Though the web offers us an abundance of important, entertaining and useful information, occasionally it shows itself as a dumping ground for old crap. Quite a bit of that crap, unsurprisingly, comes from me.

Case in point, this excerpt from an article by Susan G. Strother in the November 2, 1997 edition of the Orlando Sentinel:

With a click of the mouse, William Chinda caused images to flicker across the computer screen.

He saw a shopping mall, a man in Mickey Mouse ears, the same man laughing hysterically and waving his arms. The frenetic scenes, titled ”Inertia: An Examination of the Narcoleptic Cyborg,” lasted for several minutes until William moved on.

”This is pretty cool,” said the Cypress Creek High School junior. ”But it’s a little weird.”

Welcome to cyber-culture, where the computer is as much a part of art as traditional paints and canvas. The Orlando Museum of Art this weekend is home to more than 50 pieces of computer-driven artwork – composed by people who call themselves ”digital artists” – in Art & Technology ‘97: Beyond the Virtual Edge.

Really? I have the opportunity to make a statement that will somehow encapsulate the importance of technology on the future of creative endeavors and the best I could come up with was THAT?

When I was 16, I desperately wanted to do something with my life that would involve art and computers, and I remember really looking forward to that exhibition. Unfortunately, what I found was fairly uninteresting, and the Sentinel reporter caught me completely off guard.

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Of course, when I did know exactly what to say, the results were not much better. This is a letter to the editor, published on February 3, 1999, in the Sentinel:

FOR NEARLY 10 years, I have lived in the suburban wasteland midway between downtown Orlando and Disney World. What I see every day driving these neighborhoods is disturbing: traffic jams, lack of trees and a general feeling of artificiality. It reminds me very much of Los Angeles – a city full of people who found the American dream in nice cars and suburban houses but lost touch with the city.

Light rail won’t guarantee that Orlando won’t become New Los Angeles, but it may just slow the process by stopping the dreaded sprawl monster that is responsible for the decline of American cities. William Chinda, ORLANDO

That was off the charts on the pretentiousness scale. It actually reads more like an artist’s statement (I’m pretty sure it was adapted from one) than anything else.

At the time, I remember reading nothing but architecture magazines and articles about new urbanism. I also spent my days slogging through traffic to get to school, dreaming of the day when I could get out of Orlando. To me, the city felt like a backwater that would be left even further behind without any serious reconsideration of its transit scheme, which was being vehemently debated at the time. A decade later, things still seem contentious and unclear.

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Before the Internet, I remember going to the library and being amazed by the vast number of drawers that held nothing but microfiche of newspaper articles. The machinery was so damn complicated, I never quite figured out how to work it, having to bug the librarians for help anytime I wanted to look for something.

But now I can find any article I want, “with a click of the mouse.”

Unfortunately for me, I won’t be able to write a blog 10 years from now complaining how my terribly pretentious and nonsensical writing from now is still on Google.

There was an interesting project brought up on the most recent episode of This Week in Google (one of the more headier technology podcasts that I listen to) – it’s called Picture the Impossible, an alternate reality game (ARG) developed by students at the Rochester Institute of Technology and run in conjunction with the local newspaper.

I’ve written before about how newspapers really need to innovate in order to survive, so it’s really fascinating to see a project that takes traditional media into a space (interactive gaming) that you absolutely would not expect. In some ways, however, it really isn’t such a bizarre move. Newspapers have traditionally had readers who read mainly for the puzzles inside – my wife occasionally picks up the free paper just for the crossword.

Additionally, the ARG involves games, trivia and scavenger hunts that require knowledge of the local history of Rochester. This takes advantage of the newspaper’s core competencies of both generating local content and maintaining an archive of local content. In a way, it almost mirrors the “locavore” trend, where foodie/environmentalists only eat food grown within a certain distance from where they live.

This goes in direct opposition to what newspapers have been doing, which is to increasingly source content from international agencies like the AP or CNN. I suppose the assumption is that buying news is cheaper than hiring someone to go out and report on it. The new demands on media won’t let local newspapers get away with this anymore. If I want national press coverage, I won’t go to my local paper (or it’s website), I’ll just go to Google News.

In the future, I don’t think I’ll be opening the paper everyday and see an ARG game. It is, however, a worthwhile experiment, and it’s good to see old media trying out something new.

A bit of expansion of my comments on a recent post at St8ED.

I’ve been doing a bit of pondering on the value of traditional media, particularly with the recent shutdown of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the release of Amazon’s Kindle 2. I feel bad for the folks who have lost jobs because of the decline, but I’ll be perfectly honest: I haven’t read a newspaper since 2005 (unless you count the tbt, which I don’t).

In my mind, crying for the end of newspapers is kind of like crying for the end of music on CDs: it’s not like there’s anything about the medium that makes them inherently superior to what is replacing them. The music and newspaper industries were simply happy raking in the dough and were unwilling to consider the possibility that their dominance was impermanent.

Inevitably, the critics of new media trot out the “nostalgia” argument: traditional media cannot die because there is something about them that gets us closer to our humanity or some other lofty ideal. Sven Birkerts argues against the Kindle by telling us that by touching books, we touch a system that stands for the “labor and taxonomy of human understanding.”

Great. But are we so devoted to “touching” this “system” that we are still willing to put up with the inconveniences of paper? Are we willing to throw our cash to those who want so desperately for us to prop up their fading industry on the basis of some crazy idea that has nothing to do with how we interact with the medium?

Okay. Rant over.

Traditional media, however, does have a place – maybe their respective industries won’t go on making the same big bucks they have been, but that doesn’t mean they have to go extinct. The one criteria, however, is the medium has to be inherently superior in some respect. Beautifully worded justifications about what the medium represents are just not enough.

Case in point: vinyl records. 8-track and cassette tapes have been relegated to the dustbin of bad sitcom jokes, but vinyl records live on. In fact, in 2007, vinyl sales revenue jumped 46%. For what it lacks in portability, its quality makes vinyl to the music industry what microbrews are to the beer industry: a niche product for connoisseurs.