Cheering for Death and Other Reactions to Last Night's News

Last night, Jacob and I both took to Twitter, as we tend to do these days when big news is released. It was a crazy two hours or so of speculation and confirmation, dark jokes, reactions to the MSM coverage, elation and bloodlust, and odd looks at the elation and bloodlust. I wanted to share a few of my reactions from the announcement of Osama bin Laden's death, its coverage, America's reaction, and what it means going forward.

Egypt's Assault on Information: As Unamerican as...America?

Unless you've been living in a cave the last week or so, you've heard about the demonstrations (revolution?) going on in Egypt. This post isn't really about the protests themselves. It's about governmental assaults on information as a crackdown measure (with Egypt's being the most current). As a practical matter, any autocratic regime will suppress communication in a time of insurrection. It's been done throughout history, and this is no different, other than it being in the information age. Interestingly, these protests were reportedly even organized on Facebook, so that seems like an even more logical target. (See, it can be used for political protests more extensive than changing a profile picture.) And unlike the Iran protests, in which there was no "Twitter revolution" (all the tweets were in English, not Farsi, and came from this hemisphere), Twitter seems to be in legitimate use here.

So of course, what did the Egyptian government do in response? Shut down the internet:

Egypt has apparently done what many technologists thought was unthinkable for any country with a major Internet economy: It unplugged itself entirely from the Internet to try and silence dissent.

Reports of the Press Release's Death are Greatly Exaggerated

This is fascinating. I just saw today's This Week In Review, by the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard. (Warning: May prove addictive to media geeks.) It has a section about a debate concerning the death of two media forms: the RSS feed and the press release. I don't believe either are dead. I'm more interested in the press release though - I don't really care as much about the RSS feed. Mostly that's because as someone who looks for the RSS button whenever I find a new blog I should be reading, I think, whatever the flaws, it's here to stay. Dave Winer says the same here, and points out the one big flaw by comparison with Twitter (and one smaller one that's more of an annoyance than anything):

Small Policy Choices in the Future of News

The future of news is a hot topic these days. One troubling trend, however, among those that oppose reform of the established media is to just sort of hand-wave and say, "oh the internet will take care of it all."

What these people have to realize is that policy choices made by the people who shape the internet will have huge consequences for the future of the internet, and probably none are quite as big as net neutrality.

Here's one smaller example:

The question is this. If Twitter is a news-delivery service, and I believe it is, what are the real dimensions of a nugget of news?

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The actual number, the average [character] length of a Times "nugget-of-news" is this: 185

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[T]he answer is fairly clear. 140 [characters] is not enough, not even for the average nugget. And to be able to hold the largest one, the max would have to be 250 or 300. And there would be no room for the link, even shortened, in that size nugget.

So the future of news seems to rely heavily on new technologies like twitter. I don't doubt for a second that that's true, and we're already seeing it. It's just important to understand that policy choices in the structure of these technologies, even as small as how many characters to allow per tweet, can have huge impacts on our future discourse.