Okay, I am fully aware that I am a media dinosaur. I have hard copies of The New York Times and The Financial Times home delivered each morning. I get hard copy subscriptions to The Economist and Business Week. Frankly, my major online news source is fcw.com, although I have recently started finding myself clicking through to maybe 5 or 10 links a week from Facebook friends that I see on my status update page.
But in viewing the media habits of young people who are interested in following the news (such as my students), I find that few if any of them would read the hard copy of a newspaper. Instead they generally would "read" a paper (such as The New York Times) online – probably not as carefully as somebody reads a hard copy paper, but more like skimming headlines. They would probably read some blogs. And now more and more they would be getting news by clicking to Facebook links.
Well, I had an interesting conversation at dinner with a Public Policy Fellow at LMI, the non-profit consulting company that works on improving government management, on whose Board of Directors I sit. LMI has about five such fellows a year, newly minted grads of public administration and public policy programs. I can't remember exactly how we got on the topic, but we got into a conversation about how he gets his news, which he said was common among people his age who like to follow current affairs.
The most-surprising part of the conversation was that although he follows current affairs very closely, basically he didn't look at a daily newspaper, even online, at all. He regarded the expression "read a newspaper" as a phrase belonging to his parents' generation, and indeed the very word "newspaper" seemed old-fashioned to him. Instead, he checks through 15 to 25 different blogs in the course of a day, to get different views and insights about what's going on in the world. Sources such as CNN.com, the Times or Post were not more credible for him than the sum of the blogs he reads. Interestingly, he kept using words like "opinion" and "point of view" to describe what he was looking for, rather than words such as "reporting" or "analysis" that I (and I suspect many of those in my generation who follow the news) would tend to use to describe what I am looking for.
After the dinner, I spoke with another board member about my conversation. She reported recently asking students in a course (at a Washington, D.C.-area university) to prepare material from the media comparing U.S. departures from Iraq and Afghanistan. Apparently, The Washington Post had run an article (or articles) on exactly this topic only a short time before -- yet none of the students used the Post as one of their media sources.
BTW, my conversation partner said he didn't use Facebook status update links very much as a source of news. However, when I mentioned that I had started using it a lot he smiled (in a nice way), indicating that for him "didn't use very much" translated to far more than my pathetic 5 to 10 times.
Posted on Feb 10, 2012 at 7:19 AM0 comments
Recently Alan Joch wrote a piece on the FCW website, called
"Is Government Procurement Ready for the Cloud?" The piece was one of the five-most read and emailed on the FCW website for two days running.
"Many IT procurement practices and contracting vehicles," Alan wrote, "were designed to help managers provision hardware and software, not on-demand services. Can the current acquisition practices translate easily to the dynamic world of cloud computing?" The article quoted a technical manager at DHS who was worried about the ability of the procurement system to accommodate to cloud computing, though it also quoted Larry Allen, longtime head of the Coalition for Government Procurement, which represents vendors on the GSA schedules, saying he didn't see a problem.
What was frustrating about the article, frankly, was the lack of specifics. The only actual example of a "procurement problem" the article cited was a protest over a requirement in one procurement that, for security reasons, the cloud infrastructure be hosted in the US. That requirement is not a "procurement problem'; it is a policy decision about risk that the procuring agency made. (Maybe the procurement problem was the ability to protest. One may have different views about bid protests, and I am hardly known as one of the great supporters of protests, but this is hardly a special problem the procurement system has in buying cloud computing.)
The article was an example of a genre of statements that one often hears about how rigidities in the procurement system create barriers to buying certain kinds of products and services. Often, these statements are not accompanied by examples of specific problems. They appeal to, and exacerbate, a climate of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) that many in the government feel when they are going to have to deal with the procurement system.
It is possible that there are procurement regulations or practices that throw roadblocks in the way of intelligent procurement of cloud computing services. If so, I hope blog readers will post comments saying what they are -- which will offer progressive people in the procurement system the opportunity to put on their thinking caps to see if ways to unblock these obstacles can be found. But all too often, consumers of the procurement system get paralyzed by worries of roadblocks they think the system creates that in fact aren't there. The fear also makes it more difficult for program people constructively and collegially to deal with their counterparts in procurement or, worse, to avoid the procurement system until the last moment -- like getting an infected tooth pulled -- which only makes things much worse.
Program and technical customers, and folks in contracting shops, need to realize they are part of the same team and to work to overcome the FUD factor.
Posted on Feb 02, 2012 at 9:39 AM4 comments
I recently met with the latest group of China Future Leaders university students coming through Boston. There were 140 of them this time -- reflecting the growth of Chinese tourism to the US -- and I had to divide up my appearance into two meetings, because the room we had couldn't fit more than 100.
As I always do (faithful blog readers may recall earlier posts on these student visits), I asked them a bunch of questions at the beginning of each session. I started by asking them a version of a question I had asked in the past. First I asked them what the best thing about the US was, and the worst thing. Then I asked them the same question about China -- what were the best and worst things.
What was interesting was that there was very strong agreement, for both the US and China, about the best thing about each country, and much less about the worst thing. For the US, by far what the students shouted out was that the best thing was "freedom," with "education system" in a fairly distant second place as the best thing. (Critics of US education take note, though -- the Chinese were probably thinking more about universities than elementary or secondary schools).
For China, two answers dominated the best thing -- Chinese history and Chinese culture, with Chinese food in distant third place. Anybody who looks at the popularity of historical dramas, involving long-ago dynasties, on Chinese television would not be surprised about this answer. Things were relatively silent -- maybe due to politeness? -- about the worst thing about the US, and no real consensus, but individual answers included arrogance and high crime. For China, again there wasn't as much shouting out about the worst thing, but the most common answer was "too many people," with pollution in second place.
Then, as I have frequently asked them before, I asked them whether they thought the US government was on the whole friendly or unfriendly to China, and then whether the Chinese government was on the whole friendly or unfriendly to the US.
The response was the same as it has been every time before: Most students thought the US government was unfriendly to China, but that the Chinese government was friendly to the US. This time I asked the majority why they answered the way they did. On the US being unfriendly, the good news was that the students pointed to very concrete issues, such as the value of the Chinese currency, trade relations, and Taiwan. Nobody suggested anything more broad. Why did they think the Chinese government was friendly to the US? One answer dominated: "They buy US government debt."
At the end -- in the context of inviting interested students to "friend" me on Facebook -- I asked them how many of them were on Facebook, which is of course blocked in China and can be accessed only using special software to "jump the wall" (the so-called "Great Firewall of China"). To my surprise, about a quarter to a third of the students raised their hands -- though this number probably isn’t a good guide to guess the number of people who have managed to get and use this software, since some of these students are studying in Hong Kong, where the Internet isn't blocked.
I then asked them, "If Facebook were allowed in China, would you participate?" Essentially every student in the audience raised a hand. This is interesting, since just about all of them are already on Facebook's Chinese knockoff Renren, so this suggests they want to be able to communicate with foreigners. These students aren't necessarily typical of all Chinese students -- they come from families rich enough to afford this trip, and they have chosen to come to visit the US -- but their responses suggest a continuing desire by young Chinese to cultivate contacts with us.
Posted on Jan 30, 2012 at 3:13 PM4 comments