On the future of smalltown newspapers, the news business and snailpapers

A guest blog post by Curtis Bloes. [Mr Bloes lives and works in Sac City, Iowa where he dishes the dirt on snailpapers in his neck of the woods....]

[webposted in Danny Bloom's ''I SEE BY THE SNAILPAPERS'' blog on January 32, 2010.]

The smalltown local weekly newspaper. To most people, it's kind of a joke in the "It's so bad it's good" vein. They don't read it for insight into what actually happened in their town over the course of the last 7 days because that's not really what the weekly local newspaper does.



Don't get me wrong, those lonely editors sitting in their main street buildings that used to be drugstores back when people shopped in their home towns have the best of intentions. They, to the best of their journalistic abilities, print at least a single sentence about the major votes of the local council and publish pictures of the local kids dressed up like elves and reindeer.



The one page of sports featured in the small town weekly newspaper is usually pretty solid. The long standing relationship the paper has with the local school usually guarantees that all of the scores and stats that editor needs will be passed along a well greased communication line. Comments from the coaches who are so used to answering the handful of questions one can ask about any sporting event usually take a few seconds to scribble out answers to all of them for inclusion with the fax. Pop in a play by play of one girl's and one boy’s varsity event and presto! Sports page done.



The "news" section of a small town local weekly newspaper really isn't about much more then slightly expanded minutes of the local meetings, some sports stats and stories, and pictures of the kids and pictures of people with giant checks shaking hands. If you squished it all together and included press releases from the police about accidents and arrests of note, and of course obits,* it would take up about two pages or both sides of one page, however you choose to measure.



After that you have about 10 pages, that are mostly advertising of one sort or another. They have:

1. Actual advertising, (wanna make a million dollars stuffing envelopes, a job driving trucks, whiter teeth?)

2. A category of advertising I call "supporting the local paper" **

3. A category commonly referred to as "advertorial", (you know, those articles written by local people who think of their hobby or start-up as a benefit to the public, even though their motives are actually to make profit. They have gone past the "maybe we can get (local newspaper editor) to write a story about us, and have moved shamelessly on to the "we'll write it ourselves" phase.)



Typically you can find about two pages, with nothing but announcements like where the next church soup supper is going to be, or what clubs are selling which kinds of sandwiches or pies next week.



There is usually one page, with utter filler like local not very funny columnists and boilerplate stuff from the local state rep, and then one page of legal notices.



Voila! Four pieces of paper folded into 16 pages and delivered up with a bit of an apologetic grin.



Nobody really spends much time reading it. They have the best of intentions when they open it up, but usually they just scan the 5 paragraphs about the city council meeting and the 7 paragraphs about the school board meet. They glance at the 2 paragraphs about county supervisors meeting and then check to see if anyone actually wrote a letter to the editor this week. Lastly they read about their friends who have passed away. Getting through the actual news content of a small town newspaper is usually done between the counter where they ponied up the $0.75 and their car they drove to get to the store.



Don’t get me wrong. It's not like people really care about the lack of news in smalltown newspapers. They recognize that those pieces of paper are part of the world of yesterday and don't really expect too much from them. Laziness on the part of their local newspaper editors is part of the process and they have grown used to it. They are getting all of their actual local news the same way as they always have... from their neighbors... DAYS and DAYS before a single sentence appears in the paper... and in greater detail. Social networking seems to be supplanting and improving upon the face to face method of exchange, and it also throws into sharp relief just how unneeded the local paper really is.



All of the non-news things like where to buy a house, and when will the church soup supper be and where can I get a job have been replaced by the internet. The local weekly small town newspaper only has the value of their content left to them. Because they are unwilling to upset the local businessmen, who are also the local councilmen and planning and zoning members, and who are also the people in that category of advertising that is really just about supporting the paper, they will not actually print more than a slightly beefed up version of minutes of those meetings.



As much as I love the interface, I think small town newspapers are doomed to walk the same path as snail mail. Why pay to send a letter when you can send a message right now for free? Why pay to read about it 7 days later in the paper when you can hear what really happened from your neighbor right now for free?

Like the written letter, the newspaper has evolved. It is now the snailpaper.



*possibly the most important news feature for which people in small towns continue to buy papers



**These are advertising dollars spent on the paper by people with established businesses and no real competition. Either under pressure from the local chamber of commerce, or because they realize that without their advertising dollars, the paper would literally fold, they spend a couple hundred per week on advertising more as the cost of being good citizens than because they need to get the word out about their product.



Also in this category is the local school paper. This gives the local kids experience writing news, and the local paper a guaranteed full page of advertising.

LINKS:

http://thesacnews.blogspot.com/2010/01/google-sez-931-unique-computers-in-sac.html

TheSacNews.com
http://thesacnews.blogspot.com

On the future of smalltown newspapers, the news business and snailpapers

A guest blog post by Curtis Bloes on the future of the news business, small town newspapers and snailpapers: [Curtis Bloes in Sac City, Iowa dishes the dirt on snailpapers in his neck of the woods....]

[webposted in Danny Bloom's ''I SEE BY THE SNAILPAPERS'' blog on January 32, 2010.]

The small town local weekly newspaper. To most people, it's kind of a joke in the "It's so bad it's good" vein. They don't read it for insight into what actually happened in their town over the course of the last 7 days because that's not really what the weekly local newspaper does.



Don't get me wrong, those lonely editors sitting in their main street buildings that used to be drugstores back when people shopped in their home towns have the best of intentions. They, to the best of their journalistic abilities, print at least a single sentence about the major votes of the local council and publish pictures of the local kids dressed up like elves and reindeer.



The one page of sports featured in the small town weekly newspaper is usually pretty solid. The long standing relationship the paper has with the local school usually guarantees that all of the scores and stats that editor needs will be passed along a well greased communication line. Comments from the coaches who are so used to answering the handful of questions one can ask about any sporting event usually take a few seconds to scribble out answers to all of them for inclusion with the fax. Pop in a play by play of one girl's and one boy’s varsity event and presto! Sports page done.



The "news" section of a small town local weekly newspaper really isn't about much more then slightly expanded minutes of the local meetings, some sports stats and stories, and pictures of the kids and pictures of people with giant checks shaking hands. If you squished it all together and included press releases from the police about accidents and arrests of note, and of course obits,* it would take up about two pages or both sides of one page, however you choose to measure.



After that you have about 10 pages, that are mostly advertising of one sort or another. They have:

1. Actual advertising, (wanna make a million dollars stuffing envelopes, a job driving trucks, whiter teeth?)

2. A category of advertising I call "supporting the local paper" **

3. A category commonly referred to as "advertorial", (you know, those articles written by local people who think of their hobby or start-up as a benefit to the public, even though their motives are actually to make profit. They have gone past the "maybe we can get (local newspaper editor) to write a story about us, and have moved shamelessly on to the "we'll write it ourselves" phase.)



Typically you can find about two pages, with nothing but announcements like where the next church soup supper is going to be, or what clubs are selling which kinds of sandwiches or pies next week.



There is usually one page, with utter filler like local not very funny columnists and boilerplate stuff from the local state rep, and then one page of legal notices.



Voila! Four pieces of paper folded into 16 pages and delivered up with a bit of an apologetic grin.



Nobody really spends much time reading it. They have the best of intentions when they open it up, but usually they just scan the 5 paragraphs about the city council meeting and the 7 paragraphs about the school board meet. They glance at the 2 paragraphs about county supervisors meeting and then check to see if anyone actually wrote a letter to the editor this week. Lastly they read about their friends who have passed away. Getting through the actual news content of a small town newspaper is usually done between the counter where they ponied up the $0.75 and their car they drove to get to the store.



Don’t get me wrong. It's not like people really care about the lack of news in smalltown newspapers. They recognize that those pieces of paper are part of the world of yesterday and don't really expect too much from them. Laziness on the part of their local newspaper editors is part of the process and they have grown used to it. They are getting all of their actual local news the same way as they always have... from their neighbors... DAYS and DAYS before a single sentence appears in the paper... and in greater detail. Social networking seems to be supplanting and improving upon the face to face method of exchange, and it also throws into sharp relief just how unneeded the local paper really is.



All of the non-news things like where to buy a house, and when will the church soup supper be and where can I get a job have been replaced by the internet. The local weekly small town newspaper only has the value of their content left to them. Because they are unwilling to upset the local businessmen, who are also the local councilmen and planning and zoning members, and who are also the people in that category of advertising that is really just about supporting the paper, they will not actually print more than a slightly beefed up version of minutes of those meetings.



As much as I love the interface, I think small town newspapers are doomed to walk the same path as snail mail. Why pay to send a letter when you can send a message right now for free? Why pay to read about it 7 days later in the paper when you can hear what really happened from your neighbor right now for free?

Like the written letter, the newspaper has evolved. It is now the snailpaper.



*possibly the most important news feature for which people in small towns continue to buy papers



**These are advertising dollars spent on the paper by people with established businesses and no real competition. Either under pressure from the local chamber of commerce, or because they realize that without their advertising dollars, the paper would literally fold, they spend a couple hundred per week on advertising more as the cost of being good citizens than because they need to get the word out about their product.



Also in this category is the local school paper. This gives the local kids experience writing news, and the local paper a guaranteed full page of advertising.

LINKS:

http://thesacnews.blogspot.com/2010/01/google-sez-931-unique-computers-in-sac.html

TheSacNews.com
http://thesacnews.blogspot.com

I see by the snailpapers that Matt Gross of the New York Times still insists on calling lamen as ramen and pronouncing it with an R sound when everyone knows it's really lamen with an L and that the Japanese, who do pronouce it with an L sound, made a mistake long ago when they spelled it in English, their second language, with a R. Wrong!

We told Matt,

konnichiwa and ni hao ma, shalom aleichem too: my post above re lamen/ramen .... wonder if you can find time later to comment pro or con? I realize this is an impossible Sysiphean, Quixotic task, getting the Western world to correct the way it spells and pronounces lamen, but it must be done. What if we all called London as Rondon? What if we called Taiwan as China when it is not China? What if people wote hootzpah instead of chutzpah and pronounced it as HOO PAH? Would you let them get away with that? No way. Not on your grnadmother's gefilte fish! Or is that garfilter fish? Come on, Matt, c'est le temps to correctly spell and pronounce lamen with the L firmly in place, and your little daughter will be one happy camper when she grows up and realizes she can call lamen by its real name. Capice? Can do? Fact is the Japanese spellers make a mistake when they turned the hiragana lamen into English ramen, and the mistake is nothing to be ashamed of. But it's a mistake nevertheless. It needs to be rectified. But how? By the way, I can no longer eat lamen due to my advancing age, diabetes and recent heart attack. Still, I remain optimistic I will see lamen spelled correctly in my lifetime. Already one restaurant in NYC does call itself a lamen shop. See? Change we can! Lamen we can!

I see by the snailpapers that polar cities is an idea that is poised to take off -- in 2500 AD! -- not now!

Is There an Ecological Unconscious?




Daniel B. Smith, who knows about polar cities, wanted to include the idea in his article in the New York Times, so here is a look at what it might have looked like, in a parallel universe and in another format. Smith holds the Critchlow Chair in English at the College of New Rochelle. His last article for the Times magazine was on the writer Lewis Hyde.



by DANIEL B. SMITH

January 27, 3010 , note date!~



A long time ago, climate activist Danny Bloom envisioned polar cities as climate refuges where millions of climate refugees might one day find safe refuge from major impact events caused by global warming in the 2500 - 3500 time period. Bloom got his ideas indirectly from Dr James Lovelock in what was then  the UK, and asked Deng Cheng-hong, an artist in what was then the island nation of Taiwan, to come up with some sample design illustrations of what polar city life might be like in the future. The results: http://pcillu101.blogspot.com/

Of course, nobody took Bloom seriously in his lifetime, and the ideas for polar cities remained on the drawing board for a long, long time. Now, of course, we are all living in them. Go figure. Who knew?
Yet all the attention paid to the behavioral and cognitive barriers to safeguarding the environment in an old APA paper about polar cities as a possible adaptation strategy — topics of acute interest to policy makers and activists — disguised the fact that a significant portion of the document addressed the supposed emotional costs of ecological decline: anxiety, despair, numbness, “a sense of being overwhelmed or powerless,” grief. It also disguised the unusual background of the eighth member of the task force, Thomas Doherty, a clinical psychologist in Portland, Ore. Doherty runs a private therapeutic practice called Sustainable Self and is the most prominent American advocate of a growing discipline known as “ecopsychology.”



There are numerous psychological subfields that, to one degree or another, look at the interplay between human beings and their natural environment. But ecopsychology embraces a more revolutionary paradigm: just as Freud believed that neuroses were the consequences of dismissing our deep-rooted sexual and aggressive instincts, ecopsychologists believe that grief, despair and anxiety are the consequences of dismissing equally deep-rooted ecological instincts.



“If you look at the beginnings of clinical psychology,” Patricia Hasbach, a psychotherapist and prominent ecopsychologist based in Eugene, told me, “the focus was on intrapsychic forces” — the mind-bound interplay of ego, id and superego. “Then the field broadened to take into account interpersonal forces such as relationships and interactions between people. Then it took a huge leap to look at whole families and systems of people. Then it broadened even further to take into account social systems” and the importance of social identities like race, gender and class. “Ecopsychology wants to broaden the field again to look at ecological systems,” she said. “It wants to take the entire planet into account.”



The terms in which ecopsychology pursues this admittedly ambitious goal are steeped in the field’s countercultural beginnings. Ecopsychology emerged in the early 1960s, just as the modern environmental movement was gathering strength, when a group of Boston-area graduate students gathered to discuss what they saw as the isolation and malaise infecting modern life. It had another brief period of efflorescence, particularly on the West Coast and among practitioners of alternative therapies, in the early ’90s, when Theodore Roszak, a professor of history (he coined the word “counterculture”) published a manifesto, “The Voice of the Earth,” in which he criticized modern psychology for neglecting the primal bond between man and nature. “Mainstream Western psychology has limited the definition of mental health to the interpersonal context of an urban-industrial society,” he later wrote. “All that lies beyond the citified psyche has seemed of no human relevance — or perhaps too frightening to think about.” Ecopsychology’s eclectic following, which includes therapists, researchers, ecologists and activists, still reflects these earlier foundations. So does its rhetoric. Practitioners are as apt, if not more apt, to cite Native American folk tales as they are empirical data to make their points.



Yet even as it remains committed to its origins, ecopsychology has begun in recent years to enter mainstream academic circles. Last April, Doherty published the first issue of Ecopsychology, the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to “the relationship between environmental issues and mental health and well-being.” Next year, M.I.T. Press will publish a book of the same name, edited by Hasbach and Peter Kahn, a developmental psychologist, and Jolina Ruckert, a Ph.D. candidate, both at the University of Washington. The volume brings together scholars from a range of disciplines, among them the award-winning biologist Lynn Margulis and the anthropologist Wade Davis, as it delves into such areas as “technological nature” and how the environment affects human perception. Ecopsychology is taught at Oberlin College, Lewis & Clark College and the University of Wisconsin, among other institutions.



Ecopsychologists are not the first to embrace a vital link between mind and nature. They themselves admit as much, emphasizing the field’s roots in traditions like Buddhism, Romanticism and Transcendentalism. They point to affinities with evolutionary psychology — to the idea that our responses to the environment are hard-wired because of how we evolved as a species. They also point to biophilia, a hypothesis put forward by the eminent Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, in 1984, that human beings have an “innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes.” Though Wilson’s idea has been criticized as both deterministic and so broad as to be untestable, the notion that evolution endowed humans with a craving for nature struck a lasting chord in many sectors of the scientific community. Over the past quarter-century, Wilson’s hypothesis has inspired a steady flow of articles, books, conferences and, last year, the E. O. Wilson Biophilia Center in northwest Florida.



But unlike Wilson and his followers, ecopsychologists tend to focus on the pathological aspect of the mind-nature relationship: its brokenness. In this respect, their project finds echoes in the culture at large. Recently, a number of psychiatrically inflected coinages have sprung up to represent people’s growing unease over the state of the planet — “nature-deficit disorder,” “ecoanxiety,” “ecoparalysis.” The terms have multiplied so quickly that Albrecht has proposed instituting an entire class of “psycho­terratic syndromes”: mental-health issues attributable to the degraded state of one’s physical surroundings. Ecopsychologists, many of whom are licensed clinicians, remain wary of attributing specific illnesses to environmental decline or of arguing that more-established disorders have exclusively environmental causes. Rather, they propose a new clinical approach based on the idea that treating patients in an age of ecological crisis requires more than current therapeutic approaches offer. It requires tapping into what Roszak called our “ecological unconscious.”



LAST JUNE, I PAID a visit to Doherty, who works in a stone-fronted building in northeast Portland, in an office decorated with a sweeping topographical map of Oregon and a fountain that trickles water onto a pile of stones. He has receding red hair and a red mustache and beard; a small silver hoop dangles from the cartilage of his left ear. Doherty was raised in a working-class neighborhood in Buffalo and then went to Columbia University, where he majored in English. Afterward, he worked in a variety of jobs that reflected his interest in the environment: fisherman, wilderness counselor, river-rafting guide, door-to-door fund-raiser for Greenpeace.



As a therapist with activist credentials in a “green” city on the West Coast, Doherty is fairly representative of ecopsychologists today. He is also typical in that he was inspired to enter the field by Roszak’s “Voice of the Earth.” To some extent Doherty remains under Roszak’s spell. When we met, he talked about “an appropriate distrust of science,” and the “dualistic” character of empiricism — the mind/body split — which gives society “free rein to destroy the world.” But he recognizes that ecopsychology endorses a few dualisms of its own. “A more simplistic, first-generation ecopsychology position simplifies the world,” he said. “Either you’re green or you’re not. Either you’re sane or you’re not. It conflates mental health and/or lack of mental health with values and choices and the culture.” His mission, he said, is to spearhead a “second-generation ecopsychology” that leaves these binaries behind.



The bulk of his work is therapeutic. Like any therapist, Doherty, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology, sees patients and discusses routine concerns like sex and family dynamics. Unlike most therapists, he asks about patients’ relationships with the natural world — how often they get outdoors, their anxieties about the state of the environment. He recently developed a “sustainability inventory,” a questionnaire that measures, among typical therapeutic concerns like mood, attitudes and the health of intimate relationships, “comfort with your level of consumption and ecological footprint.”



The ways in which clinicians perform ecotherapy vary widely. Patricia Hasbach often conducts sessions outdoors; she finds that a natural setting helps to broaden a client’s perspective, has restorative benefits and can serve as a source of powerful metaphors. “Ecotherapy stretches the boundaries of the traditional urban, indoor setting,” she told me. “Nature provides a live and dynamic environment not under the control of the therapist or client.” Often this leads to revelatory sensory experiences, as in the case of one client who struggled with a sense of emotional numbness. The feeling dissipated after he put his feet in an icy mountain stream.



Doherty, who teaches a class on ecotherapy with Hasbach at Lewis & Clark, places less emphasis on the outdoors — not only because his office is located in an especially urban section of Portland but also because he worries about perpetuating a false dichotomy between the wilderness and the city. His Sustainable Self practice attracts a clientele that is typically self-selecting and eager to inject an ecological perspective into their sessions. Usually, his clients don’t come to him with symptoms or complaints that are directly attributable to environmental concerns, but every so often he has to engage in what he calls “grief and despair work.” For example, one client, Richard Brenne, a climate-change activist and an avid outdoorsman, came to Doherty because he was so despondent about the state of the planet and so dedicated to doing something to help that it was damaging his relationship with his family. In an e-mail message to me, Brenne praised Doherty for helping him face the magnitude of the problem without becoming despairing or overwrought. Some would argue that treating Brenne’s anxiety about the environment and the negative effect it had on his family life is no different from treating a patient whose anxieties about work cause problems at home. But for Doherty, treating an obsession with ecological decline requires understanding how the bond between the patient and the natural world may have been disrupted or pathologized. Doherty is currently working on a theoretical model in which a person’s stance toward environmental concerns can be categorized as “complicated or acute,” “inhibited or conflicted” or “healthy and normative.”



Doherty is eager to test his therapeutic ideas in a broader arena by urging the field to back up its claims with empirical data. Many subfields of clinical psychology have had to make this transformation in the past decade as calls have grown louder and louder for therapeutic systems to prove their efficacy in quantifiable ways. This shift is arguably harder on ecopsychology than it is on others: in the past, the field hasn’t just sidestepped science; it has denigrated it as a system of inquiry that objectifies the natural world.



Doherty’s journal, Ecopsychology, sometimes feels like an awkward marriage of Orion Magazine and The American Journal of Psychology, combining personal essays about communing with nature with more theoretical articles. In the first issue, Martin Jordan, a psychologist at the University of Brighton in Britain, evoked Kleinian attachment theory to warn against the “naïve” mind-set that sees the natural world as some “perfect . . . benevolent parent.” Such an outlook, he argues, isn’t just untruthful — nature is as harsh and inhospitable as it is salubrious and inviting — it’s a form of escapism, a sign that someone is less in love with nature than out of love with society.



It is not that Doherty is unfriendly to the spiritual thrust of ecopsychology; the shelves in his office are filled with volumes of nature poetry and mythology. But he hopes to press his colleagues to realize that “tending data sets and tending souls are not mutually exclusive,” as he writes in his inaugural editorial. “The idea that personal health and planetary health are connected, that’s not just an idea,” Doherty told me. It is a proposition, he said, and that proposition can and should be tested.



SUPPORT FOR ecopsychology’s premise that an imperiled environment creates an imperiled mind can be found in more established branches of psychology. In a recent study, Marc Berman, a researcher in cognitive psychology and industrial engineering at the University of Michigan, assigned 38 students to take a nearly three-mile walk — half in the Nichols Arboretum in Ann Arbor and half along a busy street. His purpose was to validate attention-restoration theory (A.R.T.), a 20-year-old idea that posits a stark difference in the ability of natural and urban settings to improve cognition. Nature, A.R.T. holds, increases focus and memory because it is filled with “soft fascinations” (rustling trees, bubbling water) that give those high-level functions the leisure to replenish, whereas urban life is filled with harsh stimuli (car horns, billboards) that can cause a kind of cognitive overload. In Berman’s study, the nature-walkers showed a dramatic improvement while the city-walkers did not, demonstrating nature’s significant restorative effects on cognition.



Peter Kahn, the developmental psychologist and a member of Ecopsychology’s editorial board, has been more explicitly testing some of ecopsychology’s underlying principles. “If you look at psychology today,” Kahn told me recently, “it still often focuses on behavior” — understanding and changing how people act toward their environments. This is an explicit aim of a branch of psychology known as conservation psychology, and it has obvious practical value. Ecopsychology, Kahn said, asks a different question: how does nature optimize the mind?



Recently, Kahn set out to study how we respond to real versus digital representations of nature. In an experiment reported in The Journal of Environmental Psychology, Kahn and his colleagues subjected 90 adults to mild stress and monitored their heart rates while they were exposed to one of three views: a glass window overlooking an expanse of grass and a stand of trees; a 50-inch plasma television screen showing the same scene in real time; and a blank wall. Kahn found that the heart rates of those exposed to the sight of real nature decreased more quickly than those of subjects looking at the TV image. The subjects exposed to a TV screen fared just the same as those facing drywall.



In themselves, these findings may seem merely to support what many already hold to be true: the authentic is better than the artificial. Nature is more healthful than television. But for Kahn, the plasma-screen study speaks to two powerful historical trends: the degradation of large parts of the environment and the increasingly common use of technology (TV, video games, the Internet, etc.) to experience nature secondhand. “More and more,” Kahn writes, “the human experience of nature will be mediated by technological systems.” We will, as a matter of mere survival, adapt to these changes. The question is whether our new, nature-reduced lives will be “impoverished from the standpoint of human functioning and flourishing.”



Like Doherty, Kahn is aware that many scientists in the profession are apt to disapprove of concepts as seemingly unquantifiable as “human flourishing.” Several months ago, I called Alan Kazdin, a former president of the American Psychological Association and a professor of psychology and child psychiatry at Yale, to ask his opinion of ecopsychology. Kazdin mentioned the discipline in a 2008 column, but when we spoke he was hazy and had to look it up. “Modern psychology is about what can be studied scientifically and verified,” he finally said. “There’s a real spiritual looseness to what I’m seeing here.”



Second-generation ecopsychologists would not necessarily disagree with this judgment. But they would dispute that “spiritual looseness” has no place in modern psychology. “Have you ever heard of rewilding?” Kahn asked me. Rewilding is a popular concept in conservation biology that was developed in the mid-1990s by Michael Soulé, an emeritus professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The idea is that the best way to restore and maximize the resilience of ecosystems is from the top down, by reintroducing and nourishing predatory “keystone” species like bears, wolves and otters. “We want to do the same thing,” Kahn said, “but from the psychological side — from the inside out. We want to rewild the psyche.”



As with much of second-generation ecopsychology, Kahn’s research into rewilding the psyche is still in its early stages; he has been exploring the idea on a blog he writes for the Web site of Psychology Today. But it rubs up against a fundamental problem of ecopsychology: even if we can establish that as we move further into an urban, technological future, we move further away from the elemental forces that shaped our minds, how do we get back in touch with them?



That question preoccupied Gregory Bateson, a major influence on eco­psychologists and something of a lost giant of 20th-century intellectual history. Bateson, an anthropologist by training, conducted fieldwork in Bali with Margaret Mead, his wife of 14 years, in the 1930s, but in midcareer he moved away from conventional ethnology and began conducting studies in areas like animal communication, social psychology, comparative anatomy, aesthetics and psychiatry. But what most interested Bateson, as the title of his 1972 book “Steps to an Ecology of Mind” suggests, were complex systems.



It was Bateson’s belief that the tendency to think of mind and nature as separate indicated a flaw at the core of human consciousness. Writing several years after Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” at a time when the budding environmental movement was focused on the practical work of curbing DDT and other chemical pollutants, Bateson argued that the essential environmental crisis of the modern age lay in the realm of ideas. Humankind suffered from an “epistemological fallacy”: we believed, wrongly, that mind and nature operated independently of each other. In fact, nature was a recursive, mindlike system; its unit of exchange wasn’t energy, as most ecologists argued, but information. The way we thought about the world could change that world, and the world could in turn change us.



“When you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premise ‘what interests me is me or my organization or my species,’ you chop off consideration of other loops of the loop structure,” Bateson wrote. “You decide that you want to get rid of the byproducts of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the ecomental system called Lake Erie is a part of your wider ecomental system — and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience.” Our inability to see this truth, Bateson maintained, was becoming monstrously apparent. Human consciousness evolved to privilege “purposiveness” — to get us what we want, whether what we want is a steak dinner or sex. Expand that tendency on a mass scale, and it is inevitable that you’re going to see some disturbing effects: red tides, vanishing forests, smog, global warming. “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds,” Bateson wrote, “and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself.”



So what to do? How do you go about rebooting human consciousness? Bateson’s prescription for action was vague. We needed to correct our errors of thought by achieving clarity in ourselves and encouraging it in others — reinforcing “whatever is sane in them.” In other words, to be ecological, we needed to feel ecological. It isn’t hard to see why Bateson’s ideas might appeal to ecopsychologists. His emphasis on the interdependence of the mind and nature is the foundation of ecotherapy. It is also at the root of Kahn’s notion that “rewilding” the mind could have significant psychological benefits. But it also isn’t hard to see how the seeming circularity of Bateson’s solution — in order to be more ecological, feel more ecological — continues to bedevil the field and those who share its interests.




Will  polar cities as an idea whose time is coming ever catch on? It seems unlikely. “


At present, ecopsychology seems to be struggling with this question. Philosophically, the field depends on an ideal of ecological awareness or communion against which deficits can then be measured. And so it often seems to rest on assuming as true what it is trying to prove to be true: being mentally healthy requires being ecologically attuned, but being ecologically attuned requires being mentally healthy. And yet, in its ongoing effort to gain legitimacy, ecopsychology is at least looking for ways to establish standards. Recently, The American Psychologist, the journal of the American Psychological Association, invited the members of the organization’s climate-change task force to submit individual papers; Thomas Doherty is taking the opportunity to develop his categorization of responses to environmental problems. His model, which he showed me an early draft of, makes distinctions that are bound to be controversial: at the pathological end of the spectrum, for example, after psychotic delusions, he places “frank denial” of environmental issues. The most telling feature of the model, however, may be how strongly it equates mental health with the impulse to “promote connection with nature” — in other words, with a deeply ingrained ecological outlook. Critics would likely point out that ecopsychologists smuggle a worldview into what should be the value-neutral realm of therapy. Supporters would likely reply that, like Bateson, ecopsychologists are not sneaking in values but correcting a fundamental error in how we conceive of the mind: to understand what it is to be whole, we must first explain what is broken.





Daniel B. Smith holds the Critchlow Chair in English at the College of New Rochelle.

I see by the snailpapers that Dan Smith's recent New York Times article on solastagia caused quite a stir in the blogosphere and illicited over 100 comments on the Times site....

Andrew Revkin, who runs the Dot Earth blog, and now teaches at Pace University, linked to the article on his FaceBook page -- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/magazine/31ecopsych-t.html -- and noted:


"I'm dubious about anything deeper here than simple unease at large-scale change and/or fear of losing the familiar. More important, to my mind, is Robert Brulle/Jeremy Jackson/et al notion of each generation's environmental norms fading. The Arctic for my two sons is now unremarkably a place in flux. The Arctic for me was a frozen untouchable wild place."


Science writer Michael Lemonick commented: "I'm with Andy -- quite dubious about the existence of a distinct syndrome other than fear of change -- maybe combined with the fact that pastoral and other landscapes feel soothing. Why must it be dressed up as a diagnosis?"

To which Danny Bloom reposted: "Michael, good question and fair comment, re "why must it be dressed up as a diagnosis?". I think the writer of the article, Dan Smith, set out to do a kind of New Age take on climate psychology and focused on Bateson and Rozsak and these new New Age shrinks in Portland and Eugene as a story not about climate change but about a new sub-field of psychology, and he used the Albrecht coinage of "solastalgia" -- which may or may not stick as a new term -- as his intro and outro, but this was really a story about treating patients using a new angle of treatment, and not really about climate or sustainability. So the diagnosis is just a tool for these shrinks in the Northwest and elsewhere to use with their patients. My two cents: good article, interesting term (solastalgia!), but basically a story for shrinks to read. I'm not a shrink. I'm an enlarger! (smile)

TheSacNews.com: Google sez 931 unique computers in Sac City...nice!

TheSacNews.com: Google sez 931 unique computers in Sac City...nice!

http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/2010/01/i-see-by-snailpapers-that-curtis-bloes.html

I see by the snailpapers that Curtis Bloes in Iowa also calls print newspapers by their modern nickname -- drum roll -- SNAILPAPERS (see his post on his blog below)

Curtis Bloes is 39 years old and is a writer in Iowa where he runs a website dedicated to chronicling his adventures in sticking his nose for news into the business of the Sac City, Iowa local government, associated 28Es and various and sundry boards. In a recent blog, he speaks of print newspapers as SNAILPAPERS, a very good term, meant not in derision but as a term of endearment I am sure, and he is the third person in the known universe to being doing this so far. A blogger in San Diego calls print newspapers "snail papers" (two words in his usage, although we snailpapers editors prefer one word: snailpapers), Curtis and Danny Bloom in Taiwan. Curtis noted on his blog:

http://thesacnews.blogspot.com/2010/01/google-sez-931-unique-computers-in-sac.html

TheSacNews.com
Your Daily Dose of Sac City, Iowa

Perspective: Newspapers count 2002 households as 4,004 readers. I think that's a scam and believe that kind of decades-long lie told us by our established newspapers is one of the core reasons people hate newspapers, BUT... that's how they do it.

I hope to beat the local chicken-dinner announcement rags around here in unique readers without having to resort to that lie to prop me up.

I don't know... you think my sheer local numbers will ever surpass their estimated then doubled world wide numbers? Top of the heap right now in Sac County is the Sac Sun with a claim of 3,000ish readers (1,500ish snailpapers delivered) have I already beat this? Are there two people literally checking in from each household right now?

Matt Gross -- travel writer par excellence -- was born in Massachusetts and incorrectly says carry-okie for karaoke and incorrectly spells "lamen" as ramen and pronoucnes it as ramen, too, but in fact, he should say lamen, and we will learn him yet!

Matt Gross, i like you and you are a good writer but you are gonna kill me for this, but the word is LAMEN ....not RAMEN .... and it should be spelled and pronounced in English as lamen, not ramen. It is a Chinese word, and the Chinese word is la-mien, or lamen, and the Japanese who spelled the word in English used an R instead of an L, even though they pronounce it themselves somewhere in the middle, but in fact, we Westerners should call it lamen and spell it lamen. I know it is too late in history to change this faux pas and gaffe extraordinaire japonnaise, but I am telling you the Kitchen God's honest truth. I have been blogging and camaigning for years to rectifiy this mistake, but nobody listens. Why? It's lamen. Ask any real Japanese.

Matt Gross was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and raised everywhere from Brighton, England, to Williamsburg, Virginia. After graduating from Johns Hopkins University in 1996, he moved to Vietnam, then found his way into the media business in New York. He now writes the Frugal Traveler column for the New York Times travel section, often visits Taiwan, and lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Jean.


How did you get started calling lamen as ramen?

MATT: I just followed common usage. I see now that I was wrong to do so.

Why do you call karaoke as carry-okie, when it should be called ka-ra-oh-kay and you know better?

MATT: Je ne sais pas.

Why do you travel so much?

MATT: I've been traveling regularly for most of the last 25 years, though I didn't really think of it as traveling at first. Basically, my family moved around enough from Massachusetts to England to Virginia that I learned how to adapt quite quickly to new geographies and new situations. And as a teenager, I was a skateboarder with a driver's license, which meant my friends and I were roaming all over the mid-Atlantic in search of cool spots. And that's what taught me how cities and towns are arranged, built and connected?essential education for traveling as an adult.

That said, my first real big solo trip was when I moved to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in 1996, right after graduating from college. Didn't really know anyone there or what I was doing, but it was the best experience of my life, and taught me that, yes, I can actually do adventurous things like that.


How did you get started writing?

I've been writing as long as I've been traveling?that is, since I was little. Again, maybe it's a family thing: my dad's a historian, my mom's an editor. Writing's just something we Grosses all learn how to do. Still, throughout college and grad school, I figured I'd be a novelist. Then I realized that until I got that first novel out, I'd have to make a living. So, I became a journalist.


What do you consider your first "break" as a writer?

My first job in journalism was writing film reviews and copyediting for the Viet Nam News, the state-owned, English-language daily paper in Vietnam. One of the best jobs I ever had: come in at 2pm, edit for a few hours, eat some fresh yogurt from the company fridge, and at the end of the day raise a glass of snake wine with my boss.

Still, it was hardly real writing. My big break was getting hooked up with the New York Times. It was back in November 2004, and I'd just quit my job at New York Magazine to go travel around Vietnam and Cambodia and research a novel. Before I left, a friend who'd just started writing for the travel section suggested I contact his editor.

So, I did: I e-mailed her, told her what I was up to, and asked if there was anything I could look into for her. Not asking for an assignment or anything, just hoping to investigate something she might be curious about.

I got a response within two days. No thanks, she said. Have a great trip!

And so I went off to Southeast Asia anyway, trekked around, met people, saw what was going on development-wise, and when that editor finally, miraculously e-mailed me six weeks later to ask if I had any ideas, I had plenty. I sent her three pitches, and she wrote back: Write 'em, she said. Utter elation was followed by utter terror?now I actually had to write these stories!

Surprisingly, they turned out okay, and my editors asked me for more?eventually suggesting I take over the Frugal Traveler column by traveling around the world for three months and blogging about the adventure. How could I refuse?


As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?

Focus. It's easy to have a great time while traveling, but when you know you're going to write a story, you want it to run along a certain theme, to have experiences that mesh into a unified, easy-to-write whole. At the same time, you want to allow for spontaneity?the essence of travel. If you're writing about Korean food in Seoul, do you accept that invitation to an innovative French restaurant in the Dongdaemun neighborhood? Will it accentuate your final story, or will it end up on the cutting room floor? Unfortunately, there's never any way to know for sure, so I go with my gut.


What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?

Focus. In any trip, there are so many facts and anecdotes and experiences and memories and characters that they can't all fit into the final story. I spend a lot of time mentally sifting all of these elements, trying to figure out which fit and in what kind of order, so that structurally, my story replicates the feeling of being on that trip. Sometimes it's easy and all the big points flow together seamlessly, and other times I try out four or five openers and kickers before finding just the right one.

There's another challenge that comes when you've written a ton of these stories and have to write a ton more: How do you avoid repeating yourself? Especially in newspaper writing, you have limited space to convey setting, characters, action, and it's easy to fall back on the same shorthand travel-writing vocabulary. I'm sure I overuse words and on occasion resort to clich鬠but I try desperately not to.


What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?

There's no way I could do this job if I weren't married to a woman
with a good, stable job. I'd be homeless. Seriously.


Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?

Not since I quit my last full-time job and decided I would write only what I really wanted to write. If things get really bad?and they could, of course, at any moment?I might resort to freelance copy editing or proofreading, which I did for years. But I'd rather tend bar or deliver pizza.


What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?

William Vollmann's books sent me to Vietnam. Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad is genius?a hilarious look at a travel writer learning how to be a travel writer. Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines captures the feeling of the wander better than anything else. As a writer, I love anything by ɭile Zola. The precision of his vocabulary, the vividness of his settings, the simultaneous inevitability and unpredictability of the stories themselves?they're what I aspire to.


What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?

Go into travel before you go into travel writing. You should know how to cross a land border, book plane tickets in a language you don't speak and befriend the old lady who squints evilly from the second-story window at everyone who passes by. In other words, if you're just after paid vacations, then you're going to have a tough time. But if you're willing to put aside your ego, embrace the unknown and endure crushing poverty, then you might have a shot.


What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?

Duh: getting to travel!

LAST QUESTION: Will you start spelling and pronouncing lamen the correct way now?

MATT: Yes. I was bad, now I will be good.

And how will you pronounce karaoke on your next NPR interview?

MATT: I promise not to say carry-okie, but say it the correct way as you have taught me, domo domo!

ON SLANGUAGE: a humor column about snailmail, snailpapers and escargot -- by Leinad Moolb

ON SLANGUAGE

a humor column

Snailmail, snailpapers and escargot

by Leinad Moolb

Snailmail came into general use in the 1980s and 1990s, and became a common term by the turn of the century. Pundits say it was first coined in around 1982 or so. It means, of course, the slow pace of surface mail, even the slow pace of airmail from country to country, compared to the instantaneous sending and receiving of email messages across the ethersphere of the Internet's blogospheric invisibility wires.

So everyone is okay with snailmail today. It is both a term of endearment and a term of derision. Some people still use snailmail, and it has its uses. Most people today use email 24/7. Even 24/7/365.

Fast foward to 2010. A bloke in a far away foreign country, raised in the wilds of western Massachusetts and mis-educated at Tufts in the Late Sixties and Early Seventies, puts his mind to the grindstone one day on a slow newsday -- he editor in chief of The Daily Snailpaper in Taiwan -- and says to himself, he says: "Hmmmmmm, why not call these print newspapers, which I dearly love, but which arrive at our doorsteps in the morning with news that is already 12 hours old, why not call these print newspapers "snailpapers", just for fun, and as a link to the term snailmail, and partly out of nostalgia, and partly out of solastagia, too, and I think I will start using that term now."

So the bloke did, and now that term is ubiquitous. Bill Keller speaks of his New York Times as a wonderful and insightful snailpaper, and even Ben Bradlee speaks of the Washington Post as one of the most important snailpapers in the USA. So there. The term is in common usage now.

The bloke who coined the word says he did partly for fun, partly in jest, and mostly as a term of endearment, not as a term of derision. "I love snailpapers," he said in a recent email. "I hope they never disappear."

After coining the term, and seeing that it was good, the editor of The Daily Snailpaper went out to eat at a posh French restaurant in Taipei and ordered, on his boss's expense account, a wonderful dish of escargot, washing it all down with a fine bottle of wine.

AND NOW YOU KNOW. .....THE REST OF THE STORY OF HOW SNAILPAPERS AS A TERM OF ENDEARMENT FOR PRINT NEWSPAPER(s) CAME INTO BEING. Sort of.

The Candle Conundrum: How in a World of Hi-Tech and Gadgetheads, There is Still Room to Ask the Question re Will Paper Books and Snailpapers Ever Become Obsolete: "We're still using candles, aren't we?"

The Candle Conundrum: How in a World of Hi-Tech and Gadgetheads, There is Still Room to Ask the Question re Will Paper Books and Snailpapers Ever Become Obsolete: "We're still using candles, aren't we?"

A question posted by Taiwan book editor Linden Lin in a recent interview about the future of paper books and the advent of ebooks.


Etymology: origin unknown
Date: 1645
an intricate and difficult problem

I see by the snailpapers that "crash blossoms" has made it into Ben Zimmer's "On Language" column in the New York Times Sunday Magazine today. Amazing! The term was co-coined by a group of word mavens just six months ago as a spur of the moment aside. And now this! Will wonder never cease?

By BEN ZIMMER

[January 27, 3010]  in [THE NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE...]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning once gave the poetry of her husband, Robert, a harsh assessment, criticizing his habit of excessively paring down his syntax with opaque results. “You sometimes make a dust, a dark dust,” she wrote him, “by sweeping away your little words.”

In their quest for concision, writers of newspaper headlines are, like Robert Browning, inveterate sweepers away of little words, and the dust they kick up can lead to some amusing ambiguities. Legendary headlines from years past (some of which verge on the mythical) include
“Giant Waves Down Queen Mary’s Funnel,”
“MacArthur Flies Back to Front”
and
“Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans.”

The Columbia Journalism Review even published two anthologies of ambiguous headlinese in the 1980s, with the classic titles
“Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim”
and
“Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge.”


For years, there was no good name for these double-take headlines. UNTIL.....(drum roll)......

 Last August, however, one emerged in a TestyCopyEditors.com online discussion forum thread iniated by Mike O'Connell, an American technical editor based in Sapporo, Japan. He had spotted the headline
“Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms”
and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?”

[The article, from the online website Japan Today, described the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father tragically died in a 1985 Japan Airlines airplane crash in the mountains outside Tokyo.]

Another regular [and active] poster in the forum, 60-year-old goofball and all around luftmensch Danny Bloom in Taiwan, and also like Mike, far from the madding (and maddening) crowd, very offhandedly and on the spur of the moment, without even thinking about what he was doing, suggested as a response on the thread .......that the last two words of the headline --“crash blossoms” --  ......might be used in a fun way as a label for such infelicitous headlines that encourage alternate readings. In literally 3 minutes, Bloom created a mini-blogsite about crash blossoms (http://amafubme.blogspot.com/) and notified the discussion thread that he has done so, giving full credit to Nessie3 (aka Mike O'Connell) as the coiner of the term, news of the neologism quickly spread. Go figure! Who knew?

[NOTE: For his tireless PR efforts and for being there at the birth of a new newsroom term, Bloom -- a 1971 Tufts grad and a student of William Safire's On Language columns for years and years and whose snailmail letter to Mr Safire made it into one of the language maven's language books even! -- was inexplicably banned for life by webmaster Phillip Blanchard at TestyCopyEditors.com without any notice or explanation from the good Mr Blanchard.
http://www.testycopyeditors.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=11134
Now back to Ben Zimmer's column.....]

After I mentioned the coinage of “crash blossoms” on the linguistics blog Language Log, having been alerted to it by the veteran Baltimore Sun copyeditor John "Let Them Eat Bacon" McIntyre, new examples came flooding in. Linguists love this sort of thing, because the perils of ambiguity can reveal the limits of our ability to parse sentences correctly. Syntacticians often refer to the garden-path phenomenon, wherein a reader is led down one interpretive route before having to double back to the beginning of the sentence to get on the right track.


One of my favorite crash blossoms is this gem from the Associated Press, first noted by the Yale linguistics professor Stephen Anderson last September:
“McDonald’s Fries the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers.”
If you take “fries” as a verb instead of a noun, you’re left wondering why a fast-food chain is cooking up sacred vessels. Or consider this headline, spotted earlier this month by Rick Rubenstein on the Total Telecom Web site:
“Google Fans Phone Expectations by Scheduling Android Event.”
 Here, if you read “fans” as a plural noun, then you might think “phone” is a verb, and you’ve been led down a path where Google devotees are calling in their hopes.



Nouns that can be misconstrued as verbs and vice versa are, in fact, the hallmarks of the crash blossom. Take this headline, often attributed to The Guardian:
"British Left Waffles on Falklands”.
 In the correct reading, “left” is a noun and “waffles” is a verb, but it’s much more entertaining to reverse the two, conjuring the image of breakfast food hastily abandoned in the South Atlantic. Similarly, crossword enthusiasts laughed nervously at a May 2006 headline on AOL News,
“Gator Attacks Puzzle Experts.”



After encountering enough crash blossoms, you start to realize that English is especially prone to such ambiguities. Since English is weakly inflected (meaning that words are seldom explicitly modified to indicate their grammatical roles), many words can easily function as either noun or verb. And it just so happens that plural nouns and third-person-singular present-tense verbs are marked with the exact same suffix, “-s.” In everyday spoken and written language, we can usually handle this sort of grammatical uncertainty because we have enough additional clues to make the right choices of interpretation. But headlines sweep away those little words — particularly articles, auxiliary verbs and forms of “to be” — robbing the reader of crucial context. If that A.P. headline had read
''McDonald's Fries Are the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers”
there would have been no crash blossom for our enjoyment.



Headline writers have long been counseled to beware of ambiguity. “Ambiguous words often lead to ludicrous and puzzling headline statements,” Grant Milnor Hyde wrote in his 1915 manual, “Newspaper Editing.” “They can be avoided only by great care in the use of words with two meanings and especially words that may be used either as nouns or verbs.”
More recently, in the 2003 book “Strategic Copy Editing,” the University of Oregon journalism professor John Russial offered this rule of thumb: “As the word count drops, the likelihood of ambiguity increases.” He advises copyeditors to think twice about trimming the little words.



The potential for unintended humor in “compressed” English isn’t restricted to headline writing; it goes back to the days of the telegraph. One clever (though possibly apocryphal) example once appeared in the pages of Time magazine: Cary Grant received a telegram from an editor inquiring, “HOW OLD CARY GRANT?” — to which he responded: “OLD CARY GRANT FINE. HOW YOU?” The omitted verb may have saved the sender a nickel, but the snappy comeback was worth far more.



The space limitations of telegrams are echoed now in the terse messages of texting and 140-character-limited Twitter. News headlines, however, are not so constrained these days, since many of them appear in online outlets rather than in print. (And many print headlines are supplanted online by more elastic “e-heads.”) But even when they are unfettered by narrow newspaper columns, headline writers still sweep away those little words as a matter of journalistic style. As long as there is such a thing as headlinese, we can count on crash blossoms continuing to bloom, er blossom.



Ben Zimmer is the executive producer of visualthesaurus.com and a very nice guy, too. The above article from the New York Times was slightly re-edited, without permission or payment, by Danny Bloom, who just wanted to tweak a few things here and there. To see the original article in perfect New York Times snailpaper ink (and in pixelated form online as well) go to the real snailpaper itself or click here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/magazine/31FOB-onlanguage-t.html

A real version of this article appeared in the snailpaper edition of the New York TImes on January 31, 3010, on page 14 of the Sunday Magazine on paper.

I see by the snailpapers that Woody Allen, humorist par excellence for the New Yorker, still has not commented publicly, or in any of his recent interviews, about whether he would ever refer to his beloved morning edition of the New York Times as a snailpaper per se, but I am sure that day is coming!

Would he?

I see by the snailpapers that A.J. Jacobs, reporter par excellence at several prestigious snailpapers, still has not commented publicly, or on Facebook even, about whether he would ever refer to the print editions of the papers he writes for as snailpapers, but I am sure that day is coming!

AJ?

I see by the snailpapers that Gabriel Sherman, reporter par excellence for several snailpapers, still has not commented publicly about whether he would ever refer to the print editions of the papers he writes for as snailpapers, but I am sure that day is coming!

Count on it.

I see by the snailpapers that Joshua Greenman in the New York Daily News still has not commented publicly about whether he would ever refer to the print edition of the Daily News as a snailpaper, but I am sure that day is coming!

If not in the News, then maybe in the New Yorker?

I see by the snailpapers that Tom Meltzer of the Guardian still has not commented publicly about whether he would ever refer to the print edition of the Guardian as a snailpaper, but I am sure that day is coming!

SarcMark or not.

I see by the snailpapers that Robert McCrum of the Guardian in London still has not commented publicly about whether he would ever refer to the print edition of the Guardian as a snailpaper, but I am sure that day is coming!

Robert has a very English sense of humour, so just you wait!

I see by the snailpapers that Neal Rubin of the Detroit News still has not commented publicly about whether he would ever refer to the print edition of the News as a snailpaper, but I am sure that day is coming!

Neal's been around the block a few times. He knows a good story when he sees one.

I see by the snailpapers that Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times still has not commented publicly about whether he would ever refer to the print edition of the Sun-Times as a snailpaper, but I am sure that day is coming!

Neil knows. Hat or no hat!

I see by the snailpapers that Maureen Dowd of the New York Times still has not commented publicly about whether she would ever refer to the print edition of the Times as a snailpaper, but I am sure that day is coming!

Maureen has a good sense of humour, and one day she will write about snailpapers -- hopefully before they become history!

I see by the snailpapers that Nick Bilton of the Bits blog at the New York Times still has not commented publicly about whether he would ever refer to the print edition of the Times as a snailpaper, but I am sure that day is coming!

Watch. Bit by bit.

I see by the snailpapers that Alex Beam, columnist par excellence at the Boston Globe still has not commented publicly about whether he would ever refer to the print edition of the Globe as a snailpaper, but I am sure that day is coming!

Stay tuned, as they said in radioland!

I see by the snailpapers that Bill Keller of the New York Times still has not commented publicly about whether he would ever refer to the print edition of the Times as a snailpaper, but I am sure that day is coming!

Watch! Then again, don't hold your breath! But it's true, Bill does have a good sense of humour.

I see by the snailpapers that Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post still has not commented publicly about whether he would ever refer to the print edition of the post as a snailpaper, but I am sure that day is coming!

Really. Stay tuned.

I see by the snailpapers that snailpapers is a term that Paul Gillin of Newspaper Death Watch feels just might have a life as a term of a term of endearment, not derision, and that maybe if newspapers poked more fun at themselves instead of getting all righteously indignant about new media, they would generate more sympathy. Yeah! Well said, Mr Gillin!

item: Danny Bloom has come up with a new word for newspapers. He calls them “snailpapers.” But the lone blogger in Taiwan insists this is a term of endearment, not derision. He thinks maybe if newspapers poked more fun at themselves instead of getting all righteously indignant about new media, they would generate more sympathy.

I see by the snailpapers that snailpapers is a word that most newspaper executives and columnists are afraid to even utter, let alone mention out loud in the newsroom!

Why is that?

I see by the snailpapers that the iPad is a pretty expensive contraption and won't be replacing print newspapers anytime soon, thank God!

Google "snailpapers" for more info.

I see by the snailpapers that Samuel Marchbanks lives!

That's Samuel Marchbanks, a wonderful character created by Roberton Davies, the great Canadian writer!

smudge magnet - A hi-tech tablet gadget like the iPad or the Kindle which whether nerdy-looking or sleek nevertheless becomes a smudge magnet during use at home or office.

smudge magnet

(noun) -- A hi-tech tablet gadget like the iPad or the Kindle which whether nerdy-looking or sleek nevertheless becomes a smudge magnet during use at home or office.

"I love the entire concept of the iPad, but I am just worried it's going to become just another smudge magnet in my home."

-- overheard at a watercooler in a San Francisco office building on January 28, 2010

by sbojevets101 [steve jobs spelled backwards] on Jan 29, 2010

tags: computers, tablets, gadgets, books, paper

I see by the snailpapers that media critic Nicholas Carr's recent oped on the iPad noted.....

Hello iPad, Goodbye PC

reconfigured title/hedline from TNR's original
The PC Officially Died Today
But will the iPad replace it?
http://www.tnr.com/article/the-pc-officially-died-today

The New Republic -- a snailmag that appears in both print on paper and online in pixelated form -- published Carrr's commentary on Apple's recent iPad announcement. We reprint it here in screen-formatted pixels:

The PC era ended this morning at ten o’clock Pacific time, when Steve Jobs mounted a San Francisco stage to unveil the iPad, Apple’s version of a tablet computer. What made the moment epochal was not so much the gadget itself - an oversized iPod Touch tricked out with an e-reader application and a few other new features - but the clouds of hype that attended its arrival.

Tablet computers have been kicking around for a decade, but consumers have always shunned them. They’ve been viewed as nerdy-looking smudge-magnets, limited by their cumbersome shape and their lack of a keyboard. Tablets were a solution to a problem no one had.

The rapturous anticipation of Apple’s tablet - the buildup to Jobs’s announcement blurred the line between media feeding-frenzy and orgiastic pagan ritual - shows that our attitude to the tablet form has shifted. Tablets suddenly look attractive. Why? Because the nature of personal computing has changed.

Until recently, we mainly used our computers to run software programs (Word, Quicken) installed on our hard drives. Now, we use them mainly to connect to the vast databases of the Internet - to “the cloud,” as the geeks say. And as the Internet has absorbed the traditional products of media - songs, TV shows, movies, games, the printed word - we’ve begun to look to our computers to act as multifunctional media players. They have to do all the work that was once done by specialized technologies - TVs, stereos, telephones, newspapers, books - as well as run a myriad of software apps. The computer business and the media business are now the same business.

The transformation in the nature of computing has turned the old-style PC into a dinosaur. A bulky screen attached to a bulky keyboard no longer fits with the kinds of things we want to do with our computers. The shortcomings of the PC have created, the iPad hype suggests, a yearning for a new kind of device - portable, flexible, always connected - that takes computing into the cloud era.

Suddenly, in other words, the tablet is a solution to a problem everyone has. Or at least it’s one possible solution. The computing market is now filled with all sorts of networked devices, each seeking to fill a lucrative niche. There are dozens of netbooks, the diminutive cousins to traditional laptops, from manufacturers like Acer and Asus. There are e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. There are smartphones like Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Nexus One. There are gaming consoles like Nintendo's Wii and the Microsoft’s Xbox. In some ways, personal computing has returned to the ferment of its earliest days, when the market was fragmented among lots of contending companies, operating systems, and technical standards.

With the iPad, Apple is hoping to bridge all the niches. It wants to deliver the killer device for the cloud era, a machine that will define computing’s new age in the way that the Windows PC defined the old age. The iPad is, as Jobs said today, “something in the middle,” a multipurpose gadget aimed at the sweet spot between the tiny smartphone and the traditional laptop. If it succeeds, we’ll all be using iPads to play iTunes, read iBooks, watch iShows, and engage in iChats. It will be an iWorld.

But will it succeed? The iPad is by no means a sure bet. It still, after all, is a tablet - fairly big and fairly heavy. Unlike an iPod or an iPhone, you can’t stick an iPad in your pocket or pocketbook. It also looks to be a cumbersome device. The iPad would be ideal for a three-handed person - two hands to hold it and another to manipulate its touchscreen - but most of humans, alas, have only a pair of hands. And with a price that starts at $500 and rises to more than $800, the iPad is considerably more expensive than the Kindles and netbooks it will compete with.

But whether it finds mainstream success or not, the iPad is the clearest sign yet that we’ve entered a new era of computing, in which media and software have merged in the Internet cloud. It’s hardly a surprise that Apple - more than Microsoft, IBM, or even Google - is defining the terms of this new era. Thanks to Steve Jobs, a bohemian geek with the instincts of an impresario, Apple has always been as much about show biz as about data processing. It sees its products as performances and its customers as both audience members and would-be artists.

Apple endured its darkest days during the early 1990s, when the PC had lost its original magic and turned into a drab, utilitarian tool. Buyers flocked to Dell’s cheap, beige boxes. Computing back then was all about the programs. Now, computing is all about the programming - the words and sounds and pictures and conversations that pour out of the Internet’s cloud and onto our screens. Computing, in other words, has moved back closer to the ideal that Steve Jobs had when he founded Apple. Today, Jobs’s ambitions are grander than ever. His overriding goal is to establish his company as the major conduit, and toll collector, between the media cloud and the networked computer.

Jobs doesn’t just want to produce glamorous gizmos. He wants to be the impresario of all media.


NOW FOR THE COMMENTS, which appeared on Mr Carr's blog ROUGH TYPE:

RE "Jobs’s ambitions are grander than ever. His overriding goal is to establish his company as the major conduit, and toll collector, between the media cloud and the networked computer."

I agree. And this is how he will do it: Analysis: iPad Is an iDRM Storefront For Apple Ambitions To Dominate All Digital Media Sales
(http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2010/01/analysis_ipad_i.php)

Posted by: Tom Foremski at January 27, 2010 04:56 PM

Lucid and insightful post. Quick edit: the Wii is Nintendo's, not Sony's.

Posted by: Mikewhitehouse1 at January 27, 2010 05:22 PM

"Clouds of Hype" accurately describes the above text. You should also be ashamed of the bad grammar and false information it reports.

Posted by: BobSapp at January 27, 2010 05:55 PM

If a device like the iPad replaces PCs for a sufficient number of users, wouldn't it also occasion the reinstatement of a slower, more deliberative, more digestible type of content consumption? Hard to picture the same type of frenetic tabbed browsing, commenting, and re-tweeting on the iPad as you might see on a networked PC--if only because the amount of hand motion would be prohibitive.

Posted by: Mikewhitehouse1 at January 27, 2010 06:19 PM

The iPad is great but does it fit into the palm of your hand? In mythology, the human interface to the magical (digital) has always been hand held: the magic wand, the philosopher’s stone or Excalibur. When Moses parted the Red Sea, he didn't run back to the temple and log into the Arc of the Covenant through a terminal emulator on the PC; he raised his staff in his hand!

The focal point of where mind meets matter has been the hand. Is it mere coincidence that the buzz word that defined the 21st century - "digital" - refers to the fingers of the hand and, the common word for useful is "handy"?

If you want to know the trend of modern computing, go into any trendy bar where the under 30 somethings hang out, you will see that the hand held smart phone predominated human interaction with the digital(magical) - it fits in your palm and you can carry it in your pocket.

Sorry, I just don't see the iPad creating the kind of massive change in social/technology interaction that the wireless Smartphone has. For most people, could it end up like the original Palm - an expensive paper weight?

Posted by: Linuxguru1968 at January 27, 2010 06:25 PM

Jobs definitely wants (among others) to swipe the rug from under Microsoft's feet. He got his ass kicked by the PC, but was smart enough to jump on the next generation of devices that might make the PC obsolete. And because he got to be there early, he gets to get a cut of each song, book / ... as well as each and every app purchased on this new platform (Microsoft would *so* love to do this on Windows)

Will the iPad be a success? I must say I'm *very* tempted to buy one next year (I don't buy first generation products anymore). Finally something with a large screen that behaves like an appliance and not a computer! Time will tell.

Worst case scenario, the iPad might have a "Gmail effect", that is, force the competition to compete by raising the bar.

Posted by: Laurent at January 27, 2010 06:30 PM

This is a consumer media player, not a tablet.

Posted by: Tobias Bray at January 27, 2010 06:55 PM

It is the bridge.

For the consumer, one nice Mac or Windows Media Center for the whole family. Family members get iPads. Cheaper than everyone having a laptop, and better than everyone fighting to use the "desktop".

Posted by: KiltBear at January 27, 2010 07:55 PM

The big question is what will be Google's response: Google And The iPad . Its crusade to put all printed material in digital format seems to make a similar competeing product much more useful and powerful than a just a trendy Kindle that play video.

Posted by: Linuxguru1968 at January 27, 2010 08:25 PM

Congratulations on a really great piece. I've been browsing around looking at a lot of coverage of Apple's new iPad.

Your piece was truly insightful and informative, going well beyond where most writers are looking. I think you're right. The whole personal computer area is transforming and the iPad will link a bunch of different needs.

Thanks for your thoughts.

I think the iPad is a great achievement, but a pity it doesn't incorporate a phone. No doubt a handwriting app will only be a few months away.

Posted by: Richard Rydge at January 27, 2010 09:40 PM

It is interesting to see how consumer/home computing computing is diverging from business computing. For so long they have been basically the same - the beige box with standard office suite on it. The business computer hasn't changed much except maybe to become a laptop with the same office suite but the consumer computer is becoming a Wii or a smartphone or an internet HDTV or now a tablet with facebook, twitter, etc.
Business computing looks so 20th-century all of a sudden.


Posted by: Irishdba.wordpress.com at January 28, 2010 11:06 AM

Thanks Nick. Nice article: good summary of the timeline, and I like the faintly ironic start about the 'end of the PC era'.
Just as Apple made smartphones cool (which even Sony didn't manage with Ericsson), they may well now make tablets acceptable to the mainstream. So, on the devices side a big plus, if only because of the increased awareness/acceptance.

In terms of media distribution this is scary. When apple started the iTunes store, they politely asked/begged the record companies to contribute. 2 years later they effectively informed the same companies that they'd maintain/reduce prices and remove DRM on music, and if they didn't like it they could back out. The movies and TV have been tougher to crack, but the music already provided the 'in' for many users. And now books... At least in traditional media you could pick any record/tape/cd player to play your music on. And imagine if you needed special Apple Glasses to read books & magazines...?


Posted by: Neil Taggart at January 28, 2010 11:50 AM

The problem with all the "doom and gloom" over "paying for what was once free" is:

- the free options are still out there. Web pages, ebook readers reading an open format.

- nothing is really free. Traditional media is hemorrhaging. It ain't free if it disappears because nobody could maintain anymore.

Additionally, this doesn't quash "for pay" competition either. Kindle app on iP(hone|ad) will be killer. I wish Steve had the balls to demo the Kindle app at 2x on the iPad.

I still want a way to rip directly to the iPad and have it back itself up to a TimeMachine though. The home PC won't be dead until we don't need it to tether to for content and backup or archive storage.

Posted by: KiltBear at January 28, 2010 12:35 PM

Taking Irishdba's comment a step further, business computing may be boring, or last century, but it's still what most people do at the their job. Write documents, create spreadsheets, compose presentations, use business analytics software. All of which is easiest with a big keyboard and a big screen, and most of which happens at a desk. If everyone in the world hung out at coffee shops using Twitter all the time, then the iPad would change the nature of computing. But as long as people spend 8 hours a day in an office, doing boring business work, the PC is still the everyday platform of choice.

Posted by: Thoughtbasket at January 28, 2010 03:14 PM

THE SHALLOWS: a new book by Nicholas Carr that you do not want to miss!

Nicholas Carr's new book, titled The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, argues [Mr Carr notes on his blog] that the tools we use to think with - our "intellectual technologies" - not only shape our habits of thought but exert an actual physical influence on the neurons and synapses in our brains. He looks at the Internet, an extraordinarily powerful intellectual technology, in this context, examining what the scientific and historical evidence tells about the effects it is having on our thoughts, memories, and even emotions - and how different the effects are from those exerted by earlier intellectual technologies such as the printed book.

Here's the table of contents for the book, which is sure to be a bestseller and a controversial at that, given the Paper vs Screen Wars we are witnessing today:

Prologue: "The Watchdog and the Thief"

Chapter 1: "HAL and Me"

Chapter 2: "The Vital Paths"

Chapter 3: "Tools of the Mind"

Chapter 4: "The Deepening Page"

Chapter 5: "A Medium of the Most General Nature"

Chapter 6: "The Very Image of a Book"

Chapter 7: "The Juggler's Brain"

Chapter 8: "The Church of Google"

Chapter 9: "Search, Memory"

Chapter 10: "A Thing Like Me"

Epilogue: "Human Elements"

The Shallows will be published in June. By the way, in related news, William Powers new book titled HAMLET's BLACKBERRY will be published in July by HarperCollins, and that book will also be a popular -- and controversial -- bestseller. Two very important books coming this summer. Stay tuned (to use an old archais radio phrase....)

NOTE:

Comments from Mr Carr's blog followers:


Look forward to the book. I have it on pre-order.

Having read http://www.wiredforthought.com/ - I am hoping this book tells the story of the other side of the coin.

Posted by: Niraj at January 25, 2010 11:44 AM

I haven't read your book (obviously) and what I'm about to say is quite speculative, but I'm interested in your thoughts.

The much rumored Apple Tablet (which might cease to be a rumor in ~ 48 hours) has been rumored to be a next-generation media device that will allow true hypermedia (integrated text, audio, video) on what will likely be a gorgeous device.

Could it be that the shallowness that you observe is simply one mode of working in the Internet-world - e.g. reading Tweets or a blog entry summarizing a book is much easier (though also much shallower) than actually reading a book. Could it be that once the tablet "shows the way" (sorry for how that sounds) that it could unleash a new wave of deep learning because we'll have a device that's not just always with us and always connected to the network but has enough textual/audio/visual capabilities and a big enough screen that it will enable us to do a whole new class of "deep learning"?

One other random thought... I've transitioned most of my "reading" to Audiobooks because it allows me to multitask (e.g. listen to the new Richard Dawkins book while cleaning my kitchen). While this certainly isn't as romantic as reading a big book in your study with a glass of tea next to you, I find myself addicted to this mode of learning. Ditto podcasts, which are interesting in that they go into EXTREME depth on "long tail" topics that would never merit such depth in mainstream media.

Sorry for the meandering thoughts... just trying to contribute a few thoughts to this interesting topic but need to return to the frenetic pace of work!

Posted by: BillHiggins at January 25, 2010 03:50 PM

Sorry, Nick, I see the politics involved, but one doesn't have to be a woolly-minded techno-utopian to criticize this as pandering to reactionary fogeys. I assume you know what you're doing in terms of playing angles which appeal to the frightened and fearful ("exert an actual physical influence on the neurons and synapses in our brains"). And I certainly can't argue against it being a "success". But it's the sort of material which makes me wish again that there was more support for what I call tech-positive social criticism.


Posted by: Seth Finkelstein at January 25, 2010 03:54 PM

Seth, I hope you'll keep an open mind about reconsidering your opinion of the book after you've read it. It may surprise you. Nick

Posted by: Nick Carr at January 25, 2010 04:04 PM

Any excerpts available? Maybe the prologue?

Posted by: Ivo Quartiroli at January 25, 2010 08:27 PM

Nick, what REALLY interests me, is whether or not one day we will want or need or benefit from a new word for "screen-reading" since screen-reading is so different mentally and emotiinally from reading text on paper surfaces, and future MRI brain scans at UCLA will show that different parts of our brains light up when we are reading on ... See Morepaper compared to when we, er, "read", on these screens. I say it is NOT reading per se. But a new kind of reading that calls out for a new term. I coined "screening" as a starter fire, to get a discussion going, giving screening a new meaning apart from its earlier meanings. But I am sure others will nominate other new or old terms for screen-reading-which-is-so-different-from-paper-reading, and I would llove to hear more people discuss this with an open mind. So far Kevin Kelly and Paul Saffo back me up on this idea. Anybody else agree this might be a good direction to go in? I am all ears. And I am not married to the word "screening" -- and i have no agenda -- whatever word or term FITS, that's the one we should adopt. Yes or no?

Posted by: blarmeingidiot at January 25, 2010 11:14 PM

I think it's an important point. An obvious point, but an important one nonetheless that people are getting dumber by using Twitter and Facebook. People understand the danger of smoking or drinking alcohol but they don't comprehend the dangers of other tools they use like Facebook and Twitter. A great discussion which you might like Mr. Carr on the effects of the ubiquitous facebook photos and Twitter on people's lives:
http://www.pandalous.com/topic/ubiquitous_facebook

Posted by: John at January 26, 2010 02:20 PM

Congratulations on the new book, waiting forward to see the details in it. Certainly - it is a different reading, learning, view and communication approaches we are getting used to thanks to the little machines :)

I notice a tendency to read books online rather than good old paper... because I read faster; but even when I read books, I do the browsing, multi-tabbing; skimming, etc... habits from online reading. Typing is faster than hand-writing, writing without the spell-check is a disaster;

I am forgetting most of the 'encyclopedic' knowledge from high school... I am lazy to make myself search in my memories - I google instead.

What is more interesting, recently I notice that I have started watching movies in the same way; not exaggerating- it is getting irritating for me to watch movies in the cinema, because I cannot FF. Often even in every day routine, I wish I had a FF, but instead - open a new tab in my mind ;)

Congratulations to all of you who are reading this part - this text is getting way too long already... Last drop of enthusiasm on the subject, and I will keep it short.

Business communication changes so much the way we write to our friends; the way we talk to our family; the preferred channels of communication; the tolerance to response timings. Just think of it, and here is my example - I was chatting in skype with a friend, and at the same time, she sent me an e-mail, stating 3 options(routes, hours, agenda) among which by date xx, I was supposed to pick one... and reply by e-mail ...for our trip in the holidays! Does it sound familiar?
How long until emoticons get to be the first thing to show up when we want to express an emotion? Too late?


Posted by: imkoleva at January 26, 2010 06:42 PM


NOTE: Earlier in the writing process Carr's book was tentatively titled The Shallows: Mind, Memory and Media in an Age of Instant Information.

Zach Tumin noted back on Dec. 12, 2008: "In the future, every idea will be expressed in 140 characters, every explanation contained in a video 12 seconds or less."

In a comment on Nicholas Carr's blog, Zach wrote:

With apologies (not really) to Andy Warhol:

"In the future, every idea will be expressed in 140 characters, every explanation contained in a video 12 seconds or less."

Posted by: Zach Tumin at December 12, 2008 06:48 A

We are still using candles, aren't we? So books and newspapers printed on paper will last for a long long time, in tandem with the Digital Revolution upon us......

NEWS ITEM: January 31, 2010 -- Taipei, Taiwan

When asked if one day books on paper might disappear, given the digital revolution and the introduction of the Kindle and the SONY E-reader and the Apple iPad, Linden Lin, a veteran book editor, publisher and book fair CEO, said, with a laugh, as if to signal that books will be with us for a long time to come: "We are still using candles, aren't we?"

I see by the snailpapers that Linden Lin in Taipei understands very well the need to keep paper books alive and why it will happen, too. He said in an interview with a reporter today in Taiwan:

When asked if one day books on paper might disappear, given the digital revolution and the introduction of the Kindle and the SONY E-reader and the Apple iPad, Linden Lin, an editor, publisher and book fair CEO, said, with a laugh: "We are still using candles, aren't we?"

Apple iPad news and the need for a new word for the kind of reading we do on screens: let's call it "screening" ?

I see by the snailpapers that it does seem as if the term "screening" is taking on more importance now ,post iPad intro. See 2009 notes below:

re

Screening” is a good term for the vast literary shift about to wash over us…

SOME VOICES:

1.
“Dear Mr Bloom
I find the
distinction between reading and screening to be intriguing (and it
certainly gives us all pause to consider just what it is we’re doing
with our eyeballs these days!). ”

2.
“Screening, of course, is not a new term, but this might just be the
time that it catches on…
Screening is a clever and useful term capturing the fact that the
experience of reading on a screen is fundamentally different from reading
on paper. Not a priori worse or better; just different.

It is the right word for the moment in terms of drawing people’s
attention to the vast literary shift about to wash over us.”

3.
“There are many forms of reading. We already talk about skimming and
browsing, about being deeply engrossed in reading, and surface versus
reflective reading. I see no need for yet another term that is
dependent upon technology.

When I read deeply on my Kindle, I call it reading. It is no different
than when I read deeply with a book. In both cases, I want the
technology to disappear (paper or book reader) and to become engrossed
in the story or the ideas.

You suggest “screening.” I see no need for such a term.”

4.
” …I agree with some of your other correspondents. Reading is reading. We speak of dialing a phone even though we don’t use dials any longer. Screening already has another meaning as well. Screening” is an interesting idea, but it’s probably needed as much as if you were to say you “screened” television instead of “watching” it…”

5.
“Dear Mr Bloom, My wife and I may not always reply because of our busy schedule, but we are always happy to hear from you, as your email about SCREENING did what all good emails do — it provoked thought.”

6.
“Screening is not a new term, but this might just be the time that it catches on, given the imminent arrival of Apple’s iPad, and other devices. ”

7.
“Screening is a clever and useful term capturing the fact that the experience reading on a screen is fundamentally different from reading on paper. Not a priori worse or better; just different. Keep going in the direcetion you are going. Eventually, people will listen to you. Of course, screening has multiple meanings already. But your new way of putting it …is very interesting and it provokes thought. I assume that is your intention.”

8.
“Mr Bloom, ….My advice is to use and promote “screening” as a useful new term, but don’t get too attached to the idea. You merely took a pre-existing word and retooled it with a new definition, in terms of how humans now read texts on screens, from the Kindle to PDAs to iPhones. It’s not a neologism, as Alex Beam inferred in his Globe column. And it’s not a new coinage or a newly-minted word. You took the word screen, which is what we read on when he look at a computer or reading device and you added an ING ending to the verb, and you got screening. Nothing new here. But your point of view is refreshing and helps us see where we are headed. Your best position now is to lay low and let the VIP media wonks in the New York Times and Washington Post discuss the issue of screening versus reading, with quotes from top reseachers in the field. In that event, you will have played a nice minor role in this discussion, and for someone with no PHD or connections to anyone in academia, good for you! Sometimes new ideas and new viewpoints come from independent minds like yours. Who the hell are you, anways?”

9.
“You certainly are getting quite the range of opinions here between the 50 percent on one side and the 50 percent on the other re a new meaning for “screening” and a new paradigm for reading…Very interesting..”

If newspapers poked more fun at themselves instead of getting all righteously indignant about new media, they would generate more sympathy. Therefore, let's call them "snailpapers".

http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/ny-times-swallows-paywall-pill.html

……has come up with a new word for newspapers. He calls
them “snailpapers.” [But] the longtime newspaperman insists this is a
term of endearment, not derision. He thinks maybe if newspapers poked
more fun at themselves instead of getting all righteously indignant
about new media, they would generate more sympathy.

A new word for print newspapers: "snailpapers"

Dan Bloom has come up with a new word for newspapers. He calls them “snailpapers.” Only the longtime newspaperman insists this is a term of endearment, not derision. He thinks maybe if newspapers poked more fun at themselves instead of getting all righteously indignant about new media, they would generate more sympathy.



http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/ny-times-swallows-paywall-pill.html

A new word for print newspapers: snailpapers -- a term of endearment that newspaper owners could use to poke fun at themselves instead of getting all righteously indignant about new media, and therefore generate more sympathy for the current fortunes of the newspaper business.

Dan Bloom has come up with a new word for newspapers. He calls them “snailpapers.” Only the longtime newspaperman insists this is a term of endearment, not derision. He thinks maybe if newspapers poked more fun at themselves instead of getting all righteously indignant about new media, they would generate more sympathy.

http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/ny-times-swallows-paywall-pill.html

Newspaper Death Watch: Snailpapers as a term of endearment for print newspapers

Dan Bloom has come up with a new word for newspapers. He calls them “snailpapers.” Only the longtime newspaperman insists this is a term of endearment, not derision. He thinks maybe if newspapers poked more fun at themselves instead of getting all righteously indignant about new media, they would generate more sympathy. More on his blog. [Oh, you're there now!]

http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/ny-times-swallows-paywall-pill.html

I see by the snailpapers that the Newspaper Death Watch blog webbed by Paul Gillis ran a brief item the other day about why some people are calling print newspapaers "snailpapers" and how a good healthy sense of humour about all this might even help newspaper, er, snailpaper, executives roll with the punches better.....

(hat tip to Newspaper Death Watch): SCROLL DOWN TO SEE ITEM BELOW:

NY Times Swallows Paywall Pill
By paul gillin | January 22, 2010 - - Posted in Advertising, Best/Worst, Business News, BusinessModel, Newspapers, OnlineMedia, Paywalls, Snailpapers

***** Dan Bloom has come up with a new word for newspapers. He calls them “snailpapers.” [But] the longtime newspaperman insists this is a term of endearment, not derision. He thinks maybe if newspapers poked more fun at themselves instead of getting all righteously indignant about new media, they would generate more sympathy. More on his blog at
http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/

[Dan calls them snailpapers because they arrive at our doorsteps in the morning with news that is already 12 hours late. But he uses the term as a term of endearment, let's be clear about that. Dan loves snailpapers and hopes they never disappear. While he can live with having to SCREEN text on screens, and actually spends half his waking hours online, he much prefers reading newspapers the way they were meant to be read, which is on paper, real paper, smelly and inky and foldable and clippable and tear-outable and underline-able and highlightable and re-read again at night-able and then wrap the fish with them on Saturday.... KIDDING!.....CLICHE!....... but yes, LONG LIVE SNAILPAPERS! It will be a sad day indeed when the human race is down to getting their news on pixelated computer or Kindle or iTablet screens! THAT is not reading, that is screening. YUCK!


Newspaper Death Watch: chronicling the death, strike that, DECLINE, of newspapers and the rebirth of journalism (edited by this blog)

LINK:
http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/ny-times-swallows-paywall-pill.html

http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/