Asked if he used a MAC or a PC, John McCain confessed to being a computer illiterate who depends on his wife for anything digital. Should we care?
I only recently became aware that John McCain doesn’t know how to use a computer. I suppose it’s not that shocking, a lot of people his age aren’t necessarily adept with newish technologies and a U.S. Senator is in a position to have his computing done for him. Still, I could see having some concerns about the leadership of someone who doesn’t use the dominant new technology of our time. Eve Fairbanks reports that Mark SooHoo, deputy e-campaign manager for McCain, had this to say on the matter at the Personal Democracy Forum:
You don’t necessarily have to use a computer to understand, you know, how it shapes the country. … John McCain is aware of the Internet.
I dunno. Do you have to use a computer to understand how it shapes the country? I think you might. If we had a president who didn’t know how to drive a car, that would probably strike us as pretty odd. But I think you could plausibly claim that you don’t necessarily have to have a driver’s license in order to understand how automobiles shape the country. But that’s because we assume that even someone who doesn’t have a license has still been in cars sees highways, onramps and offramps, parking lots, quiet winding roads, overpasses, bridges, etc.
Sure, I know, this is another way of reminding voters that McCain is a very old dude, but it’s a troubling point that a potential president doesn’t use the dominant technology of the day. (I almost wrote “doesn’t understand,” as if many people really do.) This is a little more serious than George Bush not knowing that grocery stores had price scanners. It would be like Abraham Lincoln refusing to ride a train or FDR disdaining that silly new thing called the radio. I’m amazed by people in their 50s and even 40s who have purposely let the digital revolution pass them by, especially considering people like my friend Betty Stein, who is in her 80s and took to her first computer like a kid in a toy store. I don’t expect McCain to stay up all night laboring over his Facebook or MySpace page, but can’t somebody for God’s sake walk him through the e-mail procedures?
A computer trainer in Lafayette, N.C., says she was oblivious to the profane modern meaning of her license plate “WTF” until her grandchildren told her.
She’s just lucky it wasn’t something like MILF or BITFOB.
Both John McCain and Barack Obama distrust the private sector and see government solutions to most problems. That means either one is more than likely to screw up more than once. That’s the bad news. The good news:
Americans have had it so good, for so long, that they seem to have forgotten what government’s heavy hand does to living standards and economic growth. But the same technological innovation that is causing all this dislocation and anxiety has also created an information network that is as near to real-time as the world has ever experienced.
For example, President Bush put steel tariffs in place in March 2002. Less than two years later, in December 2003, he rescinded them. This is something most politicians don’t do. But because the tariffs caused such a sharp rise in the price of steel, small and mid-size businesses complained loudly. The unintended consequences became visible to most American’s very quickly.
Decades ago the feedback mechanism was slow. The unintended consequences of the New Deal took too long to show up in the economy. As a result, by the time the pain was publicized, the connection to misguided government policy could not be made. Today, in the midst of Internet Time, this is no longer a problem. So, despite protestations from staff at the White House, most people understand that food riots in foreign lands and higher prices at U.S. grocery stores are linked to ethanol subsidies in the U.S., which have sent shock waves through the global system.
This is the good news. Policy mistakes will be ferreted out very quickly. As a result, any politician who attempts to change things will be blamed for the unintended consequences right away.
Both Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama view the world from a legislative perspective. Like the populists before them, they seem to believe that government can fix problems in the economy. They seem to believe that what the world needs is a change in the way government attacks problems and fixes the anxiety of voters. This command-and-control approach, however, forces a misallocation of resources. And in Internet Time this will become visible in almost real-time, creating real political pain for the new president.
Of course, it would be better for the mistakes not to be made in the first place. But the polls are closed on that option.
Allen County has its own channel at YouTube, though it’s not exactly scintillating viewing so far. There are seven clips there now, and five of them are about . . . drum roll, please . . . septic tanks!
Recently, I linked to Megan McCardle’s review of the Kindle, which she liked a lot, and she was so convincing I seriously thought about buying one. I didn’t, though, and after reading Ann Althouse’s take, I may have to think about it a little longer:
ADDED NOTE TO READERS WHO ARE HAVING TROUBLE UNDERSTANDING THIS POST: I’ve added boldface and enlarged some print in the original post, which was apparently a tad subtle. Let me be sledgehammer clear. The stuff about smell is humor. My problem with the Kindle was AND IS the gray-on-gray screen. I want contrast: black letters on a white background. I want that in a book, and I want that in a computer screen, and of course, I want that in an electronic book. I want easy to read. I don’t want to read ugly gray-on-gray print. Get it?
I confess that in case there is someone else out there who thinks something has been lost that really hasn’t been. Week before last, I did a post about my cell phone conking out, disappearing a couple of voice mails from my mother that I had saved before she died. But it turns out they are still there. Voice mail is not saved on the cell phone — it is saved on the phone company’s server. Since I stayed with the same service and just replaced the bad phone, the voice mail is just as accessible to me as it always was, and in the same way. I listened to my mother’s voice yesterday, after thinking it was lost to me forever.
(Thanks to Larry and Kevin, for their superior technical knowledge and their kindness in sharing it by e-mail instead of comments on the blog post, in a futile and pointless attempt to spare me public embarrassment.)
I keep thinking about the Kindle. The $400 price is the main drawback, but reviews like this one might put me over the line:
If possible, I love my Kindle even more than I did when I reviewed it a few weeks ago. I’ve got about 50 books on it, and I love always having something with me to read. I also love the ease of using it one handed, and checking my email from anywhere. As far as I’m concerned, it’s better than a book. The biggest downsides are that not everything I want to read is on it yet, and conversely, that it’s awful easy to spend a hell of a lot of money browsing. But there’s so much cheap content from the public domain that this is not a huge issue.
But I’m also waiting for that one device that will do it all — online, phone, computer, media player, pda, etc., etc. Maybe Kindle 2.0 or 3.0 will be it, and I should wait.
The trend of connecting to people rather than places continues:
For nearly three in 10 households, don’t even bother trying to call them on a landline phone. They either only have a cell phone or seldom if ever take calls on their traditional phone.
The federal figures, released Wednesday, showed that reliance on cells is continuing to rise at the expense of wired telephones. In the second half of last year, 16 percent of households only had cell phones, while 13 percent also had landlines but got all or nearly all their calls on their cells.
The number of wireless-only households grew by 2 percent since the first half of last year. Underscoring the rapid growth, in early 2004 just 5 percent had only cell phones.
I’m almost there. I have cable Internet, so I don’t need the “real” phone for that. Every month at bill time, it galls me to pay two phone bills, and I vow to get rid of the land line. But I keep backing down, because there’s just something frightening about going completely wireless, like my home might be incomplete, you know? I suspect a lot of old fogies feel that way.
Welcome to the wonderful world of the unfiltered Internet, where legitimate history resides side by side with vicious fantasies:
A video showing a longtime supporter of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton using slurs to describe Hoosiers spread through the Web like a virus Friday, triggering a firestorm of protest before the video was finally exposed as a hoax.
It was just the latest example of how the Internet is changing politics.
The video clip, uploaded to the popular video-sharing Web site YouTube and spread via blogs and e-mail, showed former Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor describing Hoosiers using profanity and a racial epithet.
No, this isn’t going to be a lament about the loss of “editors” and “gatekeepers” as we move from the old media to the new. That’s been fairly well chewed over in lots of places, and I suspect we willl end up with some kind of hybrid that combines new-style openness and access with old-style editing and sorting; filters and gatekeepers there will be.
My observation would be that this really isn’t new, just faster. At your dead-tree newstand, you can find copies of The New York Times and Washington Post right next to copies of those tabloids that write about space aliens and Elvis sightings. ON TV, you can see “60 minutes” side by side with “The Jerry Springer Show” and wrestling right next to football and basketball. Most people have been able to sort out the real from the fictional, but some haven’t. Scarily enough, they live and work right along with the rest of us.
The main thing that’s different about the digital age — other than how many information players there are — is how quickly the hoaxes can spread. But they can be debunked just as quickly. Most people will retain the memory of the truth, but a few, unfortunately, will act on the lie.
Kreuziger’s experience is shared by most Americans: They want the convenience of e-mail for non-urgent medical issues, but fewer than a third of U.S. doctors use e-mail to communicate with patients, according to recent physician surveys.
“People are able to file their taxes online, buy and sell household goods, and manage their financial accounts,” said Susannah Fox of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. “The health care industry seems to be lagging behind other industries.”
Of course, even if your doctor did e-mail you, it might not be all that enlightening. Doctor, doctor, what should I do? “Well, txah twx ascpron and cakk mx im teh mnrgin.”
CLARKSVILLE, Ind. (AP) - Police in Indiana say a group of middle school girls who videotaped the beating of a 12-year-old schoolmate and put it on the Internet may have been inspired by a similar video in Florida.
No charges have been filed yet in the Indiana case, which involves girls aged 12 to 14.
It was bad enough when hideous fashion fads slowly made their way to Indiana.
After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
Whew, thank goodness; no database will replace the daily newspaper. The above excerpt is from a 1995 column in Newsweek. It’s a good thing we have such visionaries looking out for our future.
The merging of technologies continues. Go here to watch full episodes of something like 200 different TV series instead of waiting for your favorite one to show up on TVland. “Hawaii 5-0″ and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “St. Elsewhere” and “WKRP in Cincinnati” and “Lou Grant.” Wasn’t I just saying how cool it was that the old “Star Trek” episodes were online? Jeez. I think I’m going to be overusing that word.
Americans would find it harder to part with their mobile phones than the Internet, television or landline telephones, according to a survey released Wednesday. The report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project also found that Americans are using their cellphones and other wireless devices for more activities including text messaging, taking pictures or sending email.
Some 51 percent of those surveyed said they would find it hard to give up their cellphones, compared with 45 percent for the Internet, 43 percent for television and 40 percent for landline phones.
I admit I feel naked without my cellphone. I’ve actually headed back home halfway to work to get it on those few occasions when I’ve forgotten it. But that’s because I like always being able to call out in case I have a need to, not because I want to be connected to everybody in the world 24/7. I’ll keep all those other things that bring me information
Just what I needed in my life, airport officials protecting me from my tendency to be unduly influenced by Bad Things From The Web:
Travelers using Denver International Airport’s free Wi-Fi service cannot visit Internet sites that airport officials consider provocative.
A report in The Denver Post says the airport is blocking Vanity Fair magazine’s Web site, the hipster site boingboing.net and others.
Airport spokesman Chuck Cannon says officials decided to block access to potentially racy sites when the airport made its wireless internet service free in November.
I’m flying out to see my brother in Texas week after next but, unfortunately, not flying through Denver. God knows how polluted my mind will be by the time I get there.
Sure, it’s nice to be able to download those movies and TV shows right to your computer, but is that gonna save your life?
Barry McRoy is one lucky guy. The fire chief says a DVD in his jacket pocket stopped a bullet from entering his stomach during a shooting Saturday at a restaurant in Walterboro, S.C.
McRoy, director of Colleton County’s fire department, says two men were fighting when the gun went off in the foyer of the local Waffle House.
It would have been cool if the DVD were a Rambo movie or something, but it contained a TV show on — drum roll, please — fire extinguishers. Exciting guy, that fire chief.
Everybody in the world has all the cool hardware now. But Japan has the best software:
Five advanced technologies available only in Japan include true mobile digital TV (all the regular terrestrial channels at no cost), mobile wallet service (phones have smart cards embedded inside, letting you add applications like electronic money or a credit card), connected cars (with a navigation system connected to a cell phone), primary wave earthquake warning systems, and home-help robots.
I greeted today’s news with an instinctive combination of shock, grief, and indignant fury: Polaroid has announced it’s ceasing production of its instant film, which will become unavailable after 2009. What will I do when I need more film my trusty Polaroid? What will all those people buying new Polaroids do?
Then it dawned on me: While I took Polaroid photos well into the 1990s, it’s been years since I last used my camera…and come to think of it, I have no idea where it is and am not positive I still own it. And reading coverage of the film plant shutdown, I learned that the company stopped making cameras a year ago. I didn’t notice at the time, which is probably a sign that I don’t really have the right to be livid about the film going away.
My reaction was pretty much the same, if a little milder: Oh, no! This is terrible! Wonder where mine is? Haven’t seen it in years.
It’s hard to overstate just how much fun it was to use a Polaroid for the first time. Yeah, they were crappy little photos, but we could see them immediately instead of taking the film someplace and waiting a few days to see how crappy they were. We accept all sorts of miraculous things as routine these days — being able to talk to anybody from anywhere without benefit of a landline, for example, and being able to carry the biggest library in the world around in our laptop. There was a time, though, when we were awed by the magic and overwhelmed by the magic that might be just around the corner. I miss that.
The Oscar nominations have been announced, and I don’t much care. It’s not so much because I’m an old fart who thinks the movies aren’t as good as they used to be (though I’m much more likely to enjoy the experience when watching Turner Classic Movies than I am when watching something new on the premium channels). It’s just that “going to the movies” has stopped being one of the things I do. I haven’t seen a single one of the nominated movies, and I won’t until they come out on DVD or hit one of my cable channels. When that happens, I will like or dislike the move, but it will just be one more digital experience among many, divorced from the year the movie was made and what it was competing with.
But the really good news is that the Oscar awards ceremony may suck so much that no one will bother to watch:
The annual rolling out of the nominees list normally sets the stage for a February full of hugs and kisses as Hollywood’s elite pat themselves on the back for a job well done. But writers are shutting down the town’s biggest parties to force management back to the negotiating table.
The rushed and tepid Golden Globes “ceremony” was a sure sign that the Oscars presentation could be in trouble, too.
I stopped watching the Oscars show, the most insufferable self-congratulatory orgy in the history of entertainment, long before I stopped going to the movies. Maybe “Casablanca” or some other earlier Oscar winner will be on TCM that night. Treat yourself, if it is.
Need historical photos for your blog or Web site? The Library of Congress has a Flickr page where it will make available thousands of photos from its collection. The photo here is a mountain farm along Skyline Drive, Va., from 1914.
The concept of privacy continues to “evolve,” i.e. the trend of everybody wanting to know where everybody else is all the time continues to strengthen. Fort Wayne Police Chief Rusty York wants to put GPS chips in all patrol cars:
It will allow officers, dispatchers and managers to see where the vehicles are located across the city. The chief said this will help in officer safety because it will better locate officers calling for help.
Not good enough, says the head of the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association. If you put the chips in our radios instead, you could know where the police officers are at all times, not just their cars.
In the meantime, the ACLU is fighting a proposal in a Rhode Island school district to put chips in studetns’ backpacks and equip school buses with GPS. The district says the chips are intended to record only when students enter and exit the bus and the GPS would show where the bus was on its route. But the ACLU says the program raises privacy and safety concerns:
“There’s absolutely no need to be tagging children,” he said. “We are not questioning the school district’s ability to use GPS to monitor school buses. But it’s a quantitative leap to monitor children themselves.”
[. . .]
Brown also raised concerns that unauthorized people, perhaps using RFID readers that are easily bought online, could exploit information contained on the tags.
So, if the chips and GPS systems are used for safety, that’s OK. But if they’re used to know more about us than we want known, that’s bad. How do we do one without the other? How do we know if we’ve crossed the line?
Whenver I think about the possibility of having an accident or getting into trouble in some other way, I’m rather glad to know about the GPS function of cell phones. I don’t ever have to feel I’m out there unprotected, on my own. And I don’t especially worry that somebody might be monitoring my movements that I don’t want monitoring my movements.
There aren’t vast networks of government snoops involved in such monitoring yet, but that doesn’t there couldn’t be. England seems to have every square foot covered with cameras these days — people can’t set foot in public without being on monitors that are watched by police 24 hours a day.
Did you get your Parade magazine in the Sunday paper yesterday? If not, you missed out on some big news:
An interview with Benazir Bhutto before the former Pakistani prime minister was assassinated was important enough to keep on the cover of Parade magazine, the magazine’s publisher said Sunday — even though the publication had already gone to print when Bhutto was killed.
Randy Siegel said Parade went to press on Dec. 21 and was already on its way to the 400 newspapers that distribute it when Bhutto was killed in a Dec. 27 shooting and bombing attack at a campaign rally in her country.
The Web version of the story was updated, Siegel said, but it was too late to change the magazine. He said the only option other than running the outdated article would have been asking newspapers not to distribute the magazine at all.
“We decided that this was an important interview to share with the American people,” he said.
Nice attempt at a save, but not terribly convincing. This isn’t evidence for the abandonment of print, but it does illustrate that not enough people have rethought how to use print. The longer the lead time, the less tied to current events a print article should be. We need to be thinking in digital terms for immediacy and print product for backgrounders and analysis.
In the “gadgets keep getting cooler” department, note this trend to watch:
Just a couple of years ago, Americans were lusting after the 3G cellphones that had been delivering broadband-like speed to the pockets of Asians and Europeans for years. Well, now we have them, and you know what? They just aren’t fast enough for us. That’s why we can’t wait for WiMAX—the most prominent 4G tech on the horizon. Sprint recently told PM it has set the wheels in motion to build a nationwide network before long, and it can’t come soon enough.
With WiMAX, manufacturers can stuff the ability to send and receive massive amounts of data into just about any gadget. In addition to always-on, high-speed Internet on your laptop and phone, this kind of networking opens up the floodgates to a slew of far more creative possibilities. Imagine a camcorder with the ability to broadcast video to a TV station or Web site live from anywhere—without having to even plug it in. Just think about the possibilities of a pocket-size PC (Intel is expected to be behind a number of such products in the coming year) that can access the entire Internet at Ethernet-like speeds—from anywhere. It will be costly for companies to build up the WiMax network infrastructure, but if they do it right, this could change everything.
Bloggers, pay attention: Pocket-size PCs and camcorders that can broadcast live to a Web site from anywhere wirelessly. This really would open up news events to an army of citizen journalists.
