Shh, I’m reading. (image by Gunjan Karun)

I finally have an iPad!

Yes, that took a while. Because although I live at the intersection of communications and digital everything, I also happen to be on a budget and think gadgets (including, and sometimes especially my beloved Apple products) cost way too darn much. But as it turns out, I’d been enrolled in one of those credit card rewards programs, and I had no idea. Which means I’d racked up the points for years. Which means I had enough to get an iPad. So I did. And there was much rejoicing in the land!

There was also the rediscovery of why, although I am agnostic and will use whatever technology both works and fits the budget, Apple continues to induce that gasp-inducing reaction with great design. The iPad came out of the box fully charged, and in fact, came on when I accidentally hit the power button while trying to get the packaging off. First I was surprised. Then I was set up. Took me a whole 5 minutes. It was an object lesson in how to win my dollars and loyalty: Make. It. Easy.

Then I tried to use the iPad for the purpose for which it is most intended in my house – reading books. Specifically, from the library.  That took longer.

This isn’t the future. It’s now. What if they didn’t have a reading device? And the library was limited? (image by Kathy Cassidy)

Basically, it took about a minute to set up Netflix, Kindle, and other fun apps. Everything worked smoothly. Really, a child could do this. Then I tried to set up things so I could check library e-books out. It took fully 35 minutes, with several steps. The librarian in my neighborhood had given me the heads-up on this. And although not an early adopter, I’m far from a luddite. Still, the process was grumble-inducing, and humbling at times.

On the one hand, it makes perfect sense that products from companies with money to invest and profit margins to watch would be easier to use. And that services from tax-funded organizations like a library would not. My friend’s response was classic, one that I’ve been known to make when users complain about Facebook’s ongoing privacy changes and Google’s random decisions to kill something like Reader: “It’s free. You don’t get to complain.”

Yes. But…

I can’t help thinking that if reading inexorably becomes a digital experience – like music has – then what does it say about us as a society if people have to work harder to access reading materials from the neighborhood library? Because the issue, increasingly, isn’t a digital divide. It’s digital access.

And no, I don’t buy the argument that it’s okay to not worry because people will still just check out books. That’s a bit like telling music enthusiasts that they can still buy cassettes and vinyl. Um, no. Yes, I know that people still do – but let’s be honest. The folks still doing that are DJs, hipsters making a conscious choice, and people who never upgraded. I know very very few people in the last category. You? Also, think back to when CDs and the iPod first began to revolutionize the music world – music stores were a bigger part of the commercial landscape than bookstores are now. Do you see where I’m going with this?

Furthermore, I’m not about to tell less well-off segments of society that they need to stick to print while the rest of us aren’t just enjoying our literature online, but probably have a more complex, interactive, and richer reading experience. That makes us a society that, in effect, tells people that if you have money, you can read. And if you do not, you get leftovers.

I want to be very clear here – this is not a knock on libraries, or librarians. Because librarians – who in my experience either know everything or know where to find out what you need – have saved my ass more than once (specifically the fabulous folks at Dana Library, Rutgers-Newark, circa 1995). And I’ve yet to meet a librarian who believes that reading should be limited. If anything, they’re usually quite the opposite.

This is also certainly not a knock on libraries, which have enriched my life immeasurably anywhere I’ve ever been. But if libraries, funded by the tax-payer in the US and therefore open to all residents, are put in a position of reducing access – by publishers, evolving digital rights norms, idiotic rules about how often you can lend out e-literature from print rules that no longer make sense – then it is a sad day.

(p.s. the featured image for this post on the home page is from Life As A Mad Dancer)

They eventually grow up, no?

On the heels of my weekend ramblation about content and privacy comes this piece in the NYT about digital content in the college classroom.

Bottom line, your professor can now tell if you’ve done your reading.

Really? I can’t help but think this an awful development.

Yes, this is going to be very valuable for textbook authors and teachers who think they’re more interesting than they’ve been led to believe. And if the entire class never looks at chapter 3, that’s probably telling.

But honestly, the bigger point is this – it’s not the professor’s job to check on you in college. It’s your job as a student to figure out who you are, set your own goals, do your own work, and oh yeah, be on top of your reading. And good educators – whether they’re teaching in person or online – probably communicate and check in with students, and don’t need analytics to tell them when a chapter, or a whole class, is falling flat.

Then again, I didn’t go to college understanding I was watched all the time because I’m older than dirt in Internet years. So what do I know?

We are a one-TV house. And come fall, we may well be a no-cable house.

Meanwhile, I think the parallel, but somewhat more interesting conversation to me—because I might just cut the cord this summer—is the one happening about “linear television” watching. 

If you know me, you know that I adore TV. I used to watch gobs and gobs of it. That’s what happens when your mom limits it when you’re a kid and you then move from late 1980s India (of the limited Doordarshan channels) to the West where you’re not only unrestricted but have access 24/7!

I particularly loved TV because it’s how I discovered the US. I’d turn on the TV to watch repeats and catch up on years and years of cultural touchstones that didn’t just help me be more American in LA (where conversations could be one long cultural riff, like Dennis Miller SNL’s Weekend Update); they explained America in all kinds of ways – big, small, good, bad. To this day, Murphy Brown’s single-motherhood, complete with weighing in by the Veep who couldn’t spell is one of those moments that drove home early an important lesson: You have choices, but all choices have outcomes and come with tradeoffs, and you can’t have everything all at once. As Frank Fontana puts it to a post-partum Brown who’s figuring it out how to do it all like Murrow and the rest, “Think about it Murph, they had wives!” I learned early, through TV, not to ignore what the highly mockable Veep has to say.

Life and the media landscape changed. I am now a parent with little kids, and I haven’t watched TV in years. I think I interrupted my older kid from his cartoons for about 20 minutes two years ago when Richard Engel reported that Hosni Mubarak had finally left Egypt. Two years prior, I watched horrified, as CNN reported live on the Mumbai attacks—although I confess that the only reason I watched at all was because I was ginormously pregnant and unable to sleep. That’s it. I haven’t watched much of anything live lately, not even my beloved Stewart/Colbert.

First, “small kids” = “need toothpicks to keep my eyes open past 11 pm.” You “sleep is for the weak” folks…please send me a card from your planet. I’d love to visit some day.

The ability to sleep anywhere is a glorious thing. My family can, but sadly, I didn’t inherit the gene.

Second, if it’s truly huge, it’ll be hard to get away from on the Internet. So you have to put up with spoilers, but that’s not hard to do. You just temporarily mute the people you know will give things away, aka, you fine folks who don’t know how to be cryptic about Downton Abbey because at 9 pm on a Sunday night I’m still putting kids to bed and prepping for the week. (I could go into how there are few surprises on the show–totally saw Sybil’s death coming from a mile away–but that’s a whole ‘nuther post.)

Not one good sympathetic character on the show. And you will still want to watch it.

Third, and probably most importantly, we have the advent of truly on-demand entertainment, something like House of Cards. I’m completely hooked, and I can watch it any time on Netflix, without ads, for a reasonable fee, and it’s GOOD. I just can’t own it or record it for keeps–remember doing that on VCRs? I can only re-watch it. Assuming I want to, and continue paying for Netflix. And therein lies the upside and downside, doesn’t it?

Digital products are owned entirely by the vendor (Netflix, HBO, the paywall), we get to consume it on their terms. And more than news or entertainment, I think the business that will most be affected by this new digital landscape is book publishing.

I’ve though for about a year that the book publishing industry is where the music industry was in the Napster years – contracting, highly challenged, catching up. But at least they seem to have learned to embrace the disruption rather than shut it down. So no more will we own books. We’ll just rent them or download them for as long as that’s possible. Or, we’ll pay very big bucks to own the rarer, limited hardback version of a classic, much like serious collectors pay to own vinyl. Oh yes, vinyl never went away, it just got relatively more expensive in a marketplace where you can buy the less shareable and easily diseappeareable single you want for a dollar, because not everyone wants or knows how to hack their downloads into a possibly illegal permanent collection. It’s the tradeoff we live with. Some of us more easily than others, though.

Now you own it, now you don’t. (image courtesy Adam Frucci/gizmodo)

I’m very grudgingly made my peace with the possibility of my content disappearing. It’s incredibly annoying and bothersome to me that I only rented, and never had the possibility of owning my viewing experience of House of Cards. And if I want to own the new Nora Roberts or Marissa Meyer, I have to buy it, possibly for more money and after waiting longer. Because getting it right away for cheaper means it could disappear – exhibit A: the flap over Kindle’s removal, of all things, of Animal Farm and 1984 in 2009. The episode made things pretty clear to anyone moving to e-readers–convenience, your privacy, and their terms vs. permanent ownership of your purchase.

For that matter, getting an article only online means it can disappear altogether, a la the ill-timed tin-eared Vogue puff piece on Basma Assad that got erased as Syria exploded into civil war. If Vogue was entirely an entirely online enterprise we’d never have proof that the article ever really existed past a certain point. It’s much harder to “disappear” inconvenient print articles published by the millions. Or anything for that matter, as many a drunk-status has proved. Take heart though remorseful spring-breakers, the “right to be forgotten” movement might fix that too. Assuming it’s still an issue as hiring managers get younger and remember doing the same thing. Because as Jane Quigley wisely observed earlier this year at Xpotomac, for those of us who’re not digital natives, privacy matters only to those of us who grew up with it. Perhaps the same applies to ownership and permanence too, and I’m just a boring old fud. You?

Three things jump out at me in this post: 

1) Anyone who thinks Goddard “complicated” matters by digging for tweets and documenting them as evidence needs to seriously rethink things. Complicated for who? Law enforcement, so they could prosecute? People who knew and not only didn’t stop what was happening but chose instead to record it? Coaches who couldn’t ignore their talent’s downside? The survivor, who was unconscious at the time of the assault and didn’t find out until video showed up after the fact? Or the rapists, who seemed to lacked all conscience but not enough that they didn’t get they’d done something wrong and tried to cover up by taking down their incriminating tweets? What part of Goddard’s documentation is complicated for you? The fact that there was indisputable evidence?

2) This is being called the case that social media won, and for good reason. There is no delete on the Internet. Nothing ever goes away. I believe in privacy, and I think you have a right to it. But you shouldn’t expect it on the web. You especially shouldn’t expect it – on or offline – if it was something you shouldn’t have done in the first place – like, say, show a total lack of humanity or compassion.

3) The web is forever. Yes, we know this. But the assailants are 16 and 17. Redemption, if it ever comes to them (legally or of their own effort), will always be a click away from being obliterated. A wise friend once told me that we are all more than one bad mistake. But we were discussing our lack of patience with children during witching hour, not sickening actions taken in a seeming absence of any sense of right or wrong. The assailants didn’t just act criminally, they bragged about it publicly, for all to see, and for the web and the blogger to document. This never goes away. It’s an inbuilt level of unforgiving punishment that makes us all Javerts in cyberspace, and matches the assailants’ lack of compassion – into perpetuity. Even as I can summon no sympathy whatsoever for the convicted juveniles, I find that deeply saddening.

I’m going to out myself here….I never used Google reader, or any reader for that matter. I’m sure it says tons about me that I never could figure out the whole deal. I tried very hard with the whole RSS thing in the early years. Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, but I just always felt like the doof in the room, the one who was going to be gently taken aside after the Friday morning staff meeting and be informed that the acceptance letter went out by mistake, you know?

This is what my earliest RSS explorations would produce on the screen. And I was supposed to do …. what next?

Looking back, I think it failed the whole “can I do this in one quick 30-second step” test that later seemed to win my loyalty to feedburner – direct to my email! Maybe Google Reader didn’t exist then, or maybe I started out with a bad reader experience, because if there’s one thing Google does do really well, it’s to keep things simple for the end user. But all it took was one baffling foray, and I was done. I survived early RSS by bookmarking things to death on the work PC. And then when I switched to my personal mac, magically, I was able to hit a button and get everything by email. (Yes, yes, I’m sure there was plenty of magic to be had on the PC, I just never stumbled across it….)

I totally get that a core group of users – who are loud enough that they’re making enough noise to generate coverage that Buzz and Wave (remember them?) never got – are really bummed. And yet I can see why Google wants to be done with the reader. There are so many other ways – and readers, for that matter – to get what you need, have been for years now. Neither lack of reader nor TV (unless it’s something massively important – the Mumbai attacks, Mubarak stepping down, that kind of important) has made any difference in being clued into the news of the day – whether or not it’s important or in my bubble.

I get some blogs delivered by email, but understand why that might not appeal – I’m not the only one who periodically ponders email bankruptcy or finds an empty inbox eventful enough to tweet about. But some of the biggest stories of the last few years came to me via Twitter. And if you find the Twitter a horrible firehose of “Gah! Make it stop!” – can’t blame you one bit – there’s always the Facebook. I’m convinced that long after people stop putting up anything about their kids on Facebook, it’ll stick around because it’s now such a great place to get news. Yes you have to wade through all the “I’m eating this now” and cat memes, but if it weren’t for Facebook, I’d probably forget to check a lot of news websites and never actually make it past the front page kluge that now serves far too many homepages.

This right here, is the smorgasbord for me as a consumer, and challenge as a consultant. And with that, I’m off to check out the other readers. It’s been a few years. Maybe the bafflement won’t be so immediate this time.