Carolyn, you have a very cool SI Personal Page.
I see you like Egyptology, Have you Read Peter Lemesurier's seminal work "The Great Pyramid Decoded" a good read.
The Egyptians built the Golden mean, the 1.618 ratio into the Pyramid's construction. The 1.618 relationship occurs as a logrithmic spiral unfolds. It is also seen in the way Fractals unfold. Fibonacci ratio's are used by some savvy mkt participants to find retracement levels and to do price and time projections.
Going Back to Marshall McLuhan, he was one of the big heavy-weight visionaries. He coined the phrase "Global Village" so he's got that going for him, which is nice -g-
here is another reference to McLuhan that the Journal worked into a 1998 internet story on the release of the Starr report.:
___________________________
September 14, 1998
Starr Report Makes History
And Marks Web's Emergence
By BART ZIEGLER, THOMAS E. WEBER and MICHAEL W. MILLER
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
It began with a single 3 «-inch floppy disk with WordPerfect files, sealed in a white envelope buried in the vanloads of cartons Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr sent Congress.
With dizzying speed, it turned into an
information wildfire that sent the Starr report
almost instantaneously onto millions of
computer and TV screens. And as it raced
around the world, the Starr report made communications history just as dramatically as it was making political history.
Technical staffers at the House Oversight
Committee grabbed the floppy disk and
worked frantically to convert its contents
into HTML. By the next afternoon they
had copied those Web files onto
hundreds of CD-ROMs, for government Web sites and news organizations. Soon it had proliferated onto hundreds of sites around the world.
"Everybody was seeing it at once-
Congress, the news media, citizens," said
Barry M. Schuler, president of the
interactive-services unit at America
Online Inc. "When this period of history is written, we may well look on this as defining the medium the way the JFK-Nixon debates defined television."
At America Online, the world's biggest on-ramp to the Web, members spent a collective 10.1 million hours on-line on Friday, the first day ever over the 10 million mark. In the first 24 hours, a file containing an exact duplicate of the entire report was downloaded fully 750,000 times. Those people now have their own personal copies of the Starr report stored on the hard drives of their PCs. And scores of other Internet services posted stratospheric numbers of their own.
But as the Starr report was creating a new model for the dissemination of information, it was also offering an unsettling lesson in the brutal new rules of democracy in the age of the Web. The prosecutor had the extraordinary power to present his combative case against President Clinton directly to the nation, unfiltered by any intermediary. The raunchy recollections and quotes of a 24-year-old were instantly transformed into the permanent record of history. Parents, teachers and news editors struggled to make split-second decisions about how to present Mr. Starr's X-rated avalanche of graphic sex scenes. And Americans everywhere were left trying to assess the fate of the republic at warp speed, like stock traders screaming out their orders while prices skitter across their screens.
"I believe we're going to a political system in which there will be a series of pulses, where everyone in the nation will become interested in something, and they will all develop an opinion of it fairly quickly. That model is one that is becoming more and more a part of our society." said Eric Schmidt, an early pioneer of the Internet and now chief executive of software maker Novell Inc.
He got his first glimpse of the report watching CNN, and he was fascinated to see the TV reporter pointing to the Starr report as it appeared on a computer screen-a common tableau across the airwaves Friday. "To me this was extraordinary," Mr. Schmidt said. "The Internet had become the document of record for an impeachment."
The French-language Swiss newspaper Le Temps was harsher. It ran an editorial Saturday under the headline "www.inquisition.com," comparing the publication of the report on the Web to "a Stalinist trial."
It all added up to a watershed event that some scholars had been warning about for decades. Marshall McLuhan, who coined the term "global village," wrote in 1964: "When information moves at the speed of signals in the central nervous system ... the old patterns of psychic and social adjustment become irrelevant."
"This is the global village," the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut told a French television network last week "and the village, contrary to the city, has always been a place where conformity, narrow-minded snooping, denunciation, gossip and poison-pen letters reign. This is what we see with the Internet now."
If the global village had a town square late last week, it was 22 miles away from Washington, in Reston, Va.: America Online's network-operations center. There, the scene Friday resembled the countdown for a moon shot. In a darkened control room, technicians huddled over computers, whispered commands over walkie-talkie headsets and awaited an onslaught of Starr-gazers.
Shortly before 3 p.m., word crackled over a speakerphone: AOL staffers had received a copy of the CD-ROM and loaded it onto the service's giant complex of server computers. Matt Korn, the senior vice president who runs AOL's network operations, typed a few keystrokes then watched as the Starr report appeared on his screen-meaning that AOL's 13 million users now had unfettered access. Mr. Korn high-fived a colleague; "Do we have any virtual champagne?" he joked.
On a giant monitor in AOL's control room, a single crawling red line told the tale. The line, charting the number of users logged on to the service, began to climb rapidly once the report became available. Before long, AOL had more than 600,000 members logged on at once-some 25% higher than normal for a Friday afternoon.
Across the country, another nerve center was the Silicon Valley office of Yahoo! Inc. Representatives from Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's office, fearful that Congress's own Web sites wouldn't be able to handle the traffic, had called the Internet company's co-founder Jerry Yang on Thursday about carrying the report on its heavily used hub of the Web.
"I think we all began to realize the ramifications of the interest on Thursday morning when the Congress said it intended to make the material available to the public," said Brad Rubin, Yahoo news producer. "Like a lot of news events, like Princess Diana's death, the surge was going to be huge."
There was "a hypersecond pause to debate how it should all be done," said Srinija Srinivasan, who is in charge of Yahoo's directory of Internet links. The company didn't want to seem to be exploiting the report's racy material to boost Yahoo traffic. To combat that, Yahoo's link was decidedly simple, a single line that read "Starr Report." The Yahoo brand name and advertisements were kept off the site.
The company also didn't want to link its well-known name directly with either side of the controversy. So when the White House issued a rebuttal of its own before the Starr report came out, Yahoo posted it immediately.
That wasn't easy, said Mr. Rubin, because the White House didn't send the files via the Internet. "I called the White House to get a file sent to us, so we could post it easily, and they said they only posted it on the White House Web site, and we should get it off there," he said. By contrast, congressional staffers sent Yahoo the Starr report via a password-protected e-mail file transfer.
When Web sites began carrying the report, work ground to a halt across the country as employees gathered around glowing computer screens. Some companies, such as investment firm Legg Mason in New York, fearing corporate network overloads, blocked or forbade employees from reading the report. Others didn't feel guilty about carving out some work time to peruse the giant document.
"I feel that I paid for a portion of this, and it's my right to read it, disseminate it and make my own conclusions," said Marilyn Casey, a 29-year-old sales representative in Atlanta who read the report on-line.
Some sites couldn't handle the rush. During a one-hour period Friday afternoon, 89% of all users trying to access the House of Representatives' primary site were denied entry, according to Keynote Systems Inc., a company, based in San Mateo, Calif., that monitors Internet performance.
The Washington Post's Web site crashed around 2 p.m. Friday, even before it had posted the Starr report, a spokeswoman confirmed. The crash came as the Post site's traffic load crested to three times the amount of its previous record day: Aug. 17, when President Clinton testified before the Starr grand jury.
Internet service providers reported seeing increases of up to 10% in their traffic during the day Friday. But experts said the increase wasn't enough to slow down the Internet's performance in general, and companies that operate the Internet's backbones, or main arteries, expressed little concern about the network's ability to handle the traffic.
A lot of traffic came from the nation's schools, where politicians and educators have been racing to build hookups to the Internet. At Palo Alto High School in northern California, principal Marilyn Cook found herself bewildered by the torrent of explicit sex scenes that was flooding her network. "The irony is that with all [the lawmakers] being enraged about pornography on the Internet, they should launch it themselves," she said.
But her clear position was that the report ran afoul of her school's Internet policy. "The Starr report being launched on a government site doesn't make it legitimate viewing for students," she said. "There is no doubt that if students access something on a government site that is sexually explicit, there is not a student here who doesn't know that isn't proper reading from our point of view."
She added: "It may be that next week we will have to be alert that sexually explicit material not allowed in school is coming from an unexpected site. We always monitor sites but don't usually monitor a government site."
Newspaper and television editors struggled with the same question. "This is pretty strong business," CBS's Bob Schieffer warned viewers as he read from the report. At the urging of colleague Dan Rather, Mr. Schieffer edited out the most graphic details as he went along.
Many newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, printed special sections containing the entire report. The Detroit Free Press didn't send the report to its subscribers, declaring it contained "language we would not ordinarily send to your home." But it printed the report in a special section for sale on newsstands.
The Daily Press in Newport News, Va., with a circulation of about 100,000, ran a 16-page special tabloid section excerpting the report. "We stewed over the more appalling passages, and there was just some language I wouldn't want to see in my newspaper," said editor Will Corbin. He also said he "warned the hell out of readers" on both the front page and inside the tabloid. "I said this is not for children, and if they are upset by graphic depictions of sexual explicitness, don't read it."
The St. Petersburg Times in Florida ran three pages of excerpts that included most of the salacious details from Ms. Lewinsky's testimony, including the now-famous cigar episode. At the last minute, the paper added a warning in bold type: "The following excerpts of the Starr report contain a number of sexually explicit references. It is the policy of the St. Petersburg Times to edit graphic references that may be gratuitous in order to respect the sensibilities of our large and diverse readership. In this case, we believe there is compelling interest to provide this official material verbatim."
In the end, the paper took the most heat not for its excerpts, but for a Saturday headline: "The story of a naive intern, lust and love." Said Chris Lavin, assistant managing editor/world for the paper, "We are getting beat up for the word naive."
ú Rebecca Quick, Wendy Bounds, John Simons and Kara Swisher contributed to this article. |
