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| Sunday, September 26, 2004 |
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Going mobile 
| | Heading up to the Bay Area for a few days. |
Air out
Love in real time
| | Euan and his daughter show how computers can add to, rather than subtract from, to the only value that matters. |
The libertarian case for unfettered TV
| | Says here (subscription req'd) that satellite TV is kicking cable's butt. No surprise there: Dish and DirecTV deliver nicer pictures and more channels for less money, on the whole, here in the U.S.. And local "content" has been going away for a long time anyhow, in both absolute and relative terms. |
| | Suggestion to the FCC: deregulate both cable and satellite. Lose the rules. Stop protecting one from the other. Just let them compete and see what happens. Do the same for satellite radio. Stop protecting the local stations, most of which aren't anymore anyway. |
| | While you're at it, stop playing nanny too. Get out of the decency enforcement racket. Recognize broadcasting as a form of speech protected by the first amendment, rather than a form of "content", regulated like so much container cargo. |
Who, and where, are "we" anyway?
| | The Bloomberg story linked above says Hurricane Ivan, the last storm to hit Florida, killed 130 people. Twelve paragraphs down, the story casually adds this: |
| | Last week, Jeanne wrecked Haiti as a tropical storm and is blamed for the deaths of 1,500 people there, with 900 still missing, the Associated Press said. Jeanne then veered north into the open Atlantic Ocean before making a loop and heading toward the Bahamas. The government of Bahamas has downgraded Jeanne to a tropical storm. |
| | We learn that three million have been given evacuation orders in Florida. Meanwhile, according to the Toronto Star, three hundred thousand people are homeless and hungry in Haiti. Actually, it's worse than that: |
| | Without enough food or clean drinking water, health experts raise the spectre of disease — an epidemic could push the current death toll of 1,160 higher. |
| | Human and animal corpses are still floating in the fetid floodwater that covers the streets that are being used as one giant latrine. It is the same water that people wash in, walk in and drink. |
| | "The water breeds disease — typhoid, diarrhea, cholera," said Marco Kocic, a spokesperson for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. |
| | As the water evaporates, some of the disease-causing bacteria will become airborne. |
| | Michel St. Ville, who lost his five children to the swirling floodwaters that came crashing through his front door last Sunday, blames his country's misery on "a curse." |
| | But the fact is, Haiti's floods are a man-made ecological disaster. |
| | Over the years, Haiti's forest has been cut down to make space for sugar cane, fuel the sugar mills, and feed Europe's hunger for mahogany furniture. |
| | The poor cut down whatever's left to make charcoal for fuel. |
| | With less than 2 per cent of the original forest remaining, there is nothing to stop the rains from flooding through Gonaïves, which lies in a valley that feeds into the ocean. |
| | "The situation will continue and other catastrophes are foreseeable," said Jean-André Victor, one of the country's top ecologists. |
| | Look up Haiti right now on Google News. The top stories are from Miami, Taiwan (Agence France-Presse), Trinidad & Tabago, Xinhua (and again), Canada (CBC), Australia, Barbados, Kerala, Toronto, Jamaica, London, Montreal, Maryland... Notice a pattern? |
| | To find out why, consider how stories work. Every story has three elements: Identification (with a character, a protagonist — somebody or something or some group you identify with and might care about); Struggle or conflict caused by a problem of some kind; and Movement toward a resolution. The best stories — the ones that keep you interested — stay with the problem, and move toward but never quite arrive at a resolution. This is what keeps us interested in soap operas and sports teams. |
| | Now look at Haiti in light of all three elements. |
| | Identification. Let's face it, most Americans don't identify with poor anonymous Haitians — especially whole populations whose personal stories are nearly always, by most accounts, hopeless tales of woe. |
| | Struggle. The problem in Haiti is worse than bad. It's all but hopeless. Which brings us to... |
| | Movement torward resolution. There isn't any — not that we here in the U.S. can see. Okay, maybe there has been a little progress. But it's hard to stay interested in losers. |
| | But why do people in Canada, India, Sri Lanka (which is sending troops) and other countries seem to care more about Haiti? My guess is that they can identify more with the people there. They can see the struggle, and at least some hope of movement. In other words, for them it's a story. |
| | If we want to save the Net by establishing it as a place, rather than as a plumbing system for industrially-produced "content", we need to mean something that isn't just national when we blog in the first person plural. |
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