Hm, this could hurt. Kill The Cliché is a new type of media watchdog service which mines newspaper sources (now six) for over-used words and displays the sins and sinners in tables, charts and tags. Something to fear for finance and sports journalists especially?
Not sure about “kill”, though – something of a cliché metaphor as well? (via FP Passport).
Umberto Eco has been a constant provider of reading pleasures over the years, intellectually stimulating, above all in his deceptively light and humorous essays. He is one of those writers who has access to a source of abundance. The serious professor turned successful novelist, of course. He wrote the book on semiotics, then Sean Connery played the monk-detective in the movie adaptation of The Name of the Rose. Beat that. Eco has never been a technology pessimist, that’s why one hesitates to take seriously some of his very un-original statements in a recent interview. That he can only find 10.000 pages when he searches for Goethe when Google finds 15,7 million — that doesn’t change his point about the new confusion of our unfiltered times, though one wonders what search engine he prefers. But some of the other arguments are just too 1997 to be believed (computers have led to increased paper use due to printing, not less — please). Take consolation instead in his confession of liking technical schnickschnack and the image of the aging professor carrying around a 250GB external harddisk with the complete Italian national library on it — that’s the genuine Eco spirit.
From an excellent Pew background article on “digital natives”, the generation now seeking employment in companies and organizations:
Our research has found consistently that the dominant metaphor for the internet in users’ minds is a vast encyclopedia — more than it is a playground, a commercial mall, a civic commons, a kaffee klatch, or a peep show.
For all the praise of the natives’ multi-tasking, content-creating and -sharing, the article notes that the youngsters aren’t necessarily media literate. Or you could say “be-critical-to-sources-literate”. All sources. Media literacy. We are going to talk more about that.
UPDATE: Encyclopedia of Earth, a new source the natives can check. A project involving the Digital Universe Foundation and Larry Sanger. See more about Sanger and his projects. (via Readers Edition).
Do some people actively choose to remain offline, as an alternative strategy of media use? Ulrich Riehm and Bettina-Johanna Krings claim that in an article in the Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft journal (abstract only, scroll down). The authors write that “for the foreseeable future there will be a relatively stable group of non-users”. That means that the vision of “internet for all” must be revised, they believe. Non-use has so far been seen as something to be overcome, not a fact society has to live with. Acknowledging this will have an impact on debates on digital divides, they conclude (and on the development of online public services, one might wonder).
Without having access to their material, it’s hard to assess the reseachers’ claims. In Norway, the online population has been growing from 2,2 Million in mid-2000 to 3,2 Mill. in December 2005. According to this TNS Gallup material, 652.000 or 17 percent of Norwegians over the age of 12 years are offline now. In mid-2000 42 percent were offline.
In a new report on media literacy in Britain, Ofcom notes what should constitute media literate internet use:
Media literate people should be able to use the internet to find information and accept that sometimes what they find may represent a particular view rather than a statement of objective fact. They will be able to control what they and their children see to avoid being offended. They may also be confident enough to be able to order and pay for goods and services online and to create their own website and contribute to a chatroom discussion.
The framework Ofcom uses seems to be a constructive approach to debates about digital divides. Hopefully this will inspire researchers in other countries. Norwegians tend to rely on research from other countries.
While TV is the preferred medium for the majority in the UK, the report also shows an enormous age gap:
Don’t take my mobile away from me!
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