Transparency and the Internet

One of the many things that the President Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act does is establish a web site called recovery.gov. The idea is that Americans can go online and see where every dollar from the Act is being spent. I think this is definitely a step in the right direction, but it falls substantially short of where governmental transparency should be.

Lack of transparency is one of the reasons we are in this economic mess in the first place. Not just in government but in major corporations that award themselves huge bonuses instead of pulling their companies out of bankruptcy. I'm not a proponent of completely unregulated capitalism but if you are bad at managing your company it should go bankrupt. You think that the economy would collapse otherwise? Look around... The economy is already crashing even after we bailed them out because they did not use the money effectively. I don't know why we thought they would be better at it this time around. One of the problems with this view is that we cannot bail out every company that is in trouble, especially in these hard economic times. You will inevitably end up choosing between those that deserve to keep their jobs and those that will see their companies fail along with all of its employees.

Money is only one aspect of transparency that the internet can help us with. With how rich many web sites are these days they provide one of the best ways to categorize information intuitively. Maybe one day this will help us not only understand where all of our money goes but also provide a quick and effective way of understanding the current social, political, and economic issues our government currently faces. Right now there is a thick fog that separates the ordinary US citizen and understanding how most legislation impacts them. Sure, some of this is due to a large amount of the population that just does not care, but I'm willing to bet that some of them don't care because that fog exists in the first place.

Speed of Communication

This post is motivated by one of the most recent features that has been added to Facebook; the ability to comment on a majority of the different news feed items. Somebody posts an interesting video to one of their friends wall and all of a sudden there is a round table discussion involving 20 different people about its content.

However; this post is not about Facebook but about the concept of increasing the speed of communication. I'm not going to pretend like I can cover the history of how communication has increased over the years or whether or not it has been beneficial or detrimental to society but I think it is important to try and understand how new and different forms of communication affect the way we interact with each other.

Imagine what it was like before we were able to communicate across oceans instantly. When the first Americans declared indepnedence and started the revolutionary war they did not just call King George on the phone and say 'screw you we are out.' They had to send a boat all the way across the north atlantic ocean to give him the finger. Entire naval wars would be fought even after peace was made just because they would have no way of communicating with each other.

I think this is important because there has to be something beneficial about increasing the speed of communication. We can better communicate about how to cure diseases, come to resolutions during disputes, and most importantly are less susceptible to misinformation campains by any organization be it motivated by money or ideology.

However, I would be a very biased blogger if I did not consider the negative affects that access to distance communication has on our interpersonal communication and relations. It's not something that I have easily accepted. I grew up as the first generation to actively communicate over instant messanger. Facebook was in beta my freshman year and only avaliable to a small section of colleges - Kansas State , my alma mater, was one of the first 50. Naturally I was quick to become one of its members and watched it grow to become the 6th most visited website in the world.

I think people have a very good point when they argue that certain technologies have distanced us physically, but have they distanced us socially? What about people that are normally very shy in public situations and find the internet as a vital tool in their ability to communicate with others that are similar to them. Who are we to say that they should conform to our form of communication or social norms?

It reminds me of the rise of the blogging movement in China where citizens would bounce their IP's off of Canadian servers just to post to the rest of the world and other Chinese citizens about thier lives inside of China. I feel like this unprecedented speed of communication can definetly be used to liberate people and give other a voice that would not otherwise have one; but there is clearly something invaluable to meeting another individual face to face and shacking thier hand.

At the end of the day just because we add another form of communication does not meant that it necessarily trades off with how we currently communicate; just that it adds another avenue for us to reach people we would not have touched otherwise.

Attaching keyboard events to alternative browser objects

It took me way too long to find out why I could not listen to keyboard events for DOM objects other than the window, form objects, or links. All you have to do is give the div or any other DOM element a tabindex. Below is an example using the prototype framework.

1. var myDiv = new Element('div' { 'tabindex': '0' })


2. myDiv.observe('keypress', function(e) {


3.   var code;


4.   if (!e) var e = window.event;


5.   if (e.keyCode) code = e.keyCode;


6.   else if (e.which) code = e.which;


7.   alert(String.fromCharCode(code));


8. });