Whilst in Chicago the only newspaper I read apart from the free Chicago Reader was the Saturday issue of The New York Times. During the week I would keep a breast of current affairs with NPR and would feed any further curiousity with The BBC. Saturday's NYT had everything I was looking for, a round up of the weeks news, a consise overview of sections and a great business supplement. Back in the UK though I have picked up the broadsheet again on a daily basis. Perusing the front pages at the news stand, be passing the red inked gossip tabloids showing even more cheek than yesterday, I ultimately surcome to the same conclusion, handing over £0.80 for The Guardian. Monday's additional supplement (the sports pullout is daily) is Media and in today's Jeff Jarvis wrote an interesting article on new technology and its effect on older mediums, specifically the iPhone vs the newspaper. I hear his concerns. Growing up, my dad bought The Daily Mail, reading it from front to back, skipping the celebrity gossip, lingering over the sports pages and completing the crossword all during breakfast. This is where my fondness for the newspaper comes from, though I take a more leisurely approach and only glance at the crossword. Today we don't simply want to be told, but also to learn, discover and experience in some respect the events of the world. That is the heart of the internet. It enables us to travel to the unreachable and gives us insight into lives we could not know of otherwise. Sounds a lot like journalism to me. There will always be people who prefer the tactile quality of a newspaper, just as technology is always advancing and making information faster to access. Newspapers need to embrace technology and learn to use it to enhance the experience, which ultimately means making the online version more user friendly and less like a flat screen version of the original.

Ill Communication

It has come to my attention that as we ever advance in the technological world, we simulatneously reverse towards a more illiterate one. This has been slapping me in the face with almost ever text message and half arsed email I have received of late. Is there no one out there who remembers how to structure a letter? OK, so I'm not saying that every email that enters my inbox needs to start "Dear Miss..." have a middle body subject and close by thanking me for my time and swift response, but I do feel that there is something lacking in these text based communications that will eventually kick us in the arse... text! All I'm asking for is real words and may be the odd complete coherent sentence. With all this "on the fly" shorthand a simple message can be read with multiple connotations, that I have often found myself stepping out of my surroundings to phone the transmitter and have an old fashioned telephone conversation to clear up what I preceived through text as world war III. Predictive text I can forgive, but sloppy writing is another fish altogether.

Visual Representation

As we become more reliant on technology in the everyday, spending ever increasing hours in front of a backlight screen, we distance ourselves from each other. Deliberating over application & software problems that will eventually be solved through painstaking determination and conversations in rooms we will never enter. We sit alone in crowded cafes using their free wifi, reaching out to people with similar facebook profiles, scanning flickr for photos of a possible cat or boy/girlfriend. Photography is an obvious medium with its relative ease in basic function and now with digital cameras making instant gratification, erase and re-record so much simplier, everyone can be whomever they want to be (or want to appear to be). In "Internet & Identity" photographer Stephen Miller puts a sharp focus on this trend & widely utilized social behaviour. Let's hope the days of pheromones & shy glances are not over for a long time to come.