So in Early December, I posted here saying that I won at teh NaNoWriMo. And since then, it's been pretty quiet here on this blog. Sorry about that.
Call it a New Years Resolution, or perhaps a Interesting-challenge-because-it's-also-an-assignment, but my goal is to blog weekly for the next fifteen weeks in hopes that I get back into a more regular swing in updating the currently lacking ramblesnatch in this pitiful blog's existence.
Either way,
Here't Goes:
Between watching my now thoroughly insane (as in Holy-shit-kids-have-way-too-much-energy-and-why-can't-I-have-a-tenth-of-that insane) daughter sugar herself up into a Christmas frenzy (the first such frenzy [being the first year she was cognizant of holiday fun] of several impending frenzies, I'm sure), and trying to ease the discomfort of Sue's pregnancy (apparently all boys are Assholes [my term not hers] in the womb--I'm sorry mom), and revising the Shadowman project (I finished a solid pass just this past week -- W00t), I've been talking and thinking and prepping for classes, which started yesterday. (I just realized: In the above I listed a bunch of stuff, but not anything about work. It was there too; but that's the ignorable bit; it's like sleep, I guess--an interim between the other, more important stuff. Not that work is bad like it was in the Verizon days, but thankfully and blissfully, contracting has been relatively stress free, and thus totally ignorable like the fifth child out of six).
This time around I've picked up two, a Rhetoric and Comp and a Basic Writing. And it is because of the Basic Writing Course that I'm challenging myself to blog regularly, because that's exactly what they'll be doing. Specifically, I've beet talking to my friend Grace a lot about various topics related to my course themes. Most of our discussions have revolved around a mutual dislike towards Facebook (which started out with Grace mocking me for joining fb back in June or July, and ended with Grace saying "see I told you it was Evil" when I quit in early December). We've also spent a goodly amount of time talking about newsmedia and the current shift that's starting to happen between print and online content.
Personally, I never read a newspaper. I've always found them boring, and the size, formatting and layout annoys me, not to mention the cost. However, slashdot, Google News, and for a good long time BBC news have all replaced any sort of need for reading traditional newspapers. Granted, I'd like to pick up some more sources; in researching essays for class, I've found that online content on Salon, The Atlantic, and a couple other places is really top notch. But I am the king of taking on too much, so while I have good intentions, I don't really foresee my news reading circle expanding much (especially in the face of how much I've been lagging in reading fiction).
So with that said, I think online news is the way to go. I'm sure I'll cover my take on the whole Rupert Murdoch/News Corporation vs. Google bit here soon, probably next week, but I think print journalism is dying, and no one is really going to miss it. While I sit far enough into the tail end of Generation X to not fully understand the usefulness and ubiquity of Twitter and Social networking (perhaps because I'm just not that social--I like my cave, and I don't like to leave it), but I do think that them kids with their cellphones and twitter feeds will be getting most of their news from that. With each successive generation we become more attuned to multi-tasking. And as that becomes more of a necessity, doing things like sitting down to read the paper will become increasingly preposterous. More likely, we'll catch a bit of news in a deadspot between text messages, while waiting in traffic on the road, or have it shipped to us, pre-filtered and set up to our desires via Twitter, RSS and all that other fun Web 2.0 stuff that makes teh Intarnets useful to us.
2 comments:
It scares me to think that people will get all of their news and information off of things like Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, and the like. While a definite probability, the lack of responsibility in reporting the truth is astounding. Anyone can report anything they want as truth simply to entertain themselves. I suppose a duty that once fell on journalist will now fall to the readers and you will have to check multiple sources and make sure they have respectable reference sources before you believe anything you read. Always a good practice anyways, but I find that most people seem to believe anything they read no matter where they found it.
It'll certainly be interesting over the next coupla years, what with all the Twitter Death Hoaxes-- Johnny Depp being the latest.
I think I used Twitter for a week before deciding I wasn't important enough to be there. But one of the feeds I subscribed to was CNN.
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