The bloggers are watching

We usually talk about blogging's impact in very "blue sky" terms -- how it's reshaping the political process, shifting the balance of power between the mass media and the audience, and so on. But, law professor Jeffrey Rosen reminds us in a New York Times Magazine piece, more and more people (not to mention organizations) will become unwitting, sometimes unwilling, participants in the blogosphere:

As Web logs proliferate -- Technorati, which tracks 5 million blogs, estimates that 15,000 are added each day -- the boundaries between public and private are being transformed. Unconstrained by journalistic conventions, bloggers are blurring the lines between public events and ordinary social interactions and changing the way we date, work, teach and live. And as blogs continue to proliferate, citizens will have to develop new understandings about what parts of our lives are on and off the record. ... In the age of blogs, all citizens, no matter how obscure, will have to adjust their behavior to the possibility that someone may be writing about them.

So much for analog

Seven years ago I was visiting the online operation at the Augusta Chronicle and needed to call for a cab. I turned to my hosts and asked, "Does anyone around here have a phone book?" They all looked at me like I was an idiot. After the moment of stunned silence had passed, someone politely suggested I turn back to my computer and look up cab companies in their city guide.

That particular old habit went to its grave right then and there.

It's a habit that many people will never develop, judging by what Cory Bergman says over at Lost Remote:

I live in a wired Seattle apartment with a youngish crowd, and the annual update of the city's phone books appeared on our doorsteps last week. Three days later, only a quarter or so of the residents had picked them up. Then the phone books gradually started disappearing as most us threw them in the recycle bin. What a waste. At least in the 18-34 demo, phone books are so yesterday.

On the mortality of media

Reflecting on humanity's eternal quest to learn everything, author Alberto Manguel shares some pertinent observations about the wonders and limitations of today's digital archives:

... new technologies need not be exclusionary. The invention of photography did not eliminate painting, it renewed it, and no doubt the screen and the codex can feed off each other and coexist amicably on the same reader's desk. All we need to do is remember the corollaries to the arguments in favor of a virtual library: that reading, in order to allow reflection, requires slowness, depth and context; that leafing through a material book or roaming through material shelves is an intimate part of the craft; that the omnipresent electronic technology is still fragile and that, as it changes, we keep losing the possibility of retrieving that which was once stored in now superseded containers. We can still read the words on papyrus ashes saved from the charred ruins of Pompeii; we don't know for how long it will be possible to read a text inscribed in a 2004 CD. This is not a complaint, just a reminder.

Quest for wild horses

The federal government says there are no wild horses left in Washington state. But Larry Lee Palmer, our horse-racing writer, had heard differently from his grandfather. So he set out to find them -- and find them he did, in a remote part of the Yakama reservation:

Horses of all types, shapes and descriptions appear on the ridgelines and in distant clearings. I watch spellbound as a ribbon of horses -- roan and dun mares, sorrels and bays, finally a strapping silver-gray stud -- plunges down the side of a ravine, then back up the other side ...