This is your Captain calling no more…
It’s 6 o’clock. Dinner is made, and the TV is on. You’re just sitting down after a long day of work, or school, or in the case of anyone who works in a school… both, when your phone rings. Your first instinct is to ignore it, the second ring seems to come and go without you giving it another thought, but then that third ring, that ominous third ring. Flashing through your head are the craziest of ideas. You’ve just won the lottery. Your friend is stranded somewhere and needs a ride, your boss needs you to come in for an extra shift, or your mother is calling you…. Again. Against your better judgment you get up and make your way over to the phone.
The fourth ring now piercing the peaceful sound of the theme from Y&R as your PVR plays back today’s latest installment makes you ask yourself why you even have a phone. You place your hand on the receiver, and a split second before you pick it up you wonder to yourself why the call display isn’t showing you who’s calling.
“Hello”….. silence. Nothing. “Hello?” again, nothing, and then… “Is this Mr Or Mrs Arlsburg?”
The telemarketers shrill voice digs its way into your brain like an Asian Pine Beetle munching its way through Canada’s forests. You try to cut them off, to say no thank you, or perhaps you’re a rude person like me, and you simply hang up. The end result is always the same. Either right away, or after some telephone wrangling you hang up the phone and make your way back to whatever it was you were doing before someone decided to inject themselves into your life through the ancient and questionably evil art of telemarketing.
Canadians have long been annoyed at these terrorists of the telephone, but there was nothing they could do to stop the seemingly unending onslaught of harassing calls… until now.
The CRTC has bravely forged ahead and decided to enact a Canadian Do Not Call Registry a mere five years after the visionary leader George W. signed similar legislation into law in the United States. Just as an aside, when you are watching Jeopardy thirty years from now and the answer is “The National Do Not Call Registry was his one and only achievements for which he is fondly remembered for” The question will be who is George W. Bush
Under the new Canadian regulations consumers can log on to the very easy to remember URL of http://www.lnnte-dncl.gc.ca/ and register their home, and cell phone numbers on the list. Telemarketers will then be prohibited from calling you on those numbers or face stiff fines. Companies who receive complaints can be fined $15,000 per call.
Not everyone is beholden to follow the new do not call registry however:
Registered Charities seeking donations
Newspapers selling subscriptions
Political parties and candidates
Or companies you have done any kind of business with in the last eighteen months.
In fact, Dr Michael Geist, the University of Ottawa Law professor who is well known for his writings on technology and privacy issues writes that up to 85% of telemarketing calls will be exempt from such a list. These organizations however must maintain their own do not call lists, and stop harassing you if requested.
To combat this the good doctor created ioptout.ca. The purpose behind the site is to give you the choice of which companies and groups (if any) you want to be contacted by. Once you register your number and choose the companies, and organizations that you do not want to hear from an email is generated and sent to them requesting your name and number be removed.
A month after the service went live the Canadian Marketing Association and the Canadian Bankers Association sent letters to CRTC Chairman, and proud owner of the coolest name in all of Canadian government Konrad von Finckenstein arguing the requests coming through a third party were invalid. The chairman shot back at the two groups saying that nothing in the new law prohibited such requests and declaring them to be valid.
Great news for me and you, not so great for that guy trying to sell you a free vacation. (Yeah he called me too…) Both the National Do Not Call Registry (which went online September 30th) and ioptout.ca may be just what the doctor ordered, and may just be the key to me finally enjoying a full hour of the Y&R without being interrupted. Now if only I could get my mother to stop calling while I’m trying to watch.
The future of journalism hopefully includes journalists getting paid…
More and more people are accessing their news online. If you are a news fiend, the internet is rather addictive. You can read all the newspapers of the world and never leave your chair. You can listen to radio stations on the other side of the globe right from your home. You can access all sorts of different kinds of media, within seconds.
It is easy to understand why so many people turn to the Internet for their news. One problem though, is that people don’t like paying for information online. If things continue as they are I don’t see a positive future merger between journalists and the web.
Don’t people realize that journalists work really hard and deserve to get paid?
I agree with Bill Gates on this one.
This is an interesting BBC video, it shows in how many ways news can be accessed online and how it reaches people.
I think over time people will realize that if they want good news online, they may have to pay for it.
Wow! Now I know how to search!
Peggy French with Mohawk College’s Library Services showed us how to effectively search and navigate the library’s many resources. This was an extremely useful presentation! I had only tried to access some of the library’s online resources once before and I had not been successful. I mistakenly tried to search the same way I searched the Internet, and had hundreds of entries. I gave up, and went into the library and took out some books.
I am glad that with Peggy’s help I now feel able to use the library’s online resources. This will help me tremendously with my work as a journalism student. I will now be able to do more thorough research and access more sources when doing research for a story. I can easily search current articles and publications relating to my topic, and easily view publications from a few years back. The library’s website also has a variety of useful links that I plan to regularly check when doing research. One is www.infoplease.com, a great site that quickly tells you a summary of the issue or term searched and a number of other useful links relating to that topic. I found this one really useful too, to find articles online.
This is going to really help, and I plan to use the online library services from now on.
To Photoshop or not to Photoshop, that is the question…
Technology is here to help right? Imagine you were a photojournalist before the days of mass photo manipulation. What if you took a really great shot (or so you thought because you can’t check the image because of course you’re not using a digital camera) but it turned out just a little too overexposed to use. Or what if it had some other minor flaw that would now be so easy to correct? You probably wouldn’t be able to use that photo.
Now you can adjust lighting, shadows, focus and almost anything else. The big question is, is it ethical? We know that photojournalists have been fired for over-doctoring photos. How do we draw the line? Some things are obvious, like photo shopping people into photos who weren’t there originally. But what if we are asking if it’s ethical to just remove a tiny black spot from a picture of a flower?
If you remove even a tiny speck you are no longer representing that flower exactly as it was.
I don’t actually have a problem with this concept. I am fine with the minor re-touching of photos, for me it does not cross any ethical guidelines. Everyone’s perceptions are different; two people can look at the same photo and have completely different perceptions and can interpret different things.
Photographs themselves can be manipulated before they even reach the Photoshop phase. The settings on a camera can be adjusted to change the image the camera captures. I don’t see a difference between changing the iris on your camera to let in less light and make a photo look darker and removing a small black spot from a photo.
This is a gray area, and I completely understand the other point of view. Some people push boundaries too far and they make the rest of us question whether or not we can remove a little black dot from a picture of a flower.
Where to go from here…
This week I have been thinking about my theme and wondering…why?
Why are there so few elected female politicians? Are they simply not getting elected? Or are not enough women running?
If there aren’t enough women getting involved…then why not? Is the Canadian political scene too much of a “boys only” club?
How do we work on this?
As per our assignment this week I was trying to find some other blogs that were about my topic. This was very hard and I was only half way successful. I found some female politicians blogs, but they weren’t true blogs. They seem to be more like press releases…they still have some useful information and I want to be informed as to what the female politicians in my area are up to so I included them anyway, but it was hard to find a good blog.
I found blogs that had individual posts about my topic, but the blogs themselves were very feminist and were covering a variety of woman’s issues and topics.
I want my blog to really help. This is important to me. I wish more women would become more involved in politics in Canada. I want my blog to be a good information site. I want it to be credible and helpful. I don’t want to turn people away by simply ranting. I want to link to relevant websites, like this great one I found: www.equalvoice.ca it’s the site of a non profit organization whose sole purpose is to try to increase female involvement in Canadian politics. Many prominent female politicians are involved with it, and both men and women support it.
I was surprised to learn that the Hamilton area has had a lot of its female candidates elected; and that women’s involvement seems to be higher than average for our area. For my next blog I would like to feature one of these empowering women.
Maybe learning more about them will help get me a little closer to understanding the lack of female involvement in Canadian politics.
My Blog Theme: Women in Canadian Politics
Women make up about 20 percent of all elected government officials in Canada. In some areas it’s as low as 10 percent and in others as high as 30 percent. In my view this is not high enough!
I chose this theme for my blog as a way to focus on and highlight the achievements of women in Canadian politics. I feel that if they are given more focus then maybe more women will get more politically involved.
I am not a raging feminist that thinks women should rule the world, but I do believe in balance. I think that Canada would benefit from a more equal division of political power between men and women.
