This New England

With college endowments tanking and tuitions and fees surging, I plug the New England Board of Higher Education's (NEBHE) Dec. 5 conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston: "Higher Education in a Troubled Economy: How New England's Colleges and Universities Can Survive the Downturn and Prepare to Thrive.'' (Not that, say, Harvard, with a $30 billion endowment, is on Food Stamps yet.)

Higher education is arguably the region's most important and successful cultural/economic sector. It's certainly what much of the world thinks about when it thinks about New England. How it gets through the recession should mean something to all of us. For more information, call (617) 357-9620 (extension 105) or look at http://www.nebhe.org/content/view/304/135/.

Speakers will include James E. Glassman, senior economist at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.; Roger Goodman, vice president of Moody's Investor Services; Philip R. Day, Jr., president & CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA); Katharine Bradbury, senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston; Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of Finaid.org; Thomas Graf, executive director of the Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority; Terry Hartle, senior vice president of government and public affairs at the American Council on Education; and Kathleen Dawley, president of Maguire Associates.

(Full disclosure: I am on an editorial advisory committee for NEBHE. So far in my three year-relationship with this dignified and ascetic group, I have received two tuna-fish sandwiches, two bags of potato chips and two chocolate cookies as payment for services rendered, the value of which is murky. They were delicious.)

Wind is their way

Though the clean electricity is needed more in southern New England than up north, Maine is the region's state moving ahead most rapidly for major wind power. Existing and proposed projects are going up all over the place. The state's many ridge lines are the most popular places. Luckily, there are fewer powerful summer people around to block them than here in more tropical climes of New England. The summers are too short and the fossil-fuel costs too high.

Locally owned newspapers' redux?

A Mainiac investment group including former Senator and Defense Secretary William Cohen has signed an agreement to buy Blethen Maine Newspapers, whose flagship is the Portland Press Herald, the nearest thing that the Pine Tree State has to a statewide paper.

As newspaper company stock falls, look for more of a national pattern of local groups trying to buy local papers (cheap) from publicly held chains, for influence and maybe even profit. After all, most of these papers remain the dominant source of public information in their communities. They are, in a sense, unregulated public utilities.

Cartoonist Thomas Nast prepares to go on attack.

Precision vs. speed

Which is more important in news blogging -- precision or immediacy? Whether we like it or not, it's probably immediacy, at least on the blogosphere's commercial side. A blog or other Web site that is not very frequently updated (preferably at least daily) is doomed to obscurity.

Most people who open these sites don't do it as would someone picking up a book to read; they want a quick hit of adrenaline-rich news or opinion (although there's so much of the latter out there that value of Web opinion may be falling as fast as real-estate in Naples, Florida) or a picture or a video. (Sadly, they generally don't want ads there.)

Readers also want to be able to respond quickly, either to the blogger or to one of his or her respondents, or to look up something on links. That doesn't usually mean answering with great care. Blogging favors quick reaction, often sardonic, over refined and rigorous developed thought.

The rapid-fire publishing of blog entries and rapid-fire responses, some very unpredictable and violent, can, it is true, create a lively (or crazed) conversation, made more so by the instant availability on the Web of related information and opinions via links.

But the Internet extravaganza also feeds into an obsessive-compulsive connection with life on the Web as compared to real life, where body language and intonation are key parts of communication. And thus much of of the dialogue (or "multilogue'') on the Web is deeply incomplete and otherwise flawed --- even more so than in "real life.''

I see little evidence so far that the life on the Web that people are increasingly living has led to the making of a mass of better informed and more thoughtful people.

Rather, attention-deficit disorder seems to have been one of the Web's major products, along with a kind of ''narcissism of now,'' in which a current event is accorded far more importance than it deserves just because it is, well, NOW and often displayed in vivid color on a screen.

If some recent surveys to measure the public's broad knowledge of current affairs and history are any measure, the Internet may have in fact made many of us stupid. We prefer its buttom pushing and instant visual and aural gratification to research, reflection and deep analysis.

Certainly the Internet's ability to get us information fast (and sometimes furiously) can be a Godsend. Mapquest is a marvel!

And yes, blogs, given how easy they are to update, at least can be far more quickly corrected than what you see in a newspaper, a magazine or a book. A blogger's capacity to quickly fix is one of the Web's allures.

But because of that ability, many who write news blogs feel all too comfortable making unsubstantiated remarks online. They figure that they can just check it and repair later -- if they remember. If they forget, few will notice as the Internet river flows on in full flood. You tend to be a lot more careful if you write something for paper. And corrections on paper are more embarrasing.

Meanwhile the inaccuracy remains somewhere on the Web forever, made more dangerous by the lack of adequate dating mechanisms on search engines, which swipe stuff willy-nilly with little care about accuracy (or copyright).

In blogging, energy generally trumps thought. And while the sea of informational riches on the Internet is immense, we still only have 24 hours a day.

The jury is still out on whether the Internet is good or bad for high or even middle-brow civilization. Meanwhile, let's have more information on the neurology of Web-watching compared to reading on paper. For instance, what are their relative memory tractions?

Meanwhile, this just in:

Another major international financial institution has had its computer system attacked by unknown cyber-hackers, Fox News has learned. The discovery of the assault last week threw into crisis the Washington, D.C. based International Monetary Fund (IMF), which offers emergency financial aid to countries faced with balance-of-payments problems, and provoked a shutdown of IMF computers that lasted for several days.

-- Fox News

 Tags  Blethen blogosphere;NEBHE college endowments Maine Portland Press Herald William Cohen wind

---