Lens4anEye

Union Station, Washington, DC Social media was suppose to be "all things to all people." Its promise was to be an avenue of access for everyone to to have access to everyone else. The lure was for everyone to have a voice and be able to express themselves. But then it became its own worst nightmare. For early adopters it was like being able to walk around the town square listening to whoever was speaking, singing; looking at the sidewalk art and performers. It was the place to make yourself known for your message, art, politics, philosophy, etc. The atmosphere was more like a Renaissance Fair than livestock auction. The free exchange of ideas and culture became overshadowed by the sellers and professional advertisers. Every message was "brought to you by" some other paid entity. In short, the fun became serious. The content became business. The debate and exchange of ideas became propaganda. Information became co-mixed with disinformation.  Crevices and and cracks f

Staying in front of an internet audience is a difficult task.  Even if you were the only one on the only 24/7 channel which could not be turned off, you’d have to attract attention to that channel from all the other audio and visual stimulation being pushed at the audience.  Click here for picture albums The major plot arc of the TV series, Max Headroom (1988-89), was competing media networks which blasted their content to screens all over the city. Each network needed to keep one-upping the others in ratings to keep the advertisers happy and rolling in revenues.  Nobody could ever relax and reap benefits of accumulated standing. The audience was notoriously fickle. Even in the middle of a police chase or 5 alarm structure fire the competition could siphon viewership with a more sensational story.  The story was the essential element, one which was supported by the “footage”. Live cameras would catch raw reality and broadcast it as is.  That near future scenario is now the

New URL Format at ClickaSnap I haven’t seen the new CAS format for URLs yet that will start being generated on August 10 but there will be some far reaching connectivity outages.  This posting has been written without links to CAS to avoid having to change them later. The current URL format is scheduled to be “redirected” to the new locations through October 10. After that date all current links between CAS and subscribers’ media will go dark.  Going dark means all existing published links will show as broken. Possibly a “404 - file not found” error will result. Such a condition reflects poorly on the owners who has that show up on their web pages. People who maintain their own web presence will be able to edit the HTML of their pages to accommodate the changes but… there are places where editing is not possible.  Tweeted images, album links, and the profile link itself are not editable. I believe (X) will still have the image which was used but the link will be dead. To