Imagine you woke up one morning and went to check your e-mail, and the internet was down. “Damn”, you think to yourself, “oh well, I’ll check it on my mobile phone and figure out the connection problem later”. Then you find your cell phone won’t get a connection. For many of us, we’d wonder if the world were ending. If you’ve ever left your phone somewhere in the middle of a busy day, you may know that panicked feeling, which you may or may not get over quickly, depending on your communication needs and personal psychology. Well, as you probably know by now, the entire country of Egypt woke up to that problem yesterday. No internet. No phone service. Especially as an outsider, you may think “Big deal. I never call Egypt or browse Egyptian websites anyway”. But it may not have occurred to you that even the US Embassy website was not available. Although it is now, presumably because according to this Netcraft query, they switched ISP’s today. And then of course, there’s commerce. If you know anything at all about modern business, you know that even convenience stores rely on internet connections, to process credit card purchases. Which would probably explain why the only Egyptian ISP that was still operating was NOOR Group, which not only hosts the Egyptian Stock Exchange, but also has some heavyweight global corporate clients. So how was Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak able to just “flick a switch” and shut off all these services? This MSNBC piece explains in plain English that in the case of Egypt, the government owns the ISP’s that provide all the networks that make the internet the internet. So he simply had to issue an order to shut things down. Whether they did it physically, by shutting down equipment, or digitally, by instructing the systems to process traffic differently, is largely irrelevant. They effectively shut down the internet and cellular communications in the country, forcing protesters to use what we might call the “Islamic Sneakernet”. Good old-fashioned person-to-person communication, fairly effectively transmitted via mosques, as this Wired piece suggests. So could the US government do the same thing in times of civil unrest? You bet. And frankly that kind of possibility is why – although I often get flak from friends about it – I KNOW I’m not crazy for constantly ranting about the evils of agency capture and the telecoms in America. Although there was a lot of hubbub last year about Obama being handed an “internet kill switch” with the “cybersecurity act”, this was simply not true. It was flat out, unquestionably bald-face lies, wrapped in the language of the moronic political blogosphere, which even infected tech blogs like the one just linked to. But it hardly matters if Obama were handed an “internet kill switch”; he already had one, as every president has since before the internet even existed, in the form of Title VII of the Communications Act of 1934. The internet needs the telecoms, and in national emergencies, the government controls the telecoms. And it’s worthy of note that even though we don’t specifically have an internet kill switch now, people politicians like Joe Lieberman want one bad. But regardless of all these hypothetical issues, shutting down the internet in reaction to the mass unrest in Egypt has highlighted a plethora of other issues. Economically, it could be catastrophic. US markets already took a plunge Friday, and worse repercussions may be expected on Monday. The events have also highlighted the US government’s awkward stance toward Egypt; they can hardly come down hard diplomatically, when they give Egypt billions in support annually and use Egypt as a favorite location to make prisoners disappear during an extraordinary rendition. And perhaps most importantly, given the American media’s shallow coverage of what’s happening in Egypt, the internet would have been a great way to get more meaningful coverage. By the way, as that article points out, you still can get some better coverage from Al Jazeera. And finally, the fact that a country can shut down its internet like this may provide a huge boost to the satellite internet business. Because although there are other ways to skirt an internet blackout, they require a rather high nerd quotient, as the PC World piece Get Internet Access When Your Government Shuts It Down makes abundantly evident.

Of course, I had to hit “refresh” like thirty times on the captcha page….

One last warning: These are pretty disturbing vids.

You’ve probably seen the nasty lady tossing the kitten in the wastebin…

And by now you may have seen the girl throwing the bucket of puppies in the river…

But are either of these acts any more cruel than how we treat animals at processing plants?

Given the fact that according to this article you’re only going to read at most 28% of this page, I wonder if I should write less so you’ll read the whole thing? That sounds like an attempt at a humorous paradox, but it’s actually not; the fact is that according to this chart from the same article, users spend only 4.4 seconds more on a web page for each additional 100 words. So I better get to the point. This week PBS is airing a special edition of Frontline called Digital Nation, which explores how the Internet, texting, blogging, social networking, and other aspects of the “digital lifestyle” are impacting our lives. This is a topic that’s been very much on my attention-deficient mind for a few years. Although there are few solid scientific studies on the topic, I believe that as well as whatever benefits we derive from the technologies in which we’ve immersed our lives, these same tools have also caused perceptible changes in attention span, basic courtesy, and memory for many people. You almost certainly have noticed that more and more often, you and your friends can recall a film or book, but can’t recall the director, actor, author, or a major character. And who hasn’t found themselves sitting in a group of people that seem more intent on proving they have to “be somewhere else” digitally by texting, phoning, or checking a web account of some kind. Given the word count of what I’m writing, I lost you 140 words ago, but if you find this topic of interest, you might also find this TechCrunch article about what we watch and how we watch it interesting. It highlights things like how in the early 50′s, 30% of American households watched NBC during prime time, and how today that number has dropped to 5%, with other networks fairing about the same. Most of the remaining video content consumed is watched on the web, and in ways that may surprise you. This fact will almost certainly be relevant to the long-term viewership of Digital Nation; it debuts Tuesday directly opposite the season premiere of “Lost”.

Not surprisingly, the web site for the show is like a mini social network of user generated content:

It’s a little ironic that I’m as intrigued as I am with the upcoming BBC Television series The Virtual Revolution, because I haven’t had TV since 2002. Since I don’t have TV, I have no idea how well they’re promoting the program through that medium, but I do know that – true to the concept of the series – they’re promoting it rather brilliantly via the web. If you follow any of the mainstream tech blogs like Gizmodo, you may already know about the program, but if you fall a little lower on the Social Technographics ladder, you’ll hear more about it soon. So why am I so excited about it? Well, aside from my minor crush on the show’s host Aleks Krotoski, the PhD-bound tech journalist who (among other things) writes a tech column for the Gaurdian, the show has been open-sourced in a fashion reminiscent of Trent Reznor’s recent concert DVD. The BBC web site for the program features a blog to keep you updated, and they’ve already had a mashup contest to highlight the series’ special content that you are allowed to download, edit and republish under a permissive licence. They even open-sourced the name of the series. View the intro teaser at left, and the mashups and other clips below; the program launches on BBC2 Saturday January 30, 2010.

Barry Pilling – BBC’s Digital Revolution Mash-Up

Cassetteboy – The Web for Beginners

Below is an example of the remixable content the BBC is providing. In this graphic segment about packet switching, they demonstrate that the Internet IS a series of tubes after all.

Okay, okay. I confess I’m only watching because I have a crush on host Aleks Krotoski…

We already mentioned Hulu and Joost, so here are some more; let us know if we missed any good ones:

Fancast is operated by Comcast, and as a result has a fair amount of decent content. This is one of the few major sites that seems a little glitchy on my systems, both Mac & PC. Who knows, maybe they can tell I’m on AT&T DSL and choke my bandwidth?

TV.com (I wonder how much they paid for that domain?) is the CBS answer to NBC’s Hulu. Lots of popular programming including shows like Dexter, True Blood, Smallville, CSI, Lost, and Family Guy

Veoh is a great aggregator that presents content from a really wide variety of sources including CBS, ABC, MTV, Warner Bros., Sony Pictures, ESPN and even YouTube.

In2TV is a partnership between AOL and Warner media that brings you a huge selection of older and more obscure programs from the 60′s and 70′s like Adam 12, Gilligan’s Island, The Addams Family, and much more.

Crackle brings you Sony media, both television *and film. The TV programming includes content like True Colors, Rescue Me, and Married with Children, while the full-length films include everything from Ghostbusters to Taxi Driver.

And of course you could always use pay services like Amazon’s Video on Demand, Netflix, or iTunes, but that kind of defeats the whole purpose, doesn’t it?

The human race. It’s what’s for dinner.

Throughout history, one form of communication has had the power to cross all cultural barriers to aid in peace and understanding: music. In modern life, one other form of communication comes close: the Internet. The video clip at left uses both to convey a global message of peace and unity, and if it doesn’t evoke a little something in you – a smile or a bittersweetness, see a heart specialist. You might not have one. The video is part of a multimedia project called Playing for Change, conceived, in their words, “to inspire, connect, and bring peace to the world through music”. The song in the video is Stand By Me, but played in a way you’ve never heard it before: by artists from Santa Monica, to New Orleans, to South Africa, brought together in a “virtual studio” that allowed them to play their parts live in their native setting. You can buy a collection of songs produced by Playing for Change on CD and DVD, and they also have a non-profit foundation at PlayingForChange.org. Is there anything cooler than peace, inspiration, and understanding on a global scale?