My writing here is sporadic at best, and I even forgot the November 15th anniversary; but this blog is still sputtering along after nineteen years.When I started this thing, George W. Bush had just won his second term. Indiana Democrats were ending their 16 year control of the Governor’s mansion and beginning what will be at least a 20 year stretch in the wilderness. I was the father of a one year old and expecting a second child. They are now in college. I was five years into a job with a firm in Lafayette and five years removed from a stretch working for Indiana’s Legislative Services Agency. I’m now in my 25th year working for Hoffman, Luhman & Masson, and LSA is a distant memory. I’ve done good blogging from time to time. However, some of what I wrote makes me cringe where it was glib, snarky, and reductive — hallmarks of the social media which killed the blogging impulse. It seemed fun at the time, but too much of it is corrosive. Probably what I’m most proud of posting was my Bicentennial series where I wrote something like 115,000 words on the subject of Indiana history over the course of 2015-2016.

In any case, here we go into year 20. As Tennyson said:

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

 

Masson’s Blog is old enough to vote. It’s tough to decide how much has changed since 2004 or remember exactly what that was. One cultural benchmark I like to use is the Dazed and Confused measurement. That movie was released in 1993 and depicted a day in 1976. The cultural shifts between 1976 and 1993 were enormous. It might be due to my age, but the differences between 2004 and 2022 don’t seem anywhere near as pronounced. 1976-1993 gets you from Gerald Ford to Bill Clinton. 2004 to 2022 gets you from George W. Bush to Joe Biden. 1976-1993 gets you from no computers basically anywhere to desktops in a lot of homes. 2004-2022 gets you from flip phones to smart phones. What do we have in the latter time period that even compares to Evel Knievel, Muhammad Ali, and KISS? Probably something, actually. Back in the late 70s, I was a little kid, finely attuned to all of the pop culture phenomena. Now I’m a middle aged dad, probably not far from AARP solicitations. I’m oblivious.

I started this blog in the last days of a Democratic governor. Joe Kernan had just lost an election to Mitch Daniels. There hasn’t been a Democratic governor in Indiana since. Now we’re so far gone from purple to red that Indiana was the only state to elect an election denier to Secretary of State. And not just by a little, resoundingly. They did so in spite of the candidate’s poor past job performance, questions about personal enrichment from campaign funds, questions about whether he complied with residency requirements in past races, and a very qualified Democratic candidate. Back then, Democrats and Republicans battled it out for control of the House of Representatives. That ended following the 2010 election where the Republicans enjoyed massive gains and then leveraged those gains through favorable electoral maps.

Republicans might not have needed those maps to maintain their majorities however. Another thing that changed has been the media landscape. Blogs were in their infancy and traditional media was still relatively strong. Over the years, blogs rose briefly and then fell as Facebook and Twitter became ascendant, algorithms directed attention, Google Reader was killed, and RSS feeds became unused relics. Meanwhile, traditional media was consolidated and hollowed out. More emphasis was placed on cheap wire feeds and opinion pieces rather than local reporting. Those feeds and opinions – along with the classified ads – were easily co-opted by non-local sources. People’s attention is fractured and, to the extent they get news, its usually national in scope and often biased toward the reader’s tribe. I don’t know if the average citizen ever had a lot of patience for detail and nuance, but if they did, they no longer do. Create, like or share a nostalgic meme complaining about kids these days and call it good.

I stopped posting as frequently over the years. I’m probably as guilty as anyone about jumping over to social media. A quick hit on Twitter or Facebook largely scratched whatever itch got me blogging. And those quick hits usually got a lot more attention than the detailed stuff I post here. Even here, I learned that a quick post about Daylight Saving Time got a lot more attention than some nuanced explanation of tax legislation or whatever. As people who have stuck with me this long know, my subject matter has become painfully focused on education issues generally and West Lafayette schools in particular. My kids are nearing the end of their days there, however, and I wouldn’t be surprised if my focus changes. I think schools are extremely important for communities, whether you happen to have kids in them or not, but I can’t imagine I will fee that as acutely when those public schools are no longer part of my family’s day-to-day life.

And I guess that brings up some more big changes. When I started this blog, I was in my early 30s. I had a very young family. I was only a few years removed from working with the Legislative Services Agency and a good deal of my day-job was tied up doing collections. Now, I am in my early 50s and am nearly an empty-nester. I have not done collections work for a decade, and my main focus is municipal law as county attorney for Tippecanoe County. When I started blogging, I was a relative newcomer to the area and, in fact, lived up in Monticello. Now, I’ve lived in West Lafayette for over a decade and feel deeply tied to the County and the city.

I guess I don’t have any big thoughts about What It All Means. The Internet is awash in hot takes, so I suppose it can do without one more for the moment. I’ll keep blogging when the mood strikes.

A friend of mine on the WELL made a comment that prompted a thought.

I recall from my history classes some discussion about the American frontier and its effect on the development of the country. How it was often attracted people who, for one reason or another, couldn’t function very well in established society. I wonder if there is a sort of memetic frontier dynamic. People who, for whatever reason, don’t thrive under mainstream ideologies, religions, common wisdom, or other narrative structures (not sure if that’s the right phrase) are attracted to worldviews where they have more mental freedom of motion. Where they have a better chance of rising in whatever power structure is involved.

The Internet kind of opened up a new memetic frontier into which people are rushing in great numbers away from the received wisdom and existing narrative structures. Just an idle thought on a Saturday morning.

 

My first post was 16 years ago. I can’t say this blog is still going strong, but it’s still going. When I started, I kind of had in mind a resource that Hoosiers could use to comment on topics of the day and maybe provide some links to legal resources, commentary on legislation, and discussion of legal opinions. With respect to the legislature, in part, I wanted to show that there was more going on with the General Assembly than just the stuff that hit the headlines. I was also inspired by the national blogs that were starting to go strong back then but whereas that space already seemed crowded, the state level seemed wide open. On top of that, my experience at Legislative Services (only 5 years prior at that point) could be helpful.

Early on, I had the notion that maybe I’d recruit some friends with other areas of expertise: business, science, medicine, etc. That never panned out. I was a little surprised by what seemed to draw traffic and what didn’t. People were *really* passionate about Daylight Saving Time. I could put up a quick hit on DST and get a lot of traffic. Meanwhile, a deep dive into a complicated piece of legislation would be less popular. It gave me some sympathy for what news organizations must struggle with.

Social media — mainly Facebook and Twitter came along — and made it easier for me to scratch my writing itch by just posting something quick there. So, I wrote less here. Which was probably just as well because that’s where people re-located in any case. It wasn’t just me – the entire blogosphere shrank. But, I keep plugging along – usually going through a burst of productivity when the General Assembly introduces its bills. I’m happy to still have this place to write and still interact with some old friends.

At the moment, I feel like social media isn’t giving me what it used to. The algorithms seem to feed me angry political stuff which gets old after awhile. I don’t have a good sense of whether my friends are still posting about their kids or what they had for lunch or cat pictures or whatever. I don’t see that stuff, but it could be that the algorithm buries it. So, maybe I’ll be writing more here. Maybe not. We’ll see. That’s been one of the joys of having a blog – I can do it when I feel like, and not do it when I don’t feel like it. For those of you who are still dropping by, thank you!

Stephen Dowling, writing for the BBC, has an article about the transient nature of the Internet and how so much of what was posted in the first ten years just isn’t there anymore.

If Brewster Kahle hadn’t set up the Internet Archive and started saving things – without waiting for anyone’s permission – we’d have lost everything.

. . .

“It’s not only the early material. Most of the internet is not being stored,” he says.

“The Internet Archive first started archives pages in 1996. That’s five years after the first webpages were set up. There’s nothing from that era that was ever copied from the live web.” Even the first web page set up in 1991 no longer exists; the page you can view on the World Wide Web Consortium is a copy made a year later.

The article also mentions the shift from tangible media to electronic media in terms of what we have in our private collections — email and pictures and whatnot. Almost none of that is going to be gathered by archivists. It notes that the British Archives, for example, has collected a lot of letters between people. MySpace recently lost years of music and photos. Google Plus is gone.

This isn’t entirely new or different. There are huge gaps in historical records, and I imagine future historians are going to have a wealth of material regardless of how much we lose. In the early days of television, they didn’t necessarily keep tapes of the broadcasts. But, I was put in mind of Harold Innis’ Empire and Communications. I’ve only read pieces of it, so take my descriptions and Wikipedia pastings with a grain of salt.

[He] argued that the “bias” of each medium either toward space or toward time helps determine the nature of the civilization in which that medium dominates. “Media that emphasize time are those that are durable in character such as parchment, clay and stone,” he writes in his introduction. These media tend to favour decentralization. “Media that emphasize space are apt to be less durable and light in character, such as papyrus and paper.” These media generally favour large, centralized administrations. Innis believed that to persist in time and to occupy space, empires needed to strike a balance between time-biased and space-biased media.

What we have now in electronic communications do not emphasize time. With the Internet, we have an ephemeral media that almost entirely negates space. “While time-biased media favour stability, community, tradition and religion, space-biased media facilitate rapid change, materialism, secularism and empire. . . . [S]ocieties that depend on space-biased media . . .  tend to favour abstract thought and control over space. They have little regard for tradition and when compared with oral societies, their ways of thinking are apt to be more rational, linear and impersonal.”

I’m not sure I entirely buy Innis’ theories, but he was a smart guy, so there is probably something to this. Our preferred communications are going to shape our culture and politics. If Innis is right, we’ll tend toward more rapidly changing, materialistic, secular society governed in a centralized, imperial manner. Right now, it feels as if things are splintering, not centralizing. But, that could be the old power structures giving way before centralized structures develop. Or maybe it’s all a bunch of hooey and things will stay more or less the same.

State Impact Indiana has been a good resource for Indiana education news since 2011. It has announced that it will stop updating its website in favor of having its stories more diffusely spread through NPR and PBS affiliates:

That change has prompted changes with StateImpact. There are no plans to update the project’s website, indianapublicmedia.org/stateimpact. That’s because local NPR and PBS station partners’ websites are home to stories from the Indiana Public Broadcasting team. These in-depth stories will be available on StateImpact’s social media accounts.

That’s a little disappointing. I have StateImpact in my Feedly newsreader. So, when they post a new story, I’d have it there waiting for me when I checked my news feed. I guess I can add a few more NPR and/or PBS sites to my reader — assuming they have RSS feeds. But, I’m afraid those stories will be mixed in with Trump’s outrage of the hour or whatever the hot issue of the day might be. I can also follow the social media feeds, but there I’m at the mercy of Twitter or Facebook’s algorithms. (You don’t have a social media account so much as Twitter or Facebook has an account that you write content for.)

More generally, I’ve been hoping for a return to the use of RSS feeds, the open web, or whatever you want to call it. I don’t know if this is like hoping for a return to a simpler time when everyone wore hats or a realistic anticipation that people will get sick of social media antics.

I was having a pleasant back-and-forth on one of my more conservative friend’s Facebook page which led to a probably overly-long-for-Facebook comment on my part. But, it seems like a good enough basis for a blog post. Also, a periodic reminder to seek out people of good will who have different opinions. Try not to get mad at each other. The discussions will be good for you.

Anyway, the subject of taxes came up. I mused about the relationship between taxes and happiness indexes because high-tax areas often seem to be areas where people rate themselves happy. He correctly pointed out that those indexes are subjective and also observed that he and I are happy living in low-tax Indiana. Which led to this, from me:

I think a fair amount of my happiness comes from having located in the People’s Republic of West Lafayette. It’s not very high tax or liberal compared to your average college town, but compared to the rest of Indiana probably more so.

Part of what makes me happy about the community is that there isn’t a lot of (noticeable anyway) dysfunction in the people with whom I come into contact. West Lafayette is a bubble. Tippecanoe County is less so but still a bit of a bubble when compared to the rest of Indiana.

The question is whether spreading social services more broadly can, in effect, expand and strengthen that “bubble?” Or, to get out of using the mildly pejorative “bubble” characterization, can spreading social services more widely reduce the dysfunction in the general population? Can taxing the rich and spending it on the poor effectively improve education, improve health, strengthen families, make people more productive, and make communities happier places to live? How much can you tax before the good things produced by the spending is outweighed by the unhappiness created by taxing and taking peoples’ money?

Then you get to the moral question — even if you generate significantly more happiness through taxing and spending, is it morally justifiable to take from the few and spend on the many? On this point, I’m probably never going to have a meeting of the minds with the “taxation is theft” purists. But, as to the previous point, I think there is a lot to discuss and to be learned about what sorts of social spending is effective and about when you hit a point of diminishing returns with respect to taxation.

Twelve years ago today, I started this blog. It was prompted in large measure by my unhappiness with the 2004 election results. Boy, look how much things have changed!

At the time, the ground was thick with bloggers about national issues. I thought maybe I’d focus on the State of Indiana. My productivity has ebbed and flowed, and my focus has wandered. Look at my Indiana Bicentennial digression. Some years I felt like I had the General Assembly under a microscope. Other years, I feel like I barely paid attention. I attribute the relative longevity of my blog to my willingness to let the quantity and focus of my blogging ebb and flow.

In any case, I’ll be interested to see where year 13 takes us. If you’re still reading: thank you!

The latest Cracked Podcast (one of my favorites by the way) is entitled “How evolution made us unfit for the modern world.” One way our bodies have not kept pace with the modern world is that our brain is set up to want to take action in response to negative information. Predator nearby? Flee or fight. Hungry? Go find food. But, now, the world is more complicated, and we’re receiving information from everywhere — much of it not particularly relevant to your situation. But, while intellectually, you might understand that the information doesn’t matter to your situation; on a more basic level your brain might have an emotional response. This causes more of a free floating anxiety that isn’t easily discharged.

An interesting statistic that the podcast pointed to had to do with the disconnect between people’s perception of the national well-being versus their own well-being. There is persistently a huge gap and has been for a long time. About 85% of people are generally happy with their life and the direction it’s going. By contrast, about 70% of people are generally unhappy with the direction they perceive that the country is headed. I think the reason for that is that folks receive fairly direct information about their own lives and generally have a certain amount of control to deal with the problems they do have. Meanwhile, information about the state of the nation comes from a lot of sources with reasons to emphasize the negative.News organizations know you’ll stay tuned through the commercials for bad news. Advertisers want to let you know that there are problems. Lots of problems. But they have the solution! And at such a reasonable price!

The Cracked podcast also points out that your attention is a finite resource. And the more attention you are paying to anxiety-provoking information outside of your control, the less attention you have for things that bring meaning or joy to your life. As I was considering these things, without me particularly trying, the Colin Kaepernick sitting-during-the-national-anthem-as-protest situation was brought to my attention. And on this topic, people have opinions. Strong opinions. It’s about perfect for Internet rage du jour. The facts are reasonably simple. You can understand them pretty quickly without some egghead pointing out too many extra details or nuances. The issues involved have a lot of emotional resonance: patriotism and protest! Have at it! “You hate America!” “You want black people to shut up!” “I like exclamation points!”

I’m not saying that you have to or should ignore these issues. And I’m the last person to criticize media-consumption from the Internet. But we should be mindful of the fact that the information we consume has an impact on our well-being. Sometimes a candy bar is just the thing — because the taste is so good or you need a spike of sugar immediately. But, if you eat junk food all day every day, it’s going to affect you. So, watch what you’re putting into your mind. It’s a dangerous mediascape out there!