A flimsy raft on the information tsunami

Why would anyone not want to get vaccinated against the H1N1 flu?

This, after all, appears to be the pandemic that we have been warned about for several years. It's serious stuff. On Oct. 26, 2009 it killed a 13-year-old boy in the Toronto area.

Agencies such as the Public Health Agency of Canada are providing a flood of information about H1N1 and recommending that people use the free vaccine.

Thousands of Canadians are listening and lining up to receive it. In some cities, lineups are so long that supplies of the vaccine are running out temporarily.

I think using the vaccine is a great idea. The bottom line is: The consequences of not protecting yourself could be fatal.

This week I tried and failed to make that point with an intelligent, well educated 30-something. It was if he was indifferent to that tsunami of medical and scientific information.

I realized that this threat is not real for him. Like most of his friends and relatives, he has had the enormously good fortune of growing up in a healthy, prosperous and peaceful society with free universal health care where young people just do not die of the flu.

His personal experience tells him that he is, if not invulnerable, at least safe from the flu.

But personal experience is a flimsy raft in which to try to ride this tsunami.

Warning! F-word used here

Don't use the F-word, I tell my students. It's tacky and it's wrong. But some of them just can't quit. They've been doing it far too long.

You know the four-letter F-word: free.

Free as in the internet is free, information is free, butterflies are free ... oops. That was a movie.

Sure, the internet is free, as long as you don't count your monthly cable fee. Yes, information is free if you value the time you spend searching for it at zero. Butterflies? Who knows?

But we love the F-word, don't we? Especially in Winnipeg, the capital of cheap.

"Everyone hates paying for books," asserts Carson Jerema, a former student-newspaper editor, in a column Oct. 19, 2009 in the Winnipeg Free Press.

Apparently retailing behemoths Amazon, Wal-Mart and Target agree. They have started a price war on a handful of hardcover books by big-name authors such as John Grisham and Sarah Palin. These authors' latest tomes are selling for about $9, a discount of about 70 per cent from the usual $25 or $30.

Palin's book is still overpriced.

But hate paying for books? Not me. I probably drop a thousand dollars a year in my favourite local independent bookstore.

Love to tell you more, but I gotta go. Time to hit Wal-Mart for some almost-F*** weekend reading.

Where's the remote for my book?

Should books come with a remote control that makes them beep when you are looking for them, like a cordless phone?

How about an in-book device that looks up words you don't understand or displays reviews and discussion about what you are reading?

These thoughts are provoked by the Oct. 14, 2009 edition of Room for Debate, a New York Times online feature on the topic "Does the Brain Like E-Books?"

David Gelernter suggests that these or similar tasks "would all be easily handled by electronics worked into the binding." Even if the circuitry breaks or the battery runs out, he notes, "I've still got a book."

This is not to attack e-books, Kindle, or any device yet to be invented, as the lawyers say. The more media that promote reading, the better -- even if, like the Kindle, they are not officially available in Canada, where I live. But it does highlight the adaptability of the seemingly simple but actually highly refined technology of the book.

Sandra Aamodt, another participant in the debate, says the usefulness of a computer for serious reading depends largely on "the user's strength of character." By this she means the reader's ability to avoid distractions such as checking email or a favourite blog.

I like her argument. It suggests that I am a character of great strength, sternly avoiding distractions every day as I read my books.

Not that Kindle users are bad people.

A killer hangover from corporate Kool-Aid

Still believe that corporate media convergence can work?

You're living in the past. The latest exposure of last decade's "solution" as a nostrum is the fate of CanWest Global Communications Corp. This once but not future owner of a worldwide batch of broadcasting and print media outlets has filed for bankruptcy protection and is restructuring.

This is one of corporations that preached the gospel of convergence: believe that you can cross-promote your media outlets, sell advertising hand over fist, and thou shalt be saved. 

Didn't quite work that way, especially when acquiring many of those properties at the peak of the market created so much debt that CanWest could not even make the interest payments.

Now, six years after the death of Canwest founder Izzy Asper, his son Leonard is overseeing the death of the dream. "Leonard drank deep of the convergence Kool-Aid," David Olive writes in the Toronto Star.

Check out Canadian journalist and media professor Chris Waddell's thoughtful comments in an interactive forum on Oct. 8 about what this means for audiences, employees and aspiring journalists.

TV is dead. Long live the news company?

The death of a small-market Manitoba TV station is an opportunity for a newspaper -- and a test of how serious it really is about transforming itself into a virtual medium.

CKX in Brandon (pop. 40,000) is not worth even $1, a couple of media companies have decided. So it's off the air.

Remember when TV was going to put newspapers out of business? Didn't quite work out that way.

Now the Brandon Sun, the established local daily newspaper, is free to hire a bunch of the dumped journalists and other employees and set up a killer local-news website that would make Western Manitobans forget CKX. All it takes is money, a bit of brains and a lot of will.

The Brandon Sun is owned by the Winnipeg Free Press. Disclosure: I used to make my living at the Free Press, and I still write occasional book reviews for it.

On Oct. 1 Margo Goodhand, editor of the Free Press, told first year students in the Creative Communications program at Red River College, "We aren't a newspaper. We are a news company." I am going to count her welcome statement as an entry in my campaign to rename newspapers, getting rid of the p-word.

Will this news company, whose sales of its dead-tree edition are plummeting, embrace the future and set up a great local news site for Brandon?

Because somebody will.

Body of writing, bawdy of work

An emaciated body and emancipated, lush bodies: themes of two writers featured at the Winnipeg International Writers Festival Sept. 20 to 27, 2009.

In the scary graphic novel Tyranny Lesley Fairfield gives the skinny on eating disorders, based on her 30-year struggle with anorexia and bulimia. Her sane, quiet bottom-line message to students and other book-lovers at Red River College: "I got well."

On the other hand, the raunchy (if not raucous) George Elliott Clarke covers corporeal excesses. Check out any of his books, particularly his latest, I & I.

Long poem? Verse novel? Whatever. Here's a taste from page 72:

The lovers laugh, get loose, snuggle.

Each sugars each sweetmeat sex.

(Betty's "hot," caramel-licorice wiggling

Summons Malcolm's molten satisfaction.)

All this, and funky footnotes, too.

Footprints on the waves

One important difference between the information tsunami and the watery one is what each leaves behind.

The sea wave destroys everything it touches, but the electronic flood does the opposite. It preserves everything.

Killer@Craigslist, a fascinating article in the October 2009 issue of Vanity Fair, lays out the evidence.

Last April a woman and a man met cute (actually, mercenary, not cute) in Boston. They hooked up through ads on Craigslist. The woman died and the man was charged with murdering her. Police made the case by following the cyber footprints of their communication.

Dear reader, you live a much more virtuous life than anyone Vanity Fair writes about, I am certain. So you don't need to worry about where your cyber footprints lead. Right?