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)
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