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My work was at Spiegel, a catalog concern which still exists in a new form. When I arrived, the company had just been acquired by Household Finance. It was proud of its computer department and obviously was in sales solicitation, where it was said that three states (Southern) paid enough in interest to equal total annual net profit. On this least machine with 2 kilobits (binary digits, not bytes) we had a card reader and a chain printer. No operating system of any kind. DEBE was a program we could load from cards and perform helpful functions, made by some clever nameless programmer. As the analog/digital divide is confounded through software, it's hard to think back to such primitive ways. Yet the culture then was similar to now.Get a group of cyber-jockeys together and there forms a kind of us/them relationship. Maybe worse then, because so many friends and family were still very skeptical of the new field. When Twitter joined the ranks of Instant Messenger, MySpace, and other quicky communications, I thought back to DEBE. We keypunched our own code, and needed a program to print out the cards to proofread them. It was a tool for the occasion.
In today's environment on social websites, be they political or some other kind, those who "get it" sometimes think the tools are the reason for the experience. Marshall McLuhan said the medium was the message. Evolving technology has not dimmed that notion for many. Whether doing video, audio, or plain narrative, a computer is really just a tool.
I come back to our task at hand. Most of us at OpEdNews are interested in political events which show newness--while at the same time allowing leaway for divergent opinions. Opinions are what keep us fresh.
So I hearken back to value of story. In the instance of health insurance reform, I see great stories about members' personal tussle with the octopus which is the present system. Many of them are buried in long OEN comments. But I think the impact would be greater if the experiences were turned into articles and diaries. Describing human experience, rather than listing statistics and making a pitch for a particular proposal, reaches the very personal experience we all have with keeping our bodies and minds tuned up.
Sometimes ideas come to surface in unusual ways. For several election cycles, the Autism Society of America has advocated for more scientific funding. In the 90's, the feminist movement developed new techniques for alerting the government toward gender specific research. If the sad, sad story of insurance meltdown does not inspire an article, there is the possibility of advocating for more help in..... Name it: nutrition, well-baby care, hospice, home healthcare. The list is long.
