Is the Internet a solution or part of the problem?
Back in the early days of the Internet those of us involved in putting some of the first sites on the World Wide Web foolishly thought it might improve the quality of communication and discourse in society.
Instead, the ‘Net is, in many ways, a cesspool that reflects the worst of our culture.
This story by Ellen Nakashima in today’s Washington Post caught my eye:
A female freelance writer who blogged about the pornography industry was threatened with rape. A single mother who blogged about “the daily ins and outs of being a mom” was threatened by a cyber-stalker who claimed that she beat her son and that he had her under surveillance. Kathy Sierra, who won a large following by blogging about designing software that makes people happy, became a target of anonymous online attacks that included photos of her with a noose around her neck and a muzzle over her mouth.
As women gain visibility in the blogosphere, they are targets of sexual harassment and threats. Men are harassed too, and lack of civility is an abiding problem on the Web. But women, who make up about half the online community, are singled out in more starkly sexually threatening terms — a trend that was first evident in chat rooms in the early 1990s and is now moving to the blogosphere, experts and bloggers said.
A 2006 University of Maryland study on chat rooms found that female participants received 25 times as many sexually explicit and malicious messages as males. A 2005 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the proportion of Internet users who took part in chats and discussion groups plunged from 28 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2005, entirely because of the exodus of women. The study attributed the trend to “sensitivity to worrisome behavior in chat rooms.”
Joan Walsh, editor in chief of the online magazine Salon, said that since the letters section of her site was automated a year and a half ago, “it’s been hard to ignore that the criticisms of women writers are much more brutal and vicious than those about men.”
Arianna Huffington, whose Huffington Post site is among the most prominent of blogs founded by women, said anonymity online has allowed “a lot of those dark prejudices towards women to surface.” Her site takes a “zero tolerance” policy toward abusive and excessively foul language, and employs moderators “24/7″ to filter the comments, she said.
Sierra, whose recent case has attracted international attention, has suspended blogging. Other women have censored themselves, turned to private forums or closed comments on blogs. Many use gender-neutral pseudonyms. Some just gut it out. But the effect of repeated harassment, bloggers and experts interviewed said, is to make women reluctant to participate online — undercutting the promise of the Internet as an egalitarian forum.
The venom aimed at women is just part of the coarseness that threatens the ‘Net. An ongoing debate among web publishers questions the value of ‘Net-based commentary, especially when it comes to comments posted to news sites and web blogs.
Friday night lights
Friday night in Floyd. Always a special night.
Normally, I tour the restaurants and music venues along Locust Street with a camera. Not this night. I left the cameras at home and went to hear the music.
Started at Oddfellas Cantina where Bernie Coveney, Chris Luster and restaurant owner Rod Neukirch entertained a full house of diners. I poured a cup of coffee and sat on an available bench to listen to the music.
Reality comes home to roost in Blacksburg
A week later and Virginia Tech is still a national story. Lots of press — some good, lots exploitive — but Neely Tucker of The Washington Post nails the story of what life and the future holds for Blacksburg:
Big cities, big places, they don’t worry like this. Shooting sprees, mass death — they don’t become linked in the national consciousness to their moment of suffering.
Small towns, little-known places, they often do. It’s not fair, but it’s still the way it is.
Columbine, Waco, Oklahoma City, even Pearl Harbor.
Tragedy tends to stick. John Rowan, proprietor, Rendezvous Tattoos, Main Street, Blacksburg, America:
"This is the last place in the world where you’d expect something like this to happen, and here we set a record for it, the worst shooting in the country."
You want to know surreal? The University of Miami baseball team came to play a series against Virginia Tech on campus this weekend.
It was the first regular campus event since 32 students were shot to death by a fellow classmate.
The Hurricanes were planning to bring an extra cop to Blacksburg so they’d feel safe.
Read the above sentence again.
This is a joke, right? A town of 40,000, more than half of them college students, a rural pocket of off-the-interstate America, a town with zero murders in the previous year, a place where the crime report for the year reads 22 burglaries, seven sex offenses, six weapons violations, 194 liquor law violations — and Miami thinks this place is rough?
Oh my aching butt
Set through a two-day jury trial in Floyd County Circuit Court, a sexual molestation that ended with a not-guilty verdict in the evening hours of Thursday.
My old bones can’t take that many hours on the hardwood benches of the Floyd County Courthouse.
Another jury trial set for this week (Monday and Tuesday) involving the bitter and often petty feud that that marks life in Park Ridge, Floyd County’s only gated community.
Back in business
Welcome to the new home of Blue Ridge Muse, now powered by WordPress and firmly settled in on a new server.
I’ve been planning the move for some time now but finally had a chance to get it completed this weekend.
Still have some housekeeping to do so please bear with me.
But we’re open for business.
About
The Blue Ridge Muse
Doug Thompson realized the value of capturing history 46 years ago as a 10-year-old schoolboy in Farmville, Virginia, when the community, caught up in a fight over integration, closed the public schools and opened an all-white private school.
Thompson wrote about his experiences and submitted his story and photos to The Farmville Herald, the local newspaper. He developed other photo stories for the paper and a journalism career was born.
When his family relocated to the Blue Ridge Mountain community of Floyd, the 14-year-old Thompson took his photographs and stories to Pete Hallman, editor of the weekly Floyd Press. Hallman encouraged the young man to continue writing and taking photos, teaching him the ins and outs of the newspaper business.
Thompson went on to join the staff of The Roanoke Times where he covered the police beat, emerging racial turmoil in the city and tackled other tough subjects. His story about a young girl who obtained an abortion (illegal at the time) won the top feature writing award from the Virginia Press Association. Another, about street racers in the city, won a feature writing award while his coverage of the murder of a Southwest Roanoke couple and the abduction and rape of their teenaged daughters brought the top news writing award from the association
After moving on to The Telegraph in Alton, Illinois, Thompson continued to win awards for writing and photography, capturing the Illinois Associated Press Managing Editors top prizes for news, feature and column writing as well as first place awards from the Illinois Press Association.
Thompson took a sabbatical from newspapers in 1981 and moved to Washington to work on Capitol Hill. He served as press secretary for two Congressmen and then Chief of Staff for another before joining the House Committee on Science & Technology. From 1987-1992, Thompson served as Vice President for Political Programs for The National Association of Realtors and then joined The Eddie Mahe Company as a senior associate for Communications. During that stint he became involved in campaign finance issues and was a founding member of the Project for Comprehensive Campaign Reform. He also lectured at the American Campaign Academy and was a sought-after spokesman on campaign finance issues.
But journalism remained Thompson’s true love and returned to his roots as a free-lance writer and photographer.
During his stint at the House Committee on Science and Technology, Thompson worked on transfer of what was then DARPANet from the Department of Defense to the National Science Foundation, the beginnings of the Internet. Sensing the coming growth of the Internet, he started a web hosting and design company in 1994 and that same year launched Capitol Hill Blue as the web’s first political news site.
Besides Blue, Thompson publishes a number of other web sites, including American Newsreel and Blue Ridge Muse. He owns Blue Ridge Creative, a photography, video production and digital imaging company in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. In 2001, Thompson and his wife launched the Our America project, a 10-year program to document the first decade of the new century through videos, photography and written essays.
The Thompsons left Washington in 2004 and moved to a hilltop retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southwestern Virginia. He returns to Washington once a year to speak to journalism students at the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism and still has business interests in the National Capital Region but his days as a Washingtonian are over. Despite his success in new media, Thompson remains a newspaperman at heart and lives by the creed that it is the role of a newspaperman to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."
Moving Day
We’re moving today to a new server with a new publishing system. During the transition, comments have been disabled. With luck (and luck has a lot to do with it) we should be back up and running by Monday morning.
Where the action is
The Virginia Tech tragedy brought some old friends from the Washington media into our backyard this week. John Niles, an acerbic Brit and a great photographer I worked with for years, decided to visit Floyd and talk about old times over a cup of coffee.
Like so many others from my previous life, John has trouble understanding why I gave up the fast lane for life in the hills.
One of your disk drives is missing
It was one of those ominous things you don’t want to see when you fire up your Mac in the morning: a blank space where a disk drive icon should be.
In this case, a blank spot that means a 1 terabyte disk drive that holds many of your video and photo files is not booting properly.
So I loaded Mac’s disk utility program and ran the repair function. It came back “unrepairable, damaged node.”
“Damaged node” means not good. I have backup files but not another 1TB drive to hold the files.
Today, everybody is a Hokie
A cop I know cried when he saw the horror at Virginia Tech Monday.
So did others.
The media calls it as massacre.
It’s more than that.
It’s madness.
We may or may not ever know what triggered the young South Korean English major to go on a killing spree that left 32 dead before he took his own life.
How can we? Insanity, whether temporary or permanent, is difficult to explain.
As a student at Floyd County High School in the early 1960s I contemplated attending Virginia Tech (or VPI as it was known in those days). I opted instead for the Roanoke campus of the University of Virginia so I could work at The Roanoke Times.
Yet Tech remains "our university," the one right down the road, just 35 minutes away. Hokie fever runs strong here.
So does pride in the Tech engineering school, long recognized as one of the best in the country.
When an escaped prisoner killed a security guard and a cop and threatened the Tech campus last fall, we held our breath and then breathed a sigh of relief when police captured him.
When the first reports of a shooting at a dorm surfaced Monday morning, we said "oh no, not again." As more details emerged, shock turned to horror and then revulsion.
I’ve witnessed and been a part of too much death in my lifetime. I have photographed death through my camera lens and taken lives in service to my country.
The nightmares have lessened over the years but they remain in the subconscious, ready to surface.
Monday’s carnage triggered far too many memories and a sleepless night.
Those who died must be mourned. Those whose heroic acts saved the lives of others must be remembered and honored.
Already, those who exploit tragedy in order to promote their political agendas show their true colors with callous disregard for simple human decency.
There will be time to deal with such opportunists.
Not now.
I’ve had my fights with Hokie fanatics over the years.
Not today.
A cartoon that shows a crying Hokie bird being comforted says it all: Today, everyone is a Hokie.