Jay Rosen:

Puzzling through the convention story, because I’m heading right for it, made me to realize that journalism’s contempt for ritual—and if “contempt” is too strong, then the difficulty the press has in understanding the conventions as ritual—was deeply involved here. Ritual is newsless; therefore it must be meaningless. But is that really true?

And that’s what leads me to the forum now happening at The Revealer … If a religion writer covered the presidential campaign, would campaign coverage be any different? My reasons for asking this months ago, when we started planning the forum, were vague. Now they’re much clearer.

As a convention blogger, I was asked recently how I plan to “cover the convention.” After striking the part of the answer that quibbled with “cover” (since I will cover the convention the way a bed bug covers a bed), I replied:

I’m there as a citizen: A thick smear of hope on top of a graham cracker of cynicism. I’m particularly interested in the event as a traffic accident where ritual and passion run into media manipulation. What do the absurdity and grandeur of this event say about the state of our democracy?

This got me thinking about how the word “ritual” doesn’t really fit very well, unless you mean by it “reptitive compulsive behavior.” Some things always happen at a Convention; speeches and roll calls, for example. But they are mere, and not true, rituals if they don’t accomplish something more than what they seem to be accomplishing. I’d like to reserve the term “ritual” for actions that connect us to something larger and more meaningful than us individuals.

So, is the Convention a ritual? From the outside — and from the way it gets covered — it seems to be a mere ritual, going through motions because the motions used to mean something. Is a roll call vote anything more than a chance to elbow your way into your 15 seconds? The voting itself merely makes official a decision that was made in the primaries. Or does the shell of action somehow invigorate the spirit? I don’t know, but I’m suspecting it does because, no matter how ordinary we want to make our public lives, it seems we can’t quite keep the extraordinary out of it.

Hence my new bumper sticker:

(Well, we’ll just see about that.)

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Yesterday, Dan Bricklin took me camera-shopping at his favorite camera store, Newtonville Camera (in, guess where, Newtonville, MA).

My current camera, a Sony DSC-S50 is about 4 years old. It’s 2.1 megapixels and only ASA 100. Worse, I’ve never been impressed by the vividness of the images it takes. So, I’m looking for a camera that I’ll use primarily for family photos, almost always for viewing on screen. The immediate spur for the purchase, however, is that I want to be able to take pictures at the Democratic Convention without having to use a flash. So, here are some of my criteria, in no particular order:

1. ASA of at least 400, and takes good photos indoors without a flash
2. At least 5 megapixels, just in case
3. $400 or so. Much more than that is hard to “justify,” although I’m open to disagreement
4. Excellent image quality — which to me, technically, means that the pictures look real good
5. Even when I owned a filmic SLR, I never changed the lens, so apparently that doesn’t matter to me
6. Even when I owned an SLR, I never manually set the settings, so apparently that doesn’t matter to me
7. I prefer small to big and light to heavy, but it doesn’t matter much. I actually have trouble manipulating the ultra small cameras
8. Has a viewfinder. (You may take it as obvious, but my current camera doesn’t have one.)
9. Prefer longer battery life to shorter. Duh.
10. Prefer less time between pressing the button and the picture being taken
11. At least 3x non-digital zoom
12. Simply owning it will, at long last, make me cool

I am, of course, open to having this list refined, extended or ridiculed.

The current leading contender is the Canon Powershot S500 Elph

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Susan Mernit blogs about the combos that have not yet combined to take us the next step towards an informed democracy…

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Jock Gill, who you probably know as a technoid politico (and Clinton’s first tech advisor) has posted some photos. I particularly like this one.

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I just got a copy of the new book by Micah Sifry and Nancy Watzman. I haven’t read it yet, but how can it be bad with a title like Is that a Politican in Your Pocket?

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Two items at Computerworld.com.

First, here’s Harris Miller, president of Technology Association of America (ITAA) on the attempts to stop e-voting until the machines are reliable:

It’s not about voting machines. It’s a religious war about open-source software vs. proprietary software..If you’re a computer scientist and you think that open-source software is the solution to everything because you’re a computer scientist and you can spot all flaws, then you hate electronic voting machines. But if you’re a person who believes that proprietary software and open-source software can both be reliable, then you don’t hate electronic voting machines.

Hmm. It’s actually not about hating e-voting machines. It’s about loving elections we can trust. For example, here’s another article from the site today:

A former California political candidate who lost the March 2004 race for Riverside County Board of Supervisors by only 45 votes filed a lawsuit today against the county after she was denied access to the memory and audit logs of the electronic voting systems used during the election.

…The case arose after Soubirous petitioned the county registrar and machine vendor Sequoia Voting Systems for access to the systems’ audit logs, redundant memory, the results of logic and accuracy tests that were conducted on the systems, and the chain-of-custody records for the system components. Despite a California law that permits any voter to request and review “all relevant election materials” pertaining to a recount, Townsend refused to grant Soubirous access to the material, arguing it was not “relevant” to a recount.

How many challenges are we going to have in the November election if we entrust our democracy to machines without paper trails?

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Well, the good news is that if Martha Stewart deserves 5 months in jail for what she did, then by the same calculus it’s going to be hard to let the Enron boys off with anything short of the chair.

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The latest list of cnvention bloggers is here.

Also, my bloggery of the Convention will be run by www.Boston.com.

Finally, in response to the NY Times editorial, yes, I fully intend to be “tamed into centrism.” I’m looking forward to it! In fact, my “George Romney in ’04” bumperstickers just arrived from the printer.

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Are we being trained by search engines to speak without “stop words”? More at Many2Many…

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Our second (and last) full day of vacation in Chicago ended well but began with a disappointment.

We slogged off to the Museum of Science and Industry. Despite its Stalinist name, it’s actually one of those interactive science places that seems to be the offspring of a museum that got lusty with an amusement park during shore leave. You’re always just a twist or a yank or a pop away from learning something. Unfortunately, the science seems aimed squarely at the Square Pants set. Why, did you know that DNA is all helixy, that friction generates heat, and that baby chicks are ooooh so cute? If so, please proceed directly to Don’t Go.

An Ode to an Interactive Science Museum

If it does not turn
you will not learn.
If it does not blare
you will not care.
If it does not bleep
you will go to sleep.
If it does not entertain
it will not enter your brain.
Not whore-ish?
It’s bore-ish.
Not fun?
Run run run.
Not a game?
Same old same.
Not TV?
Flee flee flee.

We just can’t decide which is true:
That science is dull or is it you?

Since the Museum is near the University of Chicago, we wandered around for a while and had deep dish pizzi at a local joint we stumbled across, Florian’s. Good food, very friendly service. (People do seem friendlier here than in Boston. And seeming friendly correlates to seeming happy.)

We decided to go to the nearby Smart art museum, an eclectic mix that contained some pieces we really liked by people we’d never heard of. (The front room was filled with kindergarteners making their own creative works out of scraps of colored paper and paste. Being grinchy from the science museum, I wanted to shake the teacher by her shoulders and say: “No, dammit! You teach kids about art by teaching them to see, not by telling them that they’re artists too because they can paste paper.” But, while that sounds sort of good, I suspect it’s wrong.)

By the time we got back to the hotel, it was just about time to leave for Second City. It was a beautiful 35 minute walk north. Man, are the streets lively here! The outdoor cafes were full and the weather was perfect.

Second City was great. The show consisted of three acts. The first two were sketches, with one improvised bit in each. The third was “long form” improvisation. Funny and likable, and definitely not coasting on their fame.

This morning we leave, sniff sniff. We didn’t accomplish most of what we set out to do. We particularly failed at eating through our list of restaurants…I don’t think we ate in a single place that we’d planned to, because we were always (enjoyably) off schedule. But no complaints on that score. We also saw way too little of the city and barely made a dent in our List of Attractions. Again no complaints. We’re sorry to be departing Chicago’s broad shoulders.

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