Paul Szabo is not part of digital democracy

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The main advantage Garth Turner has over Mississauga-South MP, Paul Szabo, is he sounds like a real person when he communicates with his constituency. From his welcome page to the contact us section, http://paulszabo.com/main.htm looks and sounds stale and impersonal. Understandably, Szabo would probably like to maintain a level of professionalism but he ends up sounding like one of the "suits" Turner refers to in his "Chasm" blog entry. There's a big difference between speaking out to the people in your riding directly versus having your biography, for example, written in third-person. Szabo's little virtual world looks like a template from the "standard CEO's site handbook" from the cheesy business-man picture on the left to the unimaginative site layout. There's nothing on this site that would keep me on it for longer than 1 minute which is why this site would rate a 1 in my books. The only reason I would not rate it 0 is because the chosen colours mesh well together and I feel obligated to find some validation considering he is my MP. As Turner pointed out, we're in the midst of a technological revolution and at a time when you can do so much to transform a simple site to something worth looking at, it looks like Szabo and presumably his web designer took the easy way out. There are plenty of kids out there with better Myspace pages than this! Even if the information on the site indeed had to sound so impersonal, you could fool everyone by making your site at least look appealing. I'm surprised the site looked the way it did because I would think that could mean potential votes are on the line. These sites are "out there" now for everyone to see and unless Szabo comes around your door to introduce himself during election time, this could be the only way some voters perceive him. My experience, alone, was enough cause not to care to write to him at all. The clue that gave it away was the little maple leaf icon on the "Contact Us" section which said "Click here to send us a message". Us?!? I would hope if I had a concern, I could contact Szabo himself and not his people. He just doesn't sound like an accessible guy. He might be my MP but he doesn't seem any different than the other "suits" on the CPAC channel.

**On a side note, I thought this was on the brink of bizarre. Never before have I seen such a basic page have a "click here to find out more about this site" link on it. A page on a larger scheme of a page talking about the pages contained within it? That's odd, especially when the menu options are pretty self-explanatory. For example, I would assume on the Szabo site the biography would be his own and not Dalton McGuinty's and current events would be what he's up to now and not the CTV News headlines.

Friend or Foe?

When the internet came along, we didn't really know whether we should "dig" the fact we can connect with anyone with the same means to do so. Although the internet and its capabilities have greatly expanded, the question remains and better yet, there is no definite answer. In retrospect we, ourselves, will never see the answer but future generations looking back at "history" will.
The way I see it, the internet is a great connector to an invisible world I cannot see but I know I am a part of it instantly when I log on. The difference between experiencing humanity, more particularly, societies, is the factor that this membership is constant. For lack of an advanced explanation, the example of my peculiar music taste will do. Months ago I wandered into the psychobilly world and never looked back. Problem is there is no way for me to experience this community apart from going to live shows because of the simple fact this taste is not mainstream. For the most part (ie. not around Halloween), psychobilly shows are not a dime-a-dozen, so how can I stay a part of this community on a continual basis? Enter the Psychobilly Online Retard Board. Now at the click of a few buttons, I can communicate with a larger society I choose to be a part of. This connection never "disintegrates" either because whether I am logged in or not, I am always a registered member. This way people with much narrower interests can bond and form a family, in the most platonic and virtual way possible. Of course, my view may not be shared with everybody. Someone can just as well say the internet is so vast, everyone is prone to finding their own niche society and only divulge in this "neighbourhood" creating more distance than community. Likewise, one could also comment on the exclusionary factor the internet provokes. If you do not have internet or do not have high-speed, the necessity of applications in the media driven world and the speed at which they should be carried out at drives you to conformity. Ie. The normal internet experience now includes a constant, high-speed connection. This is how the developed world is often compared to the non-developed world and begs the question with an obvious monetary answer, why are some of us not "developing"?

Do you speak my language?

Rather than limiting the web to be just like a newspaper, book, library or even a television show, it's make sense to say the web is actually an ongoing conversation through various different extensions of the computer. Starting from the obvious, a good portion of why we log onto the web is to have conversations, whether it be instant via MSN or AOL Messenger, or delayed like simply sending emails or leaving comments on someone's blogs, for example. But when you think about it, from the moment we connect to our local network, we are constantly in conversation with the web and vice versa. Through the keyboard and the mouse, which techically act as our "eyes and ears" in this virtual conversation, we are always "talking" to the web and in return it talks back to us everytime, for example, it displays a page we asked for. It may be a pretty authoritative conversation since it seems we're always giving instructions and the web is always giving us answers but, in a sense, when we type something in the address bar or even on the page, and even click on active links, we're sending out our bits'n'pieces of a conversation and the web will hopefully always respond even if it's to say, "listen there is a problem and I cannot find it". While conversation may be flowing, understanding the web's lanugage sometimes is a different challenge altogether!

What was that acronym again?

For the same reason we turned to them some odd 30 years ago, is the same reason we turn to them now and will continue to in the future. 'Big Media' outlets may arguably have lost some of their audience but their influence and presence is still a much needed entity in the media world. Sure a new blog is created every two seconds but there are some things that are still better left to the 'professionals'. Where I see the potential problem brewing is in our (sometimes) common belief that what you hear from the media must be true. Granted, several networks have learned to cross-check references due to some stumbles along the way but if this notion was applied the same way to the Internet and its online audience there would be many more "false truths" in our conversation circles. The rise of blogging and online consumer participation may have given rise to a new type of real democratic community but of course for every person who knows a thing or two is another who thinks he knows a thing or two but probably doesn't. All the more reason why most of the time, when it comes to the information landscape, it's better to leave it to the professionals! It may not seem like it now when we're reveling in our new online universe but most of the folks employed by the 'Big Media' outlets usually know important details like the right questions to ask and the right way to convey the info to the audience. Blogging and participating in the online consumer forum may be useful and done out of passion but it's also done with a certain point of view and it's always subjective. Like in the case of Wikipedia, users lean toward democratic involvement but sometimes trusting the "free encyclopedia anyone can edit" may not be the best information to go by and this is why 'Big Media' outlets will never be forced into extinction. This is not to say that they should not meet the needs of their audience. Networks like CTV and CNN have already been making effort to involve the online world in the current information landscape through polls, forums and most importantly, frequently updated web pages. Unless MySpace starts hiring journalists and videographers, these outlets are not going anywhere yet.