An internet carol
Not too many days ago, I went to a staged reading of A Christmas Carol. It was thoroughly rewarding — Scrooge was tremblingly grateful to be delivered from his obsessive thrift, and Bob Cratchitt and Scrooge's nephew were kind enough to acknowledge the change in Scrooge's habits. I went out into the streets suffused with well-being.
I had read Andy Oram's essay (”The Ghosts of Internet Time”) before, but he sent it around again today and I was delighted to see it. So here it is.
Bleeping NBC
So for more than 24 hours there I wasn't able to be online. It felt very peaceful. I stopped checking to see if there was yet another message about the economics of internet infrastructure. I didn't read a single blog entry. And I didn't haunt the front page of the New York Times or the Washington Post.
I sat in my office with a nice big cup of coffee and read a book about telecommunications law. It's a lot easier to do that when there isn't a laptop around.
Now, of course, the laptop is with me again and I'm back in the swamp. There are two full in-boxes to page through in a dispirited sort of way. The problem is that everything's interesting and I can't possibly absorb it all. It's overwhelming, every single day.
It's refreshing, under these conditions, to focus on a simple and heartwarming story from the world of mass media.
NBC broadcast [requires registration, sorry] a funny song on Saturday night as part of Saturday Night Live. I'm confident that more than 90% of the people who saw the broadcast received the show via their cable provider. But because it was a broadcast, using the sacred spectrum, NBC bleeped out a possibly offensive word. Many times. Then NBC took a deep breath and posted the funny song on YouTube without the bleeping. The claim is that the video is funnier with the bleeps included, but the unbleeped song is getting a lot more attention because it's online.
So what does this parable tell us? A low-ranking network is trying to make sure it gets some attention, is that all this is?
Maybe there's more here. The anachronistic bleep may be the heart of this story. It can't possibly make sense for the FCC to continue making vague threats about license renewal (and assessing not-vague fines) associated with the appearance of broadcast impropriety, when all the kids we're supposedly protecting have access to innumerable other sources of impropriety using other forms of electromagnetic transmission.
In fact, I'll go out on a limb here and say that it's embarrassing for the FCC to continue along this indecency path. Surely the agency has better things to do. Tinkering with the timing and content of broadcasts seems increasingly beside the point. Not that there's a need (I have to say quickly) to tinker with any other form of communication either. The best software is between the ears.