The new digital divide

Since the Internet started to become popular we have heard concerns about the digital divide. A fear that in the information age, those who are not computer-literate will struggle to keep up with the rest of us, and that we might even see a new kind of working class. Those without access to the Internet.

But there is another type of digital divide, a divide that is potentially far more dangerous, even a potential threat to democracy. That is the emerging divide between those who get their news online only, and those who find time to read the good old-fashioned newspaper.

News on the Internet is all about the "here and now". The accident that just happened down the street. Live feeds from events as they are taking place etc., while the traditional newspaper gives room for thought and reflection. It allows you to understand and discuss the how of things, not just the what. Both paper and electronic publications have their strengths. In order to understand, and to be an enlightened citizen, you need both the what and the why of things.

But traditional media have fewer and fewer readers. Even media students are becoming online only-readers, missing out on the why. And seeing as online news often focus mostly on human interest, celebrities and gossip, this is a dangerous development. The only way to maintain a living, thriving democracy is to have citizens who care and know the why of things. Knowledge is, as ever, power. But now fewer and fewer people bother, and the digital divide widens.

Anonymity a threat to public discussion?

Åge Hareide, manager for the Norwegian international team, is worried about all the anonymous comments that are being posted about him and his team in blogs, forums and comments. Anonymity is part of what makes the net a great forum for debate, but is it also undermining the seriousness of online discussion?

It seems that anonymous people will say just about anything that comes to mind when they're commenting or debating online. I could an entire book with stupid and harassing comments just from the sites I work for. Online discussion has an enormous potential to become a serious tool for public debate, allowing those without access to traditional forums to have their say. A potential that so far has not been unleashed. But demanding that posters give their full name or that editors should approve each post before it is published (such as mr. Bodahl Johansen from the Norwegian Institute for Journalism wants to do) is not the solution. Such measures would only serve to curb discussion, as the net is a "here and now" medium, and a lot fewer would bother to comment if they couldn't see the fruits of their efforts right away.

A far better solution is to demand registration, and to have some sort of verification to avoid the use of fake names etc. I don't think as many would go around calling people names if they knew that their own name could be associated with their ramblings. Or maybe I'm just naive, maybe we do need pre-approval by editors. If that's the case, we might as well just stop using the Internet as a forum for debate.

Symbols and meaning

I won't go into all that semiotics stuff, but  rarely have I seen a more negative signifier than in Edda media's (formerly Orkla Media) new logo... Maybe the designer wanted to recreate the 
negative comments Orkla received when they sold their media division to a capitalist of the 
worst kind? 

Crime reporter has an alleged affair with terror suspect

TV2 Crime reporter Karianne Solbrække was today exposed as the woman who allegedly had an affair with Arfan Qadeer Bhatti, who faces terror charges for the synagogue shootings in Oslo. TV2 did not want to release the reporters' name, but after names appeared on several web sites, Finansavisen finally let the name drop today.

Solbrække, who has been with TV2 since 2000, is an experienced journalist, covering, among other things, last year's robbery of Norsk Kontantservice in Stavanger. While Solbrække is not charged with anything (except maybe poor judgment in her selection of partners), releasing her name was still the right thing to do. TV2 rarely holds back names in other cases, so why should their own receive special treatment? And, as Solbrække is such an experienced and exposed reporter, the fact that she might have had an affair with a terror suspect is of public interest. The public should not have to worry about the objectivity of well-known reporters. I just hope that we are spared similar revelations in the future, lest the media lose its' credibility alltogether.

I post this after reading Knut Stian Olsen's request that bloggers should spread the Solbrække's name, and his reasons why we should do so.

Israeli official: Norway Israel's worst enemy

An Israeli unnamed official source claims that Norway is the country in the world that is most unfriendly towards Israel.

These allegations come after Jostein Gaarder's article in Aftenposten, which was written as a spontaneous response to Israel's invasion of Lebanon, as well as other critical remarks made by Norwegian officials and public figures.

Norwegians and Norwegian media are generally critical of Israel and their hard-line crackdown on the Palestinians and Lebanese, and rightfully so, in my opinion. Israel's response to the Hezbollah's bombs was excessive. Palestinians in the Gaza strip are suffering, and Israel's "eye-for-an-eye" policy probably creates more terrorists, just as the US invasion of Iraq has been proven to do. I'm not saying Israel can't respond to terrorist attacks. The Palestinians and Hezbollah has a lot to answer for, and going after terrorists is a legitimate policy. But not in the way Israel is currently doing it.

Disagreeing with the policy of another country is nothing new in international politics, but when Israel is criticised, they are far too quick to call the critique "thinly-veiled anti-semitism". This is a common response when a minority group feels threatened, or fails to achieve their goals. When it happens within a country, it is annoying and tiresome. But when a country starts thinking that way, dangerous things can happen...

Should Israel's actions be excused because of the Holocaust? Is the international society to close its eyes to the way Israel is oppressing Palestine? Or should we see Israel's actions today in the same light as we see other countries?

Dealing with climate change

I just watched an interesting debate on NRK TV on climate change. We all know the dangers by now, but what can the average Joe citizen do about it? And why is the government so reluctant in doing the things that would matter?

There are things that we can do, many of which aren't even all that much of a hassle. Turning off lights in rooms that aren't in use (no, Norwegians still haven't learned to do that), lowering the temperature indoors to 18-20 degrees, refrain from using terrace heaters in autumn, cycling or walking to work if you don't live too far away. Think before we go shopping for that fifteenth sweater. I'm sure most of us could do a fair bit if we only sat down and thought about it.

But a lot of the things that really would have an impact are up to the government. Norway is not a densely populated country. Most people live on small towns with less than 50.000 people, and are dependent on their cars for a lot of things. Owning a car is expensive, even if it just sits in the driveway. Public transport is also expensive, so when you have a car it pays to use it instead of taking the bus when you can. Lower public transport fares in peak hour would mean fewer cars on the roads. Lower fares and higher frequencies throughout the day and you might just see some people selling their cars. I know I would if public transport had been a viable option.

Bikes are even better than buses, in the few months without sub-zero temperatures. But there are few designated bike paths in Norwegian cities, and sharing the road with cars is not always smart, especially not on small rural roads where the cars speed by in 80 km/H. A small investment here, and people might just drag their bikes from out of the garage. Good for the environment, even better for public health.

Moving people from short-haul flights and on to the train would also benefit the environment. Most air travel between cities in southern Norway could be avoided with a high-speed train network, such as they are building in the rest of Europe. Norway already has the trains, but the high-speed tracks are missing, and there is small chance we'll see them anytime soon. And when the train ride from Oslo to Trondheim not only is over six hours long (compared to a 45 minute flight), but also is twice as expensive as flying, people will of course choose flying, even though planes emit more CO2 than any other form of transportation.

the government has the money to subsidise trains, public transport, bike paths and bio-fuelled cars, what is lacking is the political will to do something that really matters. Norway has earned so much money from oil that we cant' afford to spend any of it, and while the state government has a huge budget surplus, local government only gets crumbs. Hardly enough to cover basic public needs, let alone subsidise public transport or build cycle paths. It probably wouldn't have mattered even if local government had been given sufficient funds. The pre-WW2 days of "building the country" are long gone, replaced by a gang of petrol-crazed polluters speeding down the highway of mindless consumption.

Reality and the media

If it's on TV it has to be real, right? Wrong! The media presents us with an edited version of reality. The images we are shown are only a piece of the truth. A representation of what happened within the camera's frame at that exact moment when it was pointed towards something.

Sports is a good example of selective representation. In recent years, we've seen more cameras than spectators on some football matches. After the game we're given slow-motion reruns of situations to show how the referee made a bad decision, or how the goalkeeper should have saved that last shot. TV networks spend a lot of time with highlights and post-game analysis, supposedly objective. But this is rarely the case, at least not with the team I follow. For some reason (and I'm not being objective here, as I'm a fan), TV2, the channel with rights to the Norwegian Tippeliga, has a tendency to show how the opposition almost scored in this and that situation, or how the referee failed to give the opposing team a free kick or a penalty.

In doing this, TV creates an image that the opposition should have won the game, while as often as not the "objective" truth is that both teams had their chances. But TV wants to show one side of the story, and refrains from showing those situations.

This happening in sports might not be the end of the world. But imagine the same techniques in news coverage... You can't fit everything into a 30 second spot, so editors have to choose. And the choices are not always unbiased. War imagery is a good example. When TV showed us the Iraqis tearing down the statue of Saddam, were there other civilian Iraqis outside of the picture demonstrating against the statue being torn down? We don't know, because few of us were there...

V for very undemocratic

I've just seen the excellent film "V for vendetta", expecting a standard Hollywood action. But instead I saw a film which got me thinking about fascism and how dangerously close to it we sometimes are.

While the original comic book by Alan Moore and David Lloyd has been altered somewhat to better fit the big screen, bot the comic and the film gives me an eerie feeling. In the foreword to the most recent release of the comic, moore says he wrote the comic partially as a response to Thatcerism and what he believed to be subtle signs of an emerging police state. The movie gives us more than one hint that the chaos the world was plunged into in the years before the story begins was a result of American actions and hostility during the war on terror.

And that is why the story scares me. Are we not creeping slowly towards a police state? Fear of terrorism has made most Americans accept more and more surveillance in their daily lives. The same things are happening in Britain and, to a lesser, degree, in other countries. In order to fight terrorism, the US has moved hundreds of people to Guantanamo. People who have not received a fair trial. And who do not know when or if they will ever be released. US and British troops have commited several acts of torture in Iraq. While their governments claim that these acts have been commited by individual soldiers, US president Bush has proposed legislation that would allow US forces to torture prisoners.

Are these acts commited by a healthy, humane democracy? Torture and imprisonment without legal processing have been used many times in modern history, but always by regimes that were inherently non-democratic. Nazi Germany, fascist italy and Spain, the communist Soviet union...

Is it not then a warning signal to the state of democracy when we close our eyes to such acts? Should we accept using non-democratic tools in the fight to preserve democracy? When we accept governement intervention in our daily lives,close our eyes to human right's abuse in Iraq and Guantanamo, how are we any better than the regimes we fight against?

The difference is becoming blurry to me.

Media jobs disappearing

Norwegian tabloid VG has announced that it wants to downsize their staff by 70-90 employees. The move comes as VG's circulation is down by 10 percent as well as experiencing falling advertising revenues.

Norwegian media jobs are disappearing in their hundreds. Dagbladet announced job cuts several months ago, and Orkla Media, owner of several local newspapers, web sites and radio stations, are also considering staff cutbacks.

Statistics don't lie. Readers move from print to the web, and owners have to react. But for many papers, cutting back on staff also means sacrificing quality, which might escalate the falling circulation numbers. And while the web is becoming ever more popular and internet advertising is increasing, the print edition is still responsible for 80% of the papers' revenue. If circulation numbers keep falling, the companies will have to act. Readers might have to choose between paying for good content or receiving poor quality free content.

Publishing an online newspaper is a lot cheaper than its print sibling. No printing or distribution costs, and staff numbers can be a lot lower. But do we as consumers want news services that do no more than recycle each others' stories? Most "news" web sites today do this. The same story is published simultaneously on different sites, using the same news agencies as their source. If this is where we are headed, I fear that news coverage in the information age will be poor and of little real value. At least not if we stick with the notion of the media as society's watchdog.

New Pearl Jam single

Don't waste your time with stupid pizza songs... Pearl Jam is giving away free downloads of their new single "world wide suicide" from their upcoming album. Download it at bootlegs.pearljam.com