The mysterious case of Ms. Carrie Prejean

[kandrathe]

It isn't the media that worries me. It is the widespread intrusiveness with no societal customs to manage it.

I agree, although, I am also worried about a media which now has 24x7 programming, over 1000's of channels and infinite internet content that has no compunction against broadcasting anything they deem to be newsworthy. Technology has also changed the media from one where space on a newspaper page was considered valuable, and where editors needed to consider the worthiness of an article then edit it down to its most cohesive minimal form.

As an aside, I have the same opinion about software, where the ever expanding nature of memory and disk storage has allowed software engineers to write sloppy code (bloatware). I was pretty proud of my 1980 achievement of compressing a huge word list into less than 50K bytes for a readability utility disk that needed to fit onto a 160KB 5 1/4" floppy disk. That software would allow a teacher to type in a 100 word sample of text, and would then use 6 different readability tests to analyze the text. The other difficult part for that product was that it also needed to calculate the number of syllables in words, and had to perform all these tests working to data directly on the floppy disk within 2 x 4096 byte memory segments. It was hard to make it fit, and also work.

So, I guess tight spaces force people to be more selective in what goes into that space. In the media world, the expansion into a 24 hour x 7 day news broadcast, internet, and 1000's of digital channels has only created more space, which mostly gets filled with poor quality content. This is where then our privacy is sacrificed upon the alter of newsworthiness. Because the standards of newsworthiness, and content of the news itself has fallen into the toilet.