New Year’s resolution: More columns about cyborgs for Mediaite. Learn WordPress. And maybe get a black belt in Karate…and maybe a dog.

I have inadvertently learned a lot about cyborgs by becoming one recently. It started when I damaged my right eye after shooting a pile of cow crap with a shotgun when I was nine. Over the years the eye got worse and I ended up getting it removed four years ago. Yes, I have seen A Christmas Story and, yes, Ralphie’s mother was right – you’ll shoot your eye out.

As I am a documentary filmmaker, it occurred to me that I could put a wireless video camera in a modified prosthetic eye. Not to connect it to the brain or my retina (see another article I wrote about the difference between my eye and bionic eyes that restore vision here). Mine is just a camera that goes where my eye used to go. Thusly, I became a cyborg. Now other cyborgs call and email, I get links from friends, and I chat and read about cyborgs a lot.

Here’s the new working eye. Stand by for superamazing cyborg footage in 2010.

And now, I would now like to break down the 10 best cyborgs of the decade.

1. THE INJURED SOLDIER

There has been a lot of war this decade. Between Iraq and Afghanistan there have been soldiers who have lost whatever body part you can think of. Particularly, because of the types of roadside bombs used in these conflicts. Injured soldiers are, as it says in the Doonesbury cartoon below, proudly “pimping their gimp.” (click to enlarge)

In fact, the Pentagon has put $100 million dollars into a program called Revolutionizing Prosthetics that is making great leaps and bounds (oh yeah, and I mean literally) in bionic parts.

Here are just a few examples.

Iraq Amputee First Person Fitted With Revoultionary ‘Bionic’ Legs

Iraq war hero and double amputee Lt. Col. Greg Gadson – whose bravery helped inspire the New York Giants to their last Super Bowl victory – recently became the first person in the world to land a pair of super-high-tech prosthetic legs that practically think for themselves.

60 minutes video: The Pentagon’s bionic arm
“We want these kids to have something put back on them that will essentially allow one of these kids to pick up a raisin or a grape off a table, know the difference without looking at it. That is an extraordinary goal,” Kamen explained.

They have developed an arm that is controlled by flexing the shoulder and pressing buttons built into a pair of shoes – “almost as if he’s typing with his toes”.

The goal now is to create prosthetics that are controlled by thought alone. But hold on! Early in December of 2009 came out this story.

Robotic hand controlled by thought

A robotic hand has been successfully connected to an amputee, allowing him to feel sensations in the artificial limb and control it with his thoughts, a group of European scientists said Wednesday.

2. AIMEE MULLINS

It is no longer a conversation about overcoming deficiency. It is a conversation about augmentation. It’s a conversation about potential. A prosthetic limb doesn’t represent a need to replace loss anymore.

Aimees Mullins from her speech “How my legs give me super-powers” at the TED Conference 2009.

This woman is a true inspiration for people missing parts of their body everywhere … and she is sooooo hot. I’m not gonna lie, I want her to be my girlfriend. She lost both her legs but became a successful collegiate athlete. She’s a model and an actress and a kick ass cyborg. I am not worthy.

3. GORDON

Gordon used to be a rat. University of Reading cybernetics professor Kevin Warwick created Gordon when he took rat brain neurons and placed them on a multi-electrode array to form a ratborg. Now Gordon is the ultimate cyborg (hardly any mammal left and mostly mechanical) and I feel a kinship with him of sorts. Its a bit disturbing but, I dunno, I want to meet Gordon.

4. JERRY JALAVA, THE USB FINGER GUY

Jerry and I know each other now as we have exchanged emails. He created a small media storm when he replaced the tip of the index finger he lost in an accident with a USB flash drive. Jerry is a playful guy from Finland who gets points from me for the silliness and utility of his cyborgitude. One can have a sense of humor about these things. We are in talks for him to be my sound guy with a “microphone finger” attachment when I get going with my eye camera.

5. SPIDER-MAN FISHING ROD KID

Robert Haag’s little boy Michael lost his arm. Robert decided that his little boy should feel cool about missing an arm so he designed a Spider-Man prosthetic arm fishing rod. Its just one example of the great mods you will see at The Open Prosthetics website.

6. AQUA WOMAN

Nadya Vessey is a New Zealand woman who had lost her legs as a child but fantasized about becoming a mermaid. Lucky for her she met the New Zealand team behind the effects in Lord Of The Rings. The LOTR guys made her a fully functioning mermaid tail.

7. ELECTRIC EYE CYBORG(S)

Using an implant attached to an eyeball, this MIT project will restore partial vision to people who are blind. As some people like to say a REAL bionic eye (unlike my own plain old prosthetic eye camera). Both this cyborg advance, as well as my own, made it into Time Magazine’s 50 best inventions of the year for 2009.

Time Magazine best inventions link: The Electric Eye was voted most popular invention of the year online; and my Eyeborg eye made 23rd most popular.

8. THE 50 DOLLAR PROSTHETIC LEG GUY/GAL

House of Natural Fiber is a new media art laboratory in Yogyakarta, Indonesia that helped design a really cheap prosthetic leg for the many people who have lost a leg through natural disaster or war. These people are cyborgs taking advantage of technology as well. Just not the expensive kind. By inverting a bicycle seat where the foot goes, and some other cheap ingenuity, like using strong bamboo stalks, they have created something useful and affordable if not flashy and expensive like that for wounded vets in the West.

9. REAL IRON MAN

Iron Man is becoming real. People in Japan are really smart with robots and the like. And their population is aging. Result? They are making a real Iron Man suit/powered exoskeleton. Wicked. Here is an article from Scientific American about it.

10. DARTH VADER

When you think about it, Darth Vader is the biggest hero of them all. It was he who killed the Emperor and saved all of us.

11. LEE MAJORS

Lee Majors was THE bionic man, the original cyborg. And even though he was a fictional cyborg, he inspired me and a legion of others to take an accident or a loss and make it something to be happy about. Nah nuh nuh nuh nuh. (That’s the sound he makes when he is being bionic in his old 70′s show The Six Million Dollar Man).

And he lost his ex-wife Farrah this year, and he sells amazing hearing aids.

Last night on “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” J.Lo sang her back-to-back decade closers “Louboutins” and “Waiting For Tonight,” but what people are talking about today is the bodysuit, so much so that it’s trending on Google as “jennifer lopez new years outfit” and “j lo new years eve outfit.” Well, good. Let ‘em notice, she’s 40 and just had twins and practically invented the stunt outfit. Like today’s trending Google topics are an accident. This is J.Lo — a mother, a wife, and laying low these past few years but come on: she knows what she’s doing.

(Okay, props to Cher on the stunt outfit thing, but still — J. Lo’s Grammy 2000 dress is still a high-water mark. No doubt Lady Gaga was watching as a 13-year-old kid somewhere and thinking, hmmmm).)

So ten years later, don’t be fooled by the rocks that she’s got, because she’s still she’s still Jenny from the Block, and also, where would she hide those rocks anywhere? On that famous booty? (Say thank you, Kim Kardashian.) Clearly, er, not.

There are others to say “thank you” to J.Lo after her truly astonishing decade. She’s receded quite a bit from view in the last few years, but wow has her influence been felt over the past ten years. People forget that talk of an upcoming Jennifer Lopez album was largely met with lukewarm not-really-caring (what? The chick from Anaconda?) and that Out of Sight had been her career high-water mark, in a completely different area. Then came “On The 6″ — and that cover shot, which right away made headlines itself, followed by a few perfectly danceable songs with videos that wouldn’t look out of place today. (When I think of Y2K-era videos, I think of her — remember her as a sultry cyber-seductress in “If You Had My Love?” Yes, I know “On The Six” came out in 1999, but the set-up was all 2000s.) Then she one-upped it by being in the news every single day with Puffy (back when Sean Combs slash P. Diddy was Puff Daddy) and wearing that Grammy dress — and that was before she became J.Lo and invented a whole new nomenclature for nicknames (say thank you, BriWi). Then she worked with a Rolodex of rappers and released an album entirely of remixes and somewhere in there launched a fragrance called “Glow” that was marketed based on her shimmering naked body. She had the number-one album and the number-one movie in the same week. She was officially J. Lo, Inc.

Then she dated Ben Affleck and was on the cover of Us Weekly pretty much weekly. The Onion ran a story: “No Jennifer Lopez News Today.” (Also, remember that “Bennifer” predated “Brangelina”). She also did all of it entirely while in her 30s — and was part of a pretty crucial generation of women who refused to phase out of being hotties (I wrote about this phenomenon back in 2003). So she did Gigli. Big deal. They’re still talking about that, too. (And her scenes with Affleck in Jersey Girl were genuinely affecting.)

Thinking back on J.Lo this decade — and to be honest, this is the first time I have, which is maybe another reason why she brought it so fiercely last night, or maybe she just wanted you to forget that fall at the AMAs — I really realized what a trailblazer she was for those who came after her. Beyonc&@##, Miley, Gaga, any actress who’s ever released an album — they are all standing on the shoulders of J.Lo. She was a true triple threat — actress, singer, dancer — who brought it all and brought it all over the place, and packaged it sometimes outrageously but always sexily (redoing that iconic Flashdance scene – genius). She was also a fashion icon, and made the velour sweatsuit look ridiculously hot (say thank you, Juicy). I may have seen the ridiculous Wedding Planner on a plane, but I did watch it (and I wasn’t on a plane for Maid In Manhattan, what can I say). But in the background, there was always Out of Sight. I’m still trying to think of someone hotter with George Clooney.

So yeah. Jennifer Lopez. J.Lo. It took a decade for me to realize it, but I sort of love her.

p.s. “Fitting end” was a wholly unintentional pun. Video below.

Jennifer Lopez: Skintight Sexy on New Year’s Eve [Just Jared]
Jennifer Lopez’ New Year’s outfit; singer stalks into 2010 in a glimmering skin tight catsuit [NYDN]

(Pics via Just Jared; there’s a photogallery there, too.)

I am 16 years old, part of the first generation to be brought up with the Internet. In my case, it’s fed my politics addiction. This has been the decade that I grew up in, meaning I was raised on texting, news cycles, and social networking. In my case, the new media fed my politics addiction. At 13, I spent weekends reading the Wikipedia profiles of every single congressman and senator I could find, closely following the bills they were pushing and the campaigns they were running. One of the Wikipedia profiles I stumbled upon was that of Barack Obama’s. I was quickly drawn to him. It’s true that his charisma was a big part of it. But the Internet helped me take the next step, which was to immerse myself in the details of policy and government on various Web sites, like those of Ezra Klein, Ben Smith and Matt Yglesias. I realized I had found my calling. By 14, out of excitement and slight obsession, I started my blog, www.carmonreport.com, where I and writers I recruited post about politics, general interest, and society. I loved it. At the same time, I was using the Internet to phone-bank from my room for the Obama campaign, and convincing other people to phone-bank along with me. I could do so much, just from my bedroom.

There were never that many readers (usually 10-20 per day), but I persisted because it wasn’t for them—it was for me. Until that night, when I noticed that Marco Rubio’s Senate campaign had plagiarized an ad directly from the Obama campaign. I realized it from the very beginning of the video—the music, the pace, and the theme—all of it was the same. The similarities between the two ads were more than a coincidence. I even played the clips simultaneously to find that they actually, identical. I could not believe no one had caught it. Here it was, in the open on YouTube, and no one noticed!

I knew about all the trouble politicians like Joe Biden and others had gotten into for plagiarism, so I felt that it was very important to get the word out. And Rubio, whose entire campaign is based on the belief that Charlie Crist is too similar to Barack Obama, was himself copying Obama’s advertisements! Two hours later, I had put it everywhere I could. I wrote a post titled with all-caps letters. I tweeted it, and begged my siblings to retweet me. I emailed it to every single blogger I could think of along with several Florida political blogs. I left a message for the AP in Tallahassee and tried to send it to every news source I could think of.

The next morning at 9AM, I looked at my phone. My emails had exploded. My heart started thumping. Several blogs had posted my revelation, and thanked me for the great scoop. David Weigel (one of my favorite Tweeters) of the Washington Independent had picked up my story, and even used my name! That alone was thrilling. I escaped from the cafeteria to the computer lab, and saw that other news sources had picked it up, including Ben Smith. I was flabbergasted. The king of bloggers had posted my story and even put his own spin on it. This had to be one of the best days of my life.

But it got better. At 5:45 PM, and I got a call. “Hi, this is Brendan Farrington from the Associated Press.” They had already covered my story in Florida, and were telling me that they would run it nationally. I couldn’t pronounce a proper “thank you.” My homework could wait. I ran downstairs with my laptop, and googled “Marco Rubio News” and I gasped immediately. It was everywhere. Local news stations in South Dakota, and the Los Angeles Times. Yahoo! News and The Guardian in the UK had all picked up the AP story, which had directly mentioned and linked my website. Fellow politics junkies were joking about it on Twitter.

My blog post also led to more sniping between the Rubio and Crist campaigns. The Rubio campaign claimed that the ad was merely an ”homage” to Obama’s. The Crist campaign ripped Rubio, saying he was like Obama because they were both “media darlings of the moment dedicated to fooling voters.”

I’m 16 years old, and I created an international news story from my room. As we now reflect on the decade that was, it’s hard to remember that even ten years ago, I would have had a hard time getting people’s attention at the local barbershop, let alone getting on the Washington Post. This decade’s media revolution has given my generation the opportunity to create the news, to make the news, and to be the news. This decade gave birth to the age of information, making all of us contributors to the story. Whether it’s blogging from your room or tweeting the revolution overseas, what you do and say matters more than ever in 2010. So, what about the next ten years?

Jordan Carmon is a 16 year old junior at the Waldorf School of Garden City, where he is Student Body President. He is the editor-in-chief of CarmonReport.com and recently worked on Councilman Eric Gioia’s run for NYC Public Advocate. The full web history of the Rubio story can be found here, and Jordan can be found on Twitter at @J_Carmon.

When we do a story looking back at 2009, I typically say “Two Thousand Nine.” And when 2010 comes up in a script my first instinct is to continue the pattern and say “Two Thousand Ten.” But it’s time for a format change.

There is, of course, no governing body to make this decision for the world. And it’s not like “Two Thousand Ten” is horrible. But we’ve got to think ahead on this so we can get back into the pattern that leaves us with easy historical references like the “Summer of ’69.” The example set by the media in the next few days will be a critical one. Whether it’s Ryan Seacrest and Dick Clark on “Rockin’ New Year’s Eve” or Anderson Cooper on CNN, anybody who’s on the air this week will have to figure out how to react to the number 2010.

I’ve been watching my colleagues to try to get some affirmation of my choice. There is little consistency. Carson Daly was on the Today Show this morning saying “Two Thousand Ten.” We’ll see if he sticks with that when he hosts NBC’s countdown tonight. I listened to some of NBC Nightly News to see what direction Brian Wiliams was taking and didn’t find a reference to 2010, but I did hear him say “Twenty Twenty-Five.”

I checked with friends at CNN and there’s been no clear directive to the network’s anchors and reporters. But the promo announcer on the tease for the midnight coverage didn’t fall in line with me. He says “countdown to two thousand ten.”

I looked to the Brits for some affirmation. ITN’s reporter said “Twenty Ten” in a lookahead to London’s fireworks celebration. That definitely seems to be the pronunciation favored by my counterparts in Canada — likely driven by the fact that they’ve been talking about “Vancouver Twenty Ten” for years in their pre-Olympic coverage.

I crowd-sourced the question on Twitter and got dozens of responses and a clear consensus in favor of Twenty-Ten. Two followers led me to the TwentyNot2000.com website, which weighs in with this: “If we don’t fix this now, we’ll be stuck saying years the long way for the next 99 years. Don’t let that happen!”

Cleveland Plain-Dealer reporter Tony Brown wrote about the topic last week. An expert at the Oxford English Dictionary told him it’s obvious why we started the decade with “Two Thousand” instead of “Twenty Hundred.” From there, we were led to “Two Thousand and One” by the iconic science fiction movie. But with 2010 we are in a position to make a clean break.

So join me in the transition to “Twenty Ten.” As my interim reminder, I changed 2010 to “20-10″ in broadcast copy. I’m betting I’ll only need to do that for a few weeks, because a month from now “Twenty Ten” will be comfortably routine.

TV newsman Pat Kiernan picks his favorite stories from the morning papers each weekday on NY1 News and PatsPapers.com. He’s known to VH1 fans as the host of World Series of Pop Culture. Twitter: @patkiernan

Related:
The Aughts: A Decade of “Huh?” [Mediaite]

Here are the 10 essential moments from the Aughts Dylan.

1) Oscar for “Things Have Changed” (2001): Dylan kicked off the decade with this impressive metaphysical groove for the Wonder Boys soundtrack (2000), but its true significance would be achieved only after it was nominated for an Academy Award: On Oscar night, a touring Dylan performed via satellite from Australia, the camera zoomed in on his daring look and brand new pencil moustache for most of the song, making his performance a theatrical as well as musical triumph. Dylan was ready to look at us in the eye again. He won the award, and the statue became a permanent part of his stage act, always standing atop one of his amplifiers—a signal that the singer is not oblivious to his impact on pop culture.

2) Love and Theft (2001): Bob Dylan’s first album since Time Out of Mind (1997) moved from the swampy textures of its Grammy-winning predecessor towards a sound much closer to that of his live band—an ensemble that easily jumps from rockabilly to country, blues-rock and meta-folk. It was also the record that would galvanize the Dylan persona of the rest for the decade: an atemporal roving musician that blended himself with his influences and the American culture; a poet speaking from the mountain he built by himself, where everything and nothing is sacred at the same time. Love and Theft was also the first record Dylan self-produced, something he would continue to do for the rest of the decade.

3) Masked and Anonymous (2003): In this movie (co-written by Dylan), the singer played a has-been alter ego of himself who, amid a civil war, is released from prison to perform at a sketchy benefit concert. The film was largely ignored by audiences and critics due to its diffuse plot, but somehow translated the universe of Dylan’s songs into film, while reminding us yet again that he never saw himself just as a songwriter.

4) Chronicles (2004): The Aughts were the decade in which Dylan opened up like never before (see the No Direction Home documentary). In this first installment of what is supposed to be a trilogy of memoirs, he also fulfilled the promise of being a great prose writer, drawing stylistic comparisons to Mark Twain and becoming a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Oh and he wasn’t even halfway through the decade yet.

>>>NEXT: She Wears A Push-Up Bra Just Like A Woman (…plus five more years of Robert Zimmerman)

From the NYT “Lens” blog:

No further proof is needed that we’re in the era of the “citizen journalist” than the images coming daily from Tehran. But this gallery reminds us that most of the traumas of the last decade — as well as its triumphs — had public witnesses who were as well-equipped to record the moment as many professionals. The Times asked you to help us document the decade and you responded with some astonishing photographs and essays. Thank you.

There were over 2,360 submissions, and I can see how they settled on 667 for the slideshow — how possibly to pare down this collection? It’s amazing. Here are just a few of the images: A teacher working abroad in China. Bill and Chelsea Clinton in Nashua, New Hampshire during the 2008 primary. A march against the Iraq war. The debris of Hurricane Katrina, and the pieces of lives that were lost; a memorials at Ground Zero; a little girl in Zambia, in the midst of the African AIDS crisis, and a flourishing sex trade; the Blackout; the 35W Minneapolis bridge; Sully’s plane, half-submerged; the Tsunami.

There are more — obviously — including images from Iraq and Israel, of Obama on the rise and as a new president; of people homeless and jobless; and — despite the fact that the NYT dubs it “A Brutal Decade” — even some sweet, uplifting photos.

This is an amazing thing the NYT has put together. I recommend it.

A few disclaimers: The Aughts were also the decade in which I penetrated the United States (2004) and became a closer observer of all things Latino, which makes this account necessarily slanted towards the second half of the decade. Also, here I use a subjective way of defining what is substantially Latino in terms of pop culture: not circumscribed to blood or last names, but rather like pornography—I know it when I see it. I don’t care if Perez Hilton‘s real name is Mario Lavandeira and he learned to speak Spanish before English: His cultural contributions (?) are not Latino in any relevant way.

Ok? Aquí vamos.

Political Penetration: Several Latinos rose to political prominence during the past decade (presidential hopeful Bill Richardson and disgraced Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, to name a few), but no event was more important than the induction of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. The Bronx-born judge crystallized the Aughts version of the Latino Dream—one in which a second-generation immigrant rose to the highest levels of power by means of her brain, not sports or artistic talent. Her cool temper during the predictably long and boring confirmation hearings turned one of her “controversial” statements into a motto some of us have taken to heart: When things get ugly, we can aspire to nothing better than being “wise Latinos.” (Latina magazine took it one step further, turning the phrase into a fundraising t-shirt What’s not wise about that?)

On the other side of political penetrations (that is, the failed ones), we cannot forget the day when Daddy Yankee—he, the libertarian lyricist of “Gasolina” (see below)—threw his support behind John McCain. The political debut of the Puerto Rican musician gave us the immortal words: “I’m a man on (sic) a few words, but with a lot of action, like I always said.” (Wherever he was, we presume, the late Cantinflas smiled.)

How to catch up if you missed it: The revolution will not be televised, menso. Just look around and you will see Latino political figures all around you — Mel Martinez, Ken Salazar, Bob Menendez, Linda Sanchez and her sister Loretta — the list goes on and on. With 16% of the population Latinos already are the largest minority in the country. (Here’s a prediction for the next decade: the press will finally catch up.)

Literary Penetration: Yes, after all these years, some still name drop Gabriel García-Márquez when a conversation turns literary. Yes, he remains the only Latino writer in Gringo eyes. Surprisingly though, the Aughts have seen an upset in the status quo: the Colombian writer has been overshadowed by Chilean phenomenon, Roberto Bolaño and his all-too-perfect myth (see “Bolaño Inc.”) With the early accolades of the likes of Susan Sontag, and the posthumous publication in English of his major novels The Savage Detectives and 2666, the late Bolaño (1953-2003) became the literary equivalent of a bomb that keeps redecorating the landscape years after it has exploded.

The other Latino literary phenomenon of the decade was homebred. More than ten years after his breakthrough collection of short stories Drown (1997), Dominican-American (born in Santo Domingo, moved to New Jersey at the age of 6) writer Junot Diaz took the world by storm with his Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). In her review for the Times, Michiko Kakutani exclaimed that the book was so original it could only be described as “Mario Vargas Llosa meets ‘Star Trek’ meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West.”

How to catch up: In the case of Bolaño, you can start by reading Jonathan Lethem‘s glowing review of 2666 (but be warned that Lethem swallowed the myth: Bolaño was no heroin addict), nor was one of his stories published by the New Yorker. In the case of Díaz, check out the story which Wao was based on here, or listen to this reading of “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie).” Most importantly, learn to say “ghettonerd.”

Musical Penetration: As mentioned before, anything would be better than Ricky Martin, so I guess we should be thankful for the great musical crossover of the decade: reggaetón. At times, the pan-Caribbean blend of reggae and hip-hop seemed to blast from every corner, car and bodega, particularly after the success of “Gasolina” by Daddy Yankee (2004-2005). Radios that played only reggaeton (and the more generic notion of “urban music”) were created, and by early 2009, academic essays on reggaeton deserved a serious anthology. According to its authors, reggaeton could also be the first truly transnational genre of music.

The other great crossover musical success of the decade (sorry, JLo—or whatever her name is at the time of this writing) was Shakira. During the summer of 2006, “Hips Don’t Lie” became a worldwide hit, the most played song on American radio during one week, and the hips of the title became the most famous since Elvis‘. What made Shakira’s story even more fascinating was her chameleon-like capabilities: by the end of the decade the unlikely South-American-born star was sounding, looking and behaving like any of the Anglo divas, to the point of being accused by many of taking her crossover too far by engaging in “Beyoncification” and refusing to give interviews in Spanish.

How to catch up: You’ve heard Shakira and that Daddy McCain guy. Why not explore Latin music that doesn’t get much radio play? Good Latin music needs no crossover. It is alive and well on the other side of the border. Like soccer. Just sayin’.

Diva Penetration: Can you say the name “Penélope” and not think of a certain Miss Cruz? At the time of this writing, the Spanish actress is burning through moviehouses with her sizzling performance in Broken Embraces and getting ready to follow it up with the musical Nine. Not bad for someone who started the decade with an awkward reprise of her Abre los ojos in Vanilla Sky (2001). (And let’s not mention that Tom Cruise liaison, please.) By 2008, she was shooting with Woody Allen and getting an Oscar for it, while dating Javier Bardem, the great Latino actor of the decade, who also won an Oscar for No Country for Old Men.

How to catch up: Go all the way back in the day and watch an 18 year old Penélope with Bardem in Jamón Jamón (1993).

Media Penetration: With the Latino population growing at a faster pace than any other minority, the big media revolution is still pending—an outlet or network of outlets that truly reflect the diversity of the Latino experience. Yet some benchmarks cannot be denied, particularly for Univisión: the network became one of the most-watched stations in the country, in 2007 it hosted the first presidential debate ever broadcast in Spanish, and “Sábado Gigante” continues to break the world record for longest running TV variety show.

Jorge Ramos, the network’s anchor, situated himself as the main contender in Latino media this side of María Hinojosa, who is beyond reach in so many ways. Ramos became the real crossover story of the Aughts for his presence in both Spanish and English media—a true success for a reporter who moved to the country at the age of 25. (Sorry, Rick Sanchez.) His (rather self-evident, it must be said) books cemented his aura of Latino spokesperson for Latinos and English-speakers, while his participation in the presidential debates of 2008 made him the target of an SNL spoof. Now that is penetration.

Another significant landmark this year: Chicano comedian George Lopez got a late night show on TBS, which may prove to be a more significant milestone for TV landscape than the hyped move of Jay Leno to prime-time.

And while television may have the big numbers, surprisingly, it’s the dying newspapers that seem to hold the political clutch: during the demonstrations for immigrants’ rights and while organizing a coalition to support Sonia Sotomayor, dailies like La Opinión and El Diario helped rally the troops to have Lou Dobbs removed from CNN. While neither Dobbs nor the network acknowledged that it was the grassroots Latino campaign that caused his ousting, his resignation is one of the great milestones for Latinos— the activists behind it claim it forever changed the way Latinos organize and defend themselves.

What you need to know: Perez Hilton is not Latino. Perez Hilton is not Latino. Perez Hilton is not Latino. Ditto for Mario Lopez.

José Simián is a producer at NY1 Noticias, where he hosts a literature and music interview segment. His writing has appeared in NY Daily News, Huffington Post, Sports Illustrated Latino and Billboard en Español. He will be writing the “Meet The Prensa” column for Mediaite.

Photo by Flickr user Leofan7

DeadMalls.com is celebrating a decade of recording the death rattles of American shopping malls. Chronicling the nasty and brutish lives of malls throughout the fifty states with pictures and anecdotes, the site launched in 2000 and celebrates its first ten years next month. It seems a remarkably appropriate tenure.

Hard numbers documenting the decline of the American shopping mall are hard to come by. (Anecdotal and pictorial evidence, like this remarkable photo essay of defunct shopping malls, are much more accessible.) The phenomenon of mall death received robust coverage in magazines and newspapers and on television over the past 18 months. The Newsweek piece linked above cites the International Council of Shopping Centers, which reports that one-fifth of the nation’s largest 2,000 malls were failing. Its current number broadens that significantly – to 102,000 shopping centers of all size. This is much more in line with the widely-cited number from a 2004 Dallas Morning News article, claiming that the nation hosts 46,990 shopping malls and shopping centers. Wikipedia, meanwhile, has a list of shopping malls in the United States containing a modest 868 locations. It also notes that much of the fluctuation results from competing definitions of what constitutes a mall; we can assume that similar uncertainty exists as to what constitutes its death.

Some part of any decline, to be sure, is a function of the economic environment. The Journal article above, for example, graphed declining mall sales during the recession, painting a clear picture of impact. The recession, though, isn’t to blame. It made an existing trend worse.

In a piece from two years ago, The Economist detailed the numbers behind that trend. Nearly no new indoor shopping centers in the latter part of this decade. A 50% drop between 1997 and 2002 in the percent of all retail sales occurring at malls (from 38% to 19%). What once was a mecca became mainstream. And then, this decade – moribund.

Photo by Flickr user barxtux

This week, while visiting in-laws, I went to a mall in Visalia, deep in California’s agricultural Central Valley. For several hundred yards in any direction from the mall’s doors were the ubiquita of American suburbia (big box stores, fast food chains, roads and parking lots); beyond, in at least two directions, the orchards and fields that bring income (and air quality problems) to thousands of local residents.

The Visalia Mall doesn’t exist in New York City. It’s what malls often used to be – a commercial and community focal point whose tribulations and triumphs are common knowledge. At the mall are diverse shops that, while common on Manhattan’s streets, are too small for a big box location and need more traffic than a strip mall provides. Chains that would do fine on Madison Avenue would fail completely on Mooney Boulevard, the mall’s home, outside of the sheltering collective within its walls. At the mall, smaller chains and local stores survive in symbiosis; picking customers off the main thoroughfares like birds on a hippo.

This mall still exists, in large part, because of unique features of the community. High-speed connections are commonly unavailable, and economics and culture vastly reduce the importance of the Internet. More than anything else – more than the economy, than shifting demographics – what’s gutting American malls is the Internet.

Malls are retail newspapers. They are professionally curated assemblages of commercialism, vulnerable to simple tools that get the job done more specifically and rapidly. Nowadays, it’s far easier and more personalized to fulfill a shopping list online, putting together your own virtual mall from which you buy only what you’re interested in, skipping over the online equivalents of Cinnabon and the sunglasses kiosk. Even as newspapers are more and more relegated to niche markets, so too are malls.

Visalia, as it turns out, is in one of those niches. The Visalia Mall is robust enough that, upon losing the local department store, Gottschalks, Macy’s stepped into the void. This is the mall equivalent of a newspaper adding a new section. The Post could get away with it. The Globe can’t. (The local market does have limits. Another mall, not far from the Visalia Mall, is close to shuttering. Visalia is a one-newspaper town, and, it seems, a one-mall town.)

The blossoming of the Internet in the Aughts, a time of political and economic instability, has hastened (though not completed) the demise of many cultural components tangential to its core functionality. The slow sublimation of newspapers is understood to be its victim; the evaporation of malls, America’s once dominant retail touchstones, is not. Both industries are sliding down similar slopes, pushed by the same hand.

In ten years, after the DeadMalls.com domain has likely been allowed to lapse, retail centers will look very different than they did ten years ago in all but a few instances and locations. Visalia, still a place dependent on the core industries of the 19th century, may continue to be the exception to the rule. Its likely, though, that its newspaper and mall will join the horse-drawn plow and hand-picking walnuts in the gallery of systems once admired; now superseded.

The lesson is simple: the goal never changes, though the path to achieve it often does. For decades the goals of community and convenience were met by shopping malls. That’s simply no longer the case.

People between the ages of 30 and 39 spend the most time on the Internet — 18 hours a week, the research firm said in a press release this week. I bet those numbers are going to be higher for folks below 21, considering that many have grown up using broadband. As I showed yesterday, the number of U.S. broadband users has gone up to around 80 million from about 2.7 million at the end of 1999.

See the chart below for the full rundown:


Oh, and you, the one online! Click our ads, please?

In 10 Years, Hours Spent on Internet Almost Doubled [GigaOm]

(photo via Google image searching “internet”)

Remember, early on in this innocent decade, when it was a big deal when Bill O’Reilly started criticizing rap music? Now, it seems to happen all the time.

For someone opposed to the immorality and hedonism that he sees embraced in rap lyrics, O’Reilly knows how to start a hip-hop-style feud with some of the big names in the industry, including Ludacris, Nas, and Cam’ron.

Eight notable beefs between O’Reilly and rappers, starting off with Ludacris (semi-NSFW):

>>>First up: O’Reilly vs. Ludacris

>>>Follow the author of this post on Twitter

Yet the media spent a lot of time chasing non-stories, from Balloon Boy to Sarah Palin’s death panels…Why did so many news organizations, from old media and new, chase silly, shiny distractions? Mainly because it’s easier than reporting out, and attracting readers to, big questions of politics and public policy.

That is true, in a year of hard news the media has gone soft, likely to our detriment. That said, should this really come as a surprise? Obviously, “shiny distractions” are easier. You know why? Reporting is not only hard, it is costly and time consuming. Costly and time consuming, meanwhile happen to be at odds with just about everything to do with the media these days. Or, to be more precise, new media looking to survive, which at this point pretty much covers all media. We are, sadly, talking about an industry in which the only newspaper to finish the decade looking somewhat similar to how it started it is the New York Times, and anyone who has picked up the Sunday Times of late will tell you even that it is a ghost of its former 3.5 lbs self.

It’s easy (also, consistent content filler) to bemoan both the loss of good reporting and ease with which the blogosphere (and increasingly the MSM) picks up hollow, splashy, polarizing stories. However, this doesn’t change the fact that until someone creates a new, workable business model the coin of the Internet realm is traffic. And traffic is most cheaply generated by frequency and shock value, two things which are very much at odds with in depth reporting.

None of this is news. So why it should therefore come as a shock that a year which saw the financial bottom plummet out of the MSM also saw the rise of the sort of easy, splashy, stories that the Internet most easily allows for, seems naive. Traffic talks in the new media Internet world, what it does not do yet is report and/or research whilst penning the required 15 posts per day.

Last night on Countdown fill-in host Lawrence O’Donnell picked up on the dubious award and tried his best to create and entirely new catchphrase: Palinocchio. Probably this will be both less catchy and damaging, but points for trying! Palin apparently beat out the birthers and Joe Wilson, and Glenn Beck who once asserted that the government was putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population. So yes, the list was a long one this year.

O’Donnell also notes (via Politifact) that the phrase could be found in over 6,000 news reports in August and September alone begging the question who’s more at fault here Palin for making it up or the media for running with it. Anyway O’Donnell wants to know how on earth Palin is going to spin her way out of this! How indeed. Short answer: quite easily, no doubt, and if she’s feeling creative probably with an entirely new term, which will be coming to her Facebook page soon.

Alas, instead of a full archive of covers from 1999 (ahem) the Post has provided 50 covers for you to choose from. Many of them you will no doubt remember (Ho No!). Many of them you’ve likely forgotten in the intervening years, which only serves to make the voting process that much more fun. You can vote for you favorite here. My top five after the jump.

Those who are familiar with my pieces on Mediaite may have noticed that I’m a bit of a data nerd. So I took this analysis a step further, grokking every important death listed on Wikipedia and crunching the numbers. They are here:

As this chart clearly illustrates, 2009, so far, has actually been the second lowest in the aughts in terms of the deaths of well-known people. While Wikipedia’s definition of well-known might be broader than yours, it’s a pretty objective measure. 2009, you are vindicated.

There’s also hopeful news in these numbers – the age at which people die just keeps climbing (with the exception of an aberrant 2000).

These numbers are all well and good, but it certainly didn’t meet my needs for really digging deep. So I created the following tool. It lets you sort all 2,115 deaths by age, date of birth or death, and color codes them by the decade in which they were born. Further, rolling over the image gives more detail about whose death it represents.

Why do I make these things? Because I love you. Happy holidays, and a happy new year. Stay healthy. And, if you’re 78.24 years old, you might want to talk to a doctor.

Philip Bump writes the Wayback Machine column for Mediaite, and loves data. Follow him on Twitter here, and map your city-to-city moves this decade on his cool interactive map here.

“I think this has been a wonderful decade for civility. And anyone who disagrees with me can gargle my man-sack.”

–Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report, to guest Tom Brokaw, the former anchor of NBC Nightly News. The two were discussing the highs and lows of the previous decade when Colbert dropped this take on both civility and what to do with his “man-sack”. The moment comes in the following clip at 4:45.

–W.A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst

As you may have heard, Gawker was recently named the
blog of the decade by Adweek. Three other Gawker Media blogs, Gizmodo, Deadspin, and Lifehacker, were finalists. Adweek noted that Gawker itself was only number seven among Gawker Media properties in terms of traffic, but proclaimed it “the template for what a blog should be” — a quote eagerly snatched up by Gawker’s advertising department.

Leaving aside the question of “should,” Gawker has undeniably set the template for what the blogs of this decade aspire to be.

Gawker Media was founded in 2002. In the seven years since, its founder Nick Denton has built an empire of Hearstian scope and ambitions and forever changed the game, how it’s played — and who gets to play it. From a one-person blog written by a media outsider from Wetumpka, Alabama — you may now know her as consummate media insider Elizabeth Spiers — Denton built an empire on the backs of scrappy outsiders throwing spitballs at the big dogs and taking them down a few pegs, for the sake of the minions toiling below.

Eventually, this expanded to a stable of niche blogs run by ballsy, initially no-name young writers taking the same skeptical, ironic tone, covering a beat with an eye for finding the gossip behind the photo ops and the juice behind the press releases.

But back to Nick Denton, the man who started it all.

The Denton-Hearst analogy is not a new one. In 2007, Editorialiste was early to pick up on Gawker’s trend towards breaking original stories over aggregating old ones, and foresaw its shift towards a new “digital yellow journalism:”

Gawker Media sites would become more like MSM — original content and aggregated content when needed (like the AP, but without paying for it). But this is a whole new brand of journalism, effectively digital yellow journalism: Original opinion mixed with original stories.

On this kind of path, Nick Denton would be the next William Randolph Hearst, the next Joseph Pulitzer, the next Rupert Murdoch – a man with an army of niche publications tweaked for the popular masses.

On his own blog, Denton obliquely compared himself to Hearst, and Gawker to past revolutions in media. “For many New York writers, Gawker is a proxy for this harsh and competitive new world, because the gossip site covers the death agonies of Manhattan’s old-line media industry, without much respect for the club’s cosy rules … I presume Hearst missed a few Manhattan dinner parties. He survived.”

(N.B.: Denton does not lack for invitations amongst Manhattan’s media partygoers.)

Gawker’s Innovations

But: to be the William Randolph Hearst of the 21st century, it’s not enough to wear “especially dazzling cravats“ and build a castle; one has to innovate. How has Gawker transformed media, for better and for worse?

• As mentioned above, the most obvious Denton-Hearst connection is bringing sharp opinion back into the news. Why dredge up a quotable doctor to tell you that people shouldn’t eat 1200 calorie tubs of popcorn when you can succinctly say the same thing yourself?

Given old media’s increasing reliance on uncritically swallowed press releases and soundbites, this was badly needed.

• By openly obsessing over pageviews, i.e. display ads, i.e. $$$, and making them into a public competition, Gawker shaped profitable writing for the web and redefined writers, for better or worse, as people who actually care about the bottom line.

• Gawker has singularly eroded the boundaries between public and private life as covered by media. See also: Deadspin’s emptying of their tip box on sexual shenanigans at ESPN, which slimed private, behind-the-scenes executives as well as semipublic news personalities. As the fascinating n+1 essay on Gawker puts it, “This was the important development: the decision to treat every subject, known or unknown, in public or private situations, with the fascinated ill will that tabloid magazines have for their subjects.”

To their credit, they anticipated the trend towards micro-celebrities by treating these small fry the same way they treated Paris Hilton. In the process, they made a few stars of their own (cf. Julia Allison). But destroying private life is the single worst thing Gawker has done.

Critiques aside, the 2000s has been Gawker’s decade in media. But will they be able to hold onto the next?

>>>NEXT PAGE: The Next Gawker decade?

>>>Follow the author of this post on Twitter

But to praise (or denounce, right Time?) the end of the decade with a magazine cover is truly a special sort of honor — and oddly enough, it’s rare. So far, not too many titles have given the early 2000s the newsstand treatment, so we figured for the final edition of Cover Wars this year (and this decade!), we would celebrate those commemorating The Aughts. That means New York vs. Time vs. Rolling Stone vs. New York. See below for the winner, and as for Cover Wars, see you next year!

For their ’00s cover, New York held a contest, inviting a group of graphic designers to try their hand at illustrating the double-zeroes. The results, which can be seen in this slideshow, range from hand-drawn to tactile to totally digital — and in the case of my personal favorite, the historical. To the left was the selected newsstand cover, while on the next page is the subscribers’ edition.

Mediaite Grade (B-): For the cover most people will see — and hopefully be drawn to enough to purchase — New York could’ve been more provocative. Though the digi-balloons and black background are sleek, they fail to elicit any decade-specific memories or feelings, rendering the final product a tad dull. Perhaps the cover would be more successful had we heard the artist’s intent or the mag’s decision process.

Time‘s version of the farewell to the decade cover is a surprisingly sardonic take for the newsweekly, as they dub it “The Decade From Hell,” but with a silver lining sub-head: “And why the next one will be better.” Good riddance, they seem to be saying, but here’s our optimism, too. But the crying baby in the party hat is a bit Glenn Beck, no?

Mediaite Grade (B+): The edge they’re showing with the sharp headline is admirable and works when it comes to standing out on the newsstand, but the accompanying graphic feels a little bit chintzy, or not campy enough. It occupies an odd middle ground of gravity and humor that might have been tipped to one side or the other, say, by cutting down on the party decorations or putting the baby in a broken pair of those ’00 glasses…

>>>NEXT: Rolling Stone and New York‘s Take Two!

]]> http://www.mediaite.com/print/cover-wars-end-of-the-decade-brings-aughts-are-over-covers/feed/ 1 http://www.mediaite.com/online/mediaite-census-mapping-a-decade-of-moves-including-yours/ http://www.mediaite.com/online/mediaite-census-mapping-a-decade-of-moves-including-yours/#comments Tue, 15 Dec 2009 19:27:04 +0000 Philip Bump http://www.mediaite.com/?p=56101 Ten years ago today, I lived in a somewhat odd Melrose-style apartment building (with the pool in the middle that was never used, at least not for sexy young hipster soirees) in Northern California, where I’d lived for about five months. I was getting used to the climate, the city, and the fact that it wasn’t going to snow, no matter how much I wished it would.

I left there three years ago, another eternity in my life. I’ve lived multiple places in New York City since, and the thought of the young me, new to California, seems so foreign as to be imaginary.

Ten years, in other words, is a long time. In ten years, bookmarked by two Censuses, millions move for millions of reasons.

We thought, therefore, that the end of this year was a good opportunity to encourage reflection on those reasons and those moves. Below is a map, centered on the United States — but scalable and movable — that shows the moves of visitors to this website (you!). Feel free to add your own – just use the tool under the map to enter the city where you lived in 2000, and where you live now; optionally, you can tell a little bit about why you made the move.

A few notes on reading the data: Red lines indicate moves from east to west; blue, the opposite. The yellow line you’ll see connects the average move, connecting the average starting and ending locations. The icons over cities scale depending on whether people moved to or from them, and grow more opaque with the more moves in and out. Scroll over each line to see the reason for person’s move (mine was “Grew up in Upstate New York. Missed winters and culture.”) (NB: We reserve the right to moderate entries. Keep it clean, folks.)

The map will be live until 11:59:59 p.m. ET on December 31, 2009. So add yours in fast! When it hits zero hour 2010, the clock will be reset — and you can start planning your moves for the next decade. We’ll crunch the data and have a report for you on the migrant patterns of Mediaite readers sometime early in the 2010s.

My move is already on there – a little blue line that represents ten years of change in my life. Look forward to seeing yours.

Now, lists are great but wouldn’t it be way more fun if we could just put the decade in a word cloud. Also rather amazing if someone could figure out how to calculate it (probably someone will have figured it out by 2019). Anyone want to guess what it would include? Obama, Bush, Clinton, Iraq, Twitter, YouTube, Google, Gmail, Blackberry, iTunes, iPhone, Harry Potter, all seem likely contenders. Alas, even though this is the Internet decade (among other things), the Internet has only really comprehensively ruled our lives for the last 4-5 years, meaning there is only so much data to mine.

The same cannot be said for Barack Obama, our first Internet presidency. Whereas the 22 million emails the Bush administration “lost” have just been recovered, one wonders if that’s not the average amount of emails the current White House generates every week. It also means that Obama’s entire time in the spotlight as both presidential candidate and president exists online. The Washington Post has taken advantage of this as far as Obama’s many, many presidential speeches are concerned and created a searchable online database, which allows readers to search by issue to get available transcripts and video. It also boasts a tag cloud of the most used words. It is perhaps a measure of how devoted Obama has been to both the economy and health (at least in his speeches) that these clock in as most popular — you have to look a bit more closely to find “change.”

Few of us, we are all pleased to report, look the same way we did ten years ago (with some notable exceptions). Likewise our favorite brands; the past ten years provided a surfeit of logo redesigns, each documented, critiqued, lambasted and praised on the internet. (No site does as thorough and admirable a job of redesign review as the Brand New blog, part of the Under Consideration website. Be warned: hours can be lost reading these reviews.)

Graphic from the New York Times.

Some of the changes in the past ten years have been miniscule, as with the logo for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, tweaked so slightly as to be barely noticeable at even large sizes.

Got that?

Some, however, have been a huge change – few more so than Pepsi. Widely pilloried, the infamous Pepsi redesign suffered doubly with the release of its accompanying design document that described in detail the new logo’s emotions and energy fields. In fairness, without understanding how the line of DNA to future crosses the convention-innovation axis, it’s hard to judge the smiley little logo on its merits. So do your homework.

We’ve put together a gallery of some of the redesigns, some of which are peppered throughout this post (including my own). Companies that have done so include communications firms like AT&T and Sprint, media outlets (MSNBC and Animal Planet), old school tech companies (Xerox, Kodak), fast food (Burger King, KFC), airlines, websites, even the City of New York. Much as a sports team will change its logo to sell new merchandise, so to can a refreshed logo boost a stock price – or so the thinking goes.

But just one little link-click away lies the ugly past behind these transformations. As painful as it is for me to post the photo you’ll see below, creative directors at these firms must cringe at the color choices and line art of their predecessors. Too bad for them. The web, in essence, is the photo album brought out to show what a logo looked like in its awkward phase – and for that, it should be praised.

A good place to start is with this great post at Instant Shift.com, walking through the evolution of twenty prominent brands. (Volkswagen, for example, wisely decided to eventually downplay the swastika in its logo.) Much of this post seems to have been derived from the thorough encyclopedia of logo iterations found at LogoOrange.com, a logo design and corporate identity site. LogoOrange also describes existing trends in logo design on an annual basis – this year, psychedelia and arabesque were in, though I didn’t need to tell you that.

For lesser-known labels of years gone by, an enterprising individual took the trouble to scan an entire book of 1970s trademarks, “World of Logotypes.” Available for download as a PDF, or as a Flickr set, the monochromatic tome displays logos for hundreds of firms – many extinct, many ready for re-appropriation in sci-fi movies. (Another book, Logo RIP, pays tribute to identities of yore, its website acting as a place for fans to sit shiva.)

No discussion of logos would be complete without mentioning the secret resource of hack designers the world over: the fabulous Brands of the World. The site offers downloadable, high quality line art versions of most of the world’s top (and lesser known) brands. While a former .ru iteration of the site gave a stronger feel of Naomi Klein-style rebellion, there’s still something visceral about being able to open the Starbucks logo in Illustrator and tweak it to suit your needs. Please discuss with your attorney before doing so, and clear this page from your browser history.

I’ve always been a big fan of old advertisements, looking at how what is messaged and what is considered appropriate has evolved over time. In the moment, we often lose site of the history of our culture – which is why we love the end of a decade: it gives us an excuse to reflect upon ourselves. For the millions of dollars companies spent to develop the new logos above, a certain number of them will grow disenchanted by 2020, or 2030, and these fresh representations of what the brand stands for will slide to the left, leaving future creative directors to wring their hands in aesthetic angst.

I, however, will remain enamored of my current hairstyle forever and always. If you don’t like it, that’s simply because you aren’t privy to the research I’ve done to determine its energy fields and how it relates to the Golden Ratio.

And I’m not dumb enough to release that research to the public.
Next page: The Decade in Logos

Almost immediately after the story broke, someone produced a picture of Woods and his wife Elin standing side by side American-gothic style, with Woods sporting a photoshopped black eye and broken tooth. Next came the insta-computer game, a little bit of flash animation where the player gets to control Tiger Woods in his Escalade as he runs away from his golf club-wielding wife. And of course there are the jokes, the thousands of one-liners dumped onto comment boards from one end of the internet to the next. All, of course, were widely circulated and linked on Twitter, Facebook, and countless blogs.

By the current standards of cultural commentary, this is completely unremarkable. Whenever there is breaking news of any sort, it is now standard procedure for the internet to take control of the story. Tabloid-level scandal provides the most fruitful ground (e.g. Michael Jackson’s death, Christian Bale’s famous on-set rant, David Hasselhof’s drinking), but there is hardly anything that is off-limits, from accidents and natural disasters to celebrities and political figures.

What is remarkable though is just how fantastic this all would have seemed in 1999. Sure, ten years ago we had the Internet, but we were still treating it as little more than a more efficient distribution platform for the existing media. Our essentially “broadcast” approach, with the privileged few sending their rare and valuable content out the to the many, was still firmly in place. So much so in fact that when Conrad Black launched the National Post in 1998, complete with fancy new website, the major objections were not that the business model of newspapers was obsolescent, but just that there were just too many dailies in Toronto already.

What changed everything was the development of what has been called “Web 2.0″, the collection of web-based applications that foster interactivity, modular interoperability and collaboration. These include social networking sites, wikis, aggregators, and blogs, along with dozens of other applications that allow people to share and revise content at will.

This is what the law professor and copyright reform activist Lawrence Lessig has called a shift from a “Read Only” (R/O) to a “Read/Write” (R/W) culture. A R/O culture is characterized by a sharp distinction between producers and consumers and is based on the lecture model of distribution. In contrast, in a R/W culture the distinction between producers and consumers breaks down, and the culture becomes more like a freewheeling dinner party than a lecture. Crucial to a R/W culture is open access to information that everyone has the ability to not only share, but also manipulate and transform. This is what underwrites the open-source, multiple-drafts, reuse/remix/recycle media ecosystem we might as well call Culture 2.0.

But as Lessig has pointed out, this isn’t so much a new development as a return to a culture that dominated right to the end of the 19th century. Until the arrival of mass media like radio, television, film, and phonographs, American culture was a mongrelized mess of folk-traditions driven by free-form borrowing, appropriation, and outright copying. And so when we look back over the last century and a bit, the heyday of R/O culture from the 1920s to the 1990s starts to look like a aberration, made possible by distinct but temporary level of analog technological development. The Culture 2.0 digital revolution is taking us back to a more democratic culture built around creative communities of sharing and collaboration.

This revolution has had at least three profound effects:

(1) First, it catalyzed the Copyright Wars, the decade-long fight over intellectual property that has raged between software developers, record labels, and publishers on the one side, and programmers, artists, and file sharers on the other.

(2) Second, it completely destroyed the business models of old media, in particular newspapers and broadcast television.

(3) Finally, it has pretty much put the old information gatekeepers out of a job – the producers, editors and journalists whose job descriptions involved managing and constraining the flow of information to the masses. The result is very much like Marx’s famous description of life under capitalism: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life.”

Of course in any revolution, the old order never goes down without a fight. Big Copyright continues to manipulate governments into passing draconian intellectual property regimes that suppress the rights of users, while News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch (owner of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, along with other large properties) has declared war on Google, blaming it for profiting off his products while delivering nothing but empty page views in return.

These are little more than the rearguard actions of a doomed ancien regime. The culture has changed from one marked by information scarcity to one of plenitude, and there is no longer value to be had in gatekeeping or rationing. We live now in an attention economy, and the result has been a transfer of power to the masses, who will shop their eyeballs and scarce time to the most interesting bidder.

While our culture is now “democratic” in the most literal sense of the word, the unanswered question is the effect this will have on the actual institutions of democracy. Many people are worried that civil discourse will suffer as we retreat into the echo-chambers of the blogosphere, while others are convinced that the demise of print media will lead to unfettered corruption at City Hall and on Capitol Hill.

These are not idle worries. If the rise of Culture 2.0 was the most important development of the first decade of this century, making sure we use it to build a properly functioning Democracy 2.0 will be the most pressing task of the second.

Andrew Potter is a columnist for Maclean’s Magazine. He is also the author of The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves, forthcoming in April from HarperCollins.

40s

The news business came out of World War II a lot like the rest of the country: proud and confident. More than eyewitnesses, we were cheerleaders, too, rooters for our winning team, with our own stars: Ernie Pyle, Bill Mauldin, Ed Murrow. We trusted our victorious leaders, and even our allies, as we reported on the founding of the United Nations, and for a while eased into a routine of conventional reporting.

But not for very long.

50s

The Cold War started; the Iron Curtain had clanged down, and serious policy questions broke out;. Korea took everyone by surprise; MacArthur saved it, over reached, crossed Harry Truman, got himself fired, returned to a hero’s welcome, made a big speech, and then really did, in his own words, fade away. For the first time in years, the press was called upon to report big public controversy — still primarily in print in its traditional straightforward, structured, apparently objective way.

Joe McCarthy changed all that. He bluffed and bullied a gullible, non-challenging press into accomplices for his rampage of scare-charges of Communist subversives in government that ruined careers and wrecked, among others, the Far East sector of the State Department. This turned out to be an object lessen on press responsibility, only belatedly learned and courageously corrected by growing awareness and counter challenges, culminating in Ed Murrow’s devastating presentation of the Senator, live, in his own words.

Television started to emerge as a powerful force for institutional change, primarily as a diversion of advertising dollars, and the ultimate destruction of the evening newspapers. With the rare pioneering exceptions of fine documentaries like Murrow and Fred Friendly‘s Harvest of Shame, and attempts at meaningful public debates, and the pageantry of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, TV news was pretty much an extension of print; mostly confined to 15 minutes of Douglas Edwards and John Cameron Swayze, reading. The Nixon-Kennedy debate, though, crossed the great divide for TV news, to relevance and importance. People who heard it thought Nixon won; people who saw it, thought Kennedy won. Visual would become the primary force in journalism (as immediacy would soon become its partner).

60s

The shattering events of the 60s changed journalism, and journalists, in range and responsibilities, identity and attitude. The assassinations created an unprecedented climate of urgency, expectation, and existential uncertainty among consumers of the news; words and pictures of the riots created an intimacy with shock. In that context the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby on live TV is the historic flash point. People saw history actually happen.

Coverage of the struggle for civil rights, though, brought about the most fundamental change in journalism, as events like sit-ins; live pictures of the beatings of Freedom Riders; Bull Connor, fire hoses, and police dogs at Pettus Bridge changed the attitudes of the nation, their expectations from journalism, and the role of reporters from observers to sympathizers. They became engaged in their stories, and as they did, erased the ephemeral claim to objectivity.

Politics turned rough, at least partly to exploit the divisiveness and fear. Cops and dissenters turned the 1968 Democratic Convention into a near-riot, including the arrest and formal removal of reporters from the floor. Spiro Agnew railed against Nattering Nabobs of Negativism. SDS spawned the underground press, with publications like the LA Free Press and the Berkeley Barb. Tom Wolfe led the way into the highly subjective New Journalism, and Teddy White set new standards for depth and understanding in political reporting.

The news business explored new ranges, less violent, to report. Rachel Carson opened the way to environmental reporting with Silent Spring; Betty Friedan to gender politics with The Feminine Mystique. Hugh Hefner offered the idea of Playboy to Hearst, which turned him down; he went on to do it himself. Cosmopolitan hired Helen Gurley Brown, the editor who turned sex (and eventually prurience) into an overwhelming global publishing commodity.

70s

Advances in applications of technology shaped the news business. Creation of the satellite and the advent of cable enabled Ted Turner to stitch together the Superstation, which made fans of the Atlanta Braves across the country, and got him the money and new skills, to go with his genius gumption, to start CNN – all news, all the time, all over the world. HBO made the first global real-time show of a major event with the Thrilla in Manila (Ali-Frazier), and became the first TV network to continuously deliver signals via satellite.

Publication of the Pentagon Papers, essentially an academic exercise, was an enormous historic advance — and a very brave one — in the affirmation of the press’s duty to challenge authority. Watergate, only months later, equally historic, equally brave, was an essentially professional journalistic exercise — advancing in practice from basic shoe-leather reporting to “follow the money” — to the same end. “At the beginning, I don’t think Kay Graham and Ben Bradlee had the foggiest notion of what it would turn into,” recalls one competitor from that time. “It was just very good reporting, and it drove us nuts.”

At the same time, challenge to authority was being expressed in Viet Nam, where reporters — professional descendants of the proud eyewitnesses of earlier wars — held official pronouncements in contempt. They came to call the daily briefings The Five O’Clock Follies; Harrison Salisbury reported from Hanoi; Sy Hersh reported the My Lai massacre; and Walter Cronkite’s commentary famously caused Lyndon Johnson to concede that this was a war he could not win.

Affirmations of basic principle aside, historic adjustments were being made on the commercial and operational sides. Newspapers were losing their near-monopolistic claim to revenue from news. Families, once proud and comfortable in their stewardship, were finding the capital costs of keeping up, the threat to future profits, and generational dissent, all creating good reasons to sell to money-minded chains , where reality dictated that cost control weighed heavily against pricey journalism..

News was growing into a powerful money-maker for TV, and producing star-wattage personalities, who were making a lot of that money for themselves. The defining event was the hiring of Barbara Walters from NBC by ABC for the first million-dollar contract for a journalist, and altered many a career objective.

80s

The Reagan years were big for news, with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, Iran Contra, and the Challenger disaster, but a lot less dramatic for the media business itself.

Less dramatic, yes, but powerfully significant for the quality of reporting that: the enormous range and capacity for research created. The Internet was just getting started, and the organizing of research into ready accessibility, was making instantly available unprecedented depth and quality of fact, context, and interpretation.

90s

It was a fat time for television, where news as entertainment brought in new highs in profit, and made millionaire celebrities of its stars. Crossfire began, and talking heads became loud, shrill, and profitably entertaining.

The task of filling the giant 24/7 hole with news stretched severely thin the quality of journalism, though. For all its value, the Internet’s capability to move things quickly without full sourcing and to distribute them widely, facilitated the deterioration. The need to fill the hole invited superficiality and scandal, opened space for wild opinionating, put a premium on commentary over reporting, created a preference for anticipation and intolerance for explanation. The O.J. Simpson murder trial set the scandal meter at an all-time high – until the Clinton scandals overtook it, and made Drudge the dominant personality in the media world. Historic, in a way. Washington reporters wondered why the reporting on sex scandals was wide open now, when as recently as Jack Kennedy, it was simply not done.

The newspaper world obsessed with figuring out how to get back the revenues they lost to Craig’s List, and many of them could not. Real panic started to set in. Preparations began for the Aughts and dark days to come of layoffs, buyouts, and closings. Technologists — masters of the new universe of algorithms — got ready to take over.

And they did.

I did not quote anyone by name, except for Paul Starr, but I would like to acknowledge the great help from the following, in preparation of this post: Paul Starr, Stephen Engelberg, Ralph Engelman, Charles Bierbauer, Bob Semple, Alex Jones, John Darnton, Rachel Rich Fine, Geneva Overholser, Elliot King, Sidney Offitt, .Jim Srodes, Tom Fleming and Geoff Smith.

Bill Rappleye has spent the last 60-plus years in journalism. Read more about him here.

“So this Dec. 12, I mark a sad anniversary, and wonder, among so many other things, what “Catch-22’s” author would have had to say about President Obama’s accepting the Nobel Peace Prize shortly after ordering 30,000 more Americans to war.”

– Author Christopher Buckley marks the eighth anniversary of author Joseph Heller’s death by wondering what his friend would have made of the “tumultuous — to say the least — decade” that he “missed, or perhaps another way to put it, avoided.” Perhaps at the very least Heller could have given a name to what we are now calling the Aughts, but will likely (and hopefully) be defined by some future historian in a manner which reflects the seriousness and tumult of the last ten years. ‘Catch Aught-Aught’, while sort of accurate in its way, just doesn’t have the sort of ring to it that tends to stick, and stranger than fiction (which it certainly was) is merely too long.

I thought, therefore, that it made sense to see how they did. In the spirit of the end of the decade, I looked back at their first Year In Ideas released in December of 2001. Heavy on concepts that emerged following the terrorist attacks (such as “American Imperialism, Embraced”) and the Internet (“Populist Editing”), the series was born at a fascinating moment in American history.

While I’m not a scientist or a fashion designer, I did my best to gauge how much impact each “idea” actually had – if, in essence, it was viable. By my count, of the 77 ideas presented, over half (40 or so) are still relevant in 2009. About 30% aren’t. Many others I considered “maybes” – I just don’t know enough to make the call.

Maybe you do. Check out the full list below, complete with links to the original article, and share your wisdom. The Internet was made for arguments.

But the decade was not without its highlights. It’s hard to imagine that in 2000 that many would think same-sex marriage would be the law of the land in five states, that 12 states and the District of Columbia would add transgender rights provisions, and that you couldn’t turn on the television, glance at the computer or open a newspaper without seeing openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people staring back at you.

So, on to the gayest moments of the Aughts.

Gay Rights Win in Court

2003 was a very good year for the gays, at least in the legal world. First, in the biggest LGBT victory every in the U.S. Supreme Court, SCOTUS struck down the Texas sodomy law in Lawrence v. Texas. The law, which only applied to homosexual sodomy, was found unconstitutional by a 6-3 vote. A few months later, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled 4-3 in Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health that the commonwealth’s marriage law violated the state’s constitution and therefore the state needed to allow marriages between two men or two women.

Gay Rights Lose in Public Votes

While the courts were good to the gays, voters were not. Same sex marriage laws were rejected in 31 states over the decade, with the most stinging defeats coming in California and Maine. The most liberal state in the country overturned the California Supreme Court in 2008 and outlawed same-sex marriage by approving Proposition Eight. Although the marriages performed before the election and after the court’s ruling would remain valid, a well-funded effort led by Mormons and other religious conservatives meant even the some of the most liberal voters in the country didn’t see marriage as a civil rights issue.

The defeat in Maine, the first big Stonewall 2.0 effort, was just as devastating. After the legislature approved gay marriage, voters in the one of the least religious and most white states in the country also rejected same-sex marriage by approving Question One, despite the pro-gay marriage forces outspending their opponents 2 to 1.

Rachel Maddow given her own show on MSNBC and Andrew Sullivan begins his blog

They couldn’t be more different, yet a wonky lesbian who doesn’t have a television at home became a major player in liberal commentary on MSNBC while a wonky gay Brit defined the political blogosphere with his conservative/moderate/liberal political commentary.

The 2008 debut of Maddow at MSNBC was a triumph of substance over style, giving the former Air America radio host a national platform for her unique mixture of serious questions, raised eyebrows, and an unwillingness not to suffer fools. Sullivan, meanwhile, had started his blog in 2000 and quickly became one of the most provocative voices in the political blogosphere. Everyone seems to dislike him — too gay, not gay enough, hypocritical, obsessed with Sarah Palin — but his blog created a genre and is one of the most linked-to sites.

Manhunt debuts in 2001

Why go out to a bar when you can hook-up online, save yourself the cover charge, and see the potential hook-up naked? Manhunt.net, the most popular online gay hook-up site (NSFW!), has changed how gay men find other guys, while helping to empty gay bars across the country. “Ordering in” cuts out the middle man, though Manhunt and sites like it were criticized for fueling the crystal meth epidemic in the gay community (gay men “tweak” while cruising online for sex; It’s called “party and play” or PNP). Either way, Manhunt and its progeny — like so many innovations online — changed the game and how it was played.

>>>NEXT: Brokeback Mountain & Milk, Andy Cohen’s Reign at Bravo, and Ellen DeGeneres, Covergirl

The list was made by journalists, industry insiders, and artists that included the likes of  M.I.A, Kings of Leon, and Metallica. Here’s what the top 10 looks like:

1 | Gnarls Barkley — “Crazy”

2 | Jay-Z — “99 Problems”

3 | Beyoncé — “Crazy in Love”

4 | Outkast — “Hey Ya!”

5 | M.I.A. — “Paper Planes”

6 | The White Stripes — “Seven Nation Army”

7 | Yeah Yeah Yeahs — “Maps”

8 | Amy Winehouse — “Rehab”

9 | U2 — “Beautiful Day”

10 | Eminem — “Stan”

Don’t worry people in flannel shirts: MGMT‘s “Time to Pretend” came in at number 11.

I remember it was early 1996 and someone was talking about the best bands of the nineties – a common conversation at SPIN magazine – which got me thinking of decades. This lead to the wonder of the next decade’s brand — I thought to myself “if this is the nineties, what will next decade be called?” At the time, I had I no idea what the next decade should be called – the zeros maybe? I did recall an episode of The Simpsons where Grandpa Simpson was going on about life in Springfield in aught-five when he wore an onion dangling from his belt (which was the style of the time.) Aha! Aught! That’s the name of the next decade!

I was delusional enough to think that I was the only person having this thought, and because I was working in the digital “space,” I went to networksolutions.com and saw that aught.com was available, Thinking that this was going to be the catch phrase of skateboard of the next millenium (“dude, that ollie was totally aught!”) I registered aught.com, fully expecting to eventually sell it for maybe $50,000 (which was the style of the time.)

Guess what? I never sold it. But its still my private email domain (and now serves as the private email domain for my wife and boys!). For most people it’s not that big a deal to have the same email address for 15 years. But the ups and downs of a career as a freelance television producer, writer and interactive consultant has made me appreciate the consistency of my own domain: aught.com. (I’m choosing not to be depressed by that last sentence.)

That being said, wanna buy a domain?

The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Since the Towers came down, it has been hard to have a rational discussion about anything in this nation, least of all those two buildings themselves. Hated by critics at the time of their construction, gradually accepted as members of the urban family, they now, in their absence, occupy a space in the collective imagination that is larger than they ever possessed while they stood guard over New York harbor. The wound of their erasure is still fresh, a physical reminder of the corrupting dangers of politics, money, and ego that have defined not just the rebuilding process, but our entire culture in the years following their fall.

The Deluge of New Orleans: In the wake of 9/11, Americans were promised a secure homeland. Instead, we were the victims of an unpardonable abrogation of government responsibility. Decades of intentional urban neglect and environmental exploitation inevitably gave way to a catastrophe that will not be remedied any time soon, no matter our intentions.

The Mortgage Crisis: The home has been the locus and symbol of American prosperity for decades, the ostensible lynchpin of our dreams for both emotional contentment and fiscal well-being. But the shelter and security promised by architecture have proven to be, for many Americans, an illusion. The exploitation of our desires, whether fraudulent or merely irresponsible, triggered economic collapse. The toll that overbuilding has taken on our environment and our communities has been enormous.

The Rise of China: Perhaps the most memorable building of the decade was the “Bird’s Nest,” the extraordinary stadium designed by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron for the Beijing Olympics. It was just one of several recent high profile commissions in China that have captivated the press. But the real story of architecture in China is not so much a few high-end buildings designed by international luminaries, but the overwhelming growth of China’s cities, and the pressures that growth has exerted on the environment and China’s historic fabric.

[Photo by Karrie Jacobs]

The Fall of Dubai: An Ozymandian empire built on credit and in the desert by what amounted to slave labor. It was so obviously a parable it’s hard to believe it was ever something more than a mirage wafting over hot sands. A tower nearly half a mile tall? An artificial archipelago in the shape of a palm tree? An indoor ski slope? One could not dream up a more vivid symbol of a decade of irrational exuberance. Tread carefully, Las Vegas.

The Death of Philip Johnson: The reign of America’s pre-eminent architect was so long that, when he died in 2005 at the age of 98, it was hard to believe the profession could go on without him. It was Johnson, as a young man, who established the parameters by which architecture would be judged and practiced in the United States. He oversaw the construction of America’s greatest skyscraper (The Seagram Building), designed its most storied restaurant (The Four Seasons), and built himself a national landmark (The Glass House). His protégés included Robert Venturi, Peter Eisenman, Richard Meier, Michael Graves, Rem Koolhaas, and Robert A. M. Stern.

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