A Series, a Season, a Show. A Word (or Two) About TV Semantics.

Before I started watching British television, I never gave any thought to whether the word "season" was an appropriate or useful term to denote the set of shows that airs in a given year. It's just what it's called, right? As in "The new season of Hill Street Blues is coming up!" Or "Are you watching Cheers this season?" It all made perfect sense.

For the sake of argument, I suppose that a string of shows might be better served by being called a "series" in that, well, it is a string, of shows, all shown in a nice little row, you know, in a series . . . It's just that we already have a use for the word "series". It means the program, on the whole -- the show (as in, "Little House on the Prairie is a good TV series, isn't it?") But, if series means the show, then why can't we all just call the series a "show" and be done with it?

Because "show" is already taken. It also means the particular program, ... you know, the "episode."

Wait. This is getting hard. ...if "show" can mean "episode" AND "show" can mean "series", but "series" only means "show" to people in America, whereas in Britain, "series" means "season", how can I ever write a meaningful blog post about the show I watched last night in the series that I've been watching this season??

Figure it out and let me know. Until then I intend to freely use whatever words come off my fingertips while typing and hope that you can make sense of it.

Shame and Regret, Satisfaction and Relief

The post is about blogging. The title doesn't really have to make sense.

These are simply two phrases which popped into my mind simultaneously last week. They are nice word pairings, and somehow, by the end of this post, they will have something to do with the topic. I'll figure it out. You go ahead and read.

"Satisfaction and relief" comes from a scene in Pride and Prejudice when Elizabeth Bennett is chatting with her then-boyfriend, Mr. Wickham, and explaining that Mr. Collins is now going to marry Charlotte Lucas. Wickham says he thought that Collins' affections were inclined elsewhere (i.e. toward Lizzy herself). She tells him that "they took a turn, to everyone's satisfaction." ... "And relief" he adds with a fair amount of self-awareness. Trigger momentary stomach flips; the other suitor is seeking romance elsewhere. Woo hoo! . . .  The "shame/regret" pair comes from a similar stomach-flips moment. In Spooks our resident almost-couple Harry and Ruth have a lovely moment on a bus. Harry has been (temporarily, it turns out) removed from his job as head of the spies. Ruth is riding home from work. He sits down and she wonders how he knew she'd be there. He explains that one night while being driven home he passed her waiting for the bus in the rain. He says that "to his shame. . . and now regret . . . he drove past." Its a sexy moment. His eyes are opening to Ruth and he can imagine that night ending much differently. . .

Meanwhile back at the blog, last week I hit a milestone I'm excited about: 2000 pageviews. And since I don't track my own activity and I don't have a grandma in Iowa happily clicking away, I know that's a fairly real stat that feels great. In fact I had a great month in many bloggy ways -- a lot more consistently good traffic with fair numbers of people finding me by searching on topics I write about. Which means I have already realized the main goal I set for myself when I began writing this a couple of months ago: to be searchable enough that interested readers might conceivably find me.

Yes its a modest goal, and I'm aware that there's probably a much greater likelihood that a person seeking a discussion of "He Knew He Was Right" won't come across my post than that they will. But they might. And that's cool. I guess thats the satisfaction part of this post. And maybe the relief too. Like Wickham, its nice to know that this little experiment hasn't been a waste of time.

Yes it feels odd to put thoughts out there and ask people to read them, which they obligingly have :) and simultaneously wondering "what is my job here?"...like Harry, adrift on a bus. What do I have to add to the world's knowledge that makes me arrogant enough to blab about it?

I've been thinking about that question a lot, given that others have far more in-depth and intricate knowledge, and it makes me feel weak and ineffective chatting about my TV preferences when I'm a self-described dilettante with no particular knowledge of directors, behind the scenes, locations, or the recent gossip, or any other thing that can electrify my topics with heretofore untold meaning. I think this is the shame part of the post.

I realize my strength though, is in finding relationships, connections and viewpoints -- sometimes out of nothing, like I'm doing with this post here (lol). Connecting life to TV, thoughts to one another, finding shows that are similar or performances that are not -- is something I can do and add to the blogosphere. And, along these lines, can conclude that while blogging has brought satisfaction, relief and shame, I have no place for regret either in this post or in life. As long as I can live each day in an exploration of ideas that are stimulating and in pursuing actions I am proud to own, then there is no place for that.

Sorry Harry you're on your own there. (If I had been in the driver's seat that rainy night you would have definitely stopped for the girl, and probably gotten invited in for a nightcap.)

The Birth of a Blogger: Why Do 12 Million American Adults Write Them? For that Matter, Why Do I?

In order to begin this post I was interested in finding out how many people in America have blogs. I wanted to "find myself" in this class of people and try to discover more about us. So I started, as most of us would, with a Google search. When I typed in the query, how many people in America have blogs, I got nothing relevant. What came up was blogs... about how many people in America have:... diabetes, passports, or dental care. Obviously I had cast too disjointed a net. But when I typed the query with quotes around it, I got literally nothing. Even removing the "America" qualifier or typing it more vaguely as Americans with blogs, didn't help

I was expecting this to be a hot topic given the explosion of this form of writing. I expected commentary on who these people are, and what they want! While it is parroted again and again that there are an enormous amount of web diaries -- apparently there are so many that nobody wants to try to count them. Maybe 10 million? Maybe 100 million? Who knows? We all agree there are a lot and its an interesting thing to think about, but that's not exactly the same thing as examining how many people are writing them and what is motivating them to do it. And whether they are finding it satisfactory.

According to fairly recent census data, there are well over 300 million Americans and at least 200 million between the ages of 15 and 74. How many of those folks sit down and write web log entries on some sort of regular basis? Surely someone has done a survey, I thought. ... And then I thought of the Pew Research Center. Thank heavens for Pew! According to a research report written by by Amanda Lenhart and Susannah Fox (dated July 19, 2006),  8% of internet users maintained a blog. This study found that about 68% of adults were internet users. It can be found here: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2006/Bloggers/01-Summary-of-Findings.aspx.

This boils down to about 12 million American adults (in 2006) who kept a blog. And about 57 million American adults, of which you are one ;) who read them.

Most of these 12 million people (37%) wrote primarily about their "life and experiences." The next most common reason was "politics and government" -- a distant second at 11%. What I write about, entertainment, was the third most common topic, with only 7%. [Still, if I have done the math right, I count 840,000 American adults writing web journals about entertainment.] The other topics mentioned were sports, general news/current events, business, technology, religion/spirituality, their hobbies, a health issue or illness, and a few other things.

Pew, ever thorough, also asked why people were writing. To express themselves creatively and share personal experiences were the highest rated purposes, with about 50% of bloggers indicating these were major reasons. Staying in touch with family was also a big one, with about 37% of people citing it as a major reason. Sharing knowledge, motivating, entertaining, or influencing people were other major factors, cited by about 30% of these folks.

OK, so this is all wonderful research, but it is still not getting at exactly what I want to know, which is the deeper, underlying, perhaps more philosophical question: why, do people feel the need to express themselves creatively on the internet? And what did these people do before this mode of expression existed?

For that great majority of bloggers who write to share their own life & experiences, I wonder if it is helping people re-connect or just plain connect, given our disjointed modern life. Is this similar to our use of Facebook -- seeking a community somewhere in the midst of our separate little life-bubbles?

And for those who blog about politics, what for them? Is there just more need to express political opinion than can possibly be contained in any one relationship or on any one Facebook page? In this way, maybe political web logs are doing us all a great favor by giving outlet to that need, so that it doesn't have to boil over at the dinner table?

For me, doing this fills a need that simply went unmet before I began blogging. I love to write; I have a lot of thoughts and opinions but, now that I'm not in college anymore, very little opportunity to share them. Most of the writing I've done in the last 10 to 15 years has been legal writing. I enjoy that as well, but not in the same way as writing this.

I suppose the counterpart to what I do and what someone with similar interests might have done in the pre-blog era, would be to write a newspaper opinion column or be a movie critic. But the thing is, I'm more of  dilettante, so having to actually fact-check, do "real" research, keep from breaking any laws and adhere to professional standards seems far too troublesome. I feel the need to express! because I think rather deeply about things, but not so deep as actual writers and movie critics. So, my need went unmet -- as I suppose many people's needs for expression do.

If you think about blogs in terms of what they are doing for the blogger, not what they are doing to society (you often hear about clutter and overload), I think this use of the internet is a beautiful one.

Oh What A Tangled World Wide Web We Weave

Now that I've been doing this for a couple of months, and am starting to get more comfortable with the front end of blogging -- how to write down my thoughts, add photos and videos to make it pretty, link to some interesting sites to make it informative, and then put it all out there into the world -- I am beginning to explore the backside of the internet as well.

I use that term quite intentionally because if there ever was an entity that felt like a great big enormous, stinky, . . .  well, backside,  it is the world wide web.

Before you get the wrong idea, I am impressed with what the web can do and the way it links people. It means I can write my thoughts and someone in, say, Croatia, might conceivably read them. I can post something on some obscure version of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (which I plan to do later this week (stay tuned)), and anyone else who is interested in it can conceivably find my review, read it and tell me I'm an idiot. Others who didn't know that version existed might see my webpage and then go watch that program. It is a beautiful thing!

The down side to all this is that because the internet has become so insanely user friendly, it is being taken over by . . . users. Some of whom are simultaneously proficient in HTML programming, world business dynamics, social and behavioral science and media law. The other 99% of us are not. Yet we are out there everyday stumbling through this by the seat of our pants and hoping we're getting it right.

After writing about the latest Harry Potter movie, I saw my number of hits explode and that has caused me to think more about my traffic. I wonder how, exactly, out there in the crazy milieu that is webcrawling, folks get led to my blog.

One way is I think they are seeing the pretty pictures I am using to illustrate my entries, and somehow through a combination of search terms and kismet are coming here. I have posted pictures that I've found online through Google, easily accessible and easily linked to. The same user-friendly tool that allows me to link to other websites and Youtube videos also makes it easy for me to link to a photo someone else has posted.

Here's the backside quagmire. At what point am I taking someone else's picture? I have literally no idea. Now if I were to copy and paste an image, represent an image as my own and attempt to make money off of it, I can see someone making a good case that I'd taken it. And if it was copyrighted that would be a no no. But, if I said: "oh, I found a great picture you should look at," and then inserted a link that would take you to the picture, I can't see that ever being a problem. Even if the photo was copyrighted. No more than if I told someone to go to the museum and see the great Calder exhibit, then gave them a map.

So, with the these extremes out of the way, the hard question, as always, lies in the middle. What happens when you open a public non proprietary link, find a photo and use Blogger templates to help you link it into your online journal. Is that "taking" it?

The answer (which is "I don't know but I don't think so??") is embedded in the kind of technology that most of us have no conceptualization for. Does it matter if I disclaim ownership? Does it matter whether the picture or just the link shows up on my site? Does it matter how search engines view that picture? Or if someone can find the rightful "owner" by clicking on it? Does it matter that "everybody does it?" Does anyone who attempts to provide guidance on this issue speak any words I can recognize as English? haha.

I noticed this morning when I got online that Firefox was inviting me to dress up my browser with an image from Harry Potter. If my browser is inviting me to display proprietary images, it is no wonder indeed that lines are blurred.

It reminds me of murky issues I have with music -- for instance, if I own a CD, I think I own the rights to listen to the music in any way I want, including making an electronic copy of it to put on my iPod. But if I check out the CD from the library, I'm not so sure I legally can. What if I, and 5 of my friends, chipped in to buy the CD; can we put it on all 6 of our iPods? If the answer is "yes," does the fact that my tax dollars went in (along with a few hundred thousand friends') to buying the library's copy?

You don't need to answer that. 

Back to the backside. Legislating the proper use of images on the internet seems to me like outlawing the ingredients for making nuclear bombs but then living in a world where it is difficult to walk down the street without encountering all of the ingredients for nuclear bombs and where most people's homes are filled with at least some of those ingredients.

With this in mind, I've developed a new standard for my behavior. I want to be at least as scrupulous as most other reasonable bloggers in how I treat possibly copyrighted photos. How's that for a good legal measuring stick? I am going to try to do what I think is right and hope in the end it is. And I promise not to make any nuclear bombs.