Making It Up As I Go Along #254

MONDAY...
— Train Megan some more and it’s going fine.
— Walk with Jackson at a break and it’s pretty cold out.
— Wendy’s for supper is not bad every now and then.

TUESDAY...
— Still training. It’s been busy and there’s fear of overloading Megan’s mind with too much too soon... but we push on and she’s doing fine.
— Get the CD with the office golf pictures on it... I pick the ones I want for my computer. It makes me want summer again.

WEDNESDAY...
— Mostly a meeting night. Megan and I meet with the staff one on one to go over things from the past month and tell them how Megan will plan to do things. Takes away from the teaching and regular work I’d do but needed anyway.

THURSDAY...
— Normal day for this week. Training with Megan and some meetings as well. Get a few groceries on the way home and get my Amazon order arriving in the mail. Extras first season and Unforgiven (the best western I’ve seen).

FRIDAY...
— Last day training Megan. We also have a luncheon for me... with good food and I’m also given a card containing $25 cash... $25 movie money... and $25 at Chapters book store. Really never expected that at all.
— To Leslie’s with Linda for a surprise birthday party (Leslie’s 40th). Then we meet Melissa, Nick, and Sheila (plus some others) to have some food, drink and talking at the bar downtown where the guys from work play music. It’s a good night really.

SATURDAY...
— Quiet day around the house. The Godfather is watched on DVD (my first time seeing it and it is a really good movie. Hockey is also watched (Montreal vs. Toronto must be viewed by real hockey fans).


A Mishmash of Media Thoughts
We’ve gone back in time. From a news/media point of view, we are back in the days of the Hindenburg crashing to the earth with “ohhh the humanity” being cried in the background.

From that time on we had much advancement in the media. TV went from black and white to colour. Grainy pictures gave away to images as clear as looking through a window. And great big cameras that needed to be mounted to pedestals have been replaced by hand held devices.

Satellites allow instant access to any part of the world. But... somewhere along the way, we have fallen down on the quality of what we’re seeing.

Cell phone images and satellite phones have taken over for serious journalism. And the result is a return to grainy, stuttering images. We’ve retained the colour aspect of things... but the quality makes it all look like fifty years ago.

I think children of the future will look at images of today and wonder “what on earth were you people doing?” And that is has been accepted as quality journalism probably says something... and not necessarily a good thing... about today’s journalistic practices.

War in the Middle East has overrun us with low quality images. We see juttery pictures of armour plated assault vehicles speeding through desert terrain. We get disconnected journalists in armour plated vests and helmets. They speak in confused tones about that which happened just seconds ago. For journalism of today, speed takes priority over quality.

A network like CNN would gladly take cell phone pictures and an eyewitness describing an explosion that they’re still in shock about. Giving the time for real reporters to set up and learn the story prior to sharing the relevant details has become frowned upon. There’s a fear of losing the audience to another network that is showing the drama, raw and live.

The problem with all this is that it’s up to the viewer to filter. We see breaking news of an airplane stuck on the tarmac. And the reporters speculate... maybe it’s a highjacking... maybe a bomb found on board... maybe someone snuck a tube of toothpaste onboard. Nobody knows... but we’re all made not to know together. And wasting our time becomes a fact of live. An hour of grainy images of a plane sitting there... “Breaking News” plastered on the bottom of the screen, forcing us to remain glued to the set. Obviously, for twenty-four hour news networks, the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf hasn’t occurred to them when it comes to using discretion on the “Breaking News” usage.

So we now live in a time where archived footage of news events actually look better and more modern than that footage which occurred last week.

On the positive side of our topsy turvy media world, I can now see live images of my home town anytime I want. In fact, after just writing that sentence, I googled “St John’s Webcams” and came up with a group to look at all on one page. http://www.stormpost.com/cams.pl

I can see downtown, Bell Island, and different roads around the city. I even sat there and watched a car drive by a Portugal Cove front porch with the ocean and rocks serving as a familiar background. And the car that passed did so clearly, and without staggering... it was better than CNN!

That’s the world we live in. I can see 1950s style images of Baghdad on cable TV, or I can go to my personal computer and view clear images from the front porch of some regular person. If ever there’s a terrorist attack in Portugal Cove, I’ll know where to go to view it. Stormpost.com... CNN of the 21st century.