Multimedia Letters-to-the-Editor

In the old days if you had something to say you'd sit down at your desk and write a letter to the editor. You'd walk the letter over to the mailbox fully realizing that you had a one-in-a-thousand chance of having your letter printed.. That was then. This is now.

Today when you have something to say you compose a song, upload it to YouTube, the Internet Archive, or Blip.tv, and then submit the song to Digg. Maybe your item will rise to the front page of Digg and maybe it won't. But here's the kicker. The people who decide whether that happens are not two people sitting in some newspaper office someplace. They're several thousand people sitting at their computers – just like you are.

Now that Digg is getting more web visitors than the New York Times, it makes a lot more sense to submit an item to Digg than it does to send a letter-to-the-editor to the New York Times. To rise to the front page of Digg, the multimedia item you submit has got to be good – meaning it must be creative, authentic, meaningful, relevant, and proportionate.

Here is what such multimedia might look like. Two years ago the New York Times published an article that the digital divide is no longer a concern because African Americans are now on the Internet. I took offense at the article because of the harmful generalizations inherent in the piece. In my free time I take donated computers to people who don't have them, and let me tell you, there's a lot of folks out there who don't have them.

And so I created this two-minute multimedia, Whiskey in Your Jar, using Camtasia Studio and a public domain folk melody. I retained the chorus of the folk song and substituted my own lyrics for the verses. I then presented the lyrics right beside the article as I sang the song. Thanks to the Internet Archive, I uploaded this multimedia to the web for free.

Here's a rich irony in the above story. I wanted to share this multimedia with the author of the above-mentioned article. So I went looking for his email address. Couldn't be found. He is one of the reporters at the New York Times without a public email address.

A digital divide? Yes, the digital divide is alive and well right there at the New York Times. Reporters writing about the digital divide are not reachable for feedback about what they're written.

With that kind of irony, I couldn't help but create this spoof YouTube video, chosen as a YouTube Editor's Choice in April, 2007. And I thank PCWorld.com for giving me this forum to blog in. The conversation has begun here. How long will it take for the conversation to begin elsewhere? Two years? Five years? Ten years?

It might begin elsewhere after the elsewhere is no more.

Phil Shapiro

The blogger has been working to bridge the digital divide for 20 years in the Washington DC-area. He loves Macs, adores Linux and likes Windows. Reader responses welcome in the comments below or at philshapiroblogger@gmail.com

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