‘Radio Home: Its x and y and the blue eyed descendant’

Good evening, Matāʻutu, capital of the Territoire des îles Wallis-et-Futuna, a French collectivité d’outre-mer in the South Pacific between Tuvalu to the northwest, Fiji to the southwest, Tonga to the southeast, Samoa to the east, and Tokelau to the northeast. If it’s almost 11 p.m. Thursday, April 4, 2019 in the Pacific/Wallis Time Zone, it must be almost 6 a.m. Thursday, April 4, 2019 in the Central Daylight Time Zone here in Thompson Manitoba, right in the centre of Canada, north and south, east and west.

There are 195 countries in the world today, and about 6,500 spoken languages, although 2,000 of those languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers. The most popular language in the world is Mandarin, and there are about 1.2 billion people in the world that speak it, according to the Dallas-based publication Ethnologue: Languages of the World.

While we like to think the internet, thanks to the World Wide Web (WWW), invented by Tim (now Sir Timothy) Berners-Lee 30 years ago, is the electronic realization of Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” outlined 30 years before the WWW – then three or six decades into this, depending on whether you want to start counting with television or the internet, my global village is still pretty much English, very much commercial – and perhaps surprisingly parochial – more so than I might have expected of the near future during those halcyon days of the mid-1990s, when for just a moment I sipped from the new WIRED magazine Kool-Aid, and something more seemed possible. Mind you, in 1995 I was also reading internet pioneer Clifford Stoll’s just published Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, where he discussed his ambivalence regarding the future of how the internet would be used and suggested even then the promise of the internet was vastly over-hyped by those with vested interests to do so. An American astronomer by trade, Stoll is best known for his pursuit of hacker Markus Hess, who broke into a computer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1986, which led to Stoll’s 1989 book called The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, which I also read.

While Stoll was wildly wrong in Silicon Snake Oil in underestimating the future of e-commerce and online news publishing, almost a quarter-century on, the book still stands the test of time, I think, as a general cautionary tale about over-hyping the internet and getting too carried away in our virtual enthusiasms. As early as 1996, as the managing editor of the pioneering Kingston Net-Times, I was, as I recall, urging my readers to follow Stoll’s suggestion to log-off the old dial-up modem mainly back then from time-to-time to bake some chocolate chip cookies (at least that’s what my memory recalls him writing) and to take in a kids’ hockey game at the local arena (my idea).

I’m not sure anyone quite envisioned the angry world of online commenting, trolls, fake news and bots that would materialize sooner than later on the internet.

Why online commenting on news stories seems so often to bring out the worst in some people is a puzzle that researchers continue to study and those of us engaged in social media never cease to wonder about. Is it the anonymity afforded them by many commenting modules that don’t require real names, but only pseudonyms as usernames the problem? Perhaps. It seems likely much of what is said in online commenting would never be said face-to-face, person-to-person. If you are interested in a broader historical discussion between 2010 and 2013 on online commenting, you might check out these links: “Robert Fisk: Anonymous comments and why it’s time we all stop drinking this digital poison” at http://www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/robert-fisk-anonymous-comments-and-why-its-time-we-all-stop-drinking-this-digital-poison-3349527.html, or Margaret Sullivan: Seeking a return to civility in online comments at http://fores.blogs.uv.es/2010/06/22/01-seeking-a-return-to-civility-in-online-comments/, or Katie Roiphe’s Slate magazine article, “What’s wrong with angry commenters?” at http://www.slate.com/articles/life/roiphe/2011/12/what_s_wrong_with_angry_commenters_.html

I remember first using an internet workstation in the just opened Joseph S. Stauffer Library at Queen’s University during one of my early visits to the new library on Union Street in October 1994. The Netscape Navigator browser had just been released that same month, but Queen’s was using the NCSA Mosaic browser, released in 1993, almost the first graphical web browser ever invented. The computer services and library folks at Queen’s got it from day one to their credit. They knew this was going to be so popular with students instantly, the workstations (and there weren’t many) were designed for standing only. How many places in a university library is their no seating? Not many. But they wanted to keep people moving because there would be lineups to use the stations. But in 1994, we all knew intuitively the world had changed with the internet and graphical web browsers. I had sent my first e-mail from Trent University in Peterborough more than three years earlier in the spring of 1991 from the Thomas J. Bata Library on their “Ivory” server (someone in computer services seemingly had a sense of humour), and was also sitting down as I recall. That was neat, but this was on a whole other scale entirely.

And if the internet I experience is too English, too commercial and too parochial, it does offer me a portal to go beyond the default position on seemingly every Windows OS ever installed on a PC desktop, laptop or smartphone of a Microsoft News homepage that is distraction-saturated with celebrity clickbait, tantalizing trivia and polarizing polemics. If I can overcome my initial inertia.

One way I try and do this is by listening sometimes to radio stations available on the internet, private and public, English and non-English, around the world. While I might not understand the local broadcasting language, and I’m certainly not a linguist, there is a universality to music, I find, which often transcends spoken language. And the music being broadcast simultaneously around the world at any given moment is dazzling in variety.

The first op-ed I ever wrote for the Kingston Whig-Standard in 1983 was for a feature called “The Passing Show” that had a roster of guest contributors. My piece was on the phenomenon of sometimes being able to listen to AM radio late at night growing up in Southern Ontario with distant stations from places like Chicago coming in clearly, if intermittently at times, late at night.

Loosely, the main reason for the phenomenon is the composition of the ionosphere at night is different than during the day because of the presence or absence of the sun. You can pick up some radio stations better at night because the reflection characteristics of the ionosphere are better at night.

In those days, the experience, or lack of one, was left mainly to atmospheric chance. The internet has transformed chance to certainty, and “The Passing Show” has morphed into Radio Garden.

The Radio Garden website found at https://radio.garden/ takes the form of an interactive globe that can be rotated to pick up transmissions from every corner of the planet, clips from radio history and stories from listeners in different locations. Radio Garden is the transnational radio encounters online exhibition, developed by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and designed by Moniker, an Amsterdam based interactive design studio.

Good afternoon, Tangier! It is almost noon local time and the sun rose almost five hours ago over the Bay of Tangier in Morocco, as seen in the image off this Skyline cam. The forecast high is 17°C today, under partly cloudy skies, with a forecast low tonight of 12°C.

As Brantford, Ont. singer-songwriter, Scott Merritt wrote and sang in his 1989 song, Radio Home, a time that happened to coincide with the birth of the World Wide Web: “Its x and y and the blue eyed descendant … Why am I waiting at all? Why am I waiting on you? I don’t know why you don’t radio, radio, radio…” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5Pw8ntinr4)

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Versioning Weblog World 2.75: Dish no more

A “weblog is a website where a person writes regularly about recent events or topics that interest them, usually with photos and links to other websites that they find interesting.” So says Oxforddictionaries.com, helpfully describing the origins of the word as dating back to the 1990s “from web in the sense ‘World Wide Web’ + log in the sense ‘regular record of incidents.’” In recent years, Oxford also points out, weblog is almost always abbreviated simply to blog.

Wikipedia will tell you that as of Feb. 20, 2014, there were around 172 million Tumblr and 75.8 million WordPress blogs in existence worldwide. Origins are always a bit of a murky business, but Justin Hall, who began posting online in 1994, while working as a student intern at San Francisco-based Wired magazine in the summer of his sophomore year at Swarthmore College, just outside Philadelphia, was among the pioneers of online diarists and web loggers who started personal blogging.

In a Jan. 28 note to his readers, Andrew Sullivan announced he was shuttering his blog after almost 15 years. Originally known as The Daily Dish (later called simply the Dish), it had been online since the summer of 2000. “Biased and Balanced” became the blog’s motto in January 2012.

Sullivan wrote the blog alone for the first six years, “for no pay, apart from two pledge drives. In 2006 he took the blog to time.com and then to theatlantic.com, where he was able to employ interns for the first time to handle the ever-expanding web of content,” the Dish reported at http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/about/

In explaining his decision to end the Dish, Sullivan wrote:

“Why [end the Dish]? Two reasons. The first is one I hope anyone can understand: although it has been the most rewarding experience in my writing career, I’ve now been blogging daily for fifteen years straight (well kinda straight). That’s long enough to do any single job. In some ways, it’s as simple as that. There comes a time when you have to move on to new things, shake your world up, or recognize before you crash that burn-out does happen.

“The second is that I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms. I want to read again, slowly, carefully. I want to absorb a difficult book and walk around in my own thoughts with it for a while. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me. I want to write a book.”

His last blog post, “The Years Of Writing Dangerously,” written by Sullivan, was posted Feb. 6 “@ 3:00pm.”

In that post, Sullivan points readers back to a Sept. 3, 2002 post of his, “Are Weblogs Changing Our Culture?” published in Slate’s “Webhead. Inside the Internet” section. Wrote Sullivan more than a dozen years ago: “[T]he speed with which an idea in your head reaches thousands of other people’s eyes has another deflating effect, this time in reverse: It ensures that you will occasionally blurt out things that are offensive, dumb, brilliant, or in tune with the way people actually think and speak in private. That means bloggers put themselves out there in far more ballsy fashion than many officially sanctioned pundits do, and they make fools of themselves more often, too. The only way to correct your mistakes or foolishness is in public, on the blog, in front of your readers. You are far more naked than when clothed in the protective garments of a media entity.

“But, somehow, you’re liberated as well as nude: blogging as a media form of streaking. I notice this when I write my blog, as opposed to when I write for the old media. I take less time, worry less about polish, and care less about the consequences on my blog. That makes for more honest writing. It may not be ‘serious’ in the way, say, a 12-page review of 14th-century Bulgarian poetry in the New Republic is serious. But it’s serious inasmuch as it conveys real ideas and feelings in as unvarnished and honest a form as possible. I think journalism could do with more of that kind of seriousness. It’s democratic in the best sense of the word. It helps expose the wizard behind the media curtain.”

Closing down a blog has always been part of the life cycle of the web. “I’ve seen this happen a thousand times,” said Rebecca Blood, author of The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog, which was published in July 2002. Blood has been blogging since April 1999 and can be found at http://www.rebeccablood.com

“It’s usually people have a baby, or get married, or get a new job – interests changed, and they stop posting.” Blood wrote those words more than a decade ago. She still blogs herself at Rebecca’s Pocket, and her most recent posting on Feb. 28 was on season three of BBC One’s Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes, and Martin Freeman as Dr. John Watson. Rupert Graves plays Detective Inspector (D.I.) Greg Lestrade.

Mind you, Sullivan was not much of a fan of Blood’s book, The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. In his Sept. 3, 2002 post “Are Weblogs Changing Our Culture?” published in Slate, Sullivan refers to Blood’s book published earlier that summer in July: “It’s almost silly to write a dead-tree book about blogs anyway, don’t you think? The critical language of blogging—the hypertext links to other Web pages, for example – cannot even be translated into book form, and you end up with lame appendixes and footnotes crammed with web addresses. There were a few amusing essays in We’ve Got Blog – Julian Dibbell’s ‘Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man,’ and Tim Cavanaugh’s ‘Let Slip the Blogs of War,’ for example – but both these tomes struck me as products of old media thinking: ‘Hey, there are all these blogs out there. Let’s Do a Book.’ How about ‘Let’s Not Do a Book?’”

Bloomberg View columnist Megan McArdle, whose Asymmetrical Information blog appeared in Newsweek and the Daily Beast, and who has also written for the Atlantic and the Economist magazines, wrote in a Feb. 5 Bloomberg View story – the day before Sullivan’s departure from blogging – “Journalism is a lecture; blogging is a conversation … My industry faces two big challenges. The first is to find a business model that will pay for journalism — which is not being killed off by bloggers, but by giant web companies that sell lots of ads without doing any of that expensive reporting. Andrew was the pioneer of one possible model – subscriptions – and I think his experience has shown that this model won’t work. The Dish got an amazing amount of support from loyal readers, far more than anyone else could hope for, and it pulled in enough money to cover the cost of operations, but only if those operations operated at an unsustainably high pitch.

“The other challenge is ‘what will journalism careers look like?’ My profession, after grousing about ‘pajama-clad bloggers’ who were allowed to say anything they wanted without editorial interference, has moved toward that model. As ad dollars have died, we have come to rely more and more on armies of people putting out quick content.”

As for me, I write pretty much what I want when I want. Which is about what I did as a print journalist for the most part, some of my critics would no doubt remind me. “Write what you know” remains good advice to writers, I think, although I’d go a bit further and add write what you’re truly interested in and write about things you may want to know more about. Then let the chips fall where they may. As I wrote in a blog post last Sept. 11, “In the old days, publishers and newspaper owners would from time to time ‘kill’ a writer’s column before publication. Despite their ballyhoo and blather about freedom of the press, publishers and newspaper proprietors are almost universally in my long experience with them a timid lot, if not outright moral cowards at times, always afraid of offending someone. Freedom of the press is the last thing they want when it comes to staff.” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/retroactively-spiked-the-post-publication-killing-of-msgr-charles-popes-blog-post-on-new-york-citys-st-patricks-day-parade/)

That latter notion of writing about things that interest you but you may want to know more about is particularly apropos for bloggers where your readers are often more than happy to comment and in some cases are almost guaranteed to have more expertise and background in a particular area than you do, which they may blog about themselves, and are usually happy to share with you and your readers.

Why online commenting on news stories seems so often to bring out the worst in some people is still something of a puzzle that researchers continue to study with some wondering if it is the anonymity afforded them by many commenting modules that don’t require real names, but only pseudonyms as usernames, that causes problems.

Still, it rarely has been a problem for me blogging, with the odd notable exception. While it seems likely much of what is said in online commenting on news stories would never be said face-to-face, person-to-person, it has been only a minor – and even then, exceptional  – annoyance for me. But if you are interested in a broader discussion on some of these issues, you might check out these links: “Robert Fisk: Anonymous comments and why it’s time we all stop drinking this digital poison” at http://www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/robert-fisk-anonymous-comments-and-why-its-time-we-all-stop-drinking-this-digital-poison-3349527.html, or Margaret Sullivan: Seeking a return to civility in online comments at http://fores.blogs.uv.es/2010/06/22/01-seeking-a-return-to-civility-in-online-comments/, or Katie Roiphe’s Slate magazine article, “What’s wrong with angry commenters?” at http://www.slate.com/articles/life/roiphe/2011/12/what_s_wrong_with_angry_commenters_.html

As a generalist, who writes on an eclectic (perhaps even at times eccentric) range of topics and ideas, I find readers who are more than happy to comment and share their expertise and background in a particular area very helpful. And even if they can’t help sometimes, other bloggers and commenters will often offer encouragement.

A couple of days after I posted a piece in part on the Sir Leonard Tilley Building (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/canadas-other-national-spy-agency-the-communications-security-establishment-used-its-internet-cable-tap-program-atomic-banjo-for-http-metadata-monitoring-and-collection-from-free-file-upl/), the old Communications Security Establishment (CSE) five-storey headquarters at 719 Heron Rd., near Carleton University, and well known to the intelligence community as “The Farm,” located at the corner of Riverside Drive and Heron Road, within the boundaries of the federal government’s Confederation Heights campus, in Ottawa, I serendipitously came across Bill Robinson’s Lux Ex Umbra blog, which bills (pun intended) itself as “monitoring Canadian signals intelligence (SIGINT) activities past and present.”

The Sir Leonard Tilley Building was built in 1961 and custom designed for use by intelligence services. The building’s exterior elevations conceal specialized features linked to intelligence gathering such as the design of “slippers” beneath the floor plates and the electrical and mechanical systems. The Communications Security Establishment’s $1.2 billion new headquarters at 1929 Ogilvie Rd., completed last July, dubbed “Camelot” in official Department of National Defence documents, is the most expensive federal building ever constructed in Canada, and located next door to the only slightly better known Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which also has its headquarters in Gloucester in east-end Ottawa.

Bill, as it turned out, had written in some detail on the Sir Leonard Tilley Building about three years ago on April 7, 2012 (http://luxexumbra.blogspot.ca/2012/04/cse-facilities-sir-leonard-tilley.html), so I sent him an e-mail query Jan. 30 asking if subsequent to writing his post he “had any success discovering more about the ‘slippers’ beneath the floor plates and the electrical and mechanical systems in the Sir Leonard Tilley Building in Ottawa?”

Bill replied Feb. 1: “Sadly, I haven’t learned anything more about the Tilley building’s systems. I wonder if we’ll learn more about the building after CSE finishes vacating the premises (assuming they haven’t already).”

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22