As usual to start my work day, I exchanged text messages with my congressman, my senator, and my friend in the Middle East who keeps my Facebook group up to date on the Palestine-Israeli détente. I noted that my YouTube video has achieved 100,000+ views and surveyed some of the response videos. I considered starting a new group, “Media Ecologists against the use of sepia tone videos” but put it off until later.
Later I set up a three-way video conference with my SO who is away on business in Chicago and my daughter, who is on a mid-term break trip to Africa. We finalized plans for our family vacation this summer to one of the new National Tree Farm Parks that recently opened while the country gives the older national parks a few years fallow time to recover from the Bush years.
My daughter is researching and shooting a school report on the history of newspapers and had some questions:
Is it true that the first toy airplanes were made out of something called "paper"?
Did opinion columns and editorials once only go one way?
What is papier maché?
As printed newspapers go the way of buggy whips, antimacassers, and Republicans, it is comforting to know that the traditions and the triumphs of the age of newspaper journalism is being preserved by the Newseum in Washington D.C. (which bills itself as "the world's most interactive museum")... and online. Someday I’ll take my daughter there to see it in person.
So, Professor Goldman, perhaps the better message to your students (and would-be future journalists) would be: "Make love to the new media, not war!"
Article comments