The other day, a friend sent me a link to a USA Today article titled Students, officials locking horns over blogs. According to the article, school administrators are less than thrilled about students "blogging and chatting on social networking websites" such as MySpace and Facebook, and although access to such sites is frequently blocked on school computers, "school districts now are reaching into students' home computers, severely punishing and even expelling students for what they write on those sites from home."
Huh? Reaching into students' home computers? Unless I woke up in some kind of bizarre parallel universe this morning, students don't automatically shed their constitutional rights when they walk through the doors of their schools, much less their own homes. Short of libel, overt threats, criminal activity or inciting a riot—and it seems the latter three, at least, would be more likely to result in law-enforcement intervention—it's difficult to imagine a scenario that would allow school officials to punish a student for comments made in the decidedly public sphere of the Internet. There were a few examples in the article: sexual comments about a teacher, criticism aimed at yet another, and disparaging remarks made by a cheerleader, about cheerleaders. The article's author suggests that such situations are only recently finding their way into the legal arena.
The issue has created a free-speech debate between school administrators who are worried about the disruption of the learning process on one hand; and students, parents and First Amendment advocates who are worried about whether overzealous school boards are overstepping their bounds on the other. The debate is beginning to be explored in courts.
I have a different idea. I don't think there's anything new about this debate at all; it's been going on ever since the first disagreement between students and school officials over what's allowable in the school newspaper. Really, it's been going on as long as there have been people with differing points of view and the desire to express them, but students in particular seem to have a knack for expression that isn't necessarily welcome in the education community. The public-education community, to be specific, since the rules are quite different for private institutions.
What's new is the transport mechanism, but that's all. The communication vehicle of old required paper, and relied on time-consuming manual processes to publish and distribute the views of its contributors. The new vehicle requires only a computer and an Internet connection for virtually instantaneous publication on a global scale. While there's obvious debate concerning the impact of the new media on first-amendment rights, the courts—when the debate reaches that level—consistently rule in favor of free speech, regardless of the medium used to convey that speech, and also largely aside from the relative age of the speaker. In other words, the medium and the message exist separately; one doesn't determine, nor undermine, the validity of the other. To quote from part one of the Student Press Law Center's Student Media Guide to Internet Law, the apparatus is revolutionary, but its function is not.
Even the Supreme Court has indicated that the Internet should be viewed, at least legally, as simply another means to get a message to an intended audience. While the apparatus is certainly quite revolutionary, its function is not; the age-old practice of storytelling is no less valuable just because there is greater access to the underlying information.
With this in mind, the debate begins to take on the familiar appearance of the truth versus the powers that be struggles throughout history. In the context of student versus school, especially, these issues aren't new. There's sufficient legal precedent to predict, with some certainty, the outcome of most of these cases. In fact, most seem to be won by the students—with help from the ACLU or other first-amendment-protection groups—which says something about the misguided policies of the school systems involved. Perhaps most disturbing is the idea that these students seem to know more about constitutional principles than those who are paid to teach them.
There are a number of interesting reasons for the students' court victories, and also for their occasional losses. Beneath all the legal language lie a few basic ideas that are really just common sense in action, but tomorrow is another day, and, we hope, another post on this subject.
Most of my clocks are running on Standard Time again, and those I forgot will be set by and by, as their discrepant behavior becomes apparent. It's easier than it used to be anyhow; self-adjusting clocks and watches are a big help, cell-phones generally align themselves with the time signals sent by their service providers, and of course computers have been keeping track of the change for years. Even some of the inexpensive timepieces now make the switch a painless one- or two-button operation. 
In a previous life, I decided ghostwriting would be my new vocation. I don't mean writing books for other people; I wanted smaller, quicker projects such as marketing brochures or newsletters, and technical material. The Web was still a few years away, but the Internet made the idea of long-distance freelancing a compelling possibility. As it turned out, the realities of incompatible software, immature networks, pervasive cyberphobia, and generally negative attitudes toward telecommuting made the whole thing a lot tougher than I had anticipated. I did it, but it sure was a tough gig. 
When we write, the words on the page—whether that page is made of paper or pixels—exist in the realm of vision, but that isn't where they do their most important work. To plagiarize a couple lines from 
What's happening in the present can be interesting, and often vital. But what happened in the past is the foundation of the present; it shows us how we got to the present point, and why. This is the obvious value of history, but sometimes it's just plain fun to leaf through the old photo albums and diaries to see how things looked at the time, and what thoughts were running about in the mind of the diarist. Thanks to the Internet and those who use it, historical perspective is just a Google away. 
From the moment of his birth, David was an adorable little guy. He was always smiling, and even at that age there was something different about him. He didn't seem to require much sleep, preferring instead to gaze at his surroundings with great interest. "Goo," he would say, scrutinizing an object on the other side of the room. "Goo!" 
In your role as self-editor, the challenge is seeing your own words from a different angle. To regurgitate the final line of 
A recurring theme among writers in general is how challenging it is to spot errors in one's own writing. Typos and grammatical glitches practically jump off the page when perpetrated by others, but even after multiple passes through the self-editing loop, clean copy isn't guaranteed. Printing the piece may help; black text on a white sheet of paper often provides the contrast that's missing on a screen layout, especially when the color scheme doesn't lend itself to reading. Certain typefaces make it hard, too, when they're used much beyond logos or advertising. A compelling look and feel is great, but simplicity is more important when reader-comprehension is the ultimate goal. 
Yesterday's announcement of the Google-YouTube union is a little bit exciting. Not just because it involves one of my favorite companies—that's Google, of course—but because it so clearly points out the next step in the evolution of the Internet. While the Net-video takeover may not be good news for those of us who continue to insist on using typed words to communicate, resistance is futile and I know it. The future human race may not have any fingers, but everyone will undoubtedly have really big eyes. 
Or written it, in this case. Those clever turns on well-known phrases always grab my attention, especially when they're somehow related to whatever it is that's running through my brain at the time. Like blogs, for example. This from The Editors Weblog, culled from (what else?) another article on 
Like the Web that spawned them, blogs are part of a grand experiment in communication. It will be interesting, to say the least, to see the social and economic results of this experiment a few years from now. Maybe they won't be called blogs anymore; maybe the concept will be absorbed into the larger homogeneous framework of the Web. I hope so, because the word is really beginning to chafe. I haven't done an actual survey, but I'm thinking the majority of writers—and by that I mean anyone who uses words in their written form—who use a blog would be thrilled to see that abhorrent blogger moniker fade away. 
I've always been a radio head. I love radio in all its incarnations, from two-way communications to local FM broadcast. But the writing is on the wall: radio as I know it is going away, and there's nothing I can do about it. In some cases this is probably a good thing. The AM broadcast bands—both local and shortwave—are mostly noise, and the FM band isn't much better. Not just the sort of noise that digital technology eliminates; it's the human-generated kind that's most irritating. Basically, commercial radio is a joke, and it deserves to die. In his 
