12 Reasons a Movie Should Never be a First Date

12 Reasons a Movie Should Never be a First Date
Written by filmwad Intro paragraphs? Where we’re going, we don’t need…intro paragraphs. 12. You can’t pay attention to the movie Dates are pretty goddamned stressful experiences. You’re constantly trying to figure out how to act, what to say, where to put your arms, and if and when it’s okay to try and kiss her. They’re absurdly complex, needlessly [...]

Written by filmwad

Intro paragraphs? Where we’re going, we don’t need…intro paragraphs.

12. You can’t pay attention to the movie

Dates are pretty goddamned stressful experiences. You’re constantly trying to figure out how to act, what to say, where to put your arms, and if and when it’s okay to try and kiss her. They’re absurdly complex, needlessly aggravating social constructs that cause many to go into nervous breakdowns.

In other words, they’re not terribly conducive to a true movie-watching environment. You can’t pay attention to things like character arcs or symbolism when you’re too busy worrying about whether putting your hand on hers would be too forward at this point in the date, or if sticking your penis into the popcorn tub will either be a hilarious joke or just burn really badly.

11. Movie theatres are too almost-romantic

A darkened room with soft seats, smelling faintly of popcorn and dreams, warm and moist with human body temperature. It almost makes one think of sex, given the right date, but the obviously unsexy aspects of movie theaters — stains, spills, the fact that a fucking movie is actually playing — make the place a not-quite-romantic way to spend two hours. One part of your body is ready to engage in a ravenous makeout session with the person sitting next to you, while the other worries about how long it’s been since these seats were sanitized.

10. It’s fucking expensive

Nobody ever just goes to a movie on a date. It’s always dinner and a movie. You can do just dinner, but you can never do just a movie. This means you’ll be spending around fifty to a hundred dollars in a single night, on someone you’ve never even taken out on a date before! Throw in popcorn and candy and maybe IMAX tickets if the movie’s available there, and you’ve got the potential to waste a shitload of money on a first date that might not ever lead to a second.

9. The floors are sticky

And that shit is not sexy. Just pointing it out.

8. You can’t ask for your money back

Now, you can, technically, ask for your money back from the box office before the film’s halfway point if it really, really sucks. But you definitely can’t do that on a date. You’ll just plain look cheap. There’s no turning back if you see a crap film: that money is gone for good.

7. Movies are nerdier than other date possibilities

Dates are moments to be impressive. You can take her mini-golfing, and show her you’ve got a sense of humor whilst doing something mildly athletic. You can take her rock climbing, and show respect for her thrill-seeking ability. You can go to a carnival, and try to regress back to the simple wonder and fun you had as children.

Or, you can take her to a movie and just sort of sit and stare at fictional stories for a few hours.

Of all the things you could possibly do on a first date to impress someone, why take them to a movie? The best dates say, “I’m adventurous,” or, “I’m intelligent,” or “I’m compassionate.” Taking someone to the movies just says, “I like movies.” So what?

6. Two hours is a long time to sit around someone you might despise

Anyone who has been on a blind date knows the feeling: the person you’ve chosen to spend the night with is either really ugly, or your political opposite, or has an abhorrent personality, but you’ve still got to spend the next few hours alongside them because the date has already been arranged.

A crappy dinner, you can always leave early and split the check. A lame trip to a sporting event, you can sneak out. A movie, as previously mentioned, you cannot escape from if you’re the one who paid. Not just your money is gone, but your time, as well: you might possibly have to spend 120 minutes sitting next to the Overweight Racist Demon Date from Hell just because you chose to go to a movie instead of somethign more easily-escapable.

5. Good movies are usually not romantic

No Country for Old Men is probably one of the most incredible movies ever made, but it’s not really something that says “hey, let’s have giddy, experimental sex afterward” to your date. Reservoir Dogs is not a film that inspires cuddling, and The Godfather isn’t exactly the feel-good movie of the century.

Great films are about loss and horror and evil and triumph and sacrifice, and these are the exact things that are not remotely romantic on a first date. After you know where your date stands, sure: take her out to No Country and have a nihilistic good time, then spend the rest of the night contemplating it and trying not to think about Chigurh. If you’ve just met the chick, however, then perhaps a truly great film would simply be too emotionally overwhelming for a first date.

4. Shitty movies infect everything around them with shittiness

Conversely, something like Delta Farce or Madagascar 2 will infuriate both you and your date so much that the entire date will be ruined: the film upon which you were relying on for the quality of your entire date betrayed you, and essentially wasted a combined four hours of your and your date’s lives. Both will be angry, and whoever chose the movie will be blamed by the other, even if that person paid. Unfortunately, the evil of shitty movies can invade your date and ruin it from the inside out.

3. Wall-E will be way more adorable than whomever you’re dating

I know what you’re thinking. “Oh,” you say. “I’ll take this girl I really like to see Wall-E! It’s cute, it’s funny, and it’s a love story so she’ll think I’m really sensitive and want to give me kisses!”

Wrong.

The inherent problem with watching Wall-E is that almost every robot in that movie is at least fifteen times more adorable than you, or anyone you know, will ever be. Wall-E is the single cutest creature ever committed to film, Eve is a cute iPod-looking thing, and M-O steals the goddamn show in the very few scenes he in. Wall-E is an adorable movie, yes, but it’s so adorable that when it’s done, your date won’t be thinking about you — they’ll be thinking about seeing Wall-E again. You will have enjoyed yourself as well, but you’ll also have been officially cockblocked by a three-foot-tall metal box with no elbows.

2. It’s obvious

Women hate cliches, and considering the actual idea of a “date” is quickly being phased out in favor of drunken, passion-fueled hookups at substance-filled parties, maintaining originality is priority one. The “dinner and a movie” date is literally as old as movies themselves. Why would you want to choose the most standard, boring date possibility in the history of date possibilities? Why not bring her a heart-shaped box of chocolates and some flowers, while you’re at it?

1. It doesn’t allow for conversation

With all the etiquette and rules and nervousness that accompanies a first date, it’s easy to forget what they’re actually for: getting to know the other person. With that in mind, can you literally think of a worse way to spend two hours with someone you’re attracted to than sitting next to them for two hours in a dark room, literally without ever making eye contact?

Dates should be about conversation, and not just about some stupid movie you just saw. They’re meant to be about figuring the other person out, finding out what they’re like, who they are. In this sense, a movie is the ultimate distraction from the true meaning of a date: you’ve technically gone out, and you’ve technically shared one another’s company, but you haven’t actually done anything. Nothing is risked, and thus, nothing is gained. It’s a silly waste of time and money.

Why not take her to a monster truck rally instead?

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Not quite getting it
Via The New York Review of Books, an attempt to explain Blogs. It's a long article, mentioning ten books about blogging, but this is the author's key misunderstanding: Bloggers assume that if you're reading them, you're one of their friends, or at least in on the gossip, the joke, or the names they drop. They often begin their posts mid-thought or mid-rant—in medias craze. They don't care if they leave...

Via The New York Review of Books, an attempt to explain Blogs. It's a long article, mentioning ten books about blogging, but this is the author's key misunderstanding:

Bloggers assume that if you're reading them, you're one of their friends, or at least in on the gossip, the joke, or the names they drop.

They often begin their posts mid-thought or mid-rant—in medias craze. They don't care if they leave you in the dust. They're not responsible for your education.

Bloggers, as Mark Liberman, one of the founders of the blog called Language Log, once noted, are like Plato. :-) The unspoken message is: Hey, I'm here talking with my buddies. Keep up with me or don't. It's up to you.

Much of the article is a calm, patient explanation of what blogs are, intending for people who sincerely don't know. Both the quote above and that calm, patient explanation seem to me serious misunderstanding about writing for the web.

The review, Sarah Boxer, assumes that her readers need this background about blogging because they don't know anything about it. She assumes that bloggers don't provide this background because they've all already got it.

For some teenage blogger writing for an audience of six or seven, the background may indeed be there. But for anyone trying to gather and disseminate serious information through a blog, the background is always doubtful.

On my blog Writing Fiction, I see that a striking number of my visitors arrive on the site after googling "How many pages in a novel?" Whether or not they've written a novel, that question means they're novice novelists. They lack the exformation of more experienced writers.

Similarly, people visit my bird flu blog, H5N1, with wildly different levels of knowledge about the subject. Some are officials with the World Health Organization, others are epidemiologists, and most know nothing at all except that bird flu is supposed to be bad.

Apart from assuming a basic level of English reading ability, I don't expect anything from my readers. For both blogs I have to find some way to bring the newcomers up to speed without boring the experienced visitors. I really do feel responsible for my readers' education, and I don't want to turn anyone away.

So on H5N1 I provide an introductory page, showing the new visitor what's on the site. Currently, I'm also providing definitions of Indian words like lakh, crore, and panchayat, because they keep turning up in Indian newspapers' reports on bird flu.

On Writing Fiction, I keep responding to comments to the "How Many Pages" post, which I originally made three long years ago. I also provide a link to Write a Novel, a self-guided online course containing the basic materials now lost in the archives of Writing Fiction. (Look for it in the Writers' Resources list.)

Some blogs, like some graduate courses, can assume a cozy familiarity with little-known material. Shared exformation creates an intimate atmosphere, a feeling of belonging that newcomers may not share. If anything, they'll feel deliberately excluded.

But most webwriters, whether serious amateurs or professionals, can't afford to think about the happy few who share our private jokes and roomed with us in college. We have to reach as many people as possible, and to provide something useful for each of them.

So we have to write in simple, clear language. We have to format our material for easy navigation and response. We have to think about our visitors' needs, not our own egos. That, it seems to me, is the exformation that Sarah Boxer doesn't yet have.

A Forecast from 1994
Long ago, I published a piece in a magazine called Infobahn about how politics and the internet might evolve together. Judge for yourself how accurate I was: NET PROPAGANDA: COMING SOON TO A MONITOR NEAR YOU One fine fall day in 1948, I joined the American political process: I walked down Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood carrying fore-and-aft posters urging the election of Harry S Truman. As a seven-year-old sandwich...

Long ago, I published a piece in a magazine called Infobahn about how politics and the internet might evolve together. Judge for yourself how accurate I was:

NET PROPAGANDA: COMING SOON TO A MONITOR NEAR YOU

One fine fall day in 1948, I joined the American political process: I walked down Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood carrying fore-and-aft posters urging the election of Harry S Truman. As a seven-year-old sandwich man, I had become a campaign mechanism—a way of reaching voters with a political message.

The age of the sandwich man, however, was fast ending. A few blocks away, a TV set stood in our living room. It carried little but Felix the Cat cartoons, Hopalong Cassidy westerns, and primitive variety shows, but as a medium it would change politics before I was old enough to vote.

Over forty years later, politicians have a new medium to deal with: the Internet. So far they are using it clumsily, treating it as an odd mix of print and TV. But just as they learned the lessons of television, they will learn how to campaign in cyberspace.

They’ll have their work cut out for them. Most sensible politicians, after lurking on the Net for a time, would prefer to campaign by throwing bottled leaflets into the Pacific rather than use the Internet.

Political discourse on the Net—at least in the Usenet newsgroups—is on a par with turf wars among the howler monkeys. Tribes of fanatics battle for control of newsgroups: gun nuts, anti-gun nuts, school voucherists, libertarians, semiliterate teenagers.

Some Netters can supply sustained, documented argument for their views, but no one else pays much attention. Instead the Net provides a steady diet of flame wars, newsgroup highjacking, and debates that digress from their original topics with dizzying speed.

It’s not just that so many denizens of the Net are barking loonies; that’s equally true of the general population. But too many Netters are still a demographically narrow slice of the electorate. They’re too young to vote, too broke to contribute to campaign funds, and too busy downloading pornography to care much about upholding democracy. Worse yet, the medium itself doesn’t encourage reasoned argument or the kinds of people who engage in it.

Well, earlier politicians learned to use new media or die. If they failed to adapt, their careers ended whether they were good politicians or not. (In Richard Nixon’s case, TV killed and resurrected him several times.) So the successful politicians of the early 21st century will indeed exploit the Net—probably more effectively than they have with television.

Most 1990s politicians, if they use the Net at all, treat it as an extension of print media. They have reason to do so. Most users see the Net as text: tiny, semi-legible words scrolling up their monitors. The resemblance to newspapers and magazines is there, however distorted. So politicians from Clinton on down have been pumping out electronic news releases, press-conference transcripts, and speech texts.

For a long time I was on one of Bill Clinton’s mailing lists. He sent me verbatim texts of every speech he made on education, welfare, and related social issues. He always began with a joke, and every joke triggered what the transcripts called (laughter). When I tried to unsubscribe, however, Clinton wouldn’t let me; the jokes and (laughter) and presidential eloquence kept coming.

Eventually I pried myself away, but not before I’d learned something about the Clinton administration’s attitude towards the Net. For all the yelling about the Information Superhighway, the metaphor at work was the small-town newspaper editor’s office. When you signed on to Clinton’s mailing list, you had little choice: you could pick social issues, foreign affairs, the economy—and that was about it. What you got was raw government-issue rhetoric.

A small-town editor, getting this stuff over the wire, would know how to adapt it. A presidential speech would undergo heavy rewriting and paraphrase, or supply a few excerpts for a local columnist, or fail to appear at all. The editor, knowing local readers, would present only as much of the speech as the readers could understand and respond to. Otherwise readers would start treating the newspaper like just another kind of junk mail with nothing to say to them personally.

Clinton’s releases ran into another problem, directly related to the medium of the computer screen: It doesn’t like long stretches of text.

A monitor screen packed full of writing is ugly and hard to read. Text works best on the screen when it’s short, even fragmentary—more like a caption than a paragraph. One-liners and bulleted lists can assert and describe, but they can’t really argue.

So no matter how funny the jokes in Clinton’s speeches, few Netters would trouble to scroll past the first screen or two.

The medium’s built-in hostility to text has evidently sunk in. More recently, Clinton and other politicians are trying to use the Net like TV itself. Thanks to interfaces like Mosaic and NetScape, computer users can now access home pages full of color graphics: the White House, the president’s smiling family, and so on.

But this approach limits the potential audience still more. To get these pretty pictures you need a big, recent computer and a fast modem (better yet, direct Net access), and you need to know how to use them. So the potential audience is a small group of affluent hobbyists, a few serious professionals, and some university students.

Even with snappy graphics, this kind of Net access is right back there with Felix the Cat on a 5-inch screen, or picking up Philadelphia on your crystal-set radio: Gee whiz, you can see the White House on your computer, even if the quality isn’t as good as on your TV. This kind of thrill has a short half-life.

Plenty of politicians are using the Net as an auxiliary postal service, receiving e-mail from their constituents and replying with boilerplate comments just as they do with snail mail. As a barometer of public sentiment, however, e-mail is dubious; again, the sources are few and demographically confined to a relatively well-educated and privileged social stratum. Only in a desperately tight race would Netters be likely to swing an election—assuming they all voted the same way.

A few politicos are venturing into cyberspace themselves. David Schreck, a member of the British Columbia provincial government, goes online to debate with local flame artists—but he’s on a local BBS, not the Internet, in such discussions. “I’ve been in touch with maybe four of my 27,000 constituents,” he says.

Granted that scores of lurking constituents may also read his comments as lurkers, he’s still right to describe his online activities as a hobby.

A Toronto candidate for city council, meanwhile, did go onto the Net even though the vast majority of his readers, living far outside his district, had no interest in his campaign. For his pains he suffered intense flaming and won only 4 per cent of the municipal vote.

So the Net at this point is an also-ran as a print medium. As a TV-like medium, it’s barely better than a test pattern. For all the millions reportedly joining the Net every month, it’s not really a mass medium, and therein lies both its weakness and its strength: it’s a medium for narrowcasting, not broadcasting.

A broadcast medium assumes (or imposes) common values among millions of essentially passive consumers. As a newspaper columnist, I reached over a quarter-million readers every week; a really inflammatory article might provoke two or three letters. Print is not interactive; neither are radio and TV, for all the popularity of talk shows.

But they are “public” in the sense that we share a sense of some kind of community with other consumers. Most of us watch TV with friends or family, or split up the paper and read it together at the breakfast table.

When we go on the Net, however, we go solo. The technology puts us a few inches from a monitor, and even if we’re in a computer lab we are on our own. We read highly public messages, but we do so in private; our responses, however public they may eventually be, feel private.

That’s one reason for the flame wars that keep breaking out. It’s a problem of “register”—finding the right words to talk about the right subject to the right person under the right circumstances.

When introduced to Queen Elizabeth, we don’t say: “Hey, Liz, great to meetcha, you look a lot younger than you do on TV.” When introduced to the 13-year-old who’s come to baby-sit, we don’t say: “I am deeply honored to make your acquaintance on this memorable day, your ladyship.”

Politicians making speeches on TV sound like pompous liars because they’re usually in an “oratorical” register suited to large groups of people within earshot. Franklin Delano Roosevelt scored politically with his radio-based “Fireside Chats” because he found the right register for what seemed like small-group face-to-face discussion with a mass audience. Ronald Reagan did something similar with TV, finding a register that worked on the small screen.

So if politicians are going to gain votes on the Net, they’re going to have to find a highly intimate register, reflecting the fact that millions of users are getting the message when they feel like isolated individuals, not like members of a larger group.

The Net, then, makes its users tough customers for a political marketer. You can’t spam the voters with a generic message; for every one you get through to, you anger a dozen others. You have to tailor the appeal as precisely as possible, on the basis of as much information as possible.

Doing a simple “finger” on every Netter wouldn’t help much. But it might well be possible to track significant numbers of users as they make their way through various newsgroups—especially if they post plenty of comments. If they hang out on alt.rush-limbaugh, that may tell you something.

But most Netters are lurkers, as passively unresponsive as most newspaper readers and TV watchers. Is a given lurker a Limbaugh fan, or a left-liberal onlooker morbidly fascinated by the group? Here’s where the medium’s interactivity offers politicians a big opportunity.

E-mail the Limbaugh posters with a political message. But don’t just sit back and wait for flames. Offer them (and the lurkers) some reward for responding with details about themselves: a slick little software application, for example, as a reward for filling out a questionnaire. Maybe it even comes with a Rush icon showing him with a halo or horns.

This gives you a start on establishing Net focus groups, which while small will reflect values of larger populations. Now the political marketers can begin to tailor their appeals more accurately.

Net culture, at this point in its development, is still hung up on the technology itself. Telephone and TV users don’t think much about the hardware they’re using, but Netters do. If appeals from politicians are technically slick, the subliminal message is that the politico is a happening dude, riding the electronic surf. (Not long ago, The New Yorker magazine was breathlessly reporting on how many of Clinton’s young staffers were running around with PowerBooks, as if that were reason in itself to endorse his policies.)

This attitude will change as millions of non-technical users move into cyberspace, but it will be a factor for several more years.

The appeals will also reflect the limits of the medium: not good for extended print, not great for video or audio, but combining elements of all of them. So Net propaganda will probably tend to look like a TV commercial: strong visuals, snappy sound bites, and minimal text.

But it will be aimed at a very small audience. The multimedia ad that comes to my computer may be strikingly different from the one that ends up on my neighbour’s. Part of the difference will be content: in the version I get, the candidate pushes commitment to excellence in education, while my neighbor gets promises of spending cuts.

More importantly, each ad will be personal. When I open up the e-mail message, I hear the candidate saying: “Crawford, I’ve got some news for you and your family.” What follows will offer more TV-style jolts than hard information, but it will also offer quick, easy interaction. A slide-show questionnaire: just point and click to register your views on gun control, abortion, illegal immigration. Then see how your answers stack up against the total so far registered. Want more information? Click again for more specific messages on those issues, the candidate’s personal resume, or a free, autographed copy of his latest speech or her last book.

This is personal campaigning on a level rarely seen these days, even among main-streeting small-town politicos. But it’s taking place in a medium that’s also very public. How do you avoid looking like a liar when Netters compare your different messages? In part, you just don’t openly contradict yourself, and while your message is personal it’s not very concrete. If glittering generalities are the stock in trade of public oratory, sweet nothings are the currency of this more intimate medium.

In other cases, the strategy will be to highjack public newsgroups, just as candidates often pack meetings with their own supporters. Even now, one or two people can take over a newsgroup and set its agenda by dominating the discussions, flaming opponents, and dragging every thread in the desired direction. A couple of dozen supporters should be able to dominate debate even more thoroughly.

None of this will be official, of course—just the natural behavior of ordinary citizens who happen to support the candidate.

Home pages, still relatively primitive, could become highly effective infotainment tools for politicians. A candidate could even create captive audiences: for example, he might donate computers to nursing homes, recreation centers, and libraries. Each computer would be already programmed to log on to the candidate’s home page, which would supply plenty of data on how the candidate has supported seniors, recreation programs, and libraries. It might also include software applications that would provide a running tally of the size of the national debt, or the number of seniors murdered in the last 24 hours.

Sometimes the computer might look and act more like a video game. Imagine two or three of them set up in an employee dining hall, offering entertainment as well as political information: a game, perhaps, in which the goal is to corner the candidate’s opponent and force him to admit how he voted on some crucial bill. Or guess how much your taxes have gone up since the incumbent took office, and if you’re within 10 per cent of the answer, you get an extra 15 minutes’ time on the computer. Too expensive to work? Maybe not, if the employer is willing to cover some of the computers’ cost as a campaign contribution.

Hackers and crackers could find themselves in a new golden age. Once upon a time politicians had to break into one another’s offices. Now they can get into one another’s databases. Lists of contributors and supporters would be there for the taking—and the burglars could also damage such lists or destroy them altogether.

Dirty tricks could get really dirty. Imagine a forged home page providing violent distortions of the candidate’s position and record, or campaign ads that really come from the opposition. Such “black propaganda” would be hard to fight; publicizing the forgery would only draw more attention to its lies.

E-mail bombings could flood the candidate’s server with thousands of junk messages, making it difficult or impossible to reach voters and staffers. A software giveaway, sabotaged with a virus, would infuriate potential voters. The same virus could also disable the candidate’s system.

Scurrilous rumors could travel the Net in seconds, as hard to stop as neutrinos but with much more impact. The candidate’s private e-mail could turn up in conveniently downloadable form at FTP sites outside the country.

All of these tactics would not only resonate in cyberspace but would gain enormous attention in other media. The dirty tricksters, with very little threat of punishment facing them, could be as nasty as they liked...while their political masters hypocritically complained about them and called for more controls over the Internet.

Despite these threats, politicians are likely to get into the medium for one reason: Other politicians. Hardware and software defenses will emerge to hold off the tricksters, and the first politicos to master the Net will enjoy a measurable advantage over latecomers. Mastery will come from recognition that this is not just electronic print or low-res TV, but a medium that can and should answer back.

Net propaganda can’t just hammer on voters who do nothing until election day. It has to provoke them into response after response, with each response helping to define the politician’s next step. Many of those provocations will be inane, patronizing or downright vicious. But for once the voters’ reactions may actually force the politicos to treat them like intelligent, informed citizens.

And for the politicians, that could be the Net’s most frightening threat of all.

Infobahn, Summer 1994

Why a Book About Blogging Fails
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A few months ago I got a review copy of Blogwars, by David D. Perlmutter. Of course I was delighted, and I started to read it at once.

Then I put it down.

Today, facing a serious reading shortage, I picked it up again and made a real effort to get into it. It hadn't improved, but these stupid machines have taught me that we learn more from our mistakes than our successes.

So what's wrong with a book by a highly successful writer and professor of journalism, on the subject of political blogs and their growing impact on American life?

Put briefly, it's a print-on-paper document that needs to be more like web text.

A major design problem
I can't blame Perlmutter for the design of his book, but design is a major problem. The body text appears in a reasonably legible serif font. But the paragraphs are absurdly long, and subheads appear rarely. When they do, they're cramped boldface, barely legible—with underlines.

Now, I've been telling my students since the mid-1990s that you don't underline boldface text. Robin Williams made that simple point in 1995 in The Mac is Not a Typewriter.

Worse yet, the book includes excerpts from blogs using vast swathes of sans serif text, much of it in italics (see pages 144-147 for a really bad example).

You can get away with sans serif in short paragraphs with short lines, but not in lines of 17 to 20 words—not on screen, and not on paper.

Much of Perlmutter's text offers some interesting observations on the effect of political blogging in the 2004 US presidential election. But by failing to exploit the style of effective web text, he effectively muffles himself and undercuts whatever he's trying to say about this medium.

How web text is changing print text
When I started to teach webwriting in the late 1990s, I tried to draw a distinction between the habits of print readers and those of online readers. As one who started reading print on paper in 1947, I'm very habituated to it indeed.

But Perlmutter's book has taught me that the web is actually changing all our reading habits. Short, concise web text, well laid out, has an impact we don't get over. When we go back to print on paper, we're too impatient to put up with long sentences and long paragraphs.

Some of my favourite political bloggers, like Glenn Greenwald, still haven't learned that. His posts are long, with endless paragraphs and tedious patches of italic quotations.

A blog like Power Line, whose politics I find regrettable, at least presents itself in short, well-designed paragraphs. (But Power Line should keep its text columns narrower, and use a serif font for body text.)

Greenwald is influential despite his print-oriented text. But he'd more influential if he turned his long-winded paragraphs into short, punchy statements.

Power Line doesn't persuade me, but at least I get its point in a hurry. And I recognize that its authors are trying to make their text readable.

I hope David Perlmutter does a new edition of Blogwars, preferably in time for the fall election. But I hope he gets an editor and a designer who know how to create a print analog of a website, so his readers will understand what he's trying to tell us.

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Mediated Cultures
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Thanks to the colleague who sent me the link to this very interesting site: mediatedcultures.net @ kansas state university.

It's a showcase of the "Digital Ethnography Working Group" at Kansas State University, and it offers some dramatic examples of web communication...especially the "Explorations of Mediated Culture" video. The links on the main page are worth exploring.

My Happy Crazy Life
It isn’t often that I come across a blog that I am so impressed by that I find myself wanting to tell everyone I know about it, but My Happy Crazy Life is definitely one blog that I want to share with others.    When I found this blog, authored by Amy Sue of the Zany Zebra, [...]

Food for thought for webwriters
Via The Korea Herald: Court fines two for Web libel against Lee. Excerpt: An appeals court has found two people guilty of libel against Lee Myung-bak when he was a presidential candidate last year, overturning lower-court rulings. A Seoul High Court judge has fined a defendant, surnamed Sohn, 500,000 won ($477) for posting messages denouncing Lee and his Grand National Party 17 times in September, the court said yesterday. In...

Via The Korea Herald: Court fines two for Web libel against Lee. Excerpt:

An appeals court has found two people guilty of libel against Lee Myung-bak when he was a presidential candidate last year, overturning lower-court rulings.

A Seoul High Court judge has fined a defendant, surnamed Sohn, 500,000 won ($477) for posting messages denouncing Lee and his Grand National Party 17 times in September, the court said yesterday.

In one message, he called Lee a "criminal" and described the GNP as a "department store of corruption."

In March, a lower court in Suwon acquitted Sohn on the grounds that he had never engaged in any political activities and that the internet has become a common means for citizens to express political opinions freely.

But the higher court ruled that he violated the election law, saying his messages go beyond a simple expression of opinions.

"The messages are clearly against Lee. The defendant is thought to have done so purposely considering he posted them 17 times. He appears to have been aware that his behavior could influence the result of the election," the court said.

Current law forbids the act of distributing documents, photographs and other materials aimed at influencing election results by supporting or opposing particular candidates and political parties 180 days prior to election day.

Civic groups criticize the law for restricting freedom of expression and political participation.

In a separate case, another high-court judge fined a defendant 800,000 won for criticizing Lee 30 times in messages on an internet message board, the court said yesterday.

Granted, the fines aren't serious—at least by North American and European standards. But if the same laws were applied to political blogs in the West, most countries could pay off their deficits with the fines extracted from bloggers.

Bloggers suffer government repression
It won't be news to most of us, but Reporters sans frontières can quantify it in their Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index - 2007: Saying online what you think can get you in big trouble. Excerpt: Government repression no longer ignores bloggers The Internet is occupying more and more space in the breakdown of press freedom violations. Several countries fell in the ranking this year because of serious, repeated violations...

It won't be news to most of us, but Reporters sans frontières can quantify it in their Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index - 2007: Saying online what you think can get you in big trouble. Excerpt:

Government repression no longer ignores bloggers

The Internet is occupying more and more space in the breakdown of press freedom violations. Several countries fell in the ranking this year because of serious, repeated violations of the free flow of online news and information.

In Malaysia (124th), Thailand (135th), Vietnam (162nd) and Egypt (146th), for example, bloggers were arrested and news websites were closed or made inaccessible.

“We are concerned about the increase in cases of online censorship,” Reporters Without Borders said.

“More and more governments have realised that the Internet can play a key role in the fight for democracy and they are establishing new methods of censoring it. The governments of repressive countries are now targeting bloggers and online journalists as forcefully as journalists in the traditional media.”

At least 64 persons are currently imprisoned worldwide because of what they posted on the Internet. China maintains its leadership in this form of repression, with a total of 50 cyber-dissidents in prison.

Eight are being held in Vietnam. A young man known as Kareem Amer was sentenced to four years in prison in Egypt for blog posts criticising the president and Islamist control of the country’s universities.

We in the West can't congratulate ourselves. Canada ranks only 18th in press freedom, and the US comes in at a forlorn 48th.

The 2007 List of Banished Words
It wouldn't be a new year without Lake Superior State University's list of banished words. I don't always agree with them, but they remind me to think carefully before using a popular new expression. It may already be a cliché.

It wouldn't be a new year without Lake Superior State University's list of banished words.

I don't always agree with them, but they remind me to think carefully before using a popular new expression. It may already be a cliché.

Way more news sites, way less news
Via The Globe and Mail, columnist Russell Smith offers some cogent comments: Way more news sites, way less news. Excerpt: Every year, a report is published called "The State of the News Media." It is researched and written by a think tank called Project for Excellence in Journalism, and it deals solely with the U.S. media. This think tank was created by the journalism school at Columbia University; it is...

Via The Globe and Mail, columnist Russell Smith offers some cogent comments: Way more news sites, way less news. Excerpt:

Every year, a report is published called "The State of the News Media." It is researched and written by a think tank called Project for Excellence in Journalism, and it deals solely with the U.S. media.

This think tank was created by the journalism school at Columbia University; it is now funded by a private foundation based in Washington. The report is a summary of a comprehensive study of the kinds of news being disseminated by all American media sources, mainstream and marginal.

Its primary preoccupation, of course, recently at least, has been the effect on the news of the Internet and of "citizen" (that is to say, amateur) participation in the creation of America's informational landscape.

It always attempts to answer some big questions, particularly whether newsgathering is more reflective of reality when run by democratic principles or by elitist ones.

This year's report summarizes its conclusions as a few major trends. Perhaps the most depressing of them is the fact that despite the massive proliferation of news-headline websites and "citizen" news sites (that is to say, blogs), there is no more actual news being found and reported.

In fact, there may even be less.

The simple explanation for this is that most websites simply repackage news found and written by the conventional media. In other words, reporters who are trained and paid to do the often dry work of gathering facts and interviewing people, or the dangerous work of visiting wars or disasters, provide the news stories, and the news sites gather them up and the bloggers comment on them.

But because of the commercial nature of news sites, the stories are often filtered by popularity. There is more and more technology available to enable editors to gather reader votes on the appeal of stories and to sort stories by their popularity.

This leads to a narrowing of the number of stories that are posted: The most popular ones get the most play.

Read the whole article, and follow the links.

Offline Marketing Techniques
  Offline marketing is very similar to online marketing, either way, word of mouth is one of the best forms of advertising there is, but a huge part of that involves getting to know the people around you. Online, that might mean joining and actively participating in groups and forums. Offline that could be taking a sincere [...]

Nielsen on Website Readers' Reading Habits
Via Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: How Little Do Users Read? His summary: On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely. The conclusion he draws: Unless you're writing for really dedicated readers with a strong interest in your subject, you should keep your text to no more than 100 words per page. I'd be interested in...

Via Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: How Little Do Users Read? His summary:

On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

The conclusion he draws: Unless you're writing for really dedicated readers with a strong interest in your subject, you should keep your text to no more than 100 words per page. I'd be interested in your reactions to his argument.

A Handy Reference
I recently ran across a useful little book, The Elements of Visual Style: The Basics of Print Design for Every PC and Mac User, by Robert W. Harris. While it's aimed at print-based writing, webwriters can also draw some lessons from it. Harris gives us a quick guide to typography, layout, and the use of art in print documents. The illustrations show bad and good examples, and the book itself...

I recently ran across a useful little book, The Elements of Visual Style: The Basics of Print Design for Every PC and Mac User, by Robert W. Harris. While it's aimed at print-based writing, webwriters can also draw some lessons from it.

Harris gives us a quick guide to typography, layout, and the use of art in print documents. The illustrations show bad and good examples, and the book itself is pretty well designed. I wish it were more "hypertextual": We get no references to other books on document design, and no links to sites dealing with this and related issues.

Still, it's a compact, concise, and inexpensive handbook. Even if you find most of the advice very familiar, the book could help you back up the points you're trying to make to your clients.

The Politics of Cyberspace
The Tyee has published my article Winning Cyberspace in '08. Excerpt: ... the sudden advent of interactive media has changed propaganda into a two-way street, a conversation, a screaming match -- and a rock concert. One-way media and interactive media are themselves interacting, creating a political environment unlike any before it. The campaign of Barack Obama is not just thriving in this environment -- it's defining 21st-century campaign politics.

The Tyee has published my article Winning Cyberspace in '08. Excerpt:

... the sudden advent of interactive media has changed propaganda into a two-way street, a conversation, a screaming match -- and a rock concert. One-way media and interactive media are themselves interacting, creating a political environment unlike any before it.

The campaign of Barack Obama is not just thriving in this environment -- it's defining 21st-century campaign politics.