Changing Technology a good and a bad thing Part IV

This is part four of the series on "Changing Technology". And the part that I'm most concerned about in this wonderful new world of miniaturization and hand held technology: e-books, wireless phones, i-phones, ipods, etc. Along with the entertainment, social networks, instant communication, comes the ability to reach out and hurt. In part III of this series I pasted a Facebook link where you can read and join a discussion of bullying. It is based on the case of Phoebe Prince, who in January committed suicide after three months of bullying by her high school classmates.

That was the topic of Dr. Phil's program last week (4-8-2010 "Bullied to Death Dr. Phil") if you missed it you can click on the link and it will take you there. It was a chilling hour. My wife DVR'ed it for me and it and I had to watch it in two sittings.

I was especially taken back by one parent of two beautiful senior high school girls who had to remove her daughters from a school district and transport them to another district. When she complained to the police they told her they couldn't do anything until one of the girls was harmed.

Cyber bullying has become an integral part of the bullying going on today. But it is only one component. I don't need to repeat them all here. You can click on the web site on this blog to see the things to look for and affects the bullying begin to have on your children.

One guest on the Dr. Phil show worked with the staff and students of Miss Prince's high school. She reported that when she went into that school the days after Miss Prince's suicide some of the students were joking about it and mocking it by pretending to hold a noose above their heads.

Maybe it is time to use our new technology to re-release the 1971 Stanley Kubrick movie Clockwork Orange his view of the "near future". I think his vision has finally arrived.

New comments on The Ruin

Well today is my birthday. My folks picked an auspicious day for my birthday, April 15th. Too bad the IRS decided to share it. Made it easy to remember. I got two birthday cards that especially made my day. Both concerned my novel.

I shared my sister's comments on the Ruin when it first came out (See comments on Jan 23 post "The Ruin Novel Available"). She received the first copy and sped through it in a couple of days. She then ordered a copy for her daughter. Her daughter had to wait until March for her copy and her comments came this week. She said she read it too fast and didn't want it to end. She had recommended it to many of her friends.

My older brother shares credits on the copyright page for several passages in the Ruin. He is a painter and when he writes it is as though he writes with a paint brush. I relied heavily on his description of the La Plata Mountains of South West Colorado. In his card he commented on the book at some length. He also attended the school featured in the book and lived on the farm described in the book. As he said, "To tell the truth I had a real hard time distinguishing between what was fiction and reality." He went on to say, "Fact or fiction, I could empathize with "Cliff in his corporal punishment and the emotions that go along with it, and I think you did a fantastic job of capturing that feeling in the pages."

I was pleased by by my brother's and niece's words. Sometimes those close to us can be our harshest critics. To have their approval was very gratifying.

On another note, my daughter, a third grade teacher in the Bend-LaPine public schools was talking to me this morning about a bullying problem they are having in their school. The school officials have narrowed the problem down to two or three who are most frequently named. She overheard the discussion about what should be done, how harshly should they deal with them. My daughter is no shrinking violet, especially after hearing me carry on and having read my book and teaching in Springfield during the school shooting episode. When she heard the comment, "well we don't want to traumatize the boys...." she said, "Well yes, we do want to traumatize the boys, if that is what it takes to get the point across to them that what they are doing out on the playground to the other kids can lead to serious consequences. And those consequences somewhere down the road could lead to suicide or a school shooting. You have to stop it here. And stop it now!"

Way to go girl.
Respectfully submitted, Kenneth Fenter

Changing Technology a good and a bad thing Part III

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bull-E-The-New-World-of-Online-Cruelty/262508581777?ref=mf
This is Part III of this discussion of Changing Technology the good and the bad. Probably those of you reading this know a whole lot more about the technology that I'm talking about than I do. I use technology, put some of it together, but I am not a technician. I can trouble shoot up to a point and then I have to get on the phone. I use primarily software that edits video, digital photography, word processing and document design. I have made video DVD's using DVD software and am learning web design using Dreamweaver. Most of it is self taught.
I think technology has returned the individual to a time when everyone can express themselves the way our Founding Fathers intended. People like Thomas Paine, Ben Franklin, and such printed their own newsletters and circulated them. Now through the advent of You Tube, home video editors  such as myself have an outlet, although I have not used it.

So what is so bad about that?

Go to the link above and read the discussion there. Bull-E is the blog run by a columnist who writes for an online service of the Washington Post/Newsweek Interactive. The writer is Emile Brazelton. She is writing a series of columns on the on-line bullying that has led to suicides in small towns across the country.

Along with the flood of communication technology that allows people to connect easily have come the social networks. I enjoy a couple of them myself. Through the social networks we can keep in touch with those who have helped shape our lives down through the years. We can now share in their joy as each child grows into adulthood and grandchildren are born. We can see photos of our colleague's rally squad competing in nationals. And so on and so on.

Because we as a society have either condoned or turned a blind eye toward harassment in schools and in the workplace, it has found a ready breeding ground in the electronic world.

And that's too bad. It will be much harder to bring it under control.

I suggest you check out the link above and other columns by Ms. Brazelton who is following the problem of on-line bullying nationally.

Respectfully submitted,
Kenneth Fenter

Changing Technology a good and a bad thing Part II

In Part I, I talked about the old clone PC made in a workshop in back of a Chinese Restaurant in Springfield, Oregon. The latest Intel 8088 chip running MS-Dos with Windows 2.0 on top of that, MS Word, Pagemaker, and a duplex laser printer.

That computer was connected through the serial port to a modem and the telephone line to a list of bulletin boards in the local calling area. Some were easier to get to than others depending on how interesting they were and how busy they were. Even at that basic level a couple of them were a little "too friendly."

At some point, through those same bulletin boards we began to get instructions on how to work our way into the world wide web. A list of universities would appear and we could click on them and see various libraries and find fields of information, usually esoteric data that meant nothing. It wasn't very interesting. It was test based and very difficult.

Then came a mailer from either Wards or Sears with an invitation to join a new "scheme". Their vision was to link Americans through their PC's and Apples via the telephone lines and modems. I don't remember what this system was going to be called. I thought it an intriguing idea at the time, and tossed it along with all the other junk mail. I didn't hear anything further and assumed the idea had died. Several years later discs began to appear in stores with the familiar AOL trademark. I have no idea if AOL came out of that original SEARS mailing or not.

Jump ahead to 2003. Twelve authors at the RV park where my wife and I wintered decided to publish an anthology of our short stories. We had spent all winter writing them. How to coordinate the process among 12 men and women between 60 and 85 years of age. We did it all by broadband e-mail through the summer when the 12 authors either drove their motorhomes, 5th wheels, or flew back to summer homes scattered from Maine to Oregon. Everyone had a chance through their computers to submit their stories to me in Oregon. I edited them, sent them to a co-editor in Virginia who further edited and proofread them and sent them back. I designed the book around them and PDF'ed a copy to everyone who further proofread and e-mailed it back. At that point I e'mailed the Pagemaker file to Thomson-Shore in Dexter Minnesota. Unfortunately the books had to be delivered by truck. The book came out in 2004 shortly after everyone returned to the park in January.

By that time everyone was surfing the internet with ease, e-mail was replacing "snail mail".

Part III to come - a bad thing about technology.

Changing Technology a good and a bad thing Part I

Technology has changed dramatically since 1984 when I sat down to the keyboard of a discarded office computer with a brand name I think of Colombia. I bought it at a business liquidation sale at a motel. It ran on MS-Dos 1. It came with MS Word. The beautiful thing about the machine was it had an internal floppy 5 inch drive to save the typed file on. I added on an Epson dot matrix impact printers which was readable.

I was initially excited about my manuscript. We had gone through a unique experience back in 1978-1980 and there was a growing interest in others doing something similar. I wrote query letters to virtually every publisher and agent in the writers digest that indicated they dealt with that kind of product. The file grew with those who bothered to send a rejection notice.

I was out of work, (as society recognized it in 1984) and in the process of writing Gaijin! Gaijin! when I joined a group called the Willamette Writers Guild. It is based out of Portland, but we formed an auxiliary branch in Eugene and met once a month. Through the parent club in Portland we had some pretty savvy speakers visit our monthly meetings to give us inspiration and encouragement. It was invigorating to rub shoulders with the people in those meetings and share ideas as a 40 something with time to explore, write, research, and dig through stacks of notebooks and photos from two years in Japan. Then we had a guest at a meeting who explained the process of self publishing, and the pro's and con's.

I realized as she went through it step by step that it was exactly what I had taught my yearbook students for 14 years. Two of those years we had even printed and bound the yearbook ourselves.

I went back to the computer that night and evaluated it.  About that time Brother brought out an office printer. Proportionally spaced typefaces were on interchangeable reels and they used carbon ribbons. The print was sharp and clean and each page took forever to print. MS Word had a driver for the Brother printer. I was in business. I formatted my manuscript of the book Gaijin! Gaijin! in Word and printed it out on the best quality paper I could find, sent it off to Thomson-Shore book manufacturers and had 1200 copies printed.

I sold those copies over the phone to the Japanese bookstores throughout the United States, and filled re-orders. Encouraged by letters that came back from readers through out the US and from those who had taken it to Japan or who had received it from friends back in the states, I went to work on Mo Ichido and published it in 1985.

By 1987 the first run of that armature first venture was sold out and I owned a PC Clone with an honest to goodness hard drive plus a 3.5 inch higher capacity drive. It was hooked up to my first HP laser duplex printer. It ran Windows 2 and I immediately bought Aldus Pagemaker, re-formatted and re-printed Gaijin! Gaijin! The laser printer made the book look like a professionally typeset book. Unfortunately I didn't take the time to re-edit it. By that time I was marketing Mo Ichido and back to full time teaching. Time had entered into the equation.

The point here is that the Computer, a graphical interface, and a means of printing that enabled an individual to produce a page proof that looked professional suddenly changed the complexion of small press publishing.

Next Part II: entering the internet age