duty to inform and watchdog. Witness the lead-in to the American invasion of Iraq, when the only responsible critique of the plan was offered by Knight Ridder and by the online "fringe." Most newspaper, as well as all the commercial broadcast networks, simply yielded themselves to the euphoria and hysteria of the moment.

New media developments may assist in increasing a mainstream newspaper's audience, but they won't save the newspaper industry from its own growing corruption and incompetence. I am myself a daily reader of the New York Times online, but I entertain no illusions that I'm getting more accurate information or improved coverage from the electronic version. It's still the Times, limited in what it can report and predetermined in its outlook by its old political and corporate affiliations.

Never mind the joys of listening to the rustle of the pages and the feel of ink smudging your fingertips. If you're not getting complete, balanced, independent reporting from your newspaper, you're wasting your time. The online press is beginning to flex its muscle and prove its potential for wedding professional journalism with citizen journalism.

Huffington herself points out that "breaking a big story isn't always about getting the inside tip from a Deep Throat -- many times it's simply the piecing together of seemingly random bits of information there for everybody to see. But when they are assembled together, suddenly a big story can emerge. The blogosphere excels at this."

Politicians should stay off MySpace

Another story emerged this week about a presidential hopeful getting stung in the campaign's misinformed effort to exploit the social networking phenomenon.

This one involves John McCain, whose staffers set up a MySpace page that not only borrowed the designed of TechCrunch CEO Mike Davidson, without attribution, but also embedded a menu image directly from his server, thereby eating away at his brandwidth with every visitor to McCain's site.

Davidson responded with an "immaculate hack," by replacing the image they were using with another, with text in which McCain seems to be reversing his stance on gay marriage. "No server but my own was touched and no laws were broken," he points out.

To me, the most interesting point of this episode is contained in Davidson's comment that "I think the idea of politicians setting up MySpace pages and pretending to actually use them is a bit disingenuous." That's a polite way of putting it. I'd use the words "cynical" and "embarrassing" instead.

It's embarrassing to witness clueless politicians and their aides trying to "connect" with the MySpace generation this way, betraying themselves for the dinosaurs they truly are by trying to act cool in a medium they don't understand.

It's cynical, in some cases other than this McCain episode, for politicians to decry these sites one day and then campaign on them the next. The Shifted Librarian recently commented on the ironic positions of two other presidential candidates, "Duncan Hunter of California and Ron Paul of Texas, both Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives," who offered a bill that would have blocked student access to MySpace and similar sites on school and library computers. Yet both candidates -- or rather, their aides -- set up their own campaign pages there.

Politicians who don't grasp the culture of MySpace should stay off it.

Narrative, perception and hypertext

I've returned from a short spring break between quarters at Columbus State, a week I devoted entirely to editing a final working draft of my novel and putting it into the mail to several potential agents.

Writing this one has been an interesting experience. I consciously decided to create a traditional novel, one with a linear plotline. It was the structure needed for this particular story. I haven't taught any literature courses for almost a decade, having turned my efforts instead to technical communication and hypertext. Returning now to the craft of fiction, I realize how far I've wandered from the traditional plotline's Aristotelian assumptions about the nature of reality and perception.

In the world of the standard novel, experiences occur through chronology and causation. Characters hasten through a corridor of moments, constantly progressing forward. With each step, however, the corridor grows narrower, as one event or one decision limits the range of possibilities for all subsequent actions or choices. It's essentially a tragic perspective, although the novel often provides a comic alternative by revealing at the end that the characters' own perceptions were flawed or that a secret force has been at work to counter and alter what seemed to be an inevitable outcome.

So I was intrigued, one day after completing the manuscript, to find an article in the New York Times about anthropologist Mary Douglas' new analysis of the "ring composition" in narrative. Douglas concentrates on literary works and sacred texts that are characterized by their "lack of structure, repetition and episodic incoherence." The article's author Edward Rothstein mentions the Book of Numbers, Persian poetry, epics and unconventional novels like Tristram Shandy as classic examples. Douglas believes that these are organized according to an organizing principle of experience very different from the Western sense of narrative, but closer to living experiences when we make sense of events only through dawning realizations:

At first one event follows another. We may not be entirely sure where it is going. Is there a point at all? Then, with declarative emphasis comes the turning, where, with a shock, we hear a first echo. We connect these different moments; a pattern begins to take shape. Then, step by step, other similarities are heard — they too take on meaning — moving backward from the most recent to the earliest in time, until we return to where we began. This kind of narrative needs to be heard again, for it is only in the retelling that the full nature of its order is revealed.

One point I derive from the article is that we have legitimate alternatives available to the Aristotelian aesthetic of chronology and causation of linear narrative. The ring composition is one of those. Hypertext is another, since it operates through simultaneity and association, through an open space rather than a corridor, with options and alternatives opening with each act or decision, rather than closing. Hypertext fiction is still in its infancy, hampered I believe by the absence of tools to allow the full realization of its potential. But its comic aesthetic is promising, nonetheless.

Narcissists on the internet?

The Internet is creating an entire generation of narcissists. That, at least, is the conclusion of a professor at San Diego State University. But is this science, or just another round of generational stereotyping?

Eric Gwinn of the Chicago Tribune reports on the findings of Jean Twenge, who maintains that "Young people born after 1982 are the most narcissistic generation in recent history." We know this because, among other transgressions, they're flaunting themselves shamelessly on MySpace and You Tube.

The bulk of Gwinn's piece concerns the dangers of young people divulging personal information without safeguarding themselves, which is a legitimate concern. But the scholarly commentary that frames the issue consists of a very old puritanical theme, that every new medium or new art form releases the latent vices of whatever generation embraces it. It's the same argument, dating back to the 1950s, that claimed rock music had made my generation shockingly libidinous, and that watching Howdy Doody on television turned us into fuzzy-thinking Marxists. It's the same argument that blamed MTV for spawning a generation of iconoclastic hedonists, the likes of which the world had never seen. It's the same argument, still current today, that claims video games are responsible for youth violence, in the schools and on the streets, which had never been a problem before. So why shouldn't MySpace turn the young people of today into narcissists?

Besides being puritanical, the argument simply misunderstands the medium it's criticizing. YouTube and MySpace, two of the social networking sites that Twenge singles out, are part of the Web 2.0 development of the Internet, which encourages user participation and user creation of original content. In each case, the "content" consists of text and images about the users themselves -- but in the construction of a social network, not as an isolated platform. An individual "all about me" website, unlinked to anything outside itself, would be narcissism, the narcissist alone in a room with a mirror up to the self. MySpace is an open party, where each guest arrives in an interesting outfit and strikes a pose to draw attention.

Social networking online is not much different from networking in person. It involves the conscious creation of a public image, a persona, selecting aspects of the personality, some heightened and others downplayed. The persona isn't the true, full personality, but rather a somewhat artificial projection. The healthy, integrated individual recognizes it as such, and doesn't confuse the projection with the core personality, the construct "out there" with reality.

In addition, educator Andy Carvin has pointed out how Twenge misconstrues the "ethos" involved:

She also makes too much of the fact that some of these tools have brand names that embrace the first-person, such as MySpace and YouTube. Twenge equates these tools with being “all about me.” They are about me, but not in the way she thinks they are. The vast majority of people who use social networking sites aren’t in on it to become famous and have hordes of adoring fans. Sure, some people are there for vanity or proto-celebrity purposes, but most people are there for us, not me. They’re communities where people come together to find each other and bond over likeminded interests. They’re communities where people reinforce interpersonal relationships through sharing and creating content. The names MySpace and YouTube are merely references to the fact that they’re an experience built around your interests and creative abilities - and the others who share those interests and abilities. Just as Time Magazine botched it when they declared “you” as person of the year, Twenge misunderstands the ethos of social media, not recognizing that users of social media do it because they care about the notion of “us” and want to be a part of something bigger than themselves.

Jean Baudrillard: March 7, 2007

French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard, who among other achievements extended McLuhan's critique of media as a controller of perception, died March 7, 2007. Buried deep in evaluating final projects and giving exams at Columbus State, I wasn't able to pay tribute to him at the time of his passing.

I was and continue to be an admirer of his thought, although I found his actual writing to be almost impenetrable. In the mid-80s, a graduate student friend at Ohio State, very up-to-date in postmodern theory, lent me his translation of Baudrillard’s 1972 work For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. I did my best to get through it, but found myself frustrated enough at one point to throw the book against a wall, so it could share my pain.

His 1988 work The Ecstasy of Communication brought me similar grief. But I understand enough in the abstract to recognize the importance of his thoughts on the seductive power of media to substitute a modeled hyperreality for physical reality.

Baudrillard used the term "simulacra," from Plato, to describe an historical progression of how art and media have created different types of "copies" or nature or reality: from representations of things, to idealizations; then on to mass-produced mechanical reproductions, ending in our time of electronic, digital simulations of things. This is the age of hyperreality, virtual reality creating what he called a "desert of the real."

A challenging, controversial figure. I have a dream of someday returning to his work, when I'm older and much more patient, when I have time to savor his depths and the intricacy of his style. That won't be any time soon, though.

For an excellent overview of Baudrillard's work, check this site from the University of Western Ontario.

Blogging isn't CB radio, but .

Back in 2003, when the Chronicle of Higher Education wondered to itself whether blogging would go the way of the CB radio, the question was already a cliché. It's turned out to be a cliché with impressive staying power, since people are still posing that question online today, as if it were some sort of novel idea.

What irritates me about the question isn't its relevance, but its technological and cultural snob appeal. It assumes that CB was a perfectly serviceable tool, appropriately used by taxi drivers and truckers, until uneducated masses of enthusiasts swarmed upon it, like flies on the carcass of a wildebeest. Americans filled the airwaves with a babble of pointless, inane chatter, before suddenly abandoning all their radios in the dumpsters of interstate rest stops.

Blogging, the suggestion goes, might prove to be just another silly fad, like CB. Everyone's blogging now, but soon we'll all repent our foolishness and feel embarrassed about those blogs we stuffed with our inanities.

I'm disinclined to be dismissive. I suspect that the CB radio craze was a signature event in American culture of the 1970s. The fact that it was short-lived doesn't diminish its significance. Perhaps by attempting seriously to understand the appeal of the CB, we can better understand the current blogging phenomenon and make clearer predictions about its future.

One problem with CB radio phenomenon is that it dates to the 1970s, a decade that was hard to take seriously even while we were living it. Citizens band frequencies/channels had been available to the populace since the 1940s, but as late as the 1960s they were used only commercially by radio dispatchers and cab companies. Transistor technology eventually made the hardware affordable, and the FCC opened additional channels to the public. But improvements in the technology didn't themselves create the sudden, unprecedented demand for these radios.

The root cause of the CB craze was, in fact, a political event: the passage of the universally despised national speed limit of 55 mph. In 1973, an act of Congress turned every American motorist into a potential outlaw. The CB became the most essential weapon Americans had for combating the federal government's attempted curtailment our right to drive as fast as we chose and squander as much gasoline as we could afford to.

Used at first by interstate truckers, for the practical purpose of outwitting the highway patrols, the CB became a romantic symbol of the era. Truckers themselves, usually liminal figures in the national mythology, enjoyed a short period of glory, replacing the cowboy as the symbol of independence and rebelliousness. Two major stars of the time, Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds, played truckers in some of the biggest movies of their careers. A 1975 song titled "Convoy" by C.W. McCall made its way to the top of the charts around the world.

The 1970s was the decade of the road. For those who weren't around at the time, it's hard to grasp the sense of discontent, restlessness and dislocation that characterized the era.

Hitting the road had become a central theme of popular culture even before the national speed limit. As early as 1971, Carol King lamented about singing "One more song about moving along the highway / Can't say much of anything that's new."

Maybe it was the national hangover we were suffering after the turbulent, assassination-filled 1960s. Maybe it was weariness over our mounting losses in Vietnam and disillusionment with the political process that eventually culminated in the Watergate scandal. Maybe it was a series of recessions and a sense that the country was losing its competitive edge internationally. Maybe it was the fact that, as McLuhan once noted, societies where social mobility is diminished just naturally become nomadic.

Whatever the reason (or, more likely, combination of reasons), we were suddenly a country of Jack Kerouacs, all of us on the road searching for something we couldn't define. The CB radio filled a growing void. We'd lost our old communal ties, and required a tool to build new social networks on the highways. We were lonely. But more than that, we were yearning to reconnect with a unique American character we felt we'd lost. The CB wasn't just a radio: it was a stage where people developed complex, exaggerated, often comic personas for themselves. The airwaves were all at once filled with distinctive characters, sometimes almost mythic figures, joining in a great Whitmanesque chorus of American voices.

And then the craze ended, as suddenly and (at least on the surface) inexplicably as it had begun. But the end, I think, can also be linked to a political event: the 1980 presidential election, when Ronald Regan succeeded Jimmy Carter to the office.

Everone remembers Jimmy Carter as the president of "malaise," even though he did not actually use the word in the infamous address when he attempted, more frankly than the American public was comfortable hearing, to diagnose the nation's ills, its failure of nerve and loss of self-confidence. The word has nevertheless attached itself to the Carter administration -- unfairly so, because the whole decade was a period of malaise, not simply the four years he served as President. Ronald Reagan was not a great President, whatever the conservatives' nostalgia for him would claim, but he was the cure for the malaise that ailed us at the time. He restored Americans' belief in themselves and in the future.

His voice unified the country, reunited us with our communities and with our sense of self. By the time the national speed limit was repealed in 1982, the CB craze was already well over.

The CB served a social, political and emotional need of its time. Once those needs were satisifed or could be met in other ways, the craze ended. Blogging may also be a patch on some contemporary wound to our collective psyche, some ache that can only be soothed by spinning new social networks where we can proclaim and celebrate our individualities, while also solacing ourselves in the comfort of the crowd. History has shown that when we suffer the curse of living in "interesting" times, we develop interesting media to help us cope.

Diebold backing away from paperless voting machine business

Here's a follow-up on comments earlier this week about the value of a paper trail: Diebold -- infamous for its paperless voting machines -- is lamenting the damage done to its image as a manufacturer of fine safes and teller machines.

As a citizen of a state (Ohio) that landed in the Bush column through voting fraud during the 2004 elections, my heart bleeds for a company whose chairman Wally O'Dell promised to deliver our Electoral College votes to the White House resident.

For more specifics, check this story at Black Box Voting.