This blog, its parent website (The Nearby Café), and the three other websites that form the consortium Photo Education Online have become a Go Daddy-free zone. With that said, the cause on behalf of which Go Daddy collaborated in the making of and endorsed SOPA — prevention of internet piracy — is one in which I believe. I’ll continue to sail the online seas and hang anyone pirating my IP from the virtual yardarm here. “Arrr” yourself, matey. You’ve been warned. […]
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This boycott, and the threat of massive further customer migration, led Go Daddy to reverse its stance and officially withdraw its support of SOPA on Dec. 23, effectively apologizing to the internet community for approving it in the first place and promising to endorse revisions of this legislation, or any similar bills, only “when and if the Internet community supports it” — which, knowing the “Internet community” as I do, will happen on the proverbial chilly day in the hot place. […] Sigmund Freud, who visited this country only once, in 1909, famously declared, “America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.” The jury’s still out on that. But the nation’s first Black president winning a second term despite a collapsed economy isn’t the stuff of dreams. It’s absolutely real; and, to whatever extent photographs still function as evidence today, we have the pictures to prove it. […] The film trailer Innocence of Muslims has faded from the headlines. Yet this laughably inept, cut-rate production, bankrolled and otherwise enabled by the evangelical right in the U.S., represents the one set of images that emerged during the election cycle that promises to remain active (even if in a lower-profile way) in the post-election, post-inauguration political environment. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Return of the Prodigal
I’ve begun to consider the possibility that my brain does manage to wrap itself around these evolutionary shifts in digital technology without extreme difficulty. Which in turn suggests that perhaps this recurrent process helps to keep my brain active and young (or, more precisely, youth-like) by pushing me to learn new skills, to replace old habits with new or revised ones, and in one way or another to get some exercise for the mind. In short, I’ve begun to weigh the mental-health benefits of living la vida digital, with its steady reconfiguring of my neural pathways. […]