Joe Flood

Month: April 2008

  • Friday's Links

    Here’s what interested me this week:

    Washington City Paper: Building the Great DC Novel
    Surprisingly, no one has written a Bonfire of the Vanities for DC.  The article is correct that most novels of DC are just about a niche of this city (Edward P. Jones) or treat things with a very broad brush (Christopher Buckley).  

    Greenversations
    The Environmental Protection Agency is blogging!  Hopefully, this will spur the rest of government (including the part I’m in) to blog as well.

    The New Influencers
    I’m working my through this fascinating book.  The world of corporate PR and the mainstream media is over. Blogs and communities of people connecting online are the future.

    DCist Overheard
    The “nice balls” comment is one I submitted, LOL. 

  • The Three Things Writers Need

    I spent a beautiful spring afternoon at the Conversations and Connections conference held April 5 in Washington, DC.  This was a writer’s conference featuring “experts in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, writing for children, making connections, using the web, marketing, and everything in between.”  

    But the highlight for me was the keynote by Mary Gaitskill, author of Two Girls, Fat and Thin and the short story which was the basis of the movie Secretary.  In her inspiring talk, she recounted her long and painful struggle for literary success.  Here are the three things she believes writers need:

    1. Comfort with Solitude.  You can go to conferences, join groups, talk to people online.  But, in the end, being a writer means spending time alone in front of a screen.  A lot of time.  When other people are enjoying group pursuits in the sunny outdoors, you’ll be pounding away on a keyboard.  You better like your own company.
    2. Persistence.  Success came late for Gaitskill.  She kept at it over the years, in the face of anonymous rejection letters from literary journals.  Family and friends pitied her and told her that she should pick a different career.  But she didn’t give up because being a writer was the only thing she wanted to do with her life.
    3. Courage.  Gaitskill’s fiction is unique and disturbing, exploring ideas and situations that can really bother people.  In addition to dealing with rejection letters, Gaitskill had to cope with venomous reactions from agents and others who took a visceral dislike to her work.  What’s great about Gaitskill is that she didn’t change her voice, that she kept her singular perspective despite the occasionally hostile reaction it engendered.

  • Library of Congress Lecture on Digital Natives

     

    rose takes a picture
    Our future digital overlords.

    I went to the Library of Congress recently to hear distinguished scholar and child-development expert Edith Ackerman discuss “The Anthropology of Digital Natives”.

    Digital natives are defined as people who grew up with the Internet – basically K-12 students.  Interestingly, one point Ackerman made was that what we consider “technology” are the things we didn’t grow up with.  For digital natives, the Internet is not complicated technology but is just a normal tool.

    While I’m a “digital immigrant” instead of a native, I did somehow manage to take notes on my iPhone during the talk, which I’ve expanded upon here.

    With every new wave of technology, kids readily adopt it while older people hold back.  They grab hold of what’s new and make it their own.

    K – 12 is the first digital generation, and spends hours each week gaming and using computers  The educational system they’re in was designed for a print generation, not a digital one.

    Literacy must be redefined as encompassing all media, not just reading – beyond print.  Digital natives Google instead of going to the library, make a video instead of writing a paper – these are new, hybrid ways of being an author.  Rather than starting from scratch, they capture, collect and share.  This is done in ways that are often considered plagiarism, like the author who borrows text from Wikipedia or copyrighted content from YouTube.

    Kids must learn new relationship skills and a sense of self in a world of multiple identities (MySpace vs real life).  Kids love navigation games and the return to home – these are archetypal myths.

    Four traits of digital natives:

    1. Shareism – co-creation rather than individual authorship
    2. Border Crossing – private is public (like Facebook), kids belong to multiple tribes, have multiple identities
    3. Media Literate – borrow from others with copy and paste, read/write combining (like a wiki), everyone is an author
    4. Expect Tools to Be Easy – everything has an undo button

    This lecture was part of a series at the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress.  Here’s upcoming lectures and more information.

    Monday, May 12: “Internet, the Private Mind?” by Steven Berlin Johnson, author of “Everything Bad is Good for You.”

    Monday, June 23: “The Anthropology of YouTube” by Michael Wesch, assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University.

    Monday, June 30: “Open Source Reality” by Douglas Rushkoff, author of “Screenagers: Lessons in Chaos from Digital Kids.”

    For further information on the Kluge Center, visit www.loc.gov/kluge/. 

     

  • David Pogue's Three Megatrends

    I attended FOSE (a government technology expo in DC) last week and saw David Pogue’s keynote.  He’s the technology columnist for the New York Times.  Here are my notes from the session with the three big “megatrends” Pogue sees with technology plus some interesting links to check out:

    1. Phone and Internet will Merge

    In the future, you’ll use voice over IP at home with a portable number, $20 month.   “Voice over IP” is using the internet to call people rather than Ma Bell. You might use Grandcentral, which provides a single phone number for all the phones in your life.  One number to rule them all…

    Next time you’re looking for a phone number, check out Google 411 instead of dialing information.

    Have lots of voice mail?  Try a voice to text service, like Jott, which converts your voicemail to text and emails it to you.

    2. A La Carte Video

    All TV shows will be available on demand, anytime you want, through iTunes, Hulu or similar services. Even Comcast is creating an on demand video service.

    The DVD format war is over.  Blu-ray is the victor.

    Movie downloads won’t kill DVD business, not enough people have broadband.  And there are still too many restrictions on downloads.  Why do I only have 24 hours to watch a movie?

    People in college and younger do not understand nor recognize copyright.

    3. Web 2.0

    According to Pogue, we’re still early in this cycle of innovation.  He provided a nice definition of web 2.0, which I’m paraphrasing as, “We the people, providing the content, and connecting with others.”

    Blogs are a new channel of communication for government agencies.  After all, Microsoft used blogs to put a face on a faceless org, getting beyond their fear of openness.  It’s not PR, it’s authentic.

    Cool examples of web 2.0:

    • TripAdvisor (reviews of hotels and more)
    • Kiva  (microlending)
    • e-petitions  (petition the Prime Minister)
    • whoissick (find out what virus is floating around your neighborhood)

    And, at the end of his talk, Pogue amused the audience with a song about the lawsuit-happy RIAA, to the tune of the Village People’s “YMCA”.  Guess you had to be there.