Where Do You Get Your News?

  

Remember the good old days when the local daily showed up on your front porch in time to have it with your first cup of coffee? My Grandpa would glance at the front page then read the funny papers. My Daddy would look at the front page then turn to the want ads. My Momma just drank her coffee.

Then we got the evening news in black and white on television. The TV stations went to color in 1966, but the televisions we had didn't.

Known as "the most trusted man in America," Walter Cronkite gave us the news. He didn't comment on the stories. He just reported them. He covered much of the Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R with its Cuban Missile Crisis. He covered President Kennedy's assassination with its follow-on murder of a suspect in custody. The assassin was killed not by police, but by a nightclub owner on live TV amid the chaos of reporters and police and justice officials. 

Cronkite covered the Civil Rights Movement with film of its peaceful protesters being brutalized by their local and state law enforcement officers. We watched film of the Vietnam War and its world-wide anti-war demonstrations. We got the official daily body count -- ours and theirs. Theirs were always many times higher than ours. I began to wonder how there could be any North Vietnamese left, but we didn't question it. There was no way for the average person to research those figures. No internet. No Google.

    

Now the news is available anytime, anywhere on our smart TVs or our smart phones, from Siri and Alexa or the Amazon Echo Dot. Sometimes I have nightmares about getting it on my dental implants!

Twitter and TikTok and Facebook. The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. PBS News Hour, BBC America, Al Jazeera, Deutsche Welle. The Onion, Saturday Night Live, Facebook.

Okay, the technology is here. And it is available to most of us whether we know how to use it or not. But there are some very old rules about how we should use all this information, be it true or be it false. And those old rules rightly should continue to inform our use of all this information. Just because something we read, hear, or see seems believable doesn't make it true. Like, for instance -- I don't have dental implants.

One of those old rules is as old as the Ten Commandments, the Ninth one, to be precise. Thou shalt not bear false witness. This includes repeating, retweeting, and/or sharing something that is not true. How can you tell if something is true or not? Do your own research. 

I like Snopes.com. Just type in your question. In fact you can just Google your question. Google will give you several options to check out. Got a question about an organization that is saying something you agree with or don't agree with, but you don't know anything about that organization. Google it. 

The Washington Post is a reputable newspaper. The New York Post is a tabloid. The Philidelphia Inquirer is a reputable newspaper. The National Enquirer is a tabloid. What's the difference between a reputable newspaper and a tabloid? Google it.

Want to know if a particular newspaper is generally considered "conservative" or "liberal"? Google it.

Want to know how many species of rabbit and hares are native to North America? This is what Google said, "North America is home to 15 species of rabbits and hares. All of these are rather abundant within their range."

Google's source:  https://science.jrank.org/pages/3785/Lagomorphs-Rabbits-hares-North-America.html
 

Facebook and Google -- Opinion

image from newsmobile.in

Yesterday was Day F in the 2018 A to Z Blogging Challenge and today was G.

With all the news these days about loss of privacy and security because of our presence on social media F and G were easy--Facebook and Google.

Am I willing to give up Facebook to protect my security. To avoid being manipulated by advertisers and political operatives?

Apparently, I started on Facebook in July of 2008. I'm sure there's a way to find out exactly, but I couldn't figure it out. It's not really that important exactly when. Why is more important.

I was taking cake decorating classes and the instructor said it was easier to share photos with Facebook. She posted pictures of the cakes she did and I wanted to see them. Soooo....

My daughter Grace, a teen at the time helped her internet-illiterate mother open a Facebook account so I could see my cake decorating instructor's pictures of beautiful cakes.

In less than a week I received a friend request from a person I went to high school with. She hadn't said ten words together to me in high school so I couldn't imagine why she wanted to be my friend anywhere, much less on Facebook which could come into my home willy-nilly via my computer screen.

I didn't know if she would be notified if I rejected her friend request. And what would I do when I saw her in Walmart? Our town was small enough that that was possible. Would she be mad at me? Confront me? Vandalize my car? Well, no she wouldn't do that! So I accepted the friend request to avoid any possible unpleasantness.

Then a couple days later that same woman's ex-husband sent me a friend request. He'd never been particularly friendly to me in high school either and I surely didn't want to get in the middle of those two.

The only thing to do was to get Grace to cancel my Facebook account. Cake decorating be damned.

Grace, being slightly more rational than I, reassured me that I could just unfriend her and ignore his request. And that they wouldn't get any ugly public announcements that I had rejected them. She said that they, in fact, would probably not notice and if they did they'd just chalk it up to my flaky inability to hit the right keys and not take it personally.

She talked me into keeping my Facebook account. And I am so glad I did.

My daughter-in-law posts photos and videos of my grandchildren's activities. They live hundreds of miles away from me, and I could easily feel left out of their lives. But, just like tonight, one of my grand's team won first in their state Destination Imagination competition and will be going to Globals next month. Within minutes I could see for myself through the photos and video she posted. Color me included and proud of those beautiful, brilliant, creative young people.

Plus -- my brother lives more than a thousand miles from me. We talk on the phone, but the photos he shares via Facebook make me not feel so far away from him.

And my cousins are scattered hither and yon. We grew up together and were almost as close as siblings but I don't know their children or their spouses or their children's children and spouses very well at all. Facebook has helped me get better acquainted with them.

And my husband's family. Again we live very far away from them, but we're getting to watch the littles grow and keep up with the grown-ups.

My daughter and her partners are our only family close at hand and that will end this coming August when she marries and moves to Houston for grad school. We'll still talk on the phone, but I'm sure I'll depend on Facebook to ease the separation.

And Google? Well I'm sure Google also sells my info to businesses for all kinds of purposes. Like I heard a commentator comment "If it's a free service, my information is a commodity."

I'm a writer and like all writers I need access to information -- all kinds of information. As much as I love my local library, and as extensive as the collection is, it is still limited compared to the world's information. It is still a drive across town while my laptop sits on my desk and my cell phone is in my pocket.

I must admit, that I feel a little uncomfortable when ads for hotels in Washington, D.C., pop up because I've been researching online for an upcoming trip. Or there are ads for dining places that show up because I'm using GPS to find my way. But then access to these kinds of information when I might want to use it is very convenient.

So what can I do? I can take standard precautions -- I keep my antivirus software up to date; change my passwords regularly; turn off the location on my devices when it's not necessary for what I'm doing; avoid apps that request access to my Facebook friends and my email contacts and hope they do the same for me.

I research information for veracity. I even looked up the website that was the source for the image I used at the top of this post. It's a news agency in India.

I don't open forwarded emails. I don't open emails from sources I don't know.

And when I do mess up one of my devices as I have and probably will again, I take it to someone who knows how to clean up after me. And yes I do backups regularly.

I know, the world is a dangerous place. There are bad actors out there who will search out and take advantage of weaknesses. But I will not be cut off from the world. Or the people I care about.

So I'll keep using Facebook and Google.

Monkeydo -- Nonfiction

Image from emery.edu

"Did you sleep well?" my husband asked.

"I did," I said. "After I put the cat out of the bedroom."

"You got us a bad cat," he said as he fished around under the cook stove for cat toys. Finding none, he wadded up a bit of aluminum foil and proceeded to play kick ball with Kočka. And fetch! Who ever heard of a cat playing fetch?

But that's not what I come here to talk about. (A corruption of a line from Arlo Guthrie's slightly more than 18 minute long song Alice's Restaurant. If you haven't heard it since you were a rebellious teen in the 60's click on the link, lean back, inhale, and enjoy. If you've never heard it, then you should. And if you think you don't have eighteen plus free minutes, you definitely should.)

What I did come here to talk about is words.

At 6:14 this a.m. my phone sounded, waking me to let me know I'd gotten a new email. Apparently I had been working on a writing problem while I slept, because I awoke with a much needed monkeydo. (You probably have the same bemused expression my husband had when I used that word to explain how successfully I'd slept. And by-the-bye, bemused pronounced bih-myoozd, is an adjective meaning bewildered or confused. It has nothing to do with the word amuse unless, of course you see it in a blog post exploring words as a means of entertainment.)

When you write, you need believable reasons for characters to say or do what the plot needs them to. That's a monkeydo. Or if you need them to be in a particular place or situation, getting them there is a monkeydo. Else you have a deus ex machina.

I don't know where the term monkeydo comes from, but I don't think I coined it myself. Which brings me to terminologicalinexactitudinarian. That's my favorite word. I googled it to use in this post. And Oh my god! this is what I found

Writers sometimes think about big words... - Claudia Weber Wagner ... 

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?id=427583950611349&story_fbid...

Writers sometimes think about big words -- and I don't mean terminologicalinexactitudinarian -- today I mean justice. Check out my latest blog post....

That's right. The ONLY thing Google brought up on that word was me. How many times have you googled something and it only brought up one? Much less that one being you. Talk about feeling important! I'm still smiling like the proverbial Cheshire Cat.

Now that wasn't my first reaction. My first reaction was that I must have misspelled it the exact same way I must have misspelled it in the said reference listed by Google. I thought it was a term coined by Winston Churchill, one of my favorite word-coiners. (Terminologicians?) So I connected it to his name and googled again. This time I got "about 4,050 results." Here's one:

terminological inexactitude - definition of terminological inexactitude in ... 

www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/.../terminological-inexactitud...

OxfordDictionaries.com

Definition of terminological inexactitude in English: Share this entry. email cite discuss ... Origin. First used by Winston Churchill in a Commons speech in 1906.

Now I must question my whole understanding of the word. I don't think I made it up, nor did I make up the story wrapped around the coining of the word. I'm sure I heard it somewhere -- The Dick Cavett Show, my humanities class at Central State, one of the Muppets on Sesame Street. And the context sounded so Churchill.

The story was that the politicians in Great Britain's House of Commons are not allowed to call each other 'liars' so . . . . Apparently the part of the story about using that word in Parliament is true. I googled it.

And one more thing, which has nothing to do with this post other than I got it when I googled "words images." Isn't the picture at the top of this blog beautiful?

Educating Americans, the Shocking Failure -- An Essay

image from brainyquotes.com

I woke up this morning feeling fine. We had 47 degrees at 6 a.m. That's a good way to start the day. Then my husband told me about an article in this morning's Washington Post.

A national survey by Oklahoma State University's Food Science Department found that more than 80% of the American public would support mandatory labeling for foods containing DNA. The information included about DNA in the survey question is all completely true, but it is presented in a way that would sound frightening to a reader who does not know what DNA is. Apparently the vast majority of survey respondents do not know what DNA is.

This should be taken as an indictment of our education system. I do not know if biology is required for high school graduation. If it isn’t, it should be. I had high school biology in the 1960s and DNA was not mentioned, but in college it was. Scientists were just beginning to understand DNA. In 1962 Watson and Crick received the Nobel Prize for their work with DNA, so I don’t know how many public school biology teachers knew much about it then. Which brings up the question of continuing education for school teachers. Is it required even after they get their Masters? And does that continuing ed have to be in the field they’re teaching?

The responsibility for education does not fall solely on teachers. If we didn’t learn it from them, we have a responsibility to learn it on our own. And the world’s knowledge keeps growing. Even after we leave school. The resources for our own continuing ed are more available to us than they’ve ever been in human history. Pluto is no longer classified as a planet. Why not? Stem cell therapies are being used to treat various forms of cancer. Why?

If we like Dancing with the Stars, that’s fine, but just like eating burgers and fries is just fine, we need fruit and veggies for a healthy body. And we need healthy food for our minds. Watch Nova. Listen to Star Talk. Read a book. Google it.

When we get into the habit of exploring things we were just wondering about, we’re feeding our minds and learning to recognize that hunger for knowledge. We’ll soon discover that that hunger pops up more often than we ever imagined.

Flip a switch and turn on the light. Where did those electrons that are lighting our room actually come from and how did they get here? Read Isaac Asimov’s Atom. (What? You didn’t know he wrote anything but Science Fiction? Which, by the bye, is worth a read, too.) Exploring electricity, we’ll run into the names of Edison, Westinghouse, Tesla. Check them out.

Why don’t you ever see crows dead on the highway? Are they too smart to play in the road? How smart are they? Watch the documentary A Murder of Crows originally shown on PBS’s Nature. Now available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=s472GjbLKQ4. That’s right, youtube has things other than people and cats being dumb and cute, respectively.

Why do some people let their small children run loose in restaurants? Hmmmm. I don’t think Google can answer that satisfactorily. We’d probably have to ask those people and that might get us a few choice words we don’t need to look up.

Ask a question. Learn a new word. Expand your mental horizons.

And keep in mind, if it ain’t got DNA, it ain’t food. It might be a food supplement, but it ain’t food.

Self-Publishing and Platforms for Sales

My Website Home Page

Remember me whining about pitching my book to an agent? I complained about being required to sell my book (Murder on Ceres – wink, wink) and really I had to sell myself, too. So the agent would know there was a future for both of us. And I hated it.

So I decided to self-publish. What was I thinking? How am I going to get my book out there for readers to read? Well, salesmanship of course.

A publisher (not a big New York City publisher, but one who has several years in the business) asked me during my pitch two years ago what platforms I was on. I hadn’t any idea what he was talking about. So I sat in on the panel discussion on platforms at that writers’ conference. He meant Facebook, Twitter, blogging, Pinterest, websites, etc. ad infinitum.

Well I’ve been on Facebook for several years. It was a painful and frightening experience to be on Facebook. But now I like it, except when someone with whom I am not personal friends wants to friend me. Just typing ‘friend’ as an active verb makes me cringe. I have 34 friends and only one is someone I’ve never met. Most of my ‘friends’ are relatives and the one I don’t know is a close relative of a relative.

In person, I am friendly. On the internet, not so much. Maybe, not at all. But I’m trying.

Blogging is pretty easy for me. I used to work for a small-town daily newspaper, so I’m used to people I don’t know reading what I write. There was always a certain anonymity with that. People who didn’t know me personally recognized my name, but not my face.

My editor and graphic designer daughter Grace is helping me become active on these platforms. Trusting my computer skills, she gave me a website that helps you set up your own website, SquareSpace.com. I don’t know if the instructions on that website are not simple enough for me or if my antipathy to the project was so strong that I couldn’t allow myself to understand them. Whatever.

I made an appointment for her to come to my house and ‘help’ me do it. We sat side by side with our laptops – me playing solitaire, her building the website and periodically asking me questions. Not how-to questions, you understand, but what-do-you-want and is-this-what-you-had-in-mind questions.

There were things she learned not to ask me. She showed me umpteen fonts and at each one I sounded like A Christmas Story Ralphie’s little brother. “Oooo. I like this one.”

What was Ralphie’s little brother’s name? I know, I could Google it. Or ask Grace.

She suggested posting updates and book reviews on Google. That didn’t sound so bad.

Then she set me up a Twitter account. I wrote down what I thought she said its address is in my little black book. I tried this morning to get on my Twitter or whatever it is you do with your twitter and couldn’t. I went to my website to access my Twitter and this is what I got.

“Twitter has automated systems that find and remove multiple automated spam accounts in bulk. Unfortunately, it looks like this account, @CWeberWagner, got caught up in one of these spam groups by mistake.
We apologize for this inconvenience. It’s possible your account posted an update that appeared to be spam, so please be careful what you tweet or retweet. You might also want to review our help page for hacked or compromised accounts://support.twitter.com/entries/68916. You will need to change your behavior to continue using Twitter. Repeat violations of the Twitter Rules may result in the permanent suspension of your account.”

But my only tweet was “Check out my new webpage at http://cweberwagner.com , where #scifi and #murdermystery combines! #newauthor”

A bit of research and multiple attempts to do as they directed and I am back on my Twitter. That sounds so much more fun than it feels.

I promise to change my behavior and never, never repeat my violations. Cross my heart.

Then there are the business cards to decide on. And I’ll have to have a new picture for the business cards and to update my profiles. And a new haircut for the picture.

And I haven’t decided matte or glossy for the cover.

I’m feeling pressured.

Maybe I should tweet that.