“media”

It beats me. “My son is always checking out his Yahoo!” So what? Who’s the target audience of this ad? Angry-faced mustachioed dads? Have children become parents’ rolemodels already?

Wikipedia has become such a taken-for-granted, basic building-block (on the web and beyond) that I’ve taken a special hatred for the unwieldy, clumsy “Wikipedia article” epithet and similar unhappy permutations. I need more of the short sweetness English is known for: “email”, “web”, “net”, “blog”, “post”, “podcast”, “inbox”, or “feed”. Language is the ultimate interface (to steal an ALA title) and shortness does make a difference.

English GMail’s Sidebar

Spanish GMail’s Sidebar

I tried “article” and “wiki-article” but both are hopelessly general. Then I thought of being grammatically incorrect and use wikipedia for articles themselves—similar to the way we use email for the email address, the actual message, and the act of sending it: “email me an email at my email”—but it just won’t do. It doesn’t feel right. Wikipedia is so huge that the brutal metonymy^WP feels jarring. Port-manteaus^WP were tried, but neither wikipedicle nor wicle struck any fancy.

The only path that proved fruitful was twisted back-formation. Wikipedia comes, of course, from encyclopedia, which in turn comes from the Greek phrase enkuklios paideia, often translated as “general education.” Paideia is a nice, short Greek word that means education and that is itself a derivation of pais, child. It’s perfect (with a slight respelling).

I propose we call a Wikipedia article a pedia. It’s short, has a nice ring to it, has meaning (“a pedia is a document for learning”), is memorable, and has a semantic link with Wikipedia (the uninitiated might think it a contraction and that’d be okay too). With even the pettiest pedia gradually refining into a massive, referenced survey (take the optimistic leap with me for the sake of argument), wouldn’t it be beautiful and inspiring if we could whisperingly call them “documents-for-learning”?

Did you know “thruthiness” has a pedia?

Techcrunch—which I discovered a few days ago and am liking more and more everyday—had a recent good introduction to PornoTube, a new YouTube^WP porn clone (that as you’d expect, contains explicit sexual material).

The streaming-video website is quite something—intuitive, well-designed, web-2.0-buzz-compliant, massive, and free—and Techcrunch makes several good points throughout its review, chief among which is this one: “For more technically saavy users, bittorent has long been a source of free pornography. But PornoTube, which is usable by anyone with a computer, could be disruptive.”

And disruptive it will be. Owing to support from its porn behemoth owner, the website appears to be staying atop of the expensive bandwith deluge it must be under. If it keeps doing so and survives prosecution and finds a way to be profitable, it would be yet another beacon of our media saturated future: a whole nother level of free, easy, abundant, instant gratification.

media breakdown
n.

World withdrawal into prolonged media sprees, especially if sudden and marked by depression. Tinged with apathy, alienation, and escapism, it is brought into being by digital’s media unprecedented affordances: abundance and easy, immediate replayability. It will be to our century, what hysteria was to Freud’s: the neurosis of the time.

Nowhere is it more widespread than in Japan, the world’s media beachfront: Tokyo’s youth indulges in it in custom-built sanctuaries^ELZR, the national anime waxes philosophical on it^ELZR, and an extreme variant of the condition, with the name of hikikomori ^WP (ひきこもり or 引き篭り lit. “pulling away, being confined,” i.e., “acute social withdrawal”), has received intense mainstream-media attention.

Es francamente increible el poder de la prensa para moldear una noticia. La portada de La Jornada de hoy, por ejemplo, dedica practicamente toda su primera plana—75% del area de contenido—al “noticion” de que carteles pro-peje fueron rasgados por la noche.

Notese el nada sutil entrejuego de los subtitulares. Despues de una lectura apresurada, en la memoria queda solo el desapruebo de (gulp!) los intelectuales; la frase “actos fascistas y autoritarios”; las palabras “ataque”, “vandalismo”, “navajazos”, “al amparo de la oscuridad”; y el enojo ante el cinismo de Abascal de decir, ahora, justamente ahora (y justamente abajo), que hay “plena libertad de expresion”, y de Fox y su “eleccion de Estado”. Sin decir nada de la validez de sus motivos, concentrandonos solo en la forma y el peso que le decidio dar a la noticia, puede alguien decir que La Jornada no anda de calientahuevos?

En la misma portada, en la esquina superior derecha, hay otra noticia con un titular interesante, especialmente cuando se contrasta con el titular que tuvo la misma noticia en la portada del Publico de ayer.

El titular de La Jornada pareceria a primera vista imparcial, mostrando prominentemente numeros, citas, y nombres de instituciones, pero es interesante como escoge no decir que las casillas en cuestion fueron casillas impugnadas, un detalle sutil pero absolutamente crucial. Sin el, uno puede asumir, uno es invitado a asumir, que si hubo “votos de mas” en 2 mil 873 casillas cualquiera, que marranadas no habra habido en las 127, 604 restantes? El resultado del conteo “reajusta porcentajes en la eleccion presidencial”, segun La Jornada, mientras que en el subtitulo de Publico (del articulo en si, ya no de su titular en primera plana), se afirma que “los resultados no cambiaron de forma significativa, dice Rodrigo Morales [consejero electoral].”

Lo primero que salta a la vista en la portada de Publico, en cambio, es el gran peso que le otorgo este a la noticia y como se esfuerza en asegurarse de que recordemos quien “gano” el rencuentro. Aqui si se menciona prominentemente que se trataba de casillas impugnadas, quejosas, pues la insinuacion es clara: ahi’sta pejistas, si ese fue el resultado de examinar las casillas problematicas, cual es el punto de examinarlas todas? Lopez Obrador se antoja pequeño como su subtitulo; canson, terco, y autoritario, “exigiendo” renuncias una vez que las impugnaciones no le favorecieron (por cuanto? por que no se aclara en portada lo minima que fue la diferencia con Calderon? por que no se aclara que mas que ganar, Calderon fue el que perdio menos votos?).

Y ya paranoiqueando, no es curioso que en el articulo de La Jornada sobre el reconteo de votos, al dar los cambios porcentuales de los candidatos solo se usa la palabra “subio” para Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, siendo que fueron tres los candidatos que subieron (bueno, al parecer ellos “pasaron” de un porcentaje a otro)?

Some weeks ago I was very interested in folksonomies because I was trying to build yet another one (though a political one at that). During my journeys I found out that Del.icio.us has a special kind of tag for filetypes—system:filetype:FILETYPE_HERE. Mixing it with the popular tag, I found many truly wonderful media shards for the filetypes that came to mind—mp3, jpg, jpeg, pdf, gif, png, mov.

Here they are, lest time forgets:

Vaya! Sergio acaba de prestarme un DVD con 4 gigas de literatura en Español, es desbordante, demasiado. Nuestro futuro mediatico es la saturacion al borde del colapso.

Por lo pronto, encontre por fin esta cita que tanto busque otrora:

Supongo que uno no es realmente un blogger hasta no publicar un error en los MSM, asi que aqui les va uno que encontre hoy en la portada del Publico de ayer Sabado 8 de Julio.

And this is it. Screw Chinese, screw German or French (both of which I already studied for a year), I’m off to learn Japanese.

With this in mind, enjoy the surprisingly thoughtful (verbal abuse is an art form, as Borges himself once wrote about), unrelenting Washington Post article on Britney. Here some teasers: