Digital Age

When George W. Bush accused Al Gore of "analog thinking in a digital age" last week, it made a great sound bite - or should I say, sound byte. While no one has ever accused Dubya of being a wired guy, it's obvious that he'd never bothered to look up the meaning of the verbiage he tossed out at a campaign stop in Michigan. Otherwise, he might have known that he was attacking Gore for thinking like a human, as opposed to a machine. Don't be too hard on George, though. He's not the only one guilty of misapplication of technobabble.

To anyone who might believe printing is a dying industry in a digital age, Kerry Stackpole says this: Look in your cupboard. "Imagine opening your kitchen cabinets and having no labels on the cans," said Stackpole, president of the Printing & Graphics Association MidAtlantic. "Imagine a world without print. " Despite the challenge that digital platforms and electronic media pose to traditional printing companies, printing remains the third-largest manufacturing employer in the state, the association says.

The Digital Age may transform the consumer's living room, as well as several global industries.So much information will be offered, in the form of movies, music, pictures and text, that a major entrepreneurial challenge of the next century will be to help the consumer manage it all."The world is totally going digital. Anything you're curious about will be in digital form, accessible electronically," says William Gates III, chairman of Microsoft Corp. "So, when you sit down to watch a movie at home, it won't just be the latest movies you'll be able to see but any movie ever made."

In George Orwell's novel "1984," the unblinking eye of government surveillance is omnipresent and inescapable. Orwell could not have known what technology would one day make his nightmare scenario possible, but he could foresee that whatever it was, the government would misuse it. This week, the Supreme Court agreed. In a case that for the first time sought to put limits on the government's growing use of digital technology to monitor Americans, the justices came down firmly on the side of privacy.

ON JULY 1, the U.S. Postal Service turned 25. Of course, American mail-service goes back to the nation's birth and Benjamin Franklin. But it wasn't until 1971 that the old Post TC Office, funded by tax dollars and micromanaged by an intrusive Congress, became the quasi-public Postal Service, without taxpayer support.It has been a rocky 25 years. Saddled with a huge work force and powerful unions, postal officials haven't cut overhead. Labor costs under the old Post Office ate up 80.3 cents of every dollar spent; today, that figure is 80.8 cents.

Someday, when historians try to piece together the definitive history of the digital age, they might want to rummage through Lloyd Tabb's laundry bag. Buried beneath his stinky socks and dirty drawers, they'll find what the 37-year-old programmer considers one of the great unappreciated icons of Silicon Valley: the geek tee. For more than a quarter-century, programmers and engineers have informally memorialized their efforts with T-shirts. The clothing commemorates some of the digital age's greatest triumphs - from the creation of the first personal computers to the first commercial Web browser.

NEW YORK -- She doesn't bother with a phone at home. She has never voted. She doesn't own a car, and wears shoes only when she must. When prime-time television is on, she is often fast asleep.Esther Dyson is a creature of the Internet. And while her name is unknown to the average American, Dyson's thinking is closely watched by the leaders of software and new-media companies, as well as by the government officials who seek to regulate them.Dyson publishes Release 1.0, a tech-industry newsletter obscure enough to have just 2,000 subscribers and important enough to command $695 a year for the subscription.

Most Americans are just an email, Tweet or Facebook update away from reaching someone else - or the entire world. And the trend is accelerating, as the number of email accounts alone is expected to grow by almost a billion worldwide from last year to 2014. Now, the U.S. Postal Service has practically conceded that it's being left in the digital dust. The Postal Service proposed Monday changing its first-class delivery standard so mail will arrive two to three days after it is shipped, rather than as early as overnight.

It's a whole lot quieter in Penn Station these days - no whirring sounds, no clickety-clack of an old-fashioned, mechanical signboard bringing the news that your train is 20 minutes late. In place of the iconic board above the main desk at Baltimore's Amtrak station, there now hangs a large digital board that works intermittently as it undergoes testing. For live information, passengers depend on two small temporary digital screens - miniature versions of what travelers might see listing arrivals and departures at an airport.

There has been much speculation about the impact of the digital age on writers — the Internet, computerized writing tools, e-books and portable reading devices, and the inexorable march toward an instant-on, media-saturated society. It is, arguably, a literary and cultural wasteland. Do our post-modern gluttony for instant gratification, a plethora of tools for writers, and the growing irrelevance of anything in print bode well for the creative process? Is there any evidence to suggest that creativity, imagination and invention have benefited from the wonderful gifts bestowed upon us by the technology revolution?

Most Americans are just an email, Tweet or Facebook update away from reaching someone else - or the entire world. And the trend is accelerating, as the number of email accounts alone is expected to grow by almost a billion worldwide from last year to 2014. Now, the U.S. Postal Service has practically conceded that it's being left in the digital dust. The Postal Service proposed Monday changing its first-class delivery standard so mail will arrive two to three days after it is shipped, rather than as early as overnight.

Michelle Rhee is back in town. This time it is as a "grass-roots" activist who only wants to put children first. Surely many of her fans in the testing industry think that's really at the heart of what they are doing. They look at failing public schools and they see reason for change. As a teacher and as a parent of three public school students, I look at the type of change they are advocating for and I see the future of failure. For the last five years, I have worked in a small, independent high school program at the experimental intersection of one-to-one computing and social media in education.

There has been much speculation about the impact of the digital age on writers — the Internet, computerized writing tools, e-books and portable reading devices, and the inexorable march toward an instant-on, media-saturated society. It is, arguably, a literary and cultural wasteland. Do our post-modern gluttony for instant gratification, a plethora of tools for writers, and the growing irrelevance of anything in print bode well for the creative process? Is there any evidence to suggest that creativity, imagination and invention have benefited from the wonderful gifts bestowed upon us by the technology revolution?

It's a whole lot quieter in Penn Station these days - no whirring sounds, no clickety-clack of an old-fashioned, mechanical signboard bringing the news that your train is 20 minutes late. In place of the iconic board above the main desk at Baltimore's Amtrak station, there now hangs a large digital board that works intermittently as it undergoes testing. For live information, passengers depend on two small temporary digital screens - miniature versions of what travelers might see listing arrivals and departures at an airport.

Film Criticism in the Digital World is the name of the panel at 1:15 p.m. Sunday at the Maryland Film Festival (at the tent village across from the Charles Theatre). As a member of the panel, along with City Paper's Brett McCabe, Salon's Andrew O'Heir and the Village Voice's Aaron Hillis (who also edits GreenCine.com), I'll be prepared to discuss questions I've fielded at similar gatherings. Have blogs and Web sites democratized or debased the craft of movie reviewing? Is there any new model to support good criticism in print or at least make it easier to access amid the blizzard of opinion on the Internet?

As musical products move more toward intangible digital consumption and away from tactile sources these days, box sets remain one of the only ways fans can immerse themselves in an artist's work. It's one of the few hands-on musical experiences left over from the LP era, when the package's artwork served as a gateway to the music. Box sets have always been specialty items because only a stone fan of the artist would spend up to $100 or more on a collection of greatest hits, B-sides and outtakes.

WASHINGTON - The Library of Congress, home to about 18 million books, many dating to the mid-19th century, might be the last place you would expect to find somebody at the center of one of the hottest debates of the digital era. But Marybeth Peters, who for 38 years has labored away in the U.S. Copyright Office, an obscure arm of the library, is serving as referee in the battle between entertainment companies that are trying to control the copying and...

To anyone who might believe printing is a dying industry in a digital age, Kerry Stackpole says this: Look in your cupboard. "Imagine opening your kitchen cabinets and having no labels on the cans," said Stackpole, president of the Printing & Graphics Association MidAtlantic. "Imagine a world without print. " Despite the challenge that digital platforms and electronic media pose to traditional printing companies, printing remains the third-largest manufacturing employer in the state, the association says.

For years, my colleague Dan Rodricks has entertained us with columns entitled "Guilty - but mostly stupid." They're tales of criminals who just don't get it, like the bank robber who scribbles a holdup note on the back of his business card. Today I offer my own tale of criminal stupidity in the digital age - and the power that access to information holds to save us from terrible mistakes.

Ninety-one-year-old Mary Taliaferro's last living friend lives in Hawaii. To stay in touch with her, Taliaferro has opened a Gmail account and is slowly but surely conquering the new-to-her world of electronic messaging. It's slow going: Until this fall, Taliaferro didn't know what "sign ons" or "screen names" were. "I really wasn't too interested," Taliaferro said of learning how to use e-mail at this late stage. "But I wanted to see what goes on today. My children are all on this stuff.