This week I realized that the internet has won; the famous tipping point has occurred, and people (sorry; that is journalese for "everyone I know") are getting their information off the web, not from print publications. My completely-subjective evidence:
--I bought the Times the other day for two important stories, the State of the Union speech and Steve Jobs's announcement of his new Ipad. It lies unopened. I already absorbed what I had to absorb about both stories, didn't get to it.
--Yesterday Avi, a commenter on this site, got into it with a big Israel supporter, Smndoerksen for more than 20 comments, under another sharp post from citizen-journalist Bruce Wolman. You can see their crackling dialogue here. At one point, the two arguers switched into Hebrew. This is a new form of communication, and as James North says, a journalistic art form.
--The journalism I do read in print, like this smart piece about dogs as children, has an increasingly webby feel to it, strong point-of-view, informal style. Citizen journalism is affecting everything.
At the risk of stating the obvious, people are moving to the web because it's more exciting, it's completely immediate, the writers are well-informed, and you see someone's mind in action rather than through 100 corporate filters, which characterized a lot of my labors in the MSM. People are more sophisticated about information than ever. It's a new world.
Avi crushed Smndoerksen in the debate; congratulations, Avi.
He did. Cheers Avi.
Yes, he did.
I second Cliff’s cheer heartily, Avi. When you slipped into Hebrew, I beamed. Then when you said his Hebrew was as bad as his English, I actually howled.
Great point. I would think this success has many newspapers trying to get a piece of the action. I hope the ComCast merger does not destroy the accessibility of the internet, A packaged internet pass to newpaper sites will be tragic. It’ll be modeled after cable TV with all the ads and fillers.
Sure they are, Phil. And when I take my old dog (Shirley) for a walk, all those giant screens I see through the windows in the dark are connected to computers?
No, they are connected to cable-TV. And TV is where Americans, at least, get all their information. If they could put milk-glands on a flat-screen motherhood could end at birth.
And with the new hi-def, flatscreens the transformation is complete! Now TV is brighter, better focused, and has a much tighter narrative than real life!
TV is where Americans get their information. Americans devote more time to TV than any other activity.
I went back and read the thread with Avi and Smndoerksen (A Norwegian Jew? The only one I ever knew was named Fjord Iceberg. He was a really cool guy…)
How universal the attitude among Zionists that nobody is allowed to dis-like Israel, or say bad things about her which may not be entirely true! How can they, after….
Oh, never mind. Someday, some intrepid medical researcher will hook a Zionist-supporter up to a brain-scan and EKG thingy, and our whole concept of Zionism will be changed, from a ideology to a pathology. Will I get the credit and Nobel Pizza Prize? Noooo!
Zappa had a pet theory that there was something in beer that made you want to beat up people, but only in groups. I wonder what theories there are about the coctail of zionism, beer and groups then. Something ugly I suppose.
Theory, my tuches! Hook a Zionist-supporter to the machines and you’ll see how much of a theory it is. They go into an acute state of psychological and physiological disturbance. Could they possibly run the rest of their lives on that level, with that degree of grandiosity, brutality and whiny paranoia? Hell no, they’ed end up in jail or 72hr psych. observe. It’s a special place they go to, that zio-place.
Is ziocaine only a current drug. Did Herzl take ziocaine? Did Jabotinsky and Ben Gurion? Or is it limited to American supporters of Israel during the current era?
RE: “Someday, some intrepid medical researcher will hook a Zionist-supporter up to a brain-scan and EKG thingy, and our whole concept of Zionism will be changed, from a ideology to a pathology.” – Mooser
MUSICAL INTERLUDE (Sponsored by Ziocaine™) :
…The deeper you stick it in your vein
The deeper the thoughts there’s no more pain
I’m in heaven, I’m a god
I’m everywhere, I feel so hot.
It’s not a habit, it’s cool
I feel alive
If you don’t have it your on
the other side
I’m not an addict (maybe that’s a lie)
It’s over now, I’m cold, alone
I’m just a person on my own
Nothing means a thing to me
Oh, nothing means a thing to me….
EXCERPTED FROM “Not an Addict”, Paradise in Me(1996), by K’s Choice
Not an Addict (European version) – link to youtube.com
And you know what I think, Phil? [I'm tired, so this isn't going to be too clear.]
If the NYT had told the truth during the lead-up to the Iraq War, if its smarmy columnists hadn’t sneered at us for questioning the need for war, if it hadn’t adopted a polarized view of the world because now the NYT elites were as blue-blood as those they partied with in the Hamptons and NYC penthouses…if all that, the NYT would still have meaning. It doesn’t. It’s no longer all the news that’s fit to print.
And I blame the neocons. They had the access to money and they had the power. Today I blame the the right-wing American Zionists for blocking important strategic info that we need to know. If we go to war with Iran, if that was the meaning of Panetta making a quick secret trip to Israel last week (he goes there, they dont come here?) and this country gets bombs on these shores…….
Look what RawStory published today About Daniel Pipes.
link to rawstory.com
The miles wasted in print on this and similar whackjobs, the time wasted on TV on Israel’s paranoid need for war with Iran, and Americans still don’t know that while this has been going on, Japan and China locked up the world’s supply of Lithium in Chile and other South America countries a year ago. And what’s the significance of that? Lithium batteries for cars and electronics. China has 93% of the world’s rare earths, and is now reducing its world allocation.
Without rare earth metals, we can no longer make a powerful small motor, a nickel metal hydride battery, a Prius automobile or even lasers. The Prius uses a nickel metal hydride battery based on the rare earth metal lanthanum. The world’s production of lanthanum is almost 100% in the People’s Republic of China.
We can’t make cutting tools, military armor, or ammunition without tungsten. We can’t make high-efficiency cooling systems for our power plants no matter what their fuel source—oil, gas, coal, wind, solar or nuclear—without molybdenum. We are fucked. And this assumption that we can create clean energy beyond the next three years is a flat-out lie.
Did you know that the total world production of neodymium is less than 20,000 tons. A single wind turbine electric generator — which China now has the market on after one year — producing 1 megawatt of electricity requires one ton of neodymium. The U.S. installed capacity for electric power production is 1,000 gigawatts, which is 1 million megawatts. So, to replace America’s capacity with wind would require 1 million tons of neodymium. At current world production, that would take around 50 years— if there were no other uses for neodymium.
And where are our former great newspapers on this? Taking editorial direction from Judeoterrorists like Pipes, who is willing to risk wasting precious resources on medieval fantasies of war.
I copied and pasted lines from the rare earth expert Jack Lifton in the previous post and interspersed them with mine. Too tired to do the blockquote thing, etc. Lifton is a 45-year global expert in the field.
I see that they didn’t mention anything about Israel.
I also see that Pipes’ opinion was not well-received in the comments.
No, potsherd, I guess these media massagers assume we’ve reached the turn where the American people are prepared to accept that bombing Israel is in OUR interest, even though 16 intel agencies said it was not a threat, and that the American people will go along with Israel’s horrific paranoiac need for war at our expense. A need that will threaten our national security more than 911 ever did.
RE: “Did you know that the total world production of neodymium is less than 20,000 tons?” – MRW
ME: I did not know that! (channeling Johnny Carson)
Kennedy was wrong. In American terms, war has now become the last frontier.
I can see the internet as a force overcoming censorship.
I have found it intensely curious why Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn’s book “Two hundred years together” has not been translated to any language, anywhere.
Here is an author of international repute, people would buy sets of his work and fork out happily good money for his lesser works.
So at the end some mavericks, who couldn’t wait any longer, ended up taking up translation of the book upon themselves. It is coming up, in Polish, in drips and drabs, on polish “alternative” and “independent” websites.
The same happened to Harry Potter, by the way.
Eva, Shmuel said it was translated into Italian, and he said it was in two volumes.
Thanks MRW, I didn’t know that.
I read the first two chapters and found it very informative, as the period he covers includes polish territories. This was time when Poland, like Kurdistan, was parcelled out between three neighbours, and officially did not exist.