Blog 100: More Challenges and Less Money.

Currently journalism is going through a massive decline as the traditional revenue sources prove no longer viable to support the large legacy organizations required to investigate, verify, record and achieve information on a large scale. The primary method of monetization is still advertising the main revenue source for journalism , even for online organizations. This has and will produce two main effects, namely the lack of incentive to produce substantive (and costly) investigative articles over cheaper and shallower "clickbait" articles as well as the decrease in funding overall as expensive subscriptions and print advertising is replaced with extremely low return online advertising. As the money continue to leave journalism numbers of journalists who do anything other then rewrite others articles and local Twitter reports will continue to decrease.

One aspect, far less talked about, is the problem of digital decay making journalism a very much quickly expiring product. The internet in constantly in turmoil, editing, replacing and going offline. This means that citations and sources that may have been valid when the article was written disappear with alarming rapidity. This is most obvious in the case of reports on the Middle East North Africa region, where it is a very real necessity to read reports as soon as they are released as much of their source materiel is removed extremely quickly. There was at least one article I read that cited a video which was taken down the day after the article was published by YouTubes automated information control system.As such automated systems are improved and spread through the major corporate and governmental structures there continued use is guaranteed , and the continued quick removal of primary sources will be a staple of future issues. This means that journalistic endeavors will either have to become archives of primary material, copying and hosting source material to prevent it from being purged, or simply depend on the reader to take their word that the source did indeed exist at some point.*

The overall outlook is not a good one.


*I had been planning on including a few examples of this from my own digital archive of the Syrian Civil War, including a screengrab from the first (and long gone) video recorded loss of a SAA T-72 but my PC motherboard failed, removing my access to the images and illustrating the problems with digital storage at the same time.

Blog 011: html for them all.

Working with html again was an odd experience. The last time I used html to build a website, as opposed to adding tags to posts made on online forums, was back in early high school, roughly eight years ago at this point, and it was not a skill that I had expected to use again.The webpage I ended up producing was a simple one, single page no images, more of a “hello world” page then anything that would actually get deployed to the internet at any point later then the 90s.

The use of a text editor (in this case notepad) was not a hindrance or oddity for me as I am one of the few people who actually use notepad on a regular basis as a word processor. While it is most certainly not the most annoying language I have worked with - that dubious honor goes to TI Basic and its inexplicable inability to handle nested if statements - it is certainly not the best. The language is simply adequate to its purposes, it makes a website and makes you remember to include all the end tags. Of course it must be noted here that I do feel that a simple html page such as the one produced should be done in a simple text editor such as notepad rather than a more modern text editor that actually reminds you to include end tags, because where is the fun in simply being told where you made mistakes?

Blog 010: The Postal Service tried sending Mail by Cruise Missile.

As the name implies email does take inspiration in both form and function from traditional physical mail. The method of sending the data (mail) to increasingly higher order addresses before sending it to correspondingly lower addresses is taken from the physical method of sorting and distribution centers. Both can be used for the exchange of information between parties. Email is substantially faster for the vastly majority of use cases but is much slower than mailing physical data storage media when dealing with large amounts of information is to moved. 

Email functions substantially differently in practical terms than physical mail due to its electronic nature. Due to the massively simplified nature of sending mail electronically the ease of creating spam is accordingly simplified. This creates a need for sorting methods to filter out unwanted or harmful files, as well as default sorting categories for individual accounts not needed for physical mail. In the digital sphere this is usually done on the receiving side of the process, while the majority of the security screening for physical mail is done on the outbound side.* The most substantial difference for the majority of users is that physical mail, being physical, can allow for the transportation of goods and tangible objects rather than merely information.  Also people tend to have single mailing addresses and multiple email addresses.

*A little known fact is that the Postal Service has an armed component with arrest authority. Meanwhile Google can not shoot nor arrest people for misusing gmail. Yet.

Blog 001: Insert Witty Title Here

Out of this class I hope to acquire a greater understanding of the underlying fundamental technologies and ideas used in modern computer and digital systems. Currently I am lacking information regarding a number of areas which makes understanding a great deal of information regarding topics of personal and professional interest much more difficult than need be. While I hold no delusions that a single quarter class can completely remedy this issue it seems like a decent enough place to start gaining some degree of reliable information. As the world continues to rely on the internet for an increasingly large number of vital systems and as it becomes omnipresent by the inclusion of previously non-networked devices such information will be required to prevent doing or saying something incredibly dumb, like saying that the new US ICBM should be connected to the internet for some incomprehensibly stupid reason (luckily for the human race that was just a single corneal and it appears that everyone else knows how insanely stupid that would be). Furthermore I find workflow and social dynamics of internet-only groups to be a fascinating topic, hopefully that will be covered to some degree in class as well as the technical and historical aspects.  

The other main thing I hope to gain from this class is three credits and a good grade. As a 200 level class it should prove well in my ability to gain a grade which can work to offset the effects of substantially more demanding courses on my overall grade.