Out of the Newsroom

In the post election day hangover of emotions, the euphoria of hope gives way to the soberness of what change can really be accomplished against the backdrop of what is going on here in the real world, the inevitable cold shower stings a bit as it hits our faces.

A Sunday morning of reading the papers will confirm that, lest anyone have a doubt about it. Sure, there are still the weekly writers like the NY Times Frank Rich, who have to put in their official stamp on the monumental shift in defining who now makes up “the real America”.

I don’t mean to suggest that there is any reason for the hope that fueled Tuesday’s historic events to be quickly cashed out like shares in an underperforming Hedge fund, but Hope is also still a place in Arkansas, and as political rhetoric it still is the most visceral, yet least specific promise for a candidate to issue. The campaign that brought Presidential politics fully into the internet age isn’t about to rest on its laurels and has already moved into governance by web 2.0 with the debut of their spiffy new Change.gov website

But the web itself is trying to cope with its own problems, learning that it isn’t immune from the downturn that has hit all businesses–at least those that haven’t gotten a 700 Billion dollar bail-out with “no strings or accountability attached” (which it seems is quickly turning into the full employment act of the former financial wizards who got us into the mess in the first place.)

My favorite read of the morning was an article by Techno-pundit Nicholas Carr who has postulated on the provocative headline “Who killed the Blogosphere?” Mr. Carr documents the shift away from the collective blogging of an army of dedicated private citizens to the success of the elite professional magazine-types, turned commercial blog-based media that now dominate the lists of sites that keep such lists, like the oft-quoted Technorati. You know, the Huffington Posts, Engadgets, and Boing Boings of the world.

Carr goes on to compare the short lifespan arc of blogging to that of the still surviving arc of amateur radio. While I can agree on some similarities between the two, I think the analysis of what has happened to each since its nascent success early on is flawed. Carr and a subsequent poster suggest that Amateur radio has all but died because of licensing and equipment costs. Nothing could be further from the truth, the equipment is cheaper than its ever been for amateur radio and blogging. Licensing for “ham radio” operators is far easier than it was when I was a kid and unsuccessfully struggled to learn even a tiny bit of morse code.

No, I would suggest that Blogging and amateur radio have actually been dealing with the same social challenge. Those who got in at the start, thinking that their own stream of programming would attract large audiences of others have realized (for the most part) that it wasn’t going to happen. What is left are the people who find the art of casting forth a transmission of their own to be interesting enough, and worth doing whether there is one million or just one recipient.

And that brings us back to the question of hope. It is a very personal emotion, different for each of us. We hope for things based on our situation, whether than be a shared one with the national psyche or an individual one based on our own fates and fortunes.

Don’t ask me why, but somehow I ended up watching three Western themed movies yesterday. (“Hang ‘em High”, “Appaloosa”, and “Open Range”) All three depict life on the western frontier of the United States in the late 1800s, back in the hardscrabble days when the nation was pushing towards the Pacific. It was the time when men were men, and most women were usually categorized as either “whores or squaws”. Every movie about the Old West employs many of the same dramatic devices, but the one that seems to be fundamental to all is that the rough and often deadly times that are portrayed are balanced by the unshakable hope of the characters who know they are living in times of significant change–either to the land they love or to their own existence.

There is usually not much portrayal of what must have been an often dreary and bleak existence, that surely tested the souls of those who lived in the small towns in the corners of desolation that extended towards where the sun set each day. No, that didn’t conveniently fit in the two hour window that the promised land the settlers and sooners would ultimately discover on the western coast of these United States–Hollywood.

And thus, back to the present where we must reconcile the cinematic chapter of the endless campaign season that has just concluded with the reality that was temporarily masked by sitting for months in the darkened theatre of political drama. The credits are rolling now, the instant reviews are beginning, and the finger pointing on what didn’t work and the credit grabbing for what did, is firing up as quickly as the lights have come on.

Now we all wait to see if the first steps of the Obama presidency will give us as much hope and change as the on-screen administrations of men like Bartlet, Shepherd, and Kovic, let alone those real life ones of Washington, Roosevelt and Kennedy.

One early and not-so-hopeful sign on this Sunday morning: The Change.gov website was down for a while while I wrote this. (Update: It is back up as of early Sunday afternoon.)