Reflections from the Xmas table

Unsurprisingly, people talk technology to me even at the dinner table. Many of my long-time friends and acquaintances are not exactly early adoptors:

• Some people in the newspaper business seem fixated on the idea that blogs & podcasts are niche. Somehow, this nicheness means that blogs & podcasts are not quite as threatening.
• I was tickled to hear that many newspaper business strategy discussions these days include considerations of the new media 'threat'.
• The daughter of some friends is a member of a global young writers group where people submit their pieces to peers for review and comment. The daughter met up in Sydney on Boxing Day with another participant from New Jersey who was out on a visit. Her parents are still in the dark about the transformative power of the modern internet.
• People complain about blogs being 'opinion' as in 'just some ordinary joe's personal opinion', as if your opinion becomes more valuable if you write for a newspaper.
• The old 'serendipidity' fallacy gets another run, remember this one was all the rage about a year ago. I pointed out, yet again, that scanning 100 or more feeds each day gives me more than enough 'serendipidity', far more than leafing through a couple of newspapers ever could. Of course, my interlocutor had no idea what a feed or an aggregator might be.
• I love that journalistic commitment to curiosity. Many journalists are happy to tell you that they just aren't interested in technology. As if it is a kind of optional extra. Of course, this has always true. Writers of all sorts resisted the introduction of the typewriter, and then the replacement of that magical instrument with the 'soulless' computer. Plus le meme chose!
• Another canard that came up again this year is that you have to check information you find on the web - well, of course. The problem here is that so many people just don't know how to find their way around the blogosphere and beyond. They get a drowning sensation. It emphasises to me the need for people to understand the web as, well, a web of relationships where trust is built over time (like life) not just a document repository you access occasionally through a search.
• One friend complained to me that all these millions of blogs are cluttering up his search engine results. This, of course, is an easy one to rebut. Nevertheless, its fascinating to hear a left-winger bemoaning the idea that people might actually want to participate in their democracy. I rather helpfully, I thought, pointed out that his viewpoint was akin to a nineteenth-century British aristocrat railing against the prospect of universal suffrage.
• The boyfriend of a younger colleague bittorrents 'Lost' and then listens to 2 hour podcasts on what each episode might mean.
• My son used a gift of credit at iTunes to buy Cds on Xmas night.
• Yet my favourite vignette is from a young colleague who came here as a refugee from Vietnam with her family at age 2. Her extended family back home now email photographs to family and friends in Australia and when her Australian friends and relatives go to Vietnam people there are surprised at the age of Australian mobile phones: "is that YOUR phone?". Leap-frogging indeed.

Comments

[geekgirl2]

This is interesting - it is very similar to stuff I heard from CIOs and mainstream print media IT journos in Sydney just prior to Xmas.

PS: I agree it is heaps easier to keep on top of news with a feed aggregator than with my old practice of reading various newspapers every day. It also increases the diversity of sources I check!

Happy New Year!