From Behind The Lens
By Colleen Swartz
Blogga’ Pleeze…
This is a new age that we live in. I remember when my Mom bought the first microwave oven I had ever seen from a restaurant supply store (only restaurants had them at first) it cost $800, was the size of a pinto, and boiled water in under a minute (of course it cooked your kidneys too if you stood too close to it while operating) and it was the coolest fucking thing I had even seen.
Now I have an 11-year-old who is so jaded by technology that nothing is amazing to him anymore. I’m sure that attitude has served many of them well because it has become a generation where if they think it up… poof, it happens and it has brought us some amazing technology but this old-school girl still worries about the humanity that is being left out of our technologies.
Back in 1990 I connected my computer to something new called the Internet. I was an AOL Subscriber and I think I paid something like $.70 per hour to access the Internet. I remember being immediately hooked on it. I would stare in wonder at an AOL chat room that had people from all over the world in it and I could talk, in real time, with them! It was amazing. I spent countless hours in chat rooms to the point that I actually took a job with AOL as a chat room monitor in a “writers workshop” where my job was to kick out assholes (if there were any) or to remind people not to use bad language. My pay for this? Free access to the Internet as I was regularly running up hundreds of dollars per month in access fees.
The amazing thing about the internet at that time was the fact that it was developed by institutions of higher learning for communication. The only people back then that were on the internet were intellectuals, the wealthy and the technological advanced members of society. They were the cream of the crop and you could actually learn something by chatting with these people. Eventually, the shine wore off of this superior form of networking as it became accessed by more and more of the “base” element. It went from exciting to tedious to off-putting in a few short years and I will undoubtedly never see those “golden years” of internet chat rooms ever again.
Being quasi-employed in the media world, I hear all the time about how print magazines are on the way out. I see all these editors working so hard to make their on-line sites the best so that when they stop printing paper magazines they will be able to survive, and call me naive, but I don’t see it happening. It is not that I am slow to adopt new technologies; on the contrary, I am a down-right geek when it comes to new and cool shit, but as for me, I want my print magazines. I want to hold it and pack it in my carry-on for the plane ride and I want to save it and go back and reference it later, I want to see the photos and read the story and until they develop a laptop that bolts to the shitter, I want my paper mags in the magazine rack next to the toilet right where they belong.
Beyond online access to magazine content, there are the blogs. Some are associated with some of the magazines and some stand on their own. I admit, I watch Cyril Huze more closely than Peter Jennings on any given day and I bounce around our sub-set of the World Wide Web from Jockey Journal to Cycle Source to Old Bike Barn and beyond.
What really worries me about these message boards and blogs is the same thing that worries me about Wikipedia. Any half-wit can post opinions as gospel and falsify facts with little or no retribution whatsoever. Now I’m not saying that the moderators or owners of these blogs are guilty of this, not at all. Most of these cats see themselves as journalists, albeit a new form and they abide by the same principals that columnists at print publications do. They check facts, they stay away from rumors, they clearly mark “opinion” as that but then they open up their sites for comments and responses from the peanut gallery. Here is where things get hairy.
Opening up your site for anyone to post anything has its up-sides. People are able to quickly share information, answer questions, give advice but they can also use this opportunity to exercise personal vendettas, slander publicly, start a riot and generally flaunt their ignorance and mean spiritedness.
I, personally, have witnessed disgruntle ex-employees log in anonymously and rip apart their former employers under the guise of “innocent third party observer”. I have seen an unhappy consumer take their dissatisfaction to a blog before even contacting the source of their strife and publicly post “their side of the story” for other ass-sitting morons to not only weigh in on but also take unnecessary sides and spread the rumors like wild fire. I have seen people who don’t have the balls to say it to your face say it in a chat room or on a message board and I can’t help but think how nice it is to be a hard-ass when no one knows who you are or where you live.
For me it brings up an interesting age of not only instant communication and information but an age that has not yet learned the fine art of censoring oneself. Like the advent of any new technology it will take some time for people to understand that one cannot simply regurgitate everything that comes across their mind onto their favorite blog without repercussions. It was like the first time someone told me that typing an email in all caps was considered yelling and therefore rude. Who would have figured? But now it is absolutely understood that typing a letter in all caps is not only rude, but a poor reflection on the intellect and breeding of the author.
Bottom line? Think if you have a dog in a fight before weighing in with your opinion. Question everything you read online as assuming what you are reading is true is usually a mistake. Use blogs and message boards as an addition to your social life, not your whole life and live by the golden rule. If you haven’t got any thing nice to say, don’t hit the “send” button.
And that is how I see it, from behind the lens. Your comments are always welcome to colleen@digitalmagicbigshots and more of my work can be found at www.digitalmagicbigshots.com.
