I am updating my blog a mere day after updating my blog, after not updating it for several weeks.

Alright. So, today my head exploded again, which included my brain. I don’t know how much more it can take.

I was perusing Google News during my lunch break when a headline that this post was named after grabbed my attention:

WHAT IF RUSSIA CHINA CUT OFF YOUR ELECTRICITY?

Very well.  ABC news, eh?

It is a morning five or 10 years in the future, and the headlines have been full of news about escalating tensions with Russia or China. You turn on your lights in the morning to find that they, and virtually everything else, have been shut down by cyberspies.
Improbable? Maybe — but the Wall Street Journal reports that Chinese and Russian spies have penetrated America’s electric power grid, planting software bugs that could all but shut down the system in a crisis.

I remember, years ago, reading this apparently well-known and logical piece of insight that was given to aspiring writers: if you don’t capture someone’s interest within the first three sentences of what you have written, that person will probably not read what you have written in its entirety.   Of course, I’m sure there are exceptions to this rule, but those exceptions pertain to niche audiences who are expected to have enough interest in a topic being discussed that they recognize there is a message beyond the first three sentences.

Essentially, this article is just a creepy example of creepy political juxtaposition:  The majority of the article merely discusses all the doomsday stuff that would happen should the electricity be cut off in the United States.  Did you see Live Free or Die Hard? Okay.

Did you live in the Eastern Timezone during mid-august of 2003, and experience that crazy three-day blackout? I did.  The story reminded me of a slightly more dystopian version of what I saw.

So this story is actually about the horrors of what will happen in our electrical energy dependent society if the energy goes away one day.  It is hardly about terrorism, or spying.

What a stupid, cheap introduction.  I puke on you, ABC.

This morning while riding the Skytrain, I glimped over my a woman’s shoulder, and the some words on her Metro transit “newspaper” caught my eyes: “Province accepting applications for enhanced identification”. I thought “right on; it finally happened.”  Then, the sub-header caught my eyes: “SHOPPING IN SEATTLE IS ABOUT TO GET EASIER”.

My brain exploded a little bit on the inside.  I’m sorry.  Let’s take a step back here: “Shopping in Seattle is about to get easier”.  This is a newspaper article announcing the introducting of a new form of identification, that uses some a Radio Frequency Identity Chip to simplify the Canada – U.S. border crossing, by transmitting your information to the border guard as you approach.   Fair enough, but I don’t think I even need to explain the implications of this type of technology attached to a personal I.D.  This isn’t new technology; it’s been around for decades, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that as well as being used to simplify a transaction, there is some creepy big brother/panopticism stuff going on here.

And the best thing the newspaper can say is “SHOPPING IN SEATTLE IS ABOUT TO GET EASIER”??? That is the selling point for a new form of identification, replete with accesible, yet encrypted personal data?

These cards are not mandatory, but who is to say that identification with this type of technology may not become mandatory in Canada in the future?  Plenty of concern has been expressed about privacy issues: These privacy issues aren’t just about what governments may do with our information — as a “Western” citizen, who has grown up in a digital age (excuse the cliché), I have mild “Big Brother hysteria” fatigue, because the notion of personal information being aggregated with that of others’ for political/security/surveillance etc. purposes has become a moot point.  The other concern, that comes with this stuff is the issue of data mining, or the data getting into the wrong person/group’s hands.

But that’s not a big deal, because the upside to all this is that SHOPPING IN SEATTLE IS ABOUT TO GET EASIER!!!!

This brings me to a little aside: I watched a piece on TED a few weeks ago hosted by James Howard Kunstler that discusses suburbia, his concerns.  It’s amusing.  He was featured in “The End of Suburbia”, which I discussed a few weeks ago as well, and he definitely could be seen as a fear mongerer, but the talk had some merit.  Anyway,  sub-header about shopping in Seattle made me think of this clip on TED:  towards the end, Mr. Kunstler says something along the lines of “one of the problems [with suburbanization going out of control, sustainability being a joke, and the world becoming a global Frankenstein] is that we call ourselves ‘consumers’” .  People have to stop thinking of themselves as consumers and start thinking of themselves as people who have more value than just consumption machines: built to work to consume to work to consume.

I purchased a blender last week.  I purchased it so that I could make healthy food, from scratch, instead of paying 6$ for a styrofoam takeout container of soup for lunch during the week (I do it occasionally, but a part of me dies inside every time…).   I already made my own soup, but I didn’t have anything to blend it up super quickly.  I made this purchase because it was something useful, that I could not fashion myself out of belongings I pick up off the ground, and in the long run, it actually saves me money (not much time, because making soup takes a while) and makes me less dependent on other people to eat the food I would prefer to eat. “NOT SO!” says the cardboard box whence the blender came! The cardboard box announced to me that the blender is for “the fashion conscious consumer”.

Knock Knock?

Who the fuck buys a blender for its aesthetic value?

Who’s there?

The same people who get excited about losing another ounce of privacy if it will make their shopping trip to Seattle easier.

I just read an online article titled “Why it’s okay for newspapers to die”. It reassures that, “[t]he loss of print newspapers is akin to the loss of the horse and buggy.” In other words, the only thing about the news that is going to change is that it will be online, instead of printed on paper.  This argument is rather technologically determinist; the author of the column makes no effort to hide this when she refers to “creative destruction”, which is basically what happens when you pair technological determinism with a laissez-faire economy (read: globalization).  I have to disagree with the comparison to the “horse and buggy” for a few reasons.

First of all, there is a big difference between people switching from horse and buggies to cars, and the Internet going online.  For one thing, when people switched from the horse and buggy to the automobile, they were merely switching forms of transportation.

I could really go out on a limb and argue that the shift from horse and buggy to automobile was helped plant the seeds for the demise of a print industry, but that would be getting a little out there.  Still, consider this little summary of suburbanization etc. 101 :  the invention of the automobile initially allowed for wealthy citizens to live in suburbs and commute to work.  This reduced urban density, somewhat.  After World War 2, when there was a great deal of wealth in Canada and the United States, a great deal of people could afford to live out in the suburbs.  There was a huge boom; lots of people could buy cars.  Communication was increasingly shifting away from being “face-to-face” and turning into something that required other forms of technology, such as the telephone.  Luckily, thanks to transportation and young boys with paper routes, newspapers could still be distributed across these large urban areas, and people could still get their news, even if they lived quite far from the centre of the city.  Exciting! Oh yes, and population density decreased further.

I’m not going to get into economics and infrastructure development, cause that’s boring….  Anyway…  If you couldn’t already figure it out, the spatial diffusion of people certainly influenced the way communications technology was developed and used.  There were new needs, so there were new solutions.  Complimenting this change was the new phenomena of media mergers, buyouts and vertical/horizontal integration.  I’m not going to get into this either, because this is my blog, and not a scholarly research paper.  This publication by the Parliament of Canada is helpful if you would like to know who owns what in Canadian media, however.

[If you don't find irony in me blogging about the death of print media, just wait till I touch on the "blogger" problem.  If you can't wait: THIS IS JUST A BLOG; DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH, AND DON'T BELIEVE ANYTHING I WRITE UNTIL YOU FIND YOUR PRIMARY SOURCES OF INFORMATION.  If you are interested in the topics of infrastructure development, technological determinism, the evolution of the mass media, or anything else I am referring to and don't have access to a good pool of information, I will be happy to provide you with some good sources of information.  Otherwise, I'm not getting into it.  Additionally, if you would do not agree with some of the facts that I claim.]

Fast forward to now, and you will find a combination of a few problems: a very large amount of the media controlled by a few companies, consolidation of resources [i.e. less reporters, but just as many/more newspapers and magazines], a less diverse group of stakeholders, and the competition of the internet.

The awesome David Byrne (yes, that David Byrne) wrote a nice entry in his online journal, expressing his concern about the decline of the newspaper institution.  David Byrne echoes what I have to say about blogs, which is that:

“Blogs and Internet news sites can’t fill the gap, as they don’t have the resources to sustain a team of reporters working and digging into a story — sometimes for months before anything sees the light of day.”

These blogs are at least secondary sources of information, for the most part, and often link to other news sites, which link to news feeds, and so on.  Just look at what I’m writing.

Another problem with moving a newspaper from print to online the format in which the different stories are presented.   Go most online news sites and you will see the “most popular” list of stories (Vancouver Sun, Toronto Star, CNN, NY Times, Washington Post, etc.).  My completely scientific and untested opinion is going to suggest that these articles are more likely to be read than the others.  I am also going to suggest that being online is distracting; unlike sitting down and reading a newspaper, where you don’t have many other prominent sources of stimulation, reading an online newspaper puts the reader in a position to stray away from what he or she was initially planning to read.  The reader also may skip out on the shorter pieces, which can often be found tucked in with the larger stories, because there is the opportunity is not there in the same way for the eye to pass over the “smaller” headline.

Back to this horse and buggy issue: with the exception of the clown car, I do not recall reading of any sort of widespread consolidation of passengers as they left behind their horses and buggies: if there had been four buggies, all which could seat four people, the 16 of these people did not all pool together and hop into one sedan.  Yes — there were buses, but mass transportation had long existed, in the form of the boat and the train; I’m only talking about private, individual transportation.  What is happening to the media, is in some sense, an information clown car — dozens of newspapers being piled into one source of information.

CanWest is a media clown car that would make a real troupe of clowns jump for their money.  CanWest owns a frightening amount of Canadian media, and you can also find a lot of interesting research articles from over the years discussing what this means in the world of communications and democracy.

CanWest is also experiencing some MAJOR financial problems.  There have been reports that CanWest may sell some of their newspapers, magazines or television stations to other buyers; but, realistically, who would those buyers be?

The biggest question of all, however, is: what would it mean for the Canadian public if all of the newspapers printed by CanWest ceased to print, and went online?  What would happen if CanWest, as unreliable as it is, ceased to exist and we were left with only skeletons of an industry?

The title of this blog post is the name of a  film that I watched in my Urban Geography course this evening.  As far as I know, I’ve been living under a rock and everyone else has known about this documentary (made in 2004) except for me.  I had always been disenchanted by the Al Gore/Inconvenient Truth/Oil Oil Oil conspiracy stuff that has been going on for the last many years.  It’s not that I am ignorant, or against it — I just haven’t been too interested in getting all militant and obsessed about oil as some people have.  Anyway…

We watched this film in class. I would recommend people view “The Depletion of Oil and the Collapse of the American Dream”, not because I agree or disagree with its content, but because it had some thought provoking qualities.   The most impressive part about the documentary was just how prophetic it was.  Several scientists and academics make some predictions, which at the time seem unbelieveable to a global society so uneducated about what keeps their livelihoods from falling apart; and these predictions, for the most part, occurred — often, impressively, at the dates predicted.

People make predictions all the time.  I think when most predictions turn out to be fact, people are mildly entertained, or just neutral, or unaware.  Other times, obviously, the predictions are incorrect.  What stands out about what these people claimed would happen, is that they were predicting the equivilent of an apocalypse.  The inability to satisfy an overwhelming and exponential “need” for oil, for consumption, for a chaos theory kind of mob-mentality, consuming behaviour, means the death of a life that recent generations [from certain countries] feel entitled to, and inevitably leads to the loss of social cohesion and norms.  Most of the speakers in this film didn’t go so far as to predict a dissolution of any sort of social contract, but they do insinuate it.

So, pretty crazy stuff.

What I did take issue with, is that this film is, as can be expected, one-sided.  Obviously a film that is attempting to plead, intelligently, to the public, and to the slightly-above-layman audience that it needs to collectively WAKE THE FUCK UP and change if you want your children to see tomorrow is not going to present a lot of counter-arguments.  Fair enough.  I think anyone intelligent enough to watch this film (it’s pretty easy to follow, but not for Cletus) with an open mind can understand that it is one sided, and has a clear agenda.

Having said that, I study arts and social sciences.  I consider myself adequately educated in these areas, and can understand concepts.  However, I do not understand much about physical sciences; so, when the scientists in this film say that it takes more energy to create hydrogen power than it does to use it, or that such and such uses up so much oil, or that something is scientifically ineffecient, that isn’t good enough for me.  I would like, at least, a brief background to explain to the uneducated viewer in me: “this is why this is like THIS”.  It is important to recognize your audience, and this film obviously was not made for scientists.  If this film had been made for scientists, I would not have understood half of what was in it (or any of it?)  This film was made for people like me, like the general audience I referred to above, and most of us are not highly educated about these topics.  This film is like “Oil Mear-Mongering 101″, which is why it is so easy to watch.

Bottom few lines: Movie:

-interesting and thought provoking. Check it out!

- freakishly prophetic

- lacked empirical data for the physical scientifically uneducated geek in me.

Good night.