I’ve been doing photography and video for many years now. Just recently, I started doing it professionally again. I missed it, to tell you the truth. In the age when most people own a digital camera and more and more people are getting equipment with video capabilities, it seems like a counter-intuitive thing to do. So far though, I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve been able to photograph a few great events and even more interesting people. Add photography to the list of things I’ll cover in this blog.

Here’s a sample below:

David Bowie's letter to Sandra Dodd

One of the things that fascinates me when reading something like the letter above, (a letter that David Bowie wrote to his first “American Fan”) is the fact that writing was so linear compared to how most of us write today. Imagine putting together a letter, report, or news article back in the day. I mean, once you typed something, it was practically impossible to go back and change the structure of a paragraph or rewrite something  without having to start all over again. I suppose you could go back and add your corrections after the fact with pen, but that’s not very professional now, is it? Or I suppose you could do as David Bowie did when he caught an error and just make up a new word. Wi-at? Oh Bowie, you’re so cleaver clever.

In the video from my post on the birth of Web 2.0, the presentation starts with an example of linear writing, and then briefly illustrates how writing has changed with the help of technology. I’m absolutely certain that our method of writing is drastically different from the writing of past generations, but is it affecting our minds? I think so.

When I write, I go over a paragraph multiple times. When I’m done writing, I go back and take out entire paragraphs or move them up or down on a page. That’s because the writing that comes out is often disorganized and scattered. Digital text allows me to organize, delete, and restructure my thoughts on a page without having to start typing my entire document all over again. It almost feels like this style of writing was invented to suit my scattered brain.

So is technology affecting our minds? Yes, but some seem to think that it’s a bad thing. They say that it’s making us less organized and less effective.  I totally disagree. As evident from the letter above, communication was not linear in 1967, and I don’t think it has ever been (unless Bowie was is as scatter-brained as me). I believe that due to our technological limitations, we forced our brains to think in a very unnatural linear fashion. Now, with the help of technology, writing is more natural, more non-linear, and I couldn’t be any happier. If you ask me whether I think technology is affecting our minds, I’d say yes…finally, I can write like I think and then reorganize my thoughts so I can at least seem like I have some structure! At the very least, people can now understand what the hell I’m writing (you’d understand if you saw my handwriting).

How is technology affecting my mind? It makes  me feel normal, and that’s not so bad now, is it?

Joe Wilson is in the headlines again:

“One of the reasons I have long supported the U.S. biotechnology industry is that it is a homegrown success story that has been an engine of job creation in this country.” This written statement by Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina on the health care bill was identical to one by Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer and used language suggested by lobbyists.

The headline from the New York Times article reads “In House, many spoke with one voice: Lobbyists’” and has Joe Wilson on the front cover. We know Mr. Wilson from my blog post on his outburst during Obama’s speech and the importance of transparency.

With the technology and ability to reference check on the spot and look into ties, why do so many public figures insist on feeding us lines? I don’t think it has hit home quite yet that these aren’t the 1990′s, when you could claim or say anything and chances of you getting called on it were slim. We are in a different age. I look forward to an interesting backlash.

Back in 1998 or so, when I was working at a library as a clerk (putting back books on the shelves), I starting reading a book that caught my eye. The book was called something like HTML for Dummies and it was my first exposure to creating content for the web. For those of you who don’t know, HTML is the foundation language of the internet. HTML was by no means an easy thing to learn, but it was not difficult either. My curiosity kept me reading and later that year, I created a site on geocities.com, which as of later this month will be defunct. It kind of makes me a little sad, actually.

The main thing you should know about HTML is that it was a language created to give browsers, like the one you’re using, instructions on how to display text, pictures, links, etc. Most web pages were very simple in nature since the programmer was usually not very good with graphics or the tools to create graphics were expensive, and compression tools to make those images a decent size were nowhere near as good as they are today. Throw in the fact that most people were on dial-up (56k was fast when I was in High School!), and you ended up with a site that looked like this:

The White House home page...back in 1996.

Yeah, that’s the official White House website. Very plain and boring, and not at all like the whitehouse.gov of today. HTML, which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language was great though. It allowed people to create pages that could link to other parts of the site, files, and other sites. The ability to go from one page to the other came to be known as “Web Surfing”, I suppose because it was something like catching one wave after another. Soon enough, we had a huge collection of pages that didn’t look very visually appealing, but were all linking to one another and making information accessible to the world.

Yesterday, David Letterman revealed on-air that he was the victim of an extortion plot by a former CBS News employee who was threatening to reveal some rather embarrassing details about him by publishing them in a screenplay unless he paid 2 million dollars. Apparently, Letterman had affairs with female employees on his show and this guy thought he could extort some money from him. Letterman did the right thing by taking things to the authorities. They arrested dirtbag Robert J. “Joe” Halderman on Friday and put him behind bars where he belongs. Here’s what’s interesting, rather than keeping things under wraps after the guys plot was foiled, Letterman decided to confess his wrongdoings on national television!

There are some serious implications to having office affairs, but even more so with your subordinates. I’m not going to go into that. What I want to focus on is transparency. When Bill Clinton had an affair with Monica Lewinski in the 90s, no one was able to capitalize on the scandal better than Letterman, who was still  making jokes about the affair in 2001. Maybe Letterman learned form Clinton’s mistakes, but I think his decision to come clean even after the blackmailer was arrested really comes as a result of the type of world we live in NOW.  Whereas Clinton felt that he could lie about his affair and keep his wrongdoings secret, Letterman (and Mark Sanford) realized that access to information and dissemination via social media like blogs, social bookmarking, and social networks make the spread of this information almost inevitable and difficult to cover up, so coming clean was probably the best choice. When people said “honesty is the best policy”, they were just lying. However, transparency is making this a reality. Access to information is making it difficult to lie.

Mark Grgurich, an avid cyclist and artist was killed in a hit-and-run accident on August 30, 2009 as he was doing a 100 mile bike run in rural Iowa. After examining the location, all police investigators had was a vague description of the vehicle (a truck) and the following clue:

The clue left behind at the scene of the crime

Not having much else to go on, they asked the public for help in identifying the small plastic fragment they believed belonged to the vehicle that killed Mr. Grgurich, hoping it would generate some leads. Little did they expect what ensued.