Digital Age

At this month's BET Awards, the Viewers' Choice award seemed like a battle of front-runners. Nominees Beyonce, Jay-Z and Kanye West were seated in the front row, a skip away from the podium. Chris Brown and Lil Wayne were also nominated. They all lost to four teenage boys. Mindless Behavior, the Los Angeles boy band of Prodigy, Princeton, Ray Ray and Roc Royal, bounced up to the stage to accept the night's only award decided on by fans. After catching his breath, Princeton ended his speech with a declaration.

Santa Claus came to town in a military helicopter - which makes perfect sense for my grandson, considering who his father works for - and while Mikey was all fired up about Santa's form of transportation, he wanted no part of the big guy in red who disembarked. (A very sensible response for a 2-year-old, allowed his grandfather, an overly cautious man himself.) And so the next generation begins the campaign to get their kids to trust and invest in a benign figure who (spoiler alert!

The Howard County Office of Children's Services is offering a workshop for parents, Parenting in the Digital Age, Thursday, Oct. 25, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at The Bain Center, 5470 Ruth Keeton Way, in Columbia. The workshop covers parents concerns about online activity, including bullying, inappropriate use of photos, setting limits at home and at school, use of social media, and texting and driving. Panel discussion follows, with representatives from the school system, police, local community programs and student speakers.

The Howard County Office of Children's Services is offering a workshop for parents, Parenting in the Digital Age, Thursday, Oct. 25, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at The Bain Center, 5470 Ruth Keeton Way, in Columbia. The workshop covers parents concerns about online activity, including bullying, inappropriate use of photos, setting limits at home and at school, use of social media, and texting and driving. Panel discussion follows, with representatives from the school system, police, local community programs and student speakers.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

When Richard Young gets done with a day of crabbing, he often calls the co-owner of his seafood business on his cellphone to let her know he's headed back in. Starting next week, though, the 56-year-old waterman from Dundalk is going to be checking in by phone with the Department of Natural Resources every morning as he leaves the dock in the wee hours and then again when he's caught his last crab. And by the time he gets back to land, he'll have texted in the details of his catch - while still keeping one eye on the water, of course, as he steers his workboat, the Island Girl.

At this month's BET Awards, the Viewers' Choice award seemed like a battle of front-runners. Nominees Beyonce, Jay-Z and Kanye West were seated in the front row, a skip away from the podium. Chris Brown and Lil Wayne were also nominated. They all lost to four teenage boys. Mindless Behavior, the Los Angeles boy band of Prodigy, Princeton, Ray Ray and Roc Royal, bounced up to the stage to accept the night's only award decided on by fans. After catching his breath, Princeton ended his speech with a declaration.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When Richard Young gets done with a day of crabbing, he often calls the co-owner of his seafood business on his cellphone to let her know he's headed back in. Starting next week, though, the 56-year-old waterman from Dundalk is going to be checking in by phone with the Department of Natural Resources every morning as he leaves the dock in the wee hours and then again when he's caught his last crab. And by the time he gets back to land, he'll have texted in the details of his catch - while still keeping one eye on the water, of course, as he steers his workboat, the Island Girl.

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.