:)
Posted on 08/22/2007 5:39:41 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
I just read an interesting if flawed book,
Some fascinating tidbits in it. For example, Morse didn't invent much in the way of telegraph hardware, which is attributable to others. What he did do was software - and the entrepreneurship. Prior experimenters had used clunky codes for encoding messages; Morse used the count of each letter which was in a printer's array of type to tell him which letters to make the easiest to encode. Thus, "e," the most-used letter, is encoded as a single dot. And the other thing, of course, was his entrepreneurial commitment and refusal to give up in the face of cultural lag.
And it was striking how resistant the South in particular was to the change agents of the telegraph, and even the railroad. They made it illegal to cross state lines with a railroad! The upshot was that by the time of the Civil War, telegraph lines crisscrossed the North like spider webs, but in the whole South there were only two telegraph lines! Not only so, but the South lacked the ability to produce telegraph wire and batteries to make additional lines - and so they added very little telegraph wire during the whole Civil War!
Another fascinating point was that railroads turned out to be the initial "killer app" of telegraphy. There was a natural synergy between the two: information about where the various trains were at a given time was very valuable to a railroad because not knowing that forced you to be extremely conservative in holding trains on sidings to wait for other trains which might be late. And on the other side of the ledger, railroads had the rights of way needed to string the wires of the telegraph - so the standard deal was that the RR gave the telegraph co use of the right of way, and the telegraph gave the rr free - and first priority - use of the telegraph for its operational messages.
Finally, the Associated Press came into being because of the need of the papers to be able to exploit the telegraph. Before then, papers were local affairs which expected their customers to learn national news from other sources just as fast as the newspaper editors learned it (Back then, newspapers were frankly partisan affairs. Those were the good old days!). The telegraph made it possible to gather and disseminate news nationwide, and the AP made it economical to do so. AP was inititially a NY organization of six newspapers. But during the Civil War Lincoln imposed censorship - and AP went along with the censorship, and became the government's pet. The government made sure that AP reporters got priority at telegraph offices.
Ping.
ping
It doesn’t matter whether it’s telegraphs, emails, or a direct spoken voice. Nothing can tame the human inclination to accept positive statements as true while failing to investigate the source and determine the facts for themselves.
adj. frank, frank·er, frank·est
1. Open and sincere in expression; straightforward: made several frank remarks about the quality of their work.
2. Clearly manifest; evident: frank enjoyment.
Sure, it applies. It just needed to be made more strongly.
News in America was intended to sanctify opinions, not facts. LA Times column illustrates JournalismÂ’s fatal misunderstanding.
If there is ever a museum exhibition about the final days of the misguided journalism movement that began in the 1920’s, Pulitzer Prize winner Martin Skube’s screed deserves its own display case near the end of the exhibit. Not for its stylish vitriol, in which all bloggers are literally referred to as “blockheads,” but because it illustrates how far the movement strayed from the ideals of the Founding Fathers.
By excoriating bloggers for allegedly being heavy on opinion and light on facts, Skube upholds journalism’s cultish belief in the sanctity of facts over opinions, in their misguided quest to develop singular and “correct” public policies. This is the polar opposite of the teachings of Thomas Jefferson, who sanctified opinion over facts, in a quest to determine the will of the people to guide their government. To Jefferson, opinions were better than facts — they also included judgments to fill-in the inevitable unknowns and unknowables, and the preferences to which free individuals were entitled.
Jefferson wanted debate as delivered by blogs, not “the truth” as delivered by Pulitzer Prize-winning elitists. It is no coincidence that the Soviet Union’s official newspaper was called “Pravda,” which means “truth.” A free people deserve something better than someone else’s truth.
It is an interesting book. I have been reading it as well and plan to talk about it in my Information Policy course next term.
Students need to know that the internet isn’t the first information technology, so I talk about the telephone, tv, and radio before getting to the meat of the course, which is mostly about info via the net and attempts to regulate same.
Very interesting book, but I found it uneven.The author is hard on Samuel Morse, for appropriating the hardware work of others - but the reality is that that sort of thing is commonplace in tech. Somebody appropriated credit for the development of the binary computer, and it was decades before the credit was assigned to the actual originator. But the reality was that the guy who appropriated credit was also the one who found a market for the technology.
The thing I was struck by in the story of Thomas Edison was the fact that he not only developed the light bulb, he founded Consolidated Edison to generate and distribute electric power for the lights, and founded General Electric to make the bulbs for sale to consumers. It wasn't just the invention, it was the entrepreneurship which was essential to making the invention matter.
And of course I personally disagree strongly with the conceit of journalistic objectivity, and the author refers to the fact that pre-Associated Press newspapers were openly partisan affairs, but makes offers no comment on the putative "objectivity" of post-AP journalism.
Students need to know that the internet isn’t the first information technology, so I talk about the telephone, tv, and radio before getting to the meat of the course, which is mostly about info via the net and attempts to regulate same.
Politically, I’m probably a small ‘l’ libertarian.
Respectfully suggest you scan the following thread:I make bold to suggest that you might find something matching your above-expressed interests there.
:)
Interesting ping
BTTT
. . . and as someone who also has libertarian leanings, don't you agree that broadcast licensing as we have known it is illegitimate? For the government to grant certain individuals licenses to "broadcast in the public interest" implies that those individuals - and the government itself - have superior knowledge of what "the public interest" is. The government and the licensees of the FCC make it all sound so logical ("scarce spectrum" . . . "need to keep from having radio chaos," yada yada yada) - but what it boils down to is a rejection of the equal right to speak/print in favor of the right of the many to listen - purchased with a duty to shut up (within the broadcasting field).Broadcast licenses are actually very like titles of nobility, which are proscribed by the Constitution. Especially as they are used to broadcast "the news" - the newscast being essentially the licensee purporting to speak ex cathedra, infallibly and to great import. Since that issue is my own particular hobby horse, I think the main thing the insight about the origin of AP will be for me the main takeaway from this T-Mails.
The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing . . .
It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. - Adam Smith
Yes, interesting. I was not aware that the South resisted the spread of the telegraph.
In the early days of the United States, it took so long to obtain information from afar that people lived their lives more in its absence than its presence. On average it took 22 days for news to travel between New York City and Charleston . . .We knew there were cultural differences between the North and the South, but - WOW! The South was a backwater - and that's the way the powers-that-be liked it! It's truly amazing how close the South came to winning the Civil War. Unless you read about people like General McClellan designing a blitzkrieg strategy and then implementing it as a sitzkrieg . . .The result of such physical dspersion was economic and cultural diversity. Distance encouraged differences. . . . The government [the framers] created enshrined the opportunity for many of these regional differences (including slavery) to continue . . .
During the second third of the 19th Century, technology began to chew away at the geographic buffer that had allowed those differences to flourish . . .
For a brief period the longest rail line in the nation emanated from Charleston, South Carolina. Responding to the threat of contamination of local customs and states rights by such high-speed intercourse, however, Southern state legislators enacted laws prohibiting rail lines from crossing state borders.
. . . One of the principal opponents of [a proposed telegraph line to New Orleans to expedite news from the Mexican-American War] was states rights champion John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who challenged the constitutionality of the the federal government extending such communications through the South.
. . . the Census Report of 1850 featured . . . a map of all the existing telegraph lines. North of the Mason-Dixon Line it looked like a spider's web. South of that demarcation, however, were only two threads, one running down the east coast and the other down the Mississippi Valley.
I'm not surprised by a culture that thought its economy should be based on slave labor. They were not unlike the politicians today who think our economy should be based on illegal labor.
It's truly amazing how close the South came to winning the Civil War. Unless you read about people like General McClellan designing a blitzkrieg strategy and then implementing it as a sitzkrieg . . .
In 1864, Lincoln was abandoned by the Republican party and was certain he would lose the election. That gave him the motivation to win the war. Once Sherman took Atlanta the Republicans gave up and Lincoln won as the candidate of the National Union Party, a coalition of Some Republicans and War Democrats. W doesn't have it so bad with Reid and Pelosi.
. . . like he didn't have "motivation" to win the war before that?! Until he finally elevated Grant to General-in-chief, Lincoln constantly had to tell his generals to get moving. And it did little good. McClellan proposed the Peninsula Campaign as a quick end run which would outmaneuver Confederate forces and quickly take Richmond. But it entailed taking forces away from Washington, and didn't make sense unless you followed through quickly. But what McClellan then did was to chicken out and whimper that he needed more troops because the Confederates put up a good facade. McClellan even had an intelligence windfall which told him when Lee hadOnce Sherman took Atlanta the Republicans gave up and Lincoln won as the candidate of the National Union Party, a coalition of Some Republicans and War Democrats. W doesn't have it so bad with Reid and Pelosi.dividedfractured his forces, and what Lee's intentions were - and McClellan didn't move fast enough to prevent those forces from rejoining.
If GWB had been taking the kind of casualties that the Union Army took in the Civil War, and accomplishing no more by it than McClellan, Hooker, Burnside, and Meade had done, you would be looking for better leadership, too.
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