Archive for the ‘Societal impact’ Category

I try to keep OverCoffeeMedia politically agnostic, but our media have a long tradition of making a difference. As I see video of people acting on detailed and cynical instructions to disrupt town hall meetings during the congressional recess, I find myself drawn to Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms paintings that appeared, along with essays, in the Saturday Evening Post in 1943, illustrating President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous “Four Freedoms” speech. In light of the concerted efforts to make reasoned public discourse impossible in town meetings during the traditional August recess, I’m especially struck by Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech painting.

Note that obviously well-to-do men in suits and ties listen politely to a rough hewn working man expressing an opinion to which they may very well object. His hands are gnarly, his features are coarse, and his clothes are dirty. But there’s not a shaking fist in the picture. After all, the First Amendment was enacted not to protect popular opinions, but those that many may find objectionable.

I suppose illustrating a sitting president’s speech wouldn’t meet the bar for “objective” reporting, but the Post’s articles and paintings served a powerful purpose, at a time when we were at war our nation needed a reminder of what we were fighting for. Media have always sought to balance objectivity with a social responsibility to do the right thing. It’s a tradition that goes back to Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin.

I don’t do causes, but because of www.overcoffeemedia.com’s focus on media, I cannot avoid encouraging solidarity with the people in Iran who are seeking to communicate with each other and the world about what is happening in their country.

We must never forget that open communication within a society always supports freedom in the long run, whereas suppression serves tyranny. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians are protesting peacefully to demand that their votes be properly counted. In response, the government has shut down foreign reporting and sought to block access to networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. CNN Story.

There is, of course, precious little we can do. But one step I am taking is changing my time zone on Twitter and other social networks to GMT+03:30 (to match the Tehran time zone). What’s the point? One way the Iranian government hackers are seeking to block Iranians’ communications via Twitter, Facebook and other social networks is by searching for users that appear to be inside of Iran, and the time zone is a major tool they are using.

Do I think it will help? Not really, but some smart people believe that doing so may help provide “cover” for Iranians using the Internet to communicate with each other and to smuggle accounts, photos and videos to the world. If nothing else, I’ll be letting them know they have one more friend. Think of it as an online equivalent to the wonderful scene from the movie, V for Vendetta, when the masses don masks to make the hero impossible to identify.

Finally, there is one other step we can take on Twitter. When you see a credible tweet pointing to an information feed from Iran, consider retweeting it. Yes, I know it’ll use bandwidth and annoy some people. And of course, it could result in some of my own Internet communications being blocked for a while. But hopefully it’s just for a few days, and it just might help keep the information flowing.

While the election was in full swing, I took a break from Over Coffee, mostly because its day-to-day, news-based focus became impossible to separate from the events being covered. In McLuhanesque terms, I was having trouble separating the medium from the message.

A secondary factor was that while media transitions are always occurring, the immediate direction is pretty well set. Barring some major shift in human nature, it seems we will get our information online. Print will continue to decline as a major factor in national news coverage, and the loss of advertising revenues to online media will inevitably move newspapers more to the web themselves. Read the rest of this entry »