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Strategies & Market Trends : Piffer OT - And Other Assorted Nuts -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Carolyn who wrote (9065)	12/5/1999 12:50:00 PM
From: arno	Respond to of 63513

"We will not self-destruct. We will not self-destruct. We will not self-destruct."

To: Carolyn who wrote (9065)	12/5/1999 6:53:00 PM
From: John Pitera	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 63513

Hi Carolyn, This is really Heavy-duty "OT" and I even have a link for the script to "Annie Hall" below -g- December 3, 1999 Coming to an Argument Near You: McLuhan, Cornell and the Internet By JASON FRY and MEGAN DOSCHER THE WALL STREET JOURNAL INTERACTIVE EDITION Never mind all that blue-sky blathering about how the Internet will reshape our daily lives -- most such predictions are about things that would be neat for about two days after you got them and then be revealed as little parcels of hell. Who, besides engineers, really wants Internet-enabled kitchen appliances and milk cartons? C'mon, you know how this would work: You'd get an instant message every two minutes from the fridge shrieking about lint under the grill and e-mail messages from the milk carton offering dire predictions of impending emptiness. Is there anything the Internet can do for our daily lives that would be really useful -- without spawning hideous unintended consequences that would make us wish for a do-over? Well, yes. Here's an irritating part of normal life that the Internet could make a thing of the past. Let's call the solution to this irritation the McLuhan Effect. (And no, it's not some tedious koan about the role of mass media, so relax.) In "Annie Hall," Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are standing on line at a New York movie theater, with Mr. Allen becoming increasingly annoyed by a blowhard standing directly behind him who's windily pontificating on the work of Fellini, Beckett and Marshall McLuhan. Mr. Allen finally snaps and accuses the man of knowing nothing about Mr. McLuhan's work, to which the man retorts that he teaches a class at Columbia University called "TV Media and Culture." It's the kind of pointless, incredibly frustrating argument every one of us has had: The other person needs to be proven wrong to the point of public humiliation, but that's not going to happen, because you're not a McLuhan scholar (or a scholar of whatever) and can't prove your case from half-remembered stuff you read 10 years ago. Instead, you go home furious -- and if you're actually angry enough, you thumb through a book or two until you find the passages that would have won the case. Which only makes things worse, right? Ah, but of course the scene in "Annie Hall" ends differently. "I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here," Mr. Allen tells his tormentor, pulling Marshall McLuhan himself out of a nook in the theater lobby. "You know nothing of my work," Mr. McLuhan tells the aghast man. "How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing." Mr. Allen then turns to the camera and says, "Boy, if life were only like this!" For years, newsrooms have been places where arguments like that actually have a chance of being resolved. This week, one of the odder burrs under the saddle of World Trade Organization protesters was that the "WTO kills butterflies." The complaint is that agriculture conglomerates, in an effort at producing natural pesticides, are adding disease-resistant genes to corn -- producing corn that kills butterflies which try to pollinate the plants. As you might guess, that sparked no small amount of amazed commentary in the Interactive Journal's newsroom: Who knew? Could that really be true? But while a couple of us were gaping about this (and trying to find some grounds for a pointless but entertaining office argument), another reporter was searching through the tidal wave of articles that pour through our computer systems every day. And what did he find but a Houston Chronicle article noting that the Evil Butterfly Plot isn't quite so cut-and-dried. Cornell researchers did conduct an experiment and found that some Monarch caterpillars did die after eating milkweed -- their exclusive food, which is often found around cornfields -- dusted with bioengineered-corn pollen. But that isn't the whole story. The researchers, while concerned, warned that they couldn't predict how serious the risk to butterflies is without a lot more data. And of course there's the larger point that farmers who plant genetically altered corn don't have to use as much pesticide, which kills butterflies deader than doornails. Having information like that at your fingertips is great for defusing those butterfly-murder arguments that break out in newsrooms, but not much use anywhere else. But that's changing -- and quickly. If any of you are reading this on your PalmPilot while standing in line at a movie theater in front of someone ranting about dead butterflies, this is your lucky day. The rest of us will have to wait -- but not for too long. Internet-enabled cell phones, pagers and PIMs are an explosive market. Right now, they're only good for retrieving small bits of data from preselected sources, but soon you'll have a device in your hand that's capable of quickly and easily searching the entire Net. And then we'll be able to pull out Marshall McLuhan -- or a Cornell butterfly researcher -- whenever we need him in a movie-theater line. It may not be Internet-enabled milk cartons, but here's betting it will be a lot more useful. idt.unit.no