Invisible Art

Cooper-Hewitt just awarded type designer Matthew Carter a National Design Award for lifetime achievement in the typographic arts. You know his work very well. You've seen it countless times. You're looking at it right now. He is the designer of the ubiquitous Microsoft system fonts Georgia, Tahoma and Verdana. I usually prefer Trebuchet for TLP, but in honor of Mr. Carter, today we're sporting Georgia.

Georgia and Verdana (Tahoma is very similar to the latter) are notable as being designed specifically for high-legibility on computer screens. Both are very extensively hand-hinted, meaning that the characters are carefully encoded with rasterization data for screen display. They are easy on the eyes and legible at very small point sizes. That's why countless Web pages have Georgia or Verdana set as their default fonts. You and I unknowingly drink in Carter's invisible art every day.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Carter's landmark fonts is that they have achieved a ubiquity and acceptance that very few fonts do, but are seen by designers as appropriate for screen-only use. Ikea caused a big dustup in 2009 when they adopted Verdana as their print catalog typeface, wanting to unify their Web and print look. Critics dubbed it Verdanagate, both miffed and bemused that so savvy a design company would willfully disregard good design, in some attempt to appeal to pedestrian comfort. It's like a worldclass print design firm decorating their offices in American Colonial because that's what most Americans have in their living rooms.

Ikea blew it off. Said a spokesflunky, "I think it’s mainly experts who have expressed their views, people who are interested in fonts. I don’t think the broad public is that interested. . . . [Verdana is] a simple, cost-effective font." Lame, Ikea. You did a Gap. Just own it. You know very well that good design isn't some when-convenient option. It's a way of life. You live the aesthetic life or you don't.

The New Gap Logo

So Gap has . . . well, had a new logo. For about a week. In case you missed it in the news:



Public flogging has rarely been so entertaining. The new logo appeared on Oct. 4, and the instantaneous and universal mockery of it probably had the designers cleaning out their desks that same day. It would take a dissertation to map the full dimensions of the response.

The site craplogo.me went up straight away, turning whatever text you like into a version of the new logo. A faux Twitter account was created for the logo to explain itself ("The blue square is a scratch-n-sniff"). Eloquent descriptions of its utter failure flooded design and advertising sites. "[It's like] that awkward cap-sleeved tee with the rhinestone letters you find while thrift shopping that’s neither vintage nor new, but definitely not cool.” [1] An interview with the new logo probed its feelings: "The only way to deal with the pain is comfort eating. Pretty soon I'll be type set in Helvetica Neue Black." [2] Deconstructions of the public outcry are appearing. [3] Vanity Fair posted an obit: "The logo passed after a brief and ignominious battle with stage IV banality." [4]

I agree that the design totally blows. With the typeface they chose (Helvetica 75 Bold), placed next to a blue superset window, it reminds me of the the startup screen for Windows XP. I've lost many hours staring at that screen, and I hate it. Anyway, there is nothing interesting about the new logo. It looks undesigned. The blog iso50 has a thread with over 300 user-submitted designs. Subtracting a few that are intended purely as comic, almost every one is better than the new logo. And these were just tossed out.



What went wrong? The amount spent on the redesign was probably staggering. Perhaps millions. That was certainly the heart of the problem. There was no room in this for individual creativity and genius. It was thoroughly a committee product. And some senior decider, a non-designer, was probably really fond of that Windows XP logo. Probably Gap NA president Marka Hansen. [5] I guarantee that person still has their job. The suits never take the fall.

The passion of the public outcry shows what ownership the public feels for corporate branding. We are a consumer society. We co-opt corporate identity as our own identity. If I wear Gap chinos, that logo is my logo, too. And the chino-wearing public has spoken: Hands off my logo.

Obituary for Photojournalism

I know, I should be done with this topic, but I can't leave it alone because it makes me so sad. Anyway, photojournalism heavyweight Neill Burgess, former head of Magnum and World Press Photo, has called photojournalism's death-date as August 1, 2010.

We’ve been through major recessions; times when the advertising dollar shrank, massive lay-offs and editorial budgets tightened, but still there was a commitment to the photojournalist and what he or she produced. Even as the millennium dawned I was telling people that there was more photojournalism around now than in the 1950’s and 60’s, it’s just spread amongst more magazines. That was probably true then. Not so now.

He mostly rants, but lays out some evidence, which confirms his case but points, at the same time, to the new direction the profession-formerly-known-as-photojournalism is going. "There are some things which look very like photojournalism, but scratch the surface and you’ll find they were produced with the aid of a grant, were commissioned by an NGO, or that they were a self-financed project, a book extract, or a preview of an exhibition."

Well, walks like a duck, talks like a duck, but maybe we give it a different name. As someone not put out of work by traditional photojournalism's death, I'm less angry than Burgess, and frankly just happy to see documentary photography continue in any form and be financed by any means. One commenter pointed, in fact, to new creator-owned initiatives like VII The Magazine and Latitude Magazine. I think in Burgess's terms, this is not a sign of life, but it is a sign of afterlife.

Anyway, I'll sit shiva with him. And as a gesture of respect for the dead, and for my own enjoyment, I just ordered myself a copy of Great Photographic Essays from Life.

Please, Please Pirate Me!

In 2002, tech publisher Tim O'Reilly published a controversial essay titled, "Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution." The clunky title does not do justice to its broad vision and insight into the future of publishing, of all media. Time is proving O'Reilly correct, and daring to practice what he preaches, he continues to flourish as a publisher. A recent speaker at AAUP reported that the consistent feedback from ebook users is: if you want our business, we want all our ebooks like O'Reilly ebooks (DRM-free pdfs). A room full of fearful publishers groaned.

I won't summarize all of O'Reilly's article. No point. It's essential reading, so just read it. He breaks down his argument into seven "lessons," but I'll single out just three highlights.

1. O'Reilly's first lesson is, "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy." There is a massive disparity in supply and demand for all creative work, and as I've noted before, this disparity is growing exponentially for books. This greatly dilutes their economic value. Even if you can get published, the vast majority of books fail to find readers and fail commercially. The flourishing of niche enthusiast communities online and the "long tail" serviced by omnibus sellers like Amazon has certainly been a boon for authors, "But even then, few books survive their first year or two in print. Empty the warehouses and you couldn't give many of them away." Authors and other creators who are not established should be primarily concerned with finding an audience. Once you have an audience, you can find a way to monetize your popularity. But as for the great mass of unknowns . . .

2. "For all of these creative artists, most laboring in obscurity, being well-enough known to be pirated would be a crowning achievement. Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation, which may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists (and I say 'may' because even that point is not proven), in exchange for massive benefits to the far greater number for whom exposure may lead to increased revenues." With respect to music, for example, another essayist says likewise, yes, you should be worried about piracy, if you are U2. Otherwise, this system of free and easy distribution only works for you. And anyway, the only way to stop it is to stop recording music.

3. I'll say it again. I believe you can always turn popularity into money. If you fail to do so, that is a market or marketing problem. O'Reilly highlights the basic market problem that is feeding "piracy" (a term he rejects for unauthorized online distribution). "The simplest way to get customers to stop trading illicit digital copies of music and movies is to give those customers a legitimate alternative, at a fair price." The problem is that the pricing in old distribution models is not transferable to new distribution models. Traditional publishers are aggregators, publicists and printers who used to be necessary to connect content creators with an audience. Some of their services are still very necessary, but to remain economically viable at all will require for many self-reinvention.

The question before us is not whether technologies such as peer-to-peer file sharing will undermine the role of the creative artist or the publisher, but how creative artists can leverage new technologies to increase the visibility of their work. For publishers, the question is whether they will understand how to perform their role in the new medium before someone else does. Publishing is an ecological niche; new publishers will rush in to fill it if the old ones fail to do so.

As I've noted recently, when it comes to using socially traded content, free is not free. This is an O'Reilly principal (often repeated). People will cheerfully pay for you to give them the content they want, if you can provide it "at a fair price," meaning at lower cost than they can otherwise obtain it. Time and frustration are costly, and convenience, in aggregate, is worth a lot. That's why one of O'Reilly's seven lessons is, "'Free' is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service." The reason why so many paid services fail is less their cost than their poor implementation (limited selection, poor navigability and filtering, etc.) and unreasonable restrictions (limited format and quality choices, platform restrictions, DRM). iTunes has been a wild success compared to other music services because it's not in the music business at all. It's in the convenience business.

For unknown creators, particularly of fungible works like fiction, the great takeway from this is that, yes, the free and easy distribution of your work should be a concern. Not as something to prevent, but to promote, by every means available to you.

"Cost Is Not Value"

Following up my post yesterday, an article in the NYTimes looks at a recent exhibit on forgeries at the National Gallery in London, and what forgeries and related high art hijinks tell us about how silly the world of high art is and how simple it ought to be. It affects to rise somewhat above "the populist suspicion that much art is really just a scam," but doesn't by much, and pokes a finger in the eye of "dubious connoisseurship." But most people will be nodding their heads.

I have a conflicted relationship with art criticism of all kinds (literary, music, performance, visual, whatever). I am a critic myself, both as a blogger and professionally (academic literary criticism), and see my criticism as part formal exercise and part rationalization of subjective perceptions that are heavily conditioned by culture. I enjoy the critical exercise, but it's a cheap thrill. Opinionated bloviation in serious dress. I don't believe a word I say.

But still I seek out and am influenced by the criticism of others, and there is no question that expert criticism shapes popular aesthetics. When what I like and what others say I should like happen to coincide, I am very satisfied. When they do not, I can find myself a bit vexed, perhaps afraid that, despite my best efforts, I will never graduate from the ranks of the ignorati.

The canard goes, " I don't know art, but I know what I like." Why can't that be sufficient? Over time, I'm relieved to find that increasingly it is becoming enough. I'm becoming cheerfully ignorant and vulgar. I recently came across some simple photographic advice that summarized my emerging non-philosophy of aesthetics: "Look at collections of other people's work, go for the pictures that instantly appeal. If you have to think about an image to like it, then that's not what you are looking for here. This is not meant as an intellectual exercise."

Art is not an intellectual exercise. 'Nuff said.

Pirates, Part 2

Mr. Fweem very nicely elaborated on my previous post, from his perspective as both a consumer and creator of creative work. I started to write a long comment to his post, but decided to take it back here. So first, read his post. Then read the article he links to by Tony Woodlief.

I think Woodlief's article illustrates again in a number of ways that this is not primarily (or at least, generally not perceived as) a battle between creators and consumers of creative work, so much as between consumers and the corporations who control and exploit creators' work. Woodlief is not criticizing Joe Henry over wanting outrageous fees for citing one line of one song, but rather "his record label's parent company." Who is not looking after Mr. Henry, but after their bottom-line. That, at least, underlies Woodlief's argument and reflects general public sentiment. To me, the first element of copyright reform is ensuring that copyright protections benefit creators, not corporations that make billions by exploiting artists for their sweat and genius. I use the term exploitation frequently, but not lightly. For the uninitiated, see producer Steve Albini's classic "The Problem with Music" (profanity warning) or, more recently, Tim Quirk's drama with Warner Music over at Too Much Joy.

Everyone is in favor of compensating creators, of course. And when the composer in my original article started contacting traders of his music, saying it was not cool, most of them quickly apologized and took his work down. Of the 400 or so take-down letters sent, just one dumb teenager wanted to argue about it. The question for me and, clearly, many other people is not about supporting creators, but whether both creators and consumers should permit themselves to be victimized by corporate exploitation when they have the ready means to render those corporations irrelevant. The consensus is clearly that we shouldn't, and that this is about both parties.

On the other hand, I don't personally believe that creators have any "right to expect -- and receive -- some kind of remuneration for their creativity." And I say that as a creator. All of us are creators; creative work flows naturally from the act of humans living life. Almost none of it will ever be compensated and only the market can determine what of it has economic value. I think (e.g.) my daughter's hand-drawn Father's Day cards should have the market value of a Picasso, but I doubt the market would ever agree.

No creative act has any inherent monetary value, and the work or lack of work that goes into creative endeavor does not change that fact. Otherwise, explain Jackson Pollock to me. If we create something and no one will pay to enjoy it, that's either a market or marketing failure. It's certainly not a creative failure, though it can feel like that. Many of us choose to distribute our creative work freely because we would rather it be enjoyed by anyone with any interest than restrict it to those (typically very few) with interest enough to pay. The internet gives you more options in both those respects. Go internet.

But I hold all creative acts as being strictly equal, as creative acts. Market value measures only popularity. Someone once asked a famous songwriter what makes a song a classic. He replied, "Repetition." Classics are first and foremost marketing successes. Some also happen to be works of genius, but most are not. And copyright law is not for the fostering of genius, but for the fostering of marketing success. Marketing success may or may not itself foster creative genius, but judging from the quality of most corporate art, I'd say mostly not.

An example of my ideal. Twice in the last month I've gone to see a local band called Gypsy Cab, which is just one genius blues guitarist (Pat) and his drummer (Jesse). Pat is an 18 year-old who plays original electric blues on $200 Squier guitars through one very loud Fender Twin and smokes 98% of the guitarists I have ever heard. I paid to see them and I will again. I'm dying for CD. And a T-Shirt. I'll pay for those, too. And anything else they want to sell me. No corporations need to get involved. I'll just give them my money.

Pirates, Hoarders, Saviors of Culture?

This post by David Pogue is not interesting for David Pogue (who I rarely find interesting), but for the letter it reproduces, the issue it raises, and some of the 300+ comments it has generated. The fundamental issue it raises concerns those (many, MANY) people who are engaged in scanning and trading print materials in the same way millions do music and movies. The particular subject here is sheet music, but it could be anything ever put into print. I've been involved with this professionally for some time, for example, in creating a digital library for Syriac scholars. For this project we only included out-of-copyright materials, but informally scholars trade copyrighted research materials on a massive scale, just like these music traders. With equal excitement and glee, and a similar lack of compunction.

Academic swapping and hoarding of copyrighted material is called research and is protected in some measure, ostensibly, by fair-use laws. These laws exist to facilitate research and creative work. There is no possible way any scholar could purchase all research materials used. But no scholar was ever sued or even called a pirate for photocopying (now, scanning) an article or monograph, because you can't produce more articles and monographs without doing this. Copyright law was always meant to curb commercial exploitation of another's creative work, not to prevent the use of that work in creating new work, whether artistic or scientific.

Also, I'm not sure copyright law was originally intended to curb the profitless enjoyment of creative work without payment to the copyright holder, who so very often is not even the creator, but rather a commercial exploiter of creators. But I'm no legal scholar and that's another topic.

When a pianist, as in this article, collects all the significant piano music ever published, pops it on a thumbdrive, and gives it away to other pianists, I have a hard time seeing any difference between that pianist and most scholars. Probably, true enough, this is sowing some seeds of destruction, but it also contains the seeds of creation. And I don't know why doing this is fair-use if you work at a university but piracy if you, well, work for a living. But of course, if academics ran the world, we'd replace copyright with open access on day one, or at least some generous implementation of Creative Commons licensing.

I see this as principally an economic problem, as many commenters to this article pointed out. People with more time than money will always trade and hoard, but put all this sheet music in a database and charge $10/mo for access, and much of this activity would stop. The people who did not stop are mostly people who would not buy your stuff anyway (i.e., the teenager in the article). This is just the market's way of saying that prices are too high and selection too limited. If your time is worth anything, this traded music is not free. People spend years collecting this stuff, at a very high effective cost. It's just cheaper than the alternative, and for many rare or out-of-print works, the only alternative. As one commenter observed:

This is actually quite an interesting economic phenomenon. The fact that people illegally acquire content that is copyrighted shows the imperfect market. We, as consumers, don't always find the suppliers we want. As an example, in my town I cannot buy bok choi in the supermarket. I'd have to drive really far away to get it. I don't have the option of "stealing" it in any way that is easier. The internet allows this, though, and it's something classical economics hasn't thought about much: Stealing as a means of overcoming the imperfect market system.

Old Media vs. New Media?

My favorite columnists are (like ten million other people) David Brooks and Gail Collins of the New York Times. Brooks is the rational and pragmatic me and Collins is my inner cynic. Their Opinionator exchanges are regularly fabulous.

This most recent exchange was on Old Media vs. New Media. Brooks clearly sees himself as the former and, implicitly, Collins is colored as the latter. Old Media is dedicated to "just the facts, ma'am" impartiality and accuracy that (per Brooks) can only be done if there is a certain degree of coziness with the subjects, at least if you are covering a beat. Burn or sour your sources and you will be reduced to punditry, speculating from the outside without any direct access to the most relevant people and facts. Collins sees her journalistic self as a member of "scorn contingent," whose job it is to burn those who deserve to be burned, and damn the consequences. Better perhaps to speak forcefully based on half the facts than with restraint on all of them. Collins is clearly less concerned than Brooks about straying into the territory of advocacy media.

Is this really the divide between old and new media? Does "just the facts" reporting require certain compromises, just to get those facts? Are those compromises unacceptable? Are reporters charged with an advocacy mandate? Should we have a professional "scorn contingent"? Is that the new journalism?

Heath Care Reform?

So much is being said about the current health care legislation, but the most important thing I've personally read so far is this new article in the Atlantic by David Goldhill. It details the fundamental problems with our system, which no current reform proposal will fix. In summary, current proposals want to extend health insurance, but health "insurance" itself is the fundamental problem. That's because it is not insurance at all, but a double-blind comprehensive payment system that hides both costs and benefits from consumers, a system of "Ponzi-scheme financing, hidden subsidies, manipulated prices, and undisclosed results." He details the problems and it's agonizing to read, because he's right and of course, once pointed out, it's so obvious.

Congress will not reform health care and is, in fact, constitutionally incapable of it. And I think Obama will accept any bill that extends health care benefits to the uninsured. In a way, I agree with his pragmatism. A runaway system is pricing the uninsured right out of health care. If you cannot reform the system, at least you can try to bring more people into it.

But let's not call such a thing reform. This is just an extension of benefits that you and I will pay for. Our health care costs are about to go up. No wonder the industrial heath care complex is running ads day and night in favor of it.

A New Model for Journalism: VII

PDN just published a very interesting interview with Stephen Mayes of VII Photo Agency about the future of photojournalism, but many of his comments relate to the future of journalism generally. While some journalists are still squeaking that the big papers need to reassert some imagined monopoly and rebuild pay-walls around the business, more rational people recognize that model is dead. As Mayes says, "I think the expectation that the user has to pay for what they’re using is again a twentieth-century notion."

But Mayes says VII is finding a new model already. A biiig pull:

SM: [The biggest clients] have been the magazines and newspapers, and I still think that newspapers and magazines will continue to be incredibly important to our profession, but I think where previously we’ve seen magazines and newspapers as clients, I now see them very much as partners. At VII we’ll work with the magazines for distribution, but we’ll work with another party for funding, we may work another party for access and expertise, we may work with another party for technology. So what I find we’re doing increasingly is working on these multi-partnerships, amongst whom it’s hard to see who is the client.

When you boil it down, what VII does is integrity. That issue of believability is exactly what VII does. We express it photographically, so it’s all revealed through photographs, but actually what is valuable to VII is integrity. When I look at an environment where there’s absolutely too much information, information becomes valueless. What everyone is suffering from is that a photograph is just more information. It becomes very hard to put a price on it because there are too many pictures out there, but if you suddenly start rethinking it and saying, “We’re not selling photographs, what we’re selling is believability,” then actually we have more value than we had before. VII offers a benchmark, which now has increased value because of all the information that’s out there.

PDN: That being the case, do you envision that consumers will pay for it somehow online?

SM: No, and I think that’s where the confusion is. I think the expectation that the user has to pay for what they’re using is again a twentieth-century notion. What I’m seeing now, increasingly, is that other people will pay for consumers to have that relation, so long as it’s a shared interest. Again, that whole notion of, “Will the press re-inflate if users are charged for content?” Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. But I think it’s also missing the point on some level.

We’re coming from a model where we’re all selling units of intellectual property, and we’re all struggling with that, the prices are going down, and it’s getting harder to sell that stuff. But you step back a little bit and you see the exact same problems being encountered in the music industry. They used to sell albums, that was their unit, that doesn’t happen anymore. You see it in the movies, the model is changing, you see it in literature— culture-wide there’s a shift away from that notion of a vendor selling that unit of intellectual property, and it’s moving away from the model of a buyer buying intellectual property. Because all of this stuff is available for free, so why should they start paying for it? But there is still value there, and the exercise that I’ve been engaged with for the last two years is identifying that value, and having found it, coming up with a way to monetize it.

And hence you end up with these expanded partnerships where VII works with Human Rights Watch, VII works with the International Committee of the Red Cross, VII works with Time magazine and at the same time there’s a different value that we’re applying to each of them. We each share a common interest. I’m not selling something. There’s an ethical question at VII, and it may be different for a different agency or a different photographer. But with VII it has to be about believability, it has to be about partnering with the right people and not selling photographers down the line just to make money, but actually partnering them with people they believe they can work with to fulfill the things that those photographers believe in—and finding a commercial angle to them.

As long as any of us thinks that we’re going to make money from selling photographs, I think that we’re going to be in trouble. Everyone’s complaining that it’s difficult to make a decent living selling photographs. But what I see are much bigger revenue and distribution opportunities, working in a slightly different model.

Avatars

I've never really gotten into the whole avatar thing, those tiny pictures of yourself (or a creative substitution) which represent you online in forums, on social networking sites, blogs, etc. I've avoided them, but now would like one for my Flickr account and, yes, my blog.

Then I happened this morning onto a good article about people having real, painted portraits done of themselves for their avatars. This in turn led me to MadMenYourself.com, which I had to try out. I'd never use it for an avatar (it's already cliche, I guess), but I love the aesthetic. Yeah, baby!

Photojournalism: A Death by Inches

Reading about the history of photography lately, it's amazing how many revolutions this art form has gone through in its brief lifetime. Photography in the form we know it, portable and widely used on a variety of subjects, only came into being in the late 1870s. And then it was only after another fifty years that it really started to find its own voice and become the modern medium we all know.

Very important to photography's history is photojournalism. The most important single body of photos from the 19th century are certainly Mathew Brady & Co.'s images of the Civil War. A majority of the most iconic photos of the 20th and 21st centuries, at least among non-photographers, comes out of photojournalism, though a close second place must be awarded to fashion/celebrity portraiture (same thing to me; think Annie Liebovitz). Both those genres of photography have of course flourished because there has been money in them. They produce iconic images because, as staples of mass media, a lot of people see them.

For photojournalism, that is decreasingly the case. The NY Times just published today an article titled, "Lament for a Dying Field: Photojournalism." The story was filed under business, not art, but I see it as the death of an art form.

But only in a certain respect. As a professional art form, photojournalism has been in decline for some time, due to shifts in media. Its heyday directly corresponds to the heyday of its most prominent vehicle, Life magazine in its Henry Luce era, which ran as a weekly from 1936-1972. Its popularity funded ambitious photojournalist projects like those of W. Eugene Smith. Life and its style of photojournalism was basically killed by television.

Photojournalism has ever since been less an independent vehicle of expression than illustration, but demand for it in print media has been sufficient that the talented and determined photojournalist has still been able make a living at it. But with the decline of print media and revenues, as the NYT article describes, photojournalists are in the same dire straits as all other journalists.

Journalism and photojournalism will both survive in different forms, but it seems likely that many fewer people will be doing it professionally. That may especially be the case with photojournalism. My own concern is less for people who have to find new careers (hey, that's life) than for how this will affect the medium of photography and our visual literacy, as well as (with all journalism) the deep coverage of socially significant events and issues.

This will not mean fewer photographs are made and published. Never have more photographs been made and published. I'm not even sure that, in spite of increasing amaturization, fewer brilliant photographs will be published. I think professionals may produce great photos as much through opportunity and volume as by pure artistic talent. Some of even the most significant "professionals" in the history of photography, like Alfred Stieglitz, were not the greatest photographers, while amateurs like Julia Margaret Cameron and Jacques Henri Lartigue produced images of enduring artistry and historical importance.

But with the greater diffusion of photographs across the internet, fewer photos and photographers will enjoy the universal exposure that they once enjoyed when media channels were narrower, and therefore fewer icons will be produced. And I think icons, both iconic artists and iconic works, are necessary for the cultivation of an art. They focus collective attention, produce criticism, and provide the common points of reference needed for literacy.

So all this seems to bode ill for photojournalism, as a career and, perhaps, as an art. But will this also be detrimental to photography in general as an art?

Moonwalking

No, this is not a Michael Jackson post (sorry to disappoint). I've enjoyed the coverage of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing this week. Particularly cool were two discoveries. The first is the unveiling of Moon on Google Earth, which is just part of a more extensive collaboration between Google and NASA. It is, as you can guess, a moon version of Google Earth.

The other item is an online archive of all photographs from the last mission to land on the moon, Apollo 17. Thumbnails would be nice, but there are some brief descriptions for each item. Best of all, they put up both small and quite large images of each photo. The sample below is linked out to its large version. And if you like that, also check out the more comprehensive Apollo Image Atlas. About 20,000 photos were taken across all the Apollo missions. Love that classic Kodachrome look (Ektachrome, actually). Great stuff.

I just have to get around to watching again From the Earth to the Moon.

Trending towards Homogeneity

I found interesting Nick Kristof's take on one consequence of the global migration away from consuming newspapers to grazing on-line news. One result, he argues, is that we will see further polarity and more entrenched homogeneity of perspectives, because we naturally self-select news that is most congenial to our personal perspectives. The more empowered we are to self-select our media, the less diversity we are exposed to. One pundit calls this new self-selected Internet news "The Daily Me":

The effect of The Daily Me would be to insulate us further in our own hermetically sealed political chambers. One of last year’s more fascinating books was Bill Bishop’s “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.” He argues that Americans increasingly are segregating themselves into communities, clubs and churches where they are surrounded by people who think the way they do. Almost half of Americans now live in counties that vote in landslides either for Democrats or for Republicans, he said. In the 1960s and 1970s, in similarly competitive national elections, only about one-third lived in landslide counties. “The nation grows more politically segregated — and the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups,” Mr. Bishop writes. One 12-nation study found Americans the least likely to discuss politics with people of different views, and this was particularly true of the well educated. High school dropouts had the most diverse group of discussion-mates, while college graduates managed to shelter themselves from uncomfortable perspectives. The result is polarization and intolerance. Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor now working for President Obama, has conducted research showing that when liberals or conservatives discuss issues such as affirmative action or climate change with like-minded people, their views quickly become more homogeneous and more extreme than before the discussion. For example, some liberals in one study initially worried that action on climate change might hurt the poor, while some conservatives were sympathetic to affirmative action. But after discussing the issue with like-minded people for only 15 minutes, liberals became more liberal and conservatives more conservative.

I find this trend very disturbing, but am not sure it is substantially the result of changes in how we get our news. That is simply one facet of the democratization of information that the Internet has brought about. But the enormous welter (relative to the past) of opinions and viewpoints that we are now all exposed to has no doubt caused an increasing retreat into ideological subcultures in a search for foundational worldviews and certainty. This also has factored into the great growth of conservative religious movements (yes, like Mormonism).

I'm one of those strange people who really likes to be challenged by alternative cultural perspectives. I find it invigorating. Homogeneity, for me, is anathema. But I do not think print media inherently promotes a greater diversity of perspective. Newspapers are products, after all, that their publishers are trying to sell. They serve their readership, necessarily. But in that respect, true enough, they can never compete with the infinite alternatives available on the Web.