When nobody controls the cameras

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NYTimes.com: "When Congress adjourns, so do C-Span’s live broadcasts because the sole cameras that record the sessions of the Senate and the House of Representatives are controlled by the members of Congress.

On Friday, when several dozen Republicans decided to stay on the House floor and discuss energy legislation after the House adjourned for a five-week summer recess, the cameras and microphones were turned off. So the first source of video was a congressman who streamed live pictures to the Internet using his cellphone camera."

Just one more (small) example of how things are changing. If any feature prompts me to break down and buy a real mobile phone, it will be the ability to stream live video when there’s no wifi.

Email is yesterday. Maybe the day before.

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If you want to glimpse the future, spend time with those that will live there. Back from a weekend with my brother and his family. The kids are 18, 16 and 12. They’re back in the states for 6 months to help Ryan get settled in college.

RyanspencerUncle Steve was a big hit with his belated graduation present, but after giving Ryan his new iPod Touch, he was a little distracted the rest of the weekend. I also miss a lot of birthdays so we did a little catch-up with the other two. They opted for PSP’s (Play Station Portables).

The family is international with friends all over the world. But the kids do not use email to keep in touch (“Uncle Steve, please!”). The primary comm tools are SMS (texting) and Facebook. I had read that but it was interesting to hear it straight from the teenage horse’s mouth.

I’ve had a Facebook page for a while but never use it. If I want to keep in touch with my nephews and niece, that has to change.

Oh, and those PSP’s? Wifi ready so when they’re not gaming (or while they are), they can keep in touch with friends.

PS: On Saturday we stopped by the local Apple store. Packed. An iPhone class was underway and there were more gray heads than mohawks.

Journalism in the 21st century

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“A lot of the discontent with traditional journalism is because too many reporters have forgotten that the highest calling of journalists is to ferret out the truth, consequences be damned. Unfortunately, this is a concept that has fallen out of favor with too many journalists, who are obsessed with a false view of “balance” and “objectivity” and have become addicted not to the tireless pursuit of truth, but to the tireless promotion of the misguided notion that every story has two sides. And that the truth is supposed to be found somewhere in the middle. But not every story has two sides and the truth is often found on one side or the other. The earth is not flat. Evolution is a fact. Global warming is a fact. And there are definitely not two sides to the proposition that Iraq is our generation’s greatest foreign policy disaster. It is. Period.”

–Full interview with Arianna Huffington at Poynter Online

A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken

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I am part of the first TV generation. Thousands of hours of my life were spent watching. Just watching. These days, like many others, I spend many of my hours online, creating, sharing and consuming media. Clay Shirky explains why this “social surplus” is a very big deal:

“Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.”

If you are in any way connected to the business of “media,” you need to read –and understand– what Mr. Shirky has to say.