Dennis Dunleavy

Southern Oregon University and Blogging at the Fair

Aspyn Gillin, 11, chills out in front of some large fans at the Toys for the Home display at the Jackson County Fair Sunday where temperatures are expected to reach 112 degrees later today.

It's incredibly hot at the Jackson County Fair today -- literally. Our university is giving demonstrations on blogging, podcasting, and other webbish stuff throughout the day.

Lots of people are finding there way out of the heat and coming into our tent, which has terrific air conditioning. Lashes the clown wears an ice pack on her back, but has been hanging out making animal balloons in from of our table for the past hour or so.

Across the table is a Qwest booth and a video game display with rows of machines and young boys playing Battleground 2.

Pictures are force worth thinking about

In the war of words that coincides with every foreign conflict, it is the visual impact of images that is remembered most. Our collective memory  is organized by the recognizable, and often stereotypical, depictions of destruction and death.

Chris Hedges national bestselling book, War is a force that gives us meaning , that war creates its own culture. “It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death.”

Hedges understands the attraction of war as an inevitability -- something that adds purpose, reason, and meaning to life. “War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us.”

What we see in the scenes of suffering and carnage in the Middle East may be considered an obscenity on one hand. However, the images are also part of a mythmaking process – stream of visual messages sold to us by politicians, generals, historians, filmmakers, writers, and even journalists (Hedges, p. 3).  The mythmakers, according to Hedges, bestow war with qualities such as “excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty.”

Pictures of war are all of these things and there is a sickness in them that we have seen many times before. In the continuing crisis in Lebanon, for example, apparently the United States media appears to be presenting a very different picture than its counterparts around the globe. Recently, a few commentators have taken note of the disparities in how the conflict is between covered by the U.S. media than it is by the rest of the world.

Washington Post writer Jefferson Morley has been keeping track of what the rest of the world has been saying about how the Western media’s coverage of the crisis dramatically differs from the rest of the world.

In his analysis, Morley quotes from an article in the Lebanon Daily Star by Marc Sirois criticizing the highly sanitized versions of the news in the Western press. According to Sirois: “The vast majority of Western media reports do not accurately portray the fact that the vast majority of the dead are civilians, most of them women and children….For the most part Western television viewers, newspaper readers, and Web surfers are reading highly sanitized versions of the news, spun in such a way as to dilute the brutality of the Israeli onslaught and especially to ensure that blame is placed squarely on Lebanon in general and Hizbullah in particular.”

What Morley and others seem to want us to think about is how the U.S. media spins a more sanitized version of the news without the audience ever questioning the coverage. 

In his essay, Morley compares recent news reports from U.S. media with those of European news outlets. Apparently, the reportage is pretty skewed and reflects the foreign policy interests of the U.S. in the region.  Morley discovered that while the U.S. media focused predominantly on the evacuation of U.S. citizens from Lebanon this past Wednesday, European news agencies were reporting the increasing number of civilians being killed in the conflict.

Pictures from this past week playing up the evacuation of U.S. families from Lebanon in the news media support this claim.  At the same time, the killing of Lebanese civilians, especially children by Israeli air strikes was downplayed. Morley concludes, “The disparate reaction to Lebanon's civilian casualties may simply reflect the larger beliefs of the societies in which journalists work.”

At this point, we should reconsider what exactly is the work of journalists. Is it a journalist’s job to inculcate readers with particular tastes, values, and ideologies? As a journalist, turned educator, it is impossible to not to think about how news decisions are made. 

Increasingly it is clear to me that the events that shape what is determined to be news are interpreted through a complex array of filters -- personal, social, professional, institutional, cultural, and even political. The importance to journalism, and ultimately public confidence in the press, is that we should be able to recognize and acknowledge our biases and make transparent the processes in which news is gathered and presented.    

Public Journalism in the Classroom

The following article was written at the end of the quarter and is reposted here because I feel it speaks to the power of blogging and internet education. The essay was also recently linked to Robin Good's terrific blog called Teaching and Learning Online.

I am also extremely proud of our students for the work they did trying to understand the complexities of public journalism and blogging.

Here's my story:

Recently, our Public Journalism class at Southern Oregon University produced a number of insightful works on its blog "Student Matters". The issues covered ranged from popular entertainment to politics. Overall, the project was a welcome and exciting exploration into the brave new world of Internet communication.

Unceremoniously, we approached “blogging” and its environs the “Blogosphere” with a good bit of trepidation. As a first of its kind experiment on the SOU campus, our goal was relatively simple –Open up a conversation on campus about issues that matter to students.

This is what blogging does, for better or worse.

Blogging opens up to the world conversations between students and teachers, students and students, and community and students.

Stephen Downes in the online magazine Educause Review defines educational blogging as a form of personal publishing.   

A blog, therefore, is and has always been more than the online equivalent of a personal journal. Though consisting of regular (and often dated) updates, the blog adds to the form of the diary by incorporating the best features of hypertext: the capacity to link to new and useful resources. But a blog is also characterized by its reflection of a personal style, and this style may be reflected in either the writing or the selection of links passed along to readers.

Blogs are the core of what has come to be called personal publishing in an increasingly hyper-staurated world of information.

We explored the potentialities of public journalism through blogging about our college campus in both theory and practice. We took what we learned from listening to others in the community that have come before us. We followed the discourse about blogging and how it can affect change. 

Ultimately, we created the Student Matters blog as an online journal and a space to explore the principles of community-based learning.

Essentially, community-based learning signifies proactive engagement in problem solving. In this case, students determined that our community was on campus and that it would generate a sufficient number of issues worthy of reporting. Some of these issues included, the Higher One banking system, the search for a new university president, residence hall and health center policies, free speech on campus, and other matters students deal with while enrolled in college.

Writing assignments were divided into three categories: journalistic reportage, opinion and commentary and arts and entertainment reviews. Right from the start, the biggest obstacle in this class centered around learning how people define “public journalism.”

In the emerging world of Internet communication, especially in the Blogosphere, we quickly discovered that there are more questions raised by the activity than there were answers. Everyone seems to define public journalism differently.

At the heart of the issues of surrounding public journalism, also known as participatory or citizen journalism, resides a tension.

Cynthia Care, a student who investigated community-building and sustainability issues, comments, “Today there is a conflict between corporate interests and the accessibility of communication, information and knowledge via the Internet.” The very public nature of blogging, one that is inherently more personal in tone than practiced by traditional “objective” or “impartial” journalists, produces a dialect of incredulity.

Jerry Clarkson eloquently explains the problem with blogging and public journalism is mostly one of perception. As Clarkson argues:   

“Public journalists tend to more activist in their approach. While this activism role might   appear to create a biased approach and therefore foster trust issues, I believe that it works in reverse. Once we acknowledge our biases those reading our critiques can understand our frame of the story and accept the honesty with which we approach it.”

Care observes that the oft-noted public frustration with corporate media as provided the impetus for public journalism.

In her essay, “The Internet as a Tool for Common Good,” Care examines the historical context between private and public interests. She explores the notion of “the commons” as a “set of inherited gifts” that everyone has access to. Historically, these “inherited gifts” were assigned to natural resources, but later included social and cultural gift. It is this second set of “gift” (cultural and social) that the writer notes as “gifts” of language, art, science, and now, the Internet. For Care, and many others, the Internet has become a social and cultural commons, “an inexpensive forum for public expression, which is easily accessible to independent voices.”

Tensions or conflicts between public and private forms of expression and reportage are rooted in how people perceive one form over another.

Matt Gemmell, a photojournalism major, defines public journalism as “any news produced by someone other than a professional journalist.” Now, the user is faced with the challenge of choice.

During the quarter, students analyzed online stories from the local newspapers to find that feedback forms on the Internet allow readers to correct inconsistencies and incongruities of the account.

In one story about a motorcycle accident in front of the University, comments about the story ranged from eyewitness accounts to the incident that were not reported in the newspapers, as well as a correction posted by the sister of the motorcyclist. In this way, readers could hold the newspaper more accountable on the Internet than they could in the antecedent traditional print format.

Jeremiah Page sums up the phenomenon by contending, “People can hold the journalist responsible for accuracy, bias, conventions, and relevancy. Instead of simply learning about something and being told about an event we can be part of the solution. This is revolutionary!”
Gemmell points out further by claiming that, “public journalism is redefining the way we think of tradition journalism.”

For Page, “Public journalism takes journalism into a completely new sphere that has never been possible before. Public journalism has transformed the recipient into a potential participant.”

Donald Lind, a gradating journalism major, believes, “Today’s media is easy to dismiss as untrustworthy. But today’s technology can challenge the press like never before.”

At the same time, William Hastings found that the notion of public journalism promulgates controversy. “I feel that we are ‘feeling’ our way through the many [implications] the Internet can have for journalism, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

One of the analytical frameworks used to explicate blogging in the course was Robert Putnam’s idea of “social capital”, which builds upon Metcalfe’s law of the Internet. Metcalfe, who is credited with developing the Ethernet, believes the number of possible linkages between users of the Internet grows as the square of the number of linkages increases. Moreover, Metcalfe’s law states that the community value of a network of users grows as the square number increases.

Imagine the blogosphere as an enormous shopping mall with millions of rental shops. Every time the user selects one shop to browse in they are immediately connected,

indirectly and directly, to all of the others. For Hastings, “Ultimately, public journalism [on the Internet] allows us to connect to one another. This is a central process in making change and broadening … perspective.”

Interconnectivity and social networking, something that is inherently part of the blogosphere, presented itself several times during the quarter.

For example, after a student posted a rather pointed criticism of the financial Higher One banking system, one of the corporation’s founders responded to the blog. In a surprising act of transparency, the executive apologized for any problems the student may have had and encouraged him to follow up if he hadn’t been taken care of soon. Interestingly, other students began posted comments and complaints about the banking service to the site.

Although the students’ comments were in no way journalistic in any traditional sense, the posting could certainly give way to more investigative reportage in the future. Perhaps, this is what the executive understands. That if he were to let even the most seemingly innocuous and obscure  blog posts to go unanswered more disgruntlement may emerge.

On the other hand, perhaps the executive’s concerns were genuine and sincere, and that his intentions were socially and corporately responsible. In some respects, the Internet brings journalism back to a time when writer felt free to lash out at corporations and governments – back to a time of Nellie Bly, Upton Sinclair, George Seldes, and I.F. Stone.

As Lind contends, “Instant access to the world has allowed citizens to take apart news stories that might have been universally accepted a decade ago.” The dynamic and interactive agency of blogging suggests how the Internet makes older ways of gathering and using information obsolete.

Students learned about their own work through the study of Marshall McLuhan’s four laws of the media, which claim that newer technologies extend media and make them stronger, reverses some of the older media’s characteristics, generates new forms of communication and media, and finally, enhances qualities of media.

The reality many of us are coming to terms with now is that the future is already here and waiting for us to join in the larger conversation that public journalism promotes. As Eric Hidle points out, “With new technology comes the obsolescent of old mediums.” In his research Hidle discovered that nearly three of every four Americans now have access to the Internet.

Along with the growth of the Internet comes social networking Websites, such as MySpace, Friendster, Live Journal, Friendzy, Tribe, FriendSurfer, PeepsNation, Emode, and others, that continue to command increasingly larger audiences. In fact social networking websites have risen 47 percent over the past year and online news sites have risen accordingly with them. Hidle’s research of bloggers at Southern Oregon University is significant.   

To put it simply: people are online, they are connected and they are informed.    To compare the current state of our student body with the world would be unfair.  Students at Southern Oregon University are technologically far ahead of the standard citizen.

Every student enrolled in SOU has access to the internet through local computer labs. And, as of June 13, 2006 1,309 students are registered to Southern’s facebook.com  network and 1,873 students are registered to Southern’s MySpace.com network.

This is approximately 40 percent of the student body networked with each other. It can also be reasonably estimated that many students registered with such sites do not belong to Southern’s groups but do network with other members who are enrolled in the school.

For educators as well as students, it is important to consider the obvious implications of such statistics.

Teaching and learning is changing with the Internet. Students are by and large vastly more digitally literate than many of their instructors. This is a generation that was born to and came of age online. The Internet and technology, in many cases, appears second nature for most.

Therefore, setting learning outcomes and educational objective must be concomitant with student behavior. We have entered a brave new world of learning where students are increasingly producing creative and intellectual content for the masses. At this point, there is an imperative in education to meet students, our future journalists, where they live – online in cyberspace.

Not only is this important to the current state of higher education in this country, but this directly applies to incoming students. In a study conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life project, more than 57 percent of the teenagers presently using the Internet have created personal content in the form of blogs, podcasts, videologs, and photoblogs.

The study reveals “About 21 million or 87 percent of those ages 12-17 are active on the Internet. “The results highlight that this is a generation comfortable with content-creating technology. Teens are eager to share their thoughts, experiences, and creations with the wider Internet population,” the report concludes. 

Summer Jam

Sunday afternoon at the Black Sheep is a place where local musicians gather for a lively session of celtic music.

Professor William Greene is among the large group of musicians who play celtic music at the pub every Sunday. For me, listening to live celtic music, or any music for that matter, is always a treat. What I enjoy most about watching and photographing musicians is that they appear so consumed and lost in what they love to do -- play music.

In many ways, this has always been the same sort of feeling I have when I am making images. It is easy to lose track of time when you have trained yourself over the years to focus on detail and light. The slightest gesture, action, change in light can make such a huge difference.  These pictures  were made in color, but transforming them into black & white provides more of the feeling and tone of what I was feeling when I made them.

Professor William Greene, chair of the Master's in Teaching program at Southern Oregon University playing the fiddle.

Framing Reality through Calamity

Reality is about coming to terms with human experience. 

Sometimes, it takes a lifetime to make sense of what we see, feel and think about. 

Often, I have have a hard time believing that living in a visual culture such as ours makes visual perception any easier. In fact, I would suggest that since the advancement of optical prosthetics, like cameras, coming to terms with what is “reality” has become actually much more mediated and extenuated.

Marshall McLuhan was a careful observer of the interstice between technology and humanity.

McLuhan understood, that what some people call development and progress, causes alarm for others. He belived that there is a psychic and physical cost of technological innovation and enterprise that is often overlooked in modern times.   

When we privilege one sense over another, are we inadvertently changing the course of our interactions with the world—with how we listen, taste and touch? The demands of modern-day visual encounters, those images we consume through watching television, reading magazines, or surfing the Internet, place us in a situation where we do more looking than actual seeing.

I seem to be stuck in a vicious cycle of thinking about images that injure. At the risk of wearing out my soapbox, I find myself coming back to the images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

It has been three years since pictures of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq exposed the public to what turn out to be one of the defining moments of the conflict.

The graphic scenes of humiliation and torture that began to appear in April 2004 subvert any claims to a moral victory in Iraq by U.S. and coalition forces. In addition, images taken during an investigation into a 2005 massacre of 24 unarmed Iraqis in Haditha by U.S. forces show the power of pictures as evidence of violence and suffering.

More than 250 images and nearly two-dozen videos made by guards at the prison are now part of our national collective memory of the war.

Reduced to grainy snapshots depicting the horror and deprivation of prisoners of war, a simple truth reveals how capable we are of inflicting injustice on humanity.

The reality recorded here, of course, is not new in the history of so-called civilization, but it does provide “hard” evidence of our ability to do great harm in the name of all that is good about our country. Perhaps, what these images represent is far more than what they depict. The images signify the mockery of our nation as peaceful, tolerant, and just. 

Has anything changed in the time since the release of the first set of prison abuse pictures?

Can images contribute to justice served?

A few people are now in jail and forgotten in the eyes of the media. A few people have been demoted in rank and have returned to obscurity.

Through the lens, a central narrative in this conflict has been dutifully recorded for prosperity and it’s not a pretty picture.

How can we look at these images of tortured prisoners and see human beings? 

One reading of these images is that they are not pictures of people at all. These are pictures of things. Objects. Once pictured, people are reduced to objects of possession. Those who dare to understand the implications of such images are singed with grief. Something insidiously evil is at work in the world today and we’ve got pictures to prove it. 

These images – a naked truth revealing how human beings are strapped, bloodied, humiliated, and stripped of dignity – signify a larger tragedy in the cultural pathology of a society saturated with visual messages.  We may look at these pictures and remain unmoved. We may see them but still be blinded by apathy and what can only be called the propaganda of mass distraction.

Does the insistent bombardment of visually mediated messages depicting suffering and deprivation reduce our capacity to feel?
Sontag observed, “In a modern life – a life in which there is a superfluity of things to which we are invited to pay attention – it seems normal to turn away from images that simply make us feel bad.”

Writers use frames to organize ideas and concepts into meaningful structures. Take any issue reported in the news today – war, poverty, justice, economics, education, environment – and frames emerge as overarching structures in presenting an opinion.

At the center of an argument, idea, opinion, commentary, analysis, or editorial is a frame – a general abstraction that envelops a wider array of phenomena. Framing is way in which communicators define specific social realities. For Hertog & McLeod (2001), “Some of the most powerful are myths, narratives, and metaphors that resonate within the culture.”

Hertog & McLeod argue that frames have tremendous symbolic power, carry excess meaning, and are widely recognized within a society. For instance, the use of the “horse race” metaphor helps to frame a debate in a political election in terms of winners and losers.   

Brummett (1999) looks to theorist Kenneth Burke’s idea of the “representative anecdote” in terms of understanding how the media frame the news. “Because the audience expects the world to be mediated to them dramatically, and because the media do so by calling up standard, recurrent, culturally ingrained types of dramas, the anecdotal for of the media fits well with Burke’s notion of form as the arousing and satisfying of expectations. We expect newscasts of Presidential election results to be cast into a “horse-race” plot, for instance” (p. 483).

Frames can be thought of as both cognitive and cultural structures used to understand the social world. “Frames provide the unexpressed but shared knowledge of communicators that allows each to engage in discussion that presumes a set of shared assumptions” (Hertog & McLeod, p. 141).

Stephen Reese suggests, “Frames are organizing principles that are socially shared and persistent over time, that work symbolically to meaningfully structure the social world” (p. 140).

Words and images combine, sometimes colliding, to frame social reality by linking assigned meanings and concept that universally understood within a culture.  Early this year, the Sago mine disaster illustrated how news story develop through the cognitive and culture structuring of frames. Headlines such as “Miner Miracle”, “Miracle in the Mine”, “ Miracle in West Virginia”, reveal the framing of a phenomenon.  Framing an event as a miracle implies divine and supernatural intervention in the course of human affairs.

Frames appear dependent on mental imagery that is tied to cultural and social constructs. In turn, the frame functions sum up the essence of something. The frame can be considered in terms of  “miracle” a symbolic strategy in the formation of a discourse. The visual and verbal language encompassing the “miracle” frame becomes a persuasive determinant in the construction of how people may process calamity and trauma.

The “miracle” is a dramatic framing of a plot. This is hardly the first time, nor the last, that the media has used the frame of a “miracle” to explain an event. The term has become a master metaphor for passing off anything that cannot be easily understood.

Teaching Online Journalism

Mindy McAdams from the University of Florida is doing some great work in the area of Online journalism.

McAdams' educational blog "Teaching Online Journalism" is well worth the time it takes to cyberhop over there.

Mindy's latest post, features a note about Richard Koci Hernandez's work with online visual storytelling.

Learning How to Teach on the Blogosphere

This Spring, our Public Journalism class at Southern Oregon University produced a number of insightful works on our blog "Student Matters". The issues covered ranged from popular entertainment to politics. Overall, the project was a welcome and exciting exploration into the brave new world of Internet communication.

Unceremoniously, we approached “blogging” and its environs the “Blogosphere” with a good bit of trepidation. As a first of its kind experiment on the SOU campus, our goal was relatively simple –Open up a conversation on campus about issues that matter to students.

This is what blogging does, for better or worse.

Blogging opens up to the world conversations between students and teachers, students and students, and community and students.

Stephen Downes in the online magazine Educause Review defines educational blogging as a form of personal publishing.   

A blog, therefore, is and has always been more than the online equivalent of a personal journal. Though consisting of regular (and often dated) updates, the blog adds to the form of the diary by incorporating the best features of hypertext: the capacity to link to new and useful resources. But a blog is also characterized by its reflection of a personal style, and this style may be reflected in either the writing or the selection of links passed along to readers.

Blogs are the core of what has come to be called personal publishing in an increasingly hyper-staurated world of information.

We explored the potentialities of public journalism through blogging about our college campus in both theory and practice. We took what we learned from listening to others in the community that have come before us. We followed the discourse about blogging and how it can affect change. 

Ultimately, we created the Student Matters blog as an online journal and a space to explore the principles of community-based learning.

Essentially, community-based learning signifies proactive engagement in problem solving. In this case, students determined that our community was on campus and that it would generate a sufficient number of issues worthy of reporting. Some of these issues included, the Higher One banking system, the search for a new university president, residence hall and health center policies, free speech on campus, and other matters students deal with while enrolled in college.

Writing assignments were divided into three categories: journalistic reportage, opinion and commentary and arts and entertainment reviews. Right from the start, the biggest obstacle in this class centered around learning how people define “public journalism.”

In the emerging world of Internet communication, especially in the Blogosphere, we quickly discovered that there are more questions raised by the activity than there were answers. Everyone seems to define public journalism differently.

At the heart of the issues of surrounding public journalism, also known as participatory or citizen journalism, resides a tension.

Cynthia Care, a student who investigated community-building and sustainability issues, comments, “Today there is a conflict between corporate interests and the accessibility of communication, information and knowledge via the Internet.” The very public nature of blogging, one that is inherently more personal in tone than practiced by traditional “objective” or “impartial” journalists, produces a dialect of incredulity.

Jerry Clarkson eloquently explains the problem with blogging and public journalism is mostly one of perception. As Clarkson argues:   

“Public journalists tend to more activist in their approach. While this activism role might   appear to create a biased approach and therefore foster trust issues, I believe that it works in reverse. Once we acknowledge our biases those reading our critiques can understand our frame of the story and accept the honesty with which we approach it.”

Care observes that the oft-noted public frustration with corporate media as provided the impetus for public journalism.

In her essay, “The Internet as a Tool for Common Good,” Care examines the historical context between private and public interests. She explores the notion of “the commons” as a “set of inherited gifts” that everyone has access to. Historically, these “inherited gifts” were assigned to natural resources, but later included social and cultural gift. It is this second set of “gift” (cultural and social) that the writer notes as “gifts” of language, art, science, and now, the Internet. For Care, and many others, the Internet has become a social and cultural commons, “an inexpensive forum for public expression, which is easily accessible to independent voices.”

Tensions or conflicts between public and private forms of expression and reportage are rooted in how people perceive one form over another.

Matt Gemmell, a photojournalism major, defines public journalism as “any news produced by someone other than a professional journalist.” Now, the user is faced with the challenge of choice.

During the quarter, students analyzed online stories from the local newspapers to find that feedback forms on the Internet allow readers to correct inconsistencies and incongruities of the account.

In one story about a motorcycle accident in front of the University, comments about the story ranged from eyewitness accounts to the incident that were not reported in the newspapers, as well as a correction posted by the sister of the motorcyclist. In this way, readers could hold the newspaper more accountable on the Internet than they could in the antecedent traditional print format.

Jeremiah Page sums up the phenomenon by contending, “People can hold the journalist responsible for accuracy, bias, conventions, and relevancy. Instead of simply learning about something and being told about an event we can be part of the solution. This is revolutionary!”
Gemmell points out further by claiming that, “public journalism is redefining the way we think of tradition journalism.”

For Page, “Public journalism takes journalism into a completely new sphere that has never been possible before. Public journalism has transformed the recipient into a potential participant.”

Donald Lind, a gradating journalism major, believes, “Today’s media is easy to dismiss as untrustworthy. But today’s technology can challenge the press like never before.”

At the same time, William Hastings found that the notion of public journalism promulgates controversy. “I feel that we are ‘feeling’ our way through the many [implications] the Internet can have for journalism, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

One of the analytical frameworks used to explicate blogging in the course was Robert Putnam’s idea of “social capital”, which builds upon Metcalfe’s law of the Internet. Metcalfe, who is credited with developing the Ethernet, believes the number of possible linkages between users of the Internet grows as the square of the number of linkages increases. Moreover, Metcalfe’s law states that the community value of a network of users grows as the square number increases.

Imagine the blogosphere as an enormous shopping mall with millions of rental shops. Every time the user selects one shop to browse in they are immediately connected,

indirectly and directly, to all of the others. For Hastings, “Ultimately, public journalism [on the Internet] allows us to connect to one another. This is a central process in making change and broadening … perspective.”

Interconnectivity and social networking, something that is inherently part of the blogosphere, presented itself several times during the quarter.

For example, after a student posted a rather pointed criticism of the financial Higher One banking system, one of the corporation’s founders responded to the blog. In a surprising act of transparency, the executive apologized for any problems the student may have had and encouraged him to follow up if he hadn’t been taken care of soon. Interestingly, other students began posted comments and complaints about the banking service to the site.

Although the students’ comments were in no way journalistic in any traditional sense, the posting could certainly give way to more investigative reportage in the future. Perhaps, this is what the executive understands. That if he were to let even the most seemingly innocuous and obscure  blog posts to go unanswered more disgruntlement may emerge.

On the other hand, perhaps the executive’s concerns were genuine and sincere, and that his intentions were socially and corporately responsible. In some respects, the Internet brings journalism back to a time when writer felt free to lash out at corporations and governments – back to a time of Nellie Bly, Upton Sinclair, George Seldes, and I.F. Stone.

As Lind contends, “Instant access to the world has allowed citizens to take apart news stories that might have been universally accepted a decade ago.” The dynamic and interactive agency of blogging suggests how the Internet makes older ways of gathering and using information obsolete.

Students learned about their own work through the study of Marshall McLuhan’s four laws of the media, which claim that newer technologies extend media and make them stronger, reverses some of the older media’s characteristics, generates new forms of communication and media, and finally, enhances qualities of media.

The reality many of us are coming to terms with now is that the future is already here and waiting for us to join in the larger conversation that public journalism promotes. As Eric Hidle points out, “With new technology comes the obsolescent of old mediums.” In his research Hidle discovered that nearly three of every four Americans now have access to the Internet.

Along with the growth of the Internet comes social networking Websites, such as MySpace, Friendster, Live Journal, Friendzy, Tribe, FriendSurfer, PeepsNation, Emode, and others, that continue to command increasingly larger audiences. In fact social networking websites have risen 47 percent over the past year and online news sites have risen accordingly with them. Hidle’s research of bloggers at Southern Oregon University is significant.   

To put it simply: people are online, they are connected and they are informed.    To compare the current state of our student body with the world would be unfair.  Students at Southern Oregon University are technologically far ahead of the standard citizen.

Every student enrolled in SOU has access to the internet through local computer labs. And, as of June 13, 2006 1,309 students are registered to Southern’s facebook.com  network and 1,873 students are registered to Southern’s MySpace.com network.

This is approximately 40 percent of the student body networked with each other. It can also be reasonably estimated that many students registered with such sites do not belong to Southern’s groups but do network with other members who are enrolled in the school.

For educators as well as students, it is important to consider the obvious implications of such statistics.

Teaching and learning is changing with the Internet. Students are by and large vastly more digitally literate than many of their instructors. This is a generation that was born to and came of age online. The Internet and technology, in many cases, appears second nature for most.

Therefore, setting learning outcomes and educational objective must be concomitant with student behavior. We have entered a brave new world of learning where students are increasingly producing creative and intellectual content for the masses. At this point, there is an imperative in education to meet students, our future journalists, where they live – online in cyberspace.

Not only is this important to the current state of higher education in this country, but this directly applies to incoming students. In a study conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life project, more than 57 percent of the teenagers presently using the Internet have created personal content in the form of blogs, podcasts, videologs, and photoblogs.

The study reveals “About 21 million or 87 percent of those ages 12-17 are active on the Internet. “The results highlight that this is a generation comfortable with content-creating technology. Teens are eager to share their thoughts, experiences, and creations with the wider Internet population,” the report concludes. 

The Future of Photojournalism

Today, a transformation is taking shape. Within the next 10 years, the demand for photojournalists with experience and knowledge of video, audio, design, writing, along with basic digital camera skills will be the norm, not the exception.

In today’s competitive and changing field, photojournalists must be able to communicate well, edit with deliberation and sophistication, and maintain positive interpersonal relationships in the newsroom and beyond.

How we envision the future of photojournalism depends on whether we are talking about photojournalism as an occupational group with specific sales markets to target, or as an artistic genre and style of visual storytelling. 

As an occupation, there is little doubt that the playing field has been leveled by digital technologies. Pictures are not only easier to produce, but with the Internet they are also easier to share. In fact, digital photography, especially the use of camera phones by average unskilled citizen shutterbugs, could be having the same effect the Kodak One camera had on the itinerant portrait photographer business in the early 1890s. The Kodak put a lot of photographers out of business, but it also created an unprecedented potential for future generations of image-makers and image consumers.

From an artistic, stylistic, and aesthetic perspective the future of photojournalism has never looked better. Photojournalism education has found its niche in the academy and produces many outstanding young photographers every year. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, visual storytelling is flourishing on the Internet though the growth of Websites such as Flickr, Zoto, Smugmug, Scrapblog, and Snapfish. Granted, we may not be talking about talent like Cartier-Bresson or W. Eugene Smith on the Internet, but many of the images on these Websites demonstrate strong photojournalistic characteristics. Many of the images are candid, raw, snaps of life that tell stories about the human condition.

Like the best photojournalism, there are people uploading images to Flickr and Snapfish that can make us cry, laugh, or think about the world in new ways. 

The future of photojournalism both as an occupation as well as a means of personal expression necessitates a more humanistic and empathic style of visual practice and reportage. While markets for paparazzi pictures will continue to sustain our prurient interests, it is important to remember why people take images in the first place – to fix memories in time.

Photojournalism is an approach to photography that empowers people to record life as it happens, not just as people want it to happen. Consider the demand for photojournalistic style wedding images as evidence that people are weary of cheesecake pictures or Aunt Greta’s fake smile in every shot.

Since the 1980s photojournalism has been at a crossroads. Digital technologies do impinge on the routines, rituals, traditions, and behaviors of photojournalists. Digital technologies do require a variety of skill-sets that could not have been imagined a half-century ago. The photojournalist of the future will understand the ethical responsibilities that come with electronic digital manipulation.

The photojournalist of the future will also know computerized pagination processes, web design, audio and video, and digital workflow systems. In many ways the future of photojournalism, through digital technologies, extends our capacity for seeing and making things seen in new and exciting ways. At the same time, we must be also take into consideration that digital technologies may represent an increased liability for photojournalists – one that continues to wrestle with issues of credibility, truthfulness, and sensitivity in a world hyper-saturated with images.

Is war photography and other visual violence necessary?

It’s been more than a decade since I last looked at Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s classic work “Flow” but finding it again on a bookshelf was an invitation to reflect on the role of photography in society. Although Csikszentmihalyi focuses on the psychology of optimal experience, I have always read his work through a photographic filter.

When thinking about happiness, or what makes people happy, Csikszentmihalyi reminds us “the universe was not designed with the comfort of human beings in mind.” Yet we spend our lifetimes in search of happiness against all odds, natural and human.

Photography came about in history partly as a way to compensate for the failings of human memory as well as a way to fix our imaginations in space and time.

We hold up mental pictures to remind ourselves of things. We hold up, in our mind’s eye, two pictures. One picture shows us as things once were and the other picture reveals all things hoped for. The mental pictures of our world we hold up for ourselves are not entirely real. These mental images are mediated by our hopes and fears – constructed for us by the media.

We are bombarded with visually mediated messages in society today that may attempt to construct feelings of order and stability for us.  We are comforted with the illusion that photographs may bring a sense of calm and control over the chaos that is all around us. The pictures, even the most troubling and violent ones, act to bring about a sense of knowing and being there.

Last week, Annie asked a provocative question that I continue to struggle with. The thesis of her reports postulates: “Is war photography and other visual violence necessary?”

Intuitively, I want to respond with an absolute yes. We need images to shock us into the present and to remind us of all past injustices and sufferings in the world.

Images of war are critical in building shaping public consciousness.

Images from past conflicts such as Joe Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima flag-raising contributed to the U.S. war effort in the Pacific during WWII. At the same time, decades later, Nick Ut’s picture of a young girl fleeing a napalm attack in Viet Nam and John Filo’s image at Kent State helped to turn the tide of public opinion against continued U.S. foreign intervention in the region.

Do images from our present war, especially the pictures of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, help to foment discontent as in past conflicts?

Yes. In fact, the U.S. military is now bracing itself for another scandal involving atrocities in Iraq – atrocities that have been caught on videotape by an Iraqi journalism student. According to USA Today, “Pentagon investigators believe Marines committed unprovoked murder in the deaths of about two dozen people at Haditha in November.”

Do we need visual proof to validate such claims? Yes, not only do we need pictures, but we need them to be from a reliable source.

Annie's question becomes even more important in society today.

The idea of asking the question of whether war photography is necessary speaks to a bigger issue – one suggesting that war images no longer function in the same ways as they have in the past.

Perhaps images of violence have become such a normal part of our visual diet that they no longer move us. Perhaps these images no longer feed our worst imaginable fears, because we have seen them all before – another war, another picture of death and violence.

If true, then, we as a society are moving insidiously closer away from an enlightened civilization and more toward a new Dark Age.

Pictures of war, even though they may longer have the same impact and those in the past, still need to be taken so that they will become part of our collective memory, history, and remain in our consciousness.

How the Digital Camera Improves Photographic Routines

Technological innovation plays a significant role in the history of photography.

Digital cameras, computers, image editing software and telephony all contribute to shaping photographic routines in photojournalism. As part of a much larger trend in society, the use of digital cameras and supporting technologies coincides with a relentless push toward faster, cheaper and greater quantities of information.

Since the 1980s, digital technologies have impinged upon the routines, rituals, traditions, and behaviors of photojournalists. These technologies include electronic digital manipulation, pagination processes, web-based elements, and digital capture and storage. In photojournalism, the digital camera’s capacity for reviewing, editing, deleting, and transmitting images on-the-scene changes the landscape of photographic routines guiding visual practice.

During the past five years, more than 95 percent of all daily newspaper operations have adopted digital cameras as the primary format for image capture, and more than 99 percent use a combination of film and digital cameras. Some studies now suggest that photojournalists are generally more satisfied using digital technology than they were using film (Roehl and Moreno, 2001; Halstead, 2003, Fahmy and Smith, 2003; Seelig, 2004). In fact, many photojournalists perceive the use of the digital camera as a positive influence on routines.

It may be assumed, then, that digital technologies in photojournalism are influencing routines in three ways -- productivity, empowerment and the social interaction between photojournalist and subject.

The digital camera intensifies photojournalism by increasing efficiency, encouraging creativity and experimentation, and redefining the boundaries of autonomy in the relationship between subject and photographer.

Further, technological innovation is bound to the landscape of photographic routines as it coincides with “an increasing capacity to encode a greater amount of information….” as well as a need for “reproducibility, and [yet] another is accessibility – both technical accessibility and economic accessibility” (Coleman, 1998, p. 79).

The shift in photographic routines away from film to digital in photojournalism is now nearly complete, but the transition has taken more than two decades to complete -- beginning with scanning film into computers to create digital files in the 1980s and quickly advancing to the use of the digital camera in the early to mid-1990s.

Reasons for the move away from analog photochemical processes toward full digitalization include, but may not be limited to, the speed in which images are monitored, edited and transmitted on-the-scene has increased; the cost of producing images is cheaper with digital technology when compared to previously experienced film processes; and the quality of digitally produced images continues to increase or surpass film quality. Moreover, environmental regulations played a role. As Bryan Murley observes:

In the mid-90s, there was an attempt by some cities to enforce tighter regulations regarding the disposal of photographic processing chemicals (especially used fixer). The school I was working for at the time went all digital instead messing with the new disposal regulations.

At the same time, use of the digital camera also signifies an increased liability in photojournalism – one that is inextricably bound to the routines of an occupational group concerned about public perceptions, such as credibility, veracity and objectivity.

Understanding the transformation of photojournalism from film to digital requires insight into the social, professional and personal routines contributing to particular behavior and conduct. As Peter Howe (2001) contends, “Technological developments rarely replace what precedes them, though they do force change” (p. 25).

What photojournalists are now learning from their experiences with digital cameras is that technology both constrains and enables certain types of human behavior. Although photojouranlists may feel productive in the quantity of images produced on deadline, they may also feel overwhelmed by demands made on their time. In addition, although photojournalists may feel empowered by the immediacy of reviewing images on the back of the camera, they may also feel constrained by the behavior.

Ultimately, a shift in photojournalistic routines has occurred with the immediacy of digital photography. For some photojournalists the ability to review, edit, delete and transmit images on-the-scene offers more control and autonomy over the creative process. In addition, digital technology is improving the performance of photojournalists in a variety of ways including helping to build better rapport with subjects.

Our Media: It's Real and It's Public

Click here or on the image to link to the slideshow.

This is an example of a mixed-media project using audio from an interview with Terry Longshore, the director of Southern Oregon University's Marimba Ensemble. After resizing and editing my images I used an easy-to-work-with software call "Live Show" to make a Quicktime movie with the still. I then attached an audio file to my Live Show presentation that I mixed in Audacity, a sound editing program that is available for free on the Internet.

I have been trying to understand if the differences between personal media and public journalism. Much of what is produced as public journalism seems to be a form of personal media.

Using the resources of Our Media, a  collective of independent creative types, I believe that in this age of digital media, the lines between personal and public are being completely redrawn.

Our Media is an open-source project run by volunteer that hosts grassroots video, audio, music, photos, text and public domain works for free. In other words, Our Media is a community where people can come together to share and discuss personal media.

I view Our Media as a space for archiving various forms of media such as podcasts and movies I make so that I can share them on my blog and elsewhere.

Visual storytelling is enriched tremendously with the addition of audio. I find that the two format  coexist beautifully on the Internet.

The potential of mixing format -- still, text, audio, and moving images is extremely powerful. The best part of this sort of storytelling is that it is relatively easy to accomplish.

The Armchair Photojournalist: The Future of Photojournalism

Nearly two years ago, photographer and critic, Pedro Meyer, wrote  about some of the trends affecting professional photojournalism today. Meyer expresses concerns over the future of photojournalism in an age of increasingly immediacy, sensationalism, and amateurism. In writing about the images of prisoner abuse coming out of Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Meyers observes:

    If the most emblematic images from this war were photographed by amateurs, if agencies are able to send out people to take photographs who have never taken pictures, but have access to certain places, and if we are into a tidal wave of imagery coming in from all the digital cameras that are flooding the world; I am sure that  traditional photojournalism as is being taught today in schools all over the world,  better have a second look at reality and be prepared to tell their students that things  are no longer how they used to be and therefore need to adjust their expectations. 

Meyers continues:

    The same thing might also prove to be of interest to all those active photojournalists today, who are seeing their bread and butter documentary images being displaced by  pictures of celebrities and movie stars.

The convergence of several trends makes Meyers' take on the future of photojournalism extremely relevant.

I would summarize some of the trends influencing professional photojournalism today as not only the increase in the availability of amateur images made by shutterbugs, as well as the all-consuming and insatiable appetite of our culture for sensationalistic imagery, but also the insidious decline in the Fourth Estate's interest in and access to making images that have any value beyond the commercial, ideological, and political interests of the powerful in society via government and corporate stakeholders.

But don't go blaming photojournalists for the increasing public distrust in mainstream media or the acquiescence of the longstanding journalistic tradition of social responsibility. There are still extraordinary examples of photojournalism as a tool for social change being done today thanks to the Internet.

However, professional photojournalism as a part of a larger journalistic enterprise faces serious challenges in the future. Media consolidation, corporate downsizing, a continuing trend toward "softer" news, and increased competition from serious amateurs is shaking the foundations of what I believe has always been a pretty noble profession.


To understand the symbiotic relationship between the media, corporate America and the government in relation to photojournalism, it is imperative to step back and look at how the field came into being. Photojournalism, from this perspective, is an extension of an institutionally regulated enterprise – mass media.

Photojournalistic ethics and conventions evolved over time and continue to be constrained by personal, organizational, institutional, and moral rationales.

The rationale professional photojournalists use to justify photographing sensitive topics such as showing dead bodies on 1A of the daily newspaper or on the nightly news, are mitigated by popular tastes as well as profits.

The pathos of entertainment has always been deeply embedded in human behavior. In this age of paparazzi, we are compelled to be entertained first by media, and, if there is time, maybe enlightened a distant second.

People understand the power of the image -- image is everything. Put a camera in front of anyone and his or her behavior will change.

Thinking of photojournalism as some sort of "ideal form" that attempts an objective realism or aspires to capture a moment of truth in today's visual culture is a silly and futile notion.

Yet, there are some that hold on to the nostalgia of photojournalism's golden age -- a time when it was possible to believe what we were seeing. I still cling to this hope, but skepticism and observation is a sobering force.

Predicting what photojournalism, as an occupational group, will look like in fifty years is difficult.

But there are a few things we may portend here. First and foremost, the days of photojournalism as we have known them from the golden years of LIFE magazine are gone.

Although, the still image remains a pervasive force in society today, sound, text and movement increasingly augment it.

There is no question in my mind that photojournalism and other journalistic endeavors are being subsumed by an age of "personal media".

Our mass media world is fragmenting into a world of niche (entertainment and information) archipelagoes. I use the analogy of the archipelago because in a sea of information, camera phones, mini-digital video, videoblogs, photoblogs, mobile journalism, blogging, and other form of instant personal media represent tiny islands of content that may be overlooked one day, and then, discovered in the mainstream another day.

The handwriting is on the wall. Personal media will impact the shape of mass media in the future, but it will also be a part of it.

For Karen Becker, journalism has always been a form of institutionally regulated communication.

Becker notes journalism, "As a product" has "a structured hierarchy for conceiving, collecting, constructing, placing, positioning, and presenting information."  In the age of the BLOG, this structured hierarchy is cracking.

Extending Becker's observation to photojournalism, what happens when the profession fails to recognize the decentralizing impact of personal media on the processes of mass media content creation and consumption?

As products of culture, photojournalism helps to determine the extent of an informational and representational system that reinforces a society’s norms, values, and cultural belief systems. The introduction of personal media into a highly structured mass media hierarchy signifies an important shift or turn in our information age.

What we see and what we know are inextricably bound not only by context, but also by our systems of dominant beliefs, values, and norms.

The values and norms that have exerted power of our daily lives, perceived and real are constantly in a state of flux. New technologies are making it possible for more voices to be heard, more faces to be seen through personal media.

Already socially conditioned to a deluge of photojournalistic images, the future of the field is now being dramatically redefined by the potential of personal media and the Web -- for the better or worse.

Finally, getting back to Meyers' concerns about preparing "to tell ... students that things  are no longer how they used to be and therefore need to adjust their expectations."

What I know is this:

Educating the next generation media professionals demands an integration of knowledge beyond the specifics of specialized skills training.   

Although we may well prepare students for future careers with the appropriate technical knowledge, many students still remain challenged by understanding the social, economic and cultural aspects of what they do.

Over the past decade, in the field of photojournalism, students are finding the entry-level market for their newly acquired skills increasingly difficult to negotiate. 

Although venues for display in media seem to expand with the advent of electronic communication, traditional sources of employment such as newspapers appear to be providing fewer opportunities appear available for newcomers. Media mergers, corporate downsizing, and new technologies that help create content cheaper, faster and more efficiently combine to make the job market more a less predictable and more perilous place.

 

Private Eyes and Public Spaces

I haven't heard back from the company representing the security guard in Tom Hawks story. Interestingly, in my public journalism class we discussed the possibility of not entirely trusting the blogger's account of what happened.

The idea that blogging extends journalistic storytelling beyond traditional formats is complex. Could Hawk's posting of this incident be considered a type of public journalism? We couldn't assume that we would learn of the incident on the nightly news, the radio, or in the San Francisco Chronicle.

In this age of instant, information is a commodity that must be accounted for by the context in which it is collected, presented, and distributed. In short, we need to be skeptical.

In this case, I read an e-mail from the National Press Photographers Association list-serv about the post, read it, and decided to comment on the information. But how can I be confident that what I am reading and responding to is legitimate?

How are people able to trust the sources of information? How do we know that the ideas, information, news, and facts are true in an age when anyone and everyone can self-publish on the web?

Who Let the Dogs Out? The New Cold War on Civility and Photography

People have always been known to get a little grumpy around photographers, but since 9-11, something akin to a New Cold War on civility and civil rights has erupted in our society.

Just ask Thomas Hawk, a shutterbug living in the Bay Area. Hawk is an active blogger and posts his pictures and words on different sites such as blogspot and flickrnation. The other day while Hawk was making pictures of a building in San Francisco, a security guard came rushing out waving his middle finger at him. 

Hawk writes:

So today there I was minding my own business shooting 45 Fremont in downtown San Francisco when all of a sudden a Shorenstein Company employee security guard decides to give me the finger in my photographs of the building. Next thing you know I get the typical hassle. Except normally when the guards come out all polite like and all this guy instead comes out middle finger a blazing and telling me that I'm not allowed to photograph the building from the public space.

Marshall McLuhan’s saying that “the medium is the message” pretty much sums up this encounter. In this case, the guard is the medium and message.

No needs for words any more. If you don’t like someone taking a picture, even when they have every right to do so, just ward them off with a one-finger salute.

Jack Anderson spoke about our constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of expression and freedom of the press.  Anderson contends:

" Our Founding Fathers understood that government by its nature tends to oppress those it has power over. Our Founding Fathers decided that there must be, there had to be, there should be and there is, an institution that keeps an eye on government. That is what we do. There is nothing in the Constitution about the freedom to practice law.

There is nothing in the Constitution about the freedom to practice medicine.

There is nothing in the Constitution about the freedom to engage in commerce.

There is nothing in the Constitution about teaching or learning. But there is something in the Constitution about the freedom of the press.

Our Founding Fathers understood that it would be necessary to have a watchdog on government, and that is our role: to keep a watch out."

  --Jack Anderson, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, in 1999 speech at Utah State University.

Thanks to Ted Pease for the Anderson Quote!

In response to this situation I sent an email to the public relations office of the Shorenstein Company who manages the property and hires the building's security services.  I wanted to share my letter on my blog because I think it raises some interesting questions about human visual behavior and the blogosphere.

Dear Press Relations:

I am a journalism professor investigating human visual behavior, especially in photography and society.

I found this blog post on April 17, showing a Shorenstein employee intimidating  a photographer with what is considered in our culture a rude gesture. I am absolutely confident that you train your security people to act professionally and I find this behavior not only offensive personally but also indicative of the times in which we live.

The blog is called Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection and has generated interesting feedback from the photojournalism community about the issues raised by the guard's perception of the photographer's activity as criminal.  As an instructor who teaches public journalism, blogging and visual culture, I find this case to be very interesting.  Do you think the guard would have acted this way if he had known that his picture would been broadcast over the Internet  within hours?  There are several things that we can learn from this incident:

1) Technology democratizes communication to a global audience in an instant.

2) Since 9-11 we have entered a sort of New Cold War on civil rights and civility in this country.

3) We are all stakeholders in a representative democracy, which becomes ever more significant during a time when  the lines between private and public are seemingly being redrawn for us in a digital age.

My final suggestion here:

Your employees should know the laws of this land, because if they don't they may make your company look silly on someone's blog.

Sincerely,

Dennis Dunleavy, Ph.D.

Photojournalism's Social Capital

Last night I watched, on video tape, Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, speak about the meaning of "social capital" to a crowd at the University of Washington recently. Social capital is about building networks of people to faciliate ideas, information, and change.

There is a growing realization in my mind now of how the idea of "social capital" applies to photojournalism and public journalism. 

Putnam's argument focuses on a need to reclaim "public life" in civil society. “social capital calls attention to the fact that civic virtue is most powerful when embedded in a sense network of reciprocal social relations." Putnam claims.

Putnam and many others believe that since the mid-20th century social and civic life has been on the decline. In other words, the web of social networks that have kept America "civic minded" for the greater part of our existence as a country has been unraveling.

According to the Web site, Infed, social capital refers to interactions which enable "people to build communities, to commit themselves to each other, and to knit the social fabric. A sense of belonging and the concrete experience of social networks (and the relationships of trust and tolerance that can be involved) can, it is argued, bring great benefits to people."

As I sit behind my computer in the dark grading papers, checking RSS feeds, blogging, and writing, I am distant and remote from actual human contact. As I listen to Bach or Bread on iTunes, I may not feel any real sense of belonging or any concrete experience of social networking going on. But there is something going on in the background -- something big.

I know that once I click save my ideas, images, and the images of others, like Robert Gumpert's wonderful Baggage Claim e-Card below, will be networked. Although I may not hear from the people that take the time to read my ideas or look at my pictures, I know that I am practicing a form of social networking. My social capital as a blogger, educator, photographer, and friend is alive and well on the Internet. I may not need to belong to any one of the "animal" clubs like the Elks, Eagle, Lions, or Moose to feel connected in a world of wireless immediacy. My pockets are laden with communication technologies, from camera phone and PDA, to the new digital compact flash recorder I am using. 

For Putnam, "social capital allows citizens to resolve collective problems more easily."

I don't think there is any better communication than face-to-face interpersonal exchanges, but the Internet is extending communicative processes beyond anything we have adjusted to.

It has become clear to me that blogs can establish and build social capital that allow citizens to resolve collective problems. For example, last year I wrote about an investigation into possible recruitment practices at Brooks Institute of Photography.  Since this time, dozens of people have commented on the post to share concerns and experiences. Today I am posting a link to the address and contact information for the Braun Law Group that is handling the case.

Clearly, a blog may be considered a civic space for people to gather -- information and ideas are exchanged, which may eventually lead to action and reform.

Martin Fuchs is Back

Martin Fuchs, blogger extraordinaire and former Magnum intern, is back in New York. Fuchs, a native of Vienna, shared a wonderful behind-the-scenes look at Magnum last year on his old blog. Now he is at it again. Fuch's is working as a freelance editor in Magnum's multimedia department "Magnum In Motion" until the beginning of June.

This time around, Fuch's has an even more ambitious blogging project in mind that is particularly focused on students of photojournalism. The new blog is called "Journal of A Photographer" -- something he sees as "a continuation of his New York Photoblog."

In a recent e-mail, Fuchs explains that his goal is to write about his experiences in the world of photojournalism, post photographs from projects, and try provide a "resource for young photographers through a series of audio interviews with photographers, book reviews and a calendar with deadlines for photography grants and competitions."

Fuchs' journal is a terrific resource indeed. The site is extremely well organized and the interface is excellent. I especially enjoyed looking through the calendar of events and listening to his interview with Simon Wheatley.

Bravo Martin!

 

The Pentagon's Entertainment Recon: Is "America's Army" at War with Bush's Family Values Agenda?

It is no secret that the Bush Administration has carefully aligned itself to the promotion of so-called “family values.” In defending a strong conservative agenda on an array of causes aimed at protecting what it believes to be “traditional” values, the White House has been undeniably vocal.

For many years violent graphic visual media has been at the center of the “family values” war against mass media. Family Values promoters blame video games, movies and music for everything from school shootings to disobedience at home.

In fact, at the start of his first presidential campaign in 2000, Bush pledged to “empower parents to protect their children….from harmful material on the Internet.”   

Ironically, two years after Bush came into power, the Pentagon released its brand new weapon in the war to recruit young people into the military called “America’s Army” an online first-person-shooter computer game, that contains – surprise, surprise – violent graphic content.

A screen shot from the game America's Army.

America’s Army, with more than 5.5 million registered users, boasts that players have logged on as many as 94 million hours of online play. Today, the game remains one of the top five online action games in the country.

America’s Army is a FPS or first-person-shooter game. FPS games, like Doom and Quake have been around since the early 1990s. Since then, the games have become the subject of frequent controversy over graphic violence. According to Wikipedia, a “first-person shooter (FPS) is a combat computer or video game, which is characterized by the player’s on-screen view of the game simulating that of the character or First Person view."

In this fantasy world, according to America’s Army propaganda, “We have virtually taken our players through boot camp, through Ranger and Airborne training, and even introduced them to the Army's Quiet Professionals, the elite Special Forces.” Translation: playing at soldiering can be fun – you too can serve, protect, and kill, kill, kill in this virtual universe.

The Pentagon’s strategy to place “Soldiering” at the forefront of popular culture has been a terrific success. Young people are being exposed, at the taxpayers’ expense, to what the Army does – root out evil and destroy it…click…kill…click…kill…click…kill.

Using popular culture as a recruitment tool also puts the Pentagon in the entertainment business and at odds with the “Family Values” concerns expressed by the Bush administration. In short, America’s Army glorifies killing in an effort to attract recruits. With millions of young people playing the FPS game, I guess we can conclude that our current administration’s promise to “protect our children” from the so-called harms of the Internet is nothing short of shallow campaign rhetoric. 

At the heart of this issue is whether you believe what the research is saying. Every day, I walk into classrooms full of young people who have played FPS games for years. Should I live my life in fear that exposure to such games as America’s Army or Grand Theft Auto III will turn my students into rabid killers?

There are many studies exploring the affects of violent graphic visual media on teenagers. Most of the studies, not surprisingly, conclude that exposure to such images make boys more aggressive and less academically inclined.

An empirical review of the last 20 years of research on violence and visual media by researchers Jessica Nicoll, B.A., and Kevin M. Kieffer, Ph.D., of Saint Leo University showed that violent video games can increase aggressive behavior in children and adolescents, both in the short- and long-term. According to the report:

“One study showed participants who played a violent game for less than 10 minutes rate themselves with aggressive traits and aggressive actions shortly after playing. In another study of over 600 8th and 9th graders, the children who spent more time playing violent video games were rated by their teachers as more hostile than other children in the study. The children who played more violent video games had more arguments with authority figures and were more likely to be involved in physical altercations with other students. They also performed more poorly on academic tasks.”

However, in his testimony before Congress following the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colorado, Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, suggested that tracing explicit acts of violence to the visual media people consume can be problematic.

“The tangled relationship between these various forms of popular culture makes it impossible for us to determine a single cause for their actions. Culture doesn't work that way.”

Jenkins continued:

“Cultural artifacts are not simple chemical agents like carcinogens that produce predictable results upon those who consume them. They are complex bundles of often contradictory meanings that can yield an enormous range of different responses from the people who consume them.”

What are the cultural implications signified by the symbolic depictions of violence in first-person-shooter games?

It is interesting to note that journalists have not yet made the connection between the government's development of a violent computer game aimed at young people and Bush’s family values agenda.

I have mixed feelings about FPS games but have been on alert as new studies come out.

As a parent of two small children, I do believe that using taxdollars to fund and promote a product that could have negative consequences on society is irresponsible and problematic for a society which prides itself on human rights. At this point, I am afraid to learn how much money has been spent on this so-called “murder simulator” game, but I can imagine that its development and maintenance costs us a pretty penny,  financially, psychologically and sociologically.

Make Room for Lightroom

Here are some of the features I have enjoyed recently in using Adobe's Lightroom picture browsing software. From top left are screen shots of the Library, Develop, and Print functions.

Adobe is working out the bugs on a new image management system called Lightroom. Now in the Beta 2 stages of development, users can become involved in having a bit of input on what works best for the product prior to commercial release. Lightroom is one of the more innovative and interesting projects at Adobe since the giant software company bought up Macromedia more than a year ago.

According to a Lightroom PR blurb, the software is an "efficient new way for photographers to import, select, develop, and showcase large volumes of digital images." 

There are already a bunch of software programs out there on the market that will do essentially the same thing as Lightroom. Programs such as, Cumulus, Photo Mechanic, and Apple's soon-to-be-released Aperture, are all image browsers that help photographers manage digital files. So, why do we need another system?

I have been experimenting with Lightroom for a few weeks now and there are actually a couple of nice easy-to-use features, such as the print and development functions. More importantly, is that Lightroom, like most Adobe products, is very intuitively designed. If you are comfortable with PhotoShop, Illustrator or other Adobe products, then you will probably find Lightroom easy to use. Adobe's stock-in-trade has always been focused on usability.  Putting Lightroom up in a Beta version gives developers some critical feedback they otherwise may  overlook. As case in point can be found in the many discussion threads attached to Lightroom's labs. Folks already weighing in about some major issues, such as power drag, that will have to be addressed later on.

Lightroom will not always be available for free, and it is currently only for Macs, but watching the product develop through the Beta stages is fascinating.

The tricky issue for Adobe and other companies wanting to grab a share of the image management market will be pulling people away from systems they are already familiar with. I have been using Photo Mechanic since it first came out and feel very comfortable with the workflow I get out of it.  Lightroom, or any other product, will have to compete not only in terms of producing a technically superior product, but always dealing with users like me that creatures of habit.

Read a few reviews of Lightroom by other bloggers

Digital Grin

Luminous Landscape

At play with light: Digital Makes a Difference

I was really excited to have the chance to borrow a Canon 30D camera this week from a friend at school (Thanks Jerry!).

I wanted to see the differences between what I was doing for the past five years using only a point and shoot and now trying out this model of digital single lens reflex camera.

Since I worked with similar camera models in film, the process was not all that strange to me. What I loved about the camera is the ability to take chances with low light, panning, and fill, and then see the results (translate this to mean see the mistakes)  immediately. I made this picture of roses on our table last night at a 6th of a second at f/5.6 with a slight motion pan. For most of my professional career I would never have attempted playing around with the camera as much. In such low light I could guess the results would not be what I would hope they could be. Therefore, I was hesitant to experience and explore light. The process of seeing the images after capture is liberating and I think produces images that are closer to what I see and feel.

The biggest differences between the point and shoot and the DSLR are (1) the quality of the image and (2) the shutter delay factors on the point and shoot. In the end, I feel, both cameras are tool that help us communicate with one another more clearly, and now, more immediately.

The Camera is Just a Tool: Point and Shoot Photojournalism

Liam has figured out how to multi-task by feeding the baby while playing on the computer at the same time. This image was made with a Canon G3 point and shoot and is part of a five-year experiment in learning to rethink how I make images.

For the past five years I have pretty much forced myself to re-learn how to make images using only a point and shoot camera.

I stored away my film cameras and moved to shooting pretty much exclusively with a digital sure shot for several reasons.

First and foremost, using a point and shoot camera has taught me to rethink how I make photographs. The process, for me, has become more conscious and deliberate.

As an experiment, the point and shoot, with its painfully slow delayed release, has made me slow down and consider every element in the frame. In the past, with the SLR, I could easy "spray" whatever I was looking at with a brust of frames.

Now every picture takes great patience.

A young girl waits for a Halloween Festival to begin in Ventura, Calif.

Curiously, as a teacher I have seen an increasing number of students interested in photojournalism come to class with an array of digital cameras, everything from top of the line digital single-lens reflect models to prosumer point and shoots.

For me, it is important to know how students experience what they see with tools they can afford. Ultimately, all students would be working with DSLRs and interchangeable lenses, but in many introduction courses it is impossible to expect a student exploring this field to drop a lot of money on cameras and lenses.

We learn to adjust and adapt to the tools we have.

Recently, I read a story on Rob Galbraith's Digital Photography website about how Alex Majoli of Magnum used point and shoot cameras to cover the war in Iraq. Majoli learned to adapt is style of picture-making to the smaller, less invasive cameras.  In the article Eamon Hickey observes:

To be sure, doing effective photojournalism with point-and-shoot cameras requires some special techniques. Shutter delay is obstacle number one. Like the earliest digital SLR shooters who faced the same problem, Majoli has honed his anticipation skills and learned a new shutter timing rhythm, but he says he can't eliminate the problem entirely.

I am not sure the limitations of the smaller point and shoot cameras outweigh the benefits of the faster and bigger pro digital SLR cameras, but applying the aesthetics of photojournalism to the picture making process makes a world of difference.

In the end, photojournalism is still about relationships -- considering light, social responsibility and interaction with the people and places we photograph. At the same time, another very important relationship to consider is the photographer's relationship to the tools they use to make pictures.

My experiment with point and shoot cameras as taught to appreciate making images in many ways. I am now more conscious of making things seen through light, point of focus and the effective use of storytelling elements in the frame.

 

Blending the Best of Both Worlds: Are High-Definition Video Stills in Your Future?

The San Jose Mercury News is now integrating stills captured from High-Definition Video across print and web platforms.

For more than a decade now photojournalism has been redefining itself in a digital age.

Beginning in the early 1990s, former White House Photographer for TIME magazine, Dirck Halstead, began seriously re-thinking and promoting the future of photojournalism – mini-digital video.

Halstead’s Platypus Workshops have created a new way of thinking about photojournalism, but the transition from making still images to moving pictures for photojournalists has never been a simple proposition. In fact, there has been some resistence to understanding the potential of moving the old to the news. The bottom line, is of course, the bottom line and communication formats as well as platforms are market and audience driven.

Photojournalists, switching over, back in the day a la 1990s, had to wait until the time came when the technology, methods of delivery, and audience adaptation to the new formats improved.

The time may be at hand now for more radical change toward the use of multiple platforms as all of these dynamic forces are now in play.

The newspaper industry, with consistent declines in readership, economic cost-cutting measures, and competition from the Web with increased bandwidths and advertising, is just now coming around.

Still photojournalists at many newspapers are now leading the way toward producing richer ways of storytelling through video, audio, still and graphic presentation of content.

Although this has been in the works for a while now, I think that there may be just enough critical mass to accept that the era of traditional photojournalism is nearing an end.

However, for the foreseeable future, as Halstead notes, “There will continue to be a need for everyday news photographers and television cameramen.”

There are type of photojournalists – those formerly known as news photographers (still) and those formerly known as videographers (cameramen). Still photojournalists seek out decisive moments to tell stories – ones that distill what a moving sequence of images may pass over.

It is in the timing – the release of the shutter at 1/500th of a second – that the power of the still image is released and revealed to the viewer. 

In order to provide more context for understanding these distinctions, Halstead observes, “The fact is that in most cases still and television moments exist in a separate time-space continuum. Still photographs must be acquired at precise moments in time . . . they are moments of interaction between subjects. Television on the other hand, is largely about sequences, the moments that lead up to and follow the still photo moment.

Anyone resisting the shift to using high definition mini-digital video cameras for use across platforms is not reading the handwriting on the wall.

The handwriting simply says, in my words, “You are now at a crossroads – adapt or wither.” 

Photojournalists today have the capacity to pull high-resolution images from video for print and web content. I will even go so far to add that this trend is not some fad, but truly the future of photojournalism.

For years, MSNBC, through the hard work of people like Brian Storm, have been paving the way for integrated-interactive content. Traditional photojournalists such as Halstead, Bill Gentile, Roger Richards, and David Turnley have proven that their work is good enough for the likes of the Discovery and History channels, as well as ABC’s Nightline.

There is a market now (still in its infancy) for multi-media photojournalism and it will hopefully grow exponentially with higher speed Internet access and technological innovation.

To make this case even more abundantly clear, Richard Koci Hernandez an award-winning photojournalist for the San Jose Mercury News wrote today to share how the newspaper is making the big leap from print journalism to storytelling across platforms. The newspaper is running a multi-platform story on the Bay Area bike culture using video, audio and HDV captured stills.

This is a great example of storytelling across platforms and marks the paper’s ascension into the future of the news business.

For Richard, “Today's Merc was a big step for me as a photojournalist and I think a great innovative leap for the department.”

Richard used a Sony High Definition video camera to produce images for online video as well as stills for the print publication.  “With today's publication of our preview of the Tour of California and a story on the Bay Area bike culture I exclusively used a Sony HDV video camera to gather video and frame grabs (6 megabyte stills) to provide all the content for both packages, thus creating an Online presentation and package for the paper with one tool.”

“This change is extremely exciting for me,” Richard said.

I share Richard’s enthusiasm for this medium because it will expand the boundaries of creativity and visual storytelling.

When I viewed the site, I was impressed with the newspaper’s commitment toward integrating words, graphics and images into compelling interactive storytelling – something that can be viewed over and over again. Richard sent along some snaps of the print version of the story for comparison and the overall quality of the HDV stills seems not to have hindered page designers in terms of display.

What is most interesting about new media is the potential to move across  narratives non-linearly. This means, that "I", the reader, control and engage in what I am viewing on my terms to some extent. I am not forced into seeing a story as an editor has laid it out for me. I can, for now, still enjoy the print version of the narrative on “Bike Culture in the Bay Area”, but Online I can explore and shift around at whim.

I think the focus on the future for newspapers should be directed, first and foremost, to understanding and appreciating the richness of new media through visual, audio and textual experiences.

Over time, we will be all the better served for the changes that are underway today.

Do images make us care more or less?

Something insidiously evil is at work in the world today and we’ve got pictures to prove it. The eyes of a nation, once again, turn toward images of suffering and torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Nearly two years after pictures of torture and abuse were made public, we are once again reminded of our capacity to inflict pain on others.

We see the pictures and our insatiable appetite for viewing unimaginable atrocities and brutalities is piqued anew. 

Susie Linfield, in an essay after the release of the first abuse pictures, observes what can only be described as an increasing pathology of shame associated with this scandal.

"The casual brutality of American pop culture-embodied in Internet pornography, video games, rap music, movies, and television shows-has created a generation of moral cretins immune to, or perhaps even delighting in, the horrors of real violence."

Has anything changed in the time since the release of the first set of prison abuse pictures?

Has justice been served? 

A few people are now in jail and forgotten in the eyes of the media. A few people have been demoted in rank and have returned to obscurity.

Through the lens of a camera, the central narrative of the early part of 21st Century is being recorded for prosperity, and it is not a pretty picture.

Can we not take the time to look at these images and see human beings? Do we not see that in some way we are all victims?

Those who dare to understand the implications of such images are singed with grief.

These images – a naked truth revealing how human beings are strapped, bloodied, humiliated, and stripped of dignity – signify a larger tragedy in the cultural pathology of a society saturated with visual messages.  We may look at these pictures and remain unmoved. We may see them but still be blinded by apathy and what can only be called the propaganda of mass distraction.

Does a relentless bombardment of visually mediated messages depicting suffering and deprivation reduce our capacity to feel?

In comparing images showing toilets used as torture chambers to Jackson Pollock's paint-splattered abstract art, Philip Kennicott explains:

"What's powerful, and infinitely sad, about this bloody floor is the silence. Whatever happened in this room, it almost certainly was accompanied by a cacophony of pain. That's gone now. As is anyone involved with what happened there. The garbage on the floor, the opening of a toilet, suggest human beings reduced to refuse. The anonymity of those who may have suffered is absolute."

Susan Sontag understood the power of pictures of deprivation, humilitation and suffering. In her book "Regarding the Pain of Others", she notes, “In a modern life – a life in which there is a superfluity of things to which we are invited to pay attention – it seems normal to turn away from images that simply make us feel bad."

We must make a study of these images of horror and disgust and carefully place ourselves in the skins of the "other".

We must analyze and evaluate what these images come to signify in a culture that promulgates a value for the sancity of human life and the integrity of self.

We must talk about these pictures with friends over dinner.

We must take these images of suffering into our hearts and minds so that we may contemplate our capacity for the brutality and hatred we inflict upon each other. This is what pictures can do. Pictures can make us feel, but only if we have the capacity for feeling.

 

A few snaps

A full moon rises gently over the Siskiyou Mountains of Southern Oregon near Ashland. I made this picture from our porch after accidently locking myself out of the house. I'm glad I had the little point and shoot digital to keep me distracted from thinking about how to get back inside.

In many ways, this picture points out the limitations of the camera. The larger the magnification, the noisier the image gets. At the same time, I do like the flexibility and creativity of using o the smaller digital cameras, not to mention how I can't afford anything else at the moment. I like that I can see something, make an image, and then immediately see the results.

In this scene, I burned down the sky and the foreground. I wanted the moon to pop a bit more. It could still use a little more work, but it's still fun to play.

Valentine's Day in the Darkroom

I noticed the darkroom door to the photo lab at Southern Oregon University has become a little worn thin from use. Thinking of Valentine's Day, I had been looking at things that reminded me of the shape of a heart. This one jumped out at me.

One thing that I recognize now in my photography is that I no longer feel the pressure to create images I once had while working at newspapers.

These days, I make simple images just because they appeal to me for one reason or another. More than anything else, though, making pictures is relaxing and fun.

The Future of Photojournalism: Photoblogging?

Photoblogging may not be the best way to experience images, but in the future it may end up being the most immediate and most prevasive.

For me, I am very happy thumbing through a well-produced coffee table book of photographs by my favorites or strolling through an exhibition.

However, in the day-to-day world, the medium of photojournalism is evolving and redefining itself. Photojournalists are finding ways to keep themselves employed and it is only the few and fortunate that ever get to publish books or hang an exhibit.

The new photojournalism is on the web. It is immediate and includes audio snapshots along with images. This week, award-winning photojournalist Ron Haviv of VII is blogging while on assignment for the Washington Post from Haiti.

The work is especially compelling when accompanied by interviews and natural sounds. There is also an opportunity for viewer to comment on the posts. This sort of feedback opens up the experience and allows people to contribute to the discourse. In a sense, another narrative layer can be created on top of the pre-existing stories being told by the journalist.

I Know that there is a great deal of room for improvement in this multimedia format, but it does seem clear to me that this is where photojournalism is headed -- like it or not.

Check out more of Haviv's work on the VII site.

To "express all the human feelings -- joy, sadness, love and excitement": Those Stubborn Film Camera Fans

There's an interesting editorial in the Japan Times today concerning Nikon's decision to stop producing most of its film cameras this year. The only two models to survive the cut in a digital age will be the F-6 and the FM10. According to the Times, "Last year about 72.2 million digital cameras were shipped compared to only 6.4 million film cameras."

What is interesting about the editorial is the following claim:

"Certainly, digital cameras are handy. But film cameras offer what digital cameras cannot -- high-quality images at a reasonable price and a better feel for taking pictures."

Say what?

Maybe that would have been true a few years ago, but I am not convinced the writer's claim can hold water today.

Newspaper in England will "Thrive" with Casual Photographers

A link to a story on the National Press Photographers Association list-serv this morning caught my attention.

An article on the website Hold the Front Page reports that a newspaper in England, The Manchester Evening News, is ditching its six-member photo staff and replacing them with "casual photographers" and photo agency pictures.

The move, according to newspaper management, is one that will change the way the publication works "in order to thrive in a digital future."

In other words, thriving in a digital future is management blither-blather for sacrificing journalistic integrity and quality for cheaper content and more quantity. To thrive in the future, for business owners, means cutting trained professional news staffs in order to increase company profits. 

After all, why should a newspaper have to pay a full-time staff photojournalist when it can exploit "casual photographers" who are willing to offer them pictures at zero, or, next to zero cost? 

The economics of keeping newspapers running in a declining market is understandable. However, justifying the cuts by saying that a staff photojournalist position is now "redundant" in a digital age is hard to come to terms with.

The handwriting on the wall for the newspaper industry actually began in the 1980s with a structural shift in editorial-advertising practices and management styles. I am inclined to think that what we are now witnessing at many newspapers is not only the result of these shifts, but also a failure by journalists to identify ways to sustain their profession in the future.

If newspapers can replace photojournalists with "casual photographers", then they certainly can replace reporters and editors with "casual" staffs as well.

Read the term "casual" here to mean volunteer content providers and an over-reliance on "hand-outs" from sources outside the journalistic profession.

Photojournalism: The Personal Touch

Dai Sugano of the San Jose Mercury News spent 15 months documenting Hmong refugees.

Dai's video journal about his experiences as a photojournalist and as an immigrant provide an insightful and moving perspective. Dai's work is always from the heart, but hearing his voice and seeing some of the personal pictures made of him with the family he reported on for so long really adds another dimension to the storytelling process.

Seeing Dai's online presentation strengthens my conviction that mixing old and new media to enlighten as well as to inform and entertain is a great blessing. Knowing how the images were made -- what was going on in the photographer's head at the time -- plays an important role in how we ultimately interpret a story. I am grateful to learn about the family's life through Dai's lens. However, I am even more grateful that we can learn about the Hmong people through Dai's heart and his relationships.

Another Nail in the Coffin Story on the Death of the Newspaper Industry, Broadcast Too.

I just read another one of those goodbye newspapers-hello new media articles this evening that caught my attention.

In Rosabeth Moss Kanter's final "Business of America" column for the Miami Herald there is little teary-eyed prose that longs for the ink on your finger days and much much prescient gazing into the crystal ball of what's coming up next.

Kanter cites the already familiar Newspaper Association of America statistics claiming that between 1998 and 2005 weekday newspaper readership dropped from 58.6 to 51 percent for adults, from 43.5 to 38.4 percent for 18-24 year olds, and from 45.9 to 36.8 percent for 25-34 year olds.  Kanter argues that our present "mass media" is increasingly becoming "niche media."

It all comes down to want audiences want. For Kanter, there's a list:

New media audiences want to be more engaged and in control. They want to:

• Direct the action (video and online game players).

• Produce the package (on-demand viewing; content recorded for replay).

• Create the content (short Web films; blogs).

• Develop their own networks (e-mail communities with pirated content; news spread virally by hitting ``forward'').

But Kanter is not a "doom and gloom" thinker. Instead, she believes that "new media rarely eliminate old media; they learn to live side by side."

Will the virtual ever fully replaced the physical? Kanter doesn't think so and I'd agree. Human beings are still attached to their senses, at least for now. Just because we can live and die in cyberspace doesn't mean we have lost our sense of touch and smell.

Yes, newsprint can be stinky, especially if it gets wet. When was the last time someone tried to sniff a computer screen?

Attack of the Blog Hackers

There are many wonderful things about this brave new world of increasingly cheaper and faster modes of communication. New technologies provide us with the potential to connect smaller communities with larger communities of like-minded souls.

At the same time, there is this feeling that these same modes of communication are also fragmenting groups of people according to niches and special interests. Traditional mass audiences – one that mainstream advertising and big media has used to sell us products and presidents – are splintering.

Control over content on the Internet is, at present, no longer entirely predictable or guaranteed to be authentic. Reliability of content verifiability and veracity is critical.

In fact, the new technologies that allow us to keep connected and expand our communities is much more susceptible to surveillance and tampering from outside, often anonymous sources. Nevertheless, the convergence from analog to digital is well underway; with it, however, comes this present period of sociological adjustment, insecurity, and vulnerability.

It is reasonable to be suspicious of our virtual environments.

With every new opportunity on the Internet for learning and building community, serious challenges emerge. Because the realm of the Internet is a public space, the best and worst of human nature will prevail.

Weblogging or blogging provides an excellent example of how susceptible our emerging communication platform is.

Recently, a teacher who was conducting some research on the Internet contacted me about my blog, which she claims contained pornographic material on it. She discovered my blog during a search and was shocked to find advertisements for male reproductive organ failures and other such things.

Can people hack into a blog and post offensive material without the author’s permission or knowledge?

Yes, unfortunately they can. Absolutely. There are several ways people can manipulate the content of a blog, even if there is the author believes the material to be secure.

One way is to hack around passwords and security, and another way is to use special software that inserts ads and content automatically through a third-party.

According to Kasia Trapszo, a very informed blogger who writes about new technology, “It's most likely that the person visiting your weblog had adware installed on their computer which inserted pornographic ads into the web page.”

This type of pernicious behavior has been around for a while and will clearly accelerate as traditional forms of communication increasingly give way to the online environment.

Although this is obviously an embarrassing situation to be burdened with, there may be some important lessons to be learned.

The socially responsible things to do in this situation are to: (1) not overreact; (2) fix the problem as quickly as possible; and (3) investigate the cause of the problem.

In this case, I sent a note of apology to the teacher, deleted my blog from the Internet completely, and started exploring how these things happen. What I discovered was sobering. Blogs are susceptible to attack and defacement. In this case, my blog became the target of an individual (some malicious cretin) with too much time on their hands.

We live in a world now where data-mining, aggressive advertising, Trojans, dialers, malware, browser hijackers, government surveillance and info-tracking has become part of everyday life. This, unfortunately, is a much darker side to the silver-lined blogging cloud we have come to know.  It is a brave new world on the Internet and it is far from risk-free.

Bloggers beware.
Play nice.
Educate.
Happy Holidays.

Navel Gazing and Luminous Lint

There's a major photographic resource building up on the Internet called the Luminous-Lint - World Photography project.

So far, the site has collected the works of nearly 2,000 of the greatest Photographers from around the world, hundreds of quotations and annotates more than 5,000 Books on photography.

According to the site's founder, Alan Griffiths, "This is one of the most comprehensive and highly integrated sources for the history of photography on the Internet."

TypePad's Troubles

It has been a frustrating day I am sure for all those folks at TypePad who keep this sort of technology up and running. For the second time in the past few months, TypePad, the very popular blogging service, crashed.

During the day, I responded to a query from Forbes.com writer David Ewalt about TypePad's troubles. David  quoted me as saying that I was concerned about TypePad's difficulties and that I had even thought of switching services. All this is true, but I actually said a whole lot more that ever made it into the story. Actually, what I think TypePad and other Internet blogging services offer is remarkable. This new form of read/write communication is changing the way people interact and build communities. Good for TypePad and good for us.

During the interview I also told David that I blog not out of necessity but out of a passion for extending my classroom into the community. Blogging does this amazingly well and it is through the technology that all of this happens in the first place.

I probably talked David's ear off for about 30 minutes about the service and technology. What was printed appears to be what worked into the story's balance. That's the way those things work in journalism. The reporter has to find voices in the story that provide a sense of balance and clarity. It is interesting, however, being on the other end of things.

I am a self-confessed cyber-junkie and I enjoy writing and thinking. Blogging lets me talk to more than just four walls. I get good ideas from comments and researching posts. I like the work that goes into writing pieces that I think people will find helpful and informative.

Now, would I really switch services just because TypePad is struggling a bit with the technology? After short deliberation, probably not. Overall, TypePad has been very good. I enjoy the ease of posting and the flexibility of the templates. It is also a lot of work to build up another blog. People get used to one address and it's more trouble than it is worth to start over.

At the same, we are consumers of a product. If the product doesn't deliver than people become frustrated. It's human nature. Sure, I would have liked to have blogged earlier today about stuff I usually blog about. Sure, there is a problem in the fact that this whole week of posting has somehow disappeared. But it only took a few second on TypePad menu to bring the posts back up. That's life is the surreal world of cyberspace and that's half the fun of it all.

Defending the Wiki World Vision

After calling into question the reliability of using WikiPedia as an online reference resource, a study conducted by the journal Nature found only minor differences in the accuracy of information when comparing Wikipedia's science references to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The study is significant for the open-source software concern, which depends on more than 13,000 volunteer editors around the globe, many of them experts in his/her field.

Thanks to Tim G for sending a link to a BBC story about the study.

A Sticky Wiki Teaching Moment

The free online encyclopedia WikiPedia has been dealing with a serious issue lately -- credibility. WikiPedia, the grand scale intellectual Internet experiment, seeks to build community by sharing the world's knowledge through collaborative.  Unfortunately, some people don't play well in the sandbox with others. In its present configuration, WikiPedia has allowed people to post material anonymously to the site. In this case, knowledge is  more often relative than factual. Reputation turns out to be a big deal for web sources.

Anyone with access to the Internet and expertise in a particular area can contribute reference material to the site, or after a posting is uploaded, edit the material.

This practice is now brewing up some unwanted media attention for the reference giant.

The troubles for WikiPedia started months ago, when John Seigenthaler, a former administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy in the 1960s, had false biographical material published about him. After nearly four months of complaints, WikiPedia finally removed the inaccurate material.

Seigenthaler, in an article for USA today, argues:

My "biography" was posted May 26. On May 29, one of Wales' [WikiPedia's founder] volunteers "edited" it only by correcting the misspelling of the word "early." For four months, Wikipedia depicted me as a suspected assassin before Wales erased it from his website's history Oct. 5. The falsehoods remained on Answers.com and Reference.com for three more weeks.

The character assassination  of Seigenthaler could and should have been avoided through fact-checking and editing -- two essential components of the writing process.

Should the people responsible for posting erroneous or malicious information on the site be held accountable for their actions? One would hope so, but that isn't always the case on the Internet.

Wikipedia's lethargic response to Seigentahler's concerns is an unfortunate reality of our Internet age.

Wikipedia's popularity as a reference source for millions of online users is unprecedented and perhaps may be justification for its parsimonious tight-fisted dealings with this issue. Perhaps success does breed hubris, despite all the good intentions behind an idea.

In a perfect world Wikipedia epitomizes the collaborative learning/knowledge community of the future.

However, allowing a free flow of "hit-or-miss" fact checking by volunteers is risky business.

Today, I discovered, embarrassingly, the malicious side of WikiPedia's lack of content management, or, in other words, its "anyone can be an editor" policy.

This afternoon, I had the opportunity to talk about technology and teaching to a group of educators and administrators at Southern Oregon's University's Extended Campus Program. I had been looking forward to talking about how I use the Internet in my teaching and spoke about all sort of things including, blogging, Internet learning, podcasting, furling, as well as using wikis as a reference resource. Everything went great until I got to the Wiki part.

Generally, I do not go online to demonstrate a particular feature of the Internet. I usually prepare my presentations, consisting mostly of screen grabs from the sites I use in my teaching and research. Today, however, I took a chance, which may have been a mistake depending upon your perspective on what happened next.

After talking a little about Wikipedia's credibility issue and the Seignethaler situation, I went online and clicked on a link to a featured article at the top of the homepage. The article was a biography about the actress KaDee Strickland. As I talked and navigated through the site I innocently clicked on Strickland's name in the featured column. What appeared in front of us -- on the big screen -- was not the actress. What came up on the screen was a close up image of a significant part of the male reproduction system.

I quickly tried to navigate away from the image of the male genital looming there on the screen, but fumbled with the technology. For a brief second the picture popped up again [insert the sounds of an exasperating sigh and a lot of giggling from the audience here].

Talk about a definitive teaching/learning moment. I am sure my audience will have quite a time forgetting about Wikipedia for a while, or maybe even think long about using it as a reference tool in class.

Interestingly, I couldn't help but notice that shortly after my discovery, the featured posting on Kadee Strickland was replaced by an article about shoe polish. Could this be a coincidence or a cover-up for the mistake?

Can WikiPedia ultimately be trusted as a reference resource?

Time will time, but at this moment, I have some serious doubts.

The Shift is On: From Print to Web

Print journalism is facing difficult times, but a new Nielsen rating report of online newspaper traffic suggests a surge in growth.

According to the report, Newspaper Web Site Traffic Surges October brought more than 39 million unique visitors to newspaper web sites.

"That number represents 26 percent of the active U.S. Internet population."

The New York Times had more than 11 million new visitors to its website, while USA Today and the Washington Post combined for another 18 million.

While newspapers such as the San Francisco Chronicle faced double digit declines in print circulation recently, web traffic continues to soar.

Technological Tattletales: Things That Need to be Known

A screenshot from mapsexoffenders.com shows the area surrounding San Jose State University. The red balloons mark the locations of convicted sex offenders. The blue balloon is where I used to live.

I am not, by nature, an overly suspicious person. I tend to trust people and take them at their word. I live with a blind trust that no harm will ever come to me or those I love.

We live in a fascinating age. An age of confluences; where technology,  culture, commerce, law, human behaviors, and ideologies merge together in a vast and free flowing stream of information.

While living in San Jose, within a few blocks of the university, I had often heard rumors that our neighborhood was home to people, men specifically, that had convicted sex crimes. Many of these convicted sex offenders had committed crimes against children. Most had served time and were now back living in the world.

I had never given much thought to where men convicted of sex crimes against children should live once they had paid their debt to society until now.

I had never considered that there could be as many as 30 sex offenders living within a 10 block area of my house in San Jose.

Never.

I never imagined, that is, until I read a short article in Newsweek. The article talks about how a relatively new website called Mapsexoffenders.com can map a sex offender's profile and match it to a specific address. The addresses are then overlaid onto a Google map.

Big Brother Where Art Thou?

On the Internet, of course.

Looking at a Google map littered with little red balloons marking the locations of known sex offenders is a very sobering visual encounter. When a red balloon is activated a link profiles the sex offender's picture, name, address, and crime.

Since 1996, the passage of Megan's Law requires states to alert communities about sex offenders who move into their areas. Almost all states now have online registries of convicted sex offenders. California, for example, has more than  63,000 persons who are registered as sex offenders. According to the U.S. Department of Human Services, the rate of child abuse in this country is rising. In 2000, 12 out of every 1,000 children had been abused by adults.

I think there are a lot of privacy issues related to mapping our neighbors on websites like mapsexoffenders.com. 

I can understand how privacy advocates would argue that mapping sex offenders and profiling them online violates an individual's constitutional right to privacy.

At the same time, I can see where parents might find value in having this sort of information at their fingertips. This is a complex issues that deserves much thought. However, what does seem to be clear is that with use of technology and the Internet people can may be able to better protect their families and make more informed decisions about where to live.

 

Photo Agencies Crack Down on Web Copyright Violators

Vauhini Vara of the The Wall Street Journal reports today that photo agencies are actively pursuing people who use their images without permission. Cheap and easy image-search tools are allowing people on the Internet to appropriate images without having to pay for them. Last year alone, according to Vara, Corbis recovered over $1 million in fees from people using their images illegally.

Photo agencies are turning to companies like Digimarc Corp. of Beaverton, Ore., to embed "digital watermarks" on images. Once watermarked, a free software program lets users read the encoded images to see if they have been used in violation of copyright laws. Another company PicScout makes a business of recovering copyright violations for a fee.

According to Vara, some fair use of images still applies without breaking any laws. Some websites, like this one, are allowed to use images for educational purposes under  U.S. copyright law guidelines. Vara explains:

Not all Web site owners who use photos without permission are breaking the law. The "fair use" guidelines in U.S. copyright law provide exemptions for some cases, such as when an image is used for educational purposes.

Understanding of the the Fair Use doctrine is far from being settled. A U.S. government document makes this point clear:

Although the courts have considered and ruled upon the fair use doctrine over and over again, no real definition of the concept has ever emerged. Indeed, since the doctrine is an equitable rule of reason, no generally applicable definition is possible, and each case raising the question must be decided on its own facts.

 

Thanks to Andy Goetze's Stock Photo Blog for following this issue.