31 replies to this topic

[VicHockeyFan]

^Scary in that today, any offhand comment, photo or video can go viral. An inside joke that previously would have been seen and of interest to your inner circle of friends can potentially become a global phenomenon in a matter of hours.

More fascinating than scary then, right? Back in the olden days, we had to rely on Saturday Night Live to give us catch-phrases.

[Mike K.]

Is this really a surprise in this day and age? We hear about innocent things going viral on a daily basis.

[Holden West]

More fascinating than scary then, right? Back in the olden days, we had to rely on Saturday Night Live to give us catch-phrases.

Exactly. In our day, memes would be dispensed from on high to trickle down to us kids: "Up your nose with a rubber hose!", "sit on it!". Now they percolate from the primordial ooze of 4chan and Reddit and by the time the grownups see it on Facebook it's already old news to the kids. As kids, our best chance at fame if you didn't have the talent of Nelly Furtado or Steve Nash was maybe getting your picture in the local daily paper. Help me out here, Sparky.

[Sparky]

Help me out here, Sparky.

Ya right. You want help from an old fart that grew up watching a black and white Ralf Kramden say as he planted his right fist into his left palm say "To the moon Alice." Or Archie Bunker holler "Get away from me."

Or my personal favourite, Mrs. Cleaver saying "Ward....you were sure hard on the Beaver last night."

I just watched our youngest daughter "wifi Roku and Plexit" her laptop to our flat screen and show us 600 pictures she took with her phone of her trip to China. Then, to top that off she switches to Facebook and show us a bunch of videos where her trip mates (who she didn't know 14 days ago) tagged her and posted for her and all of her new found friends to enjoy.

Hundreds of university students from all over the world keeping in touch with each other within hours of departing with a text message, tweet, or an actual private email. Heaven forbid. Nobody dials anybody anymore. Apparently that's not cost effective. I don't think she has ever mailed a letter in her life.

Did I mention we face timed each other daily while she was in China on our iPads without spending a dime?

It's all getting to be a bit overwhelming.

$hit, I'm still trying to figure out which channel has the hockey game on in Hi Def.

To heck with it, I'm just going to go download and watch tomorrow's tennis match tonight and have a beer.

[VicHockeyFan]

^ But Sparky, you are proof that an older guy can also embrace this stuff. You LOVE your smart phone.

I sometimes shake my head when I hear an older person admit, with a laugh, how out of touch with technology they are. They certainly don't need to be.

or an actual private email.

^ Old-school! Who e-mails anymore?

[Bingo]

Comment: Newspapers are the original social media

 

In part....

 

Times are tough for traditional media. There be dragons. Newsrooms are shrinking. Monetizing digital is proving a *****, as is engaging readers who say they want quality journalism but don’t want to pay for it.

Social media have seemingly swallowed the news, and our advertising revenues with it.

But I’m an eternal optimist, and as such I have hope for our future, because the way I see it, newspapers have already survived more than a century of profound change.

 

 

I do, though, think we’re our own worst enemy, too often giving the impression that there is nothing left but to write our own obituary.

I can’t help but think that we are ceding our territory, without putting up much of a fight, while these copyright carpetbaggers continue their hostile, unearned takeover of our century-old journalistic legacy, taking our stuff, with and without permission, and rebranding it and recycling online it as if it was their own work.

It is not.

 

MORE:

This is the edited speech presented by former Vancouver Sun columnist Shelley Fralic at the Jack Webster Awards banquet in Vancouver on Oct. 20. Fralic, who retired from a four-decade journalism career this year, was presented with the 2016 Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award at the event.

http://www.timescolo...media-1.2372733

[VicHockeyFan]

But I’m an eternal optimist, and as such I have hope for our future, because the way I see it, newspapers have already survived more than a century of profound change.

 

 

Until the internet newspapers never faced the kind of challenge they do today.

 

Radio, TV, telephones etc. did not really compete with what newspapers did, the long(ish) form story, that could be consumed at will by the consumer (reader) on his own schedule.  You had to tune in your TV or radio at a certain time to catch the local news, and you had limited choice of channels, and you still do today.  The telephone never could broadcast news (anybody rememeber how Talking Yellow Pages never caught on?), it's still only used for one-on-one most of the time.

 

The internet changed all that.

 

And just when newspapers thought they could still survive, since not everyone had a computer with them at work, or in bed, or on the bus... bang, we all got smart phones.

[Bingo]

Until the internet newspapers never faced the kind of challenge they do today.

 

Radio, TV, telephones etc. did not really compete with what newspapers did, the long(ish) form story, that could be consumed at will by the consumer (reader) on his own schedule.  You had to tune in your TV or radio at a certain time to catch the local news, and you had limited choice of channels, and you still do today.  The telephone never could broadcast news (anybody rememeber how Talking Yellow Pages never caught on?), it's still only used for one-on-one most of the time.

 

The internet changed all that.

 

Yes, and all of the news that we are interested in isn't necessarily found in our local newspapers, or on local radio and tv. 

We glean the information from multiple sources on the internet or from the opinions and reporting of our own VV contributors.

There have been examples where the newspapers have sourced some of the news from us...and published a story a few days later.

[Mike K.]

All that aside, what the fundamental difference is between now and then is newspapers are no longer gatekeepers of information like they once were.

 

We no longer need to wait for the newspaper's version of an event, which could be skewed, edited, and bleached to fit a certain narrative. We can gather much of the information via social media and non-corporate media. That, I think, is what's lead to the decline. Suddenly on the Internet EVERYONE is on a level playing field and no one media can muscle in on another by simply flooding a newsstand or taking up shelf inventory, etc.

 

Of course the latter is what the large media companies want to change. They are lobbying Internet providers to create different tiers of Internet access, so if someone wants non mainstream/corporate websites (i.e., media), they'd have to pay an additional fee to their Internet provider to access different tiers of websites. Not unlike cable is setup today.

 

This would mean billions in additional revenue for cable/Internet companies, greater market share for mainstream media companies, and independent websites would become somewhat blocked to average Internet consumers.

[AllseeingEye]

I think the big difference today is that for the first time you have a generation (millennials) who have never not known a world without the convenience of personal computing technology: its immediate, always on, always available, above all for the consumption of information be that traditional news or what we call today social media. Our teenage daughter can't roll over and get out of bed before flipping on her phone and going online. That used to exasperate me but I gave up long ago trying to p*** into that wind and came to accept it as the inevitable result of the relentless march of technology and really what amounts to a re-wiring of our inherent behavior patterns as a consequence of continual and unending exposure to "tech".

 

Nothing really changes more than the pace of change itself; first came the desktop PC's, then laptops (we went "mobile" for the first time) then early cellular but not smart phones, then smart phones, and today we have the ubiquitous "cloud" however you interpret the latter. Looking ahead we already know that A-I and a true union of human and machine is not only coming but is actually in testing and is already here for all intents and purposes. The grandchildren of today's children will likely marvel that their millennial forebears actually used a physical_device !with a keyboard of all things! to connect to the internet. They'll be astonished and shake their collective heads in disbelief. Just like the millennials today generally look askance at traditional newspapers....

 

Previous generations OTOH, including those newspaper folk now edging close to retirement, represented above all by the boomers (my gang) were the first generation to bridge the gap - ask me or most of them in the 70's about 'computing' and/we I would have conjured up vague images of dudes in white coats sequestered in an underground government lab somewhere with punch cards - to today having a more or less love-hate relationship with technology: inevitably immersed in it, compelled to use it - and mostly alright with it - yet with a sense somehow of being on an endless treadmill and straining to keep up over time.

 

I've been in the industry since 1993 but precisely because I am deeply exposed to sophisticated technology 5 x 8.5 hours each and every week I usually can't wait to get the hell off and unplug from the machine at night or especially on weekends, unless I am mindlessly posting pics of my cat or latest fishing expedition on Facebook. Beyond that I try not to think so much because 45-50 hours each week "on the box" drains the hell out of me. Unquestionably my favorite activity all year is vacation - and especially those vacations to third world surf & beach locales where I leave the mobile phone at home, much to the shock and disbelief of our 18 year old.

 

I've had two direct reports in my work life - both CIO's interestingly - who today are both very happily engaged in retirement and semi-retirement in decidedly and very deliberately non-technical pursuits and hobbies.

 

One them retired prematurely at age 59. When I asked why at the time he thought about it for maybe ten seconds and responded with one of the most candidly honest answers I have ever heard: "because I lost my passion for technology". Exactly - IOW he was burned out. I am getting there now myself. I can feel it; and IMO old legacy institutions such as the traditional newspaper are likewise caught in the middle, analogous to many boomers - trying to figure out how to maintain their "traditional" position in the realm of information gathering and dissemination on the one hand while at the same scrambling - unsuccessfully it seems - to remain relevant in a continuously shifting and evolving technology environment which is increasingly unfamiliar to them.

[lanforod]

59 isn't premature at all. My target is 50!

[Victoria Watcher]

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