Steve Jobs, Apple Inc’s visionary CEO, may not be in the same league as Moses, but he has the potential to solve the current media crisis with Apple’s most innovative development:  the iPad. But is it a Tablet delivered from on high or a dud?

The almost religious delirium expressed by the self-appointed high priests of the Mac world, devotees that have dubbed the iPad the “Jesus Tablet” (more like Moses in my view), could be the solution to the crises the computer, print, music and telecoms industries.

This tablet-shaped device is, amongst everything else, to be the answer to the recent paywall controversies between Google and News Corp and the revival of sluggish advertising revenues.

In my various blog attacks on Mr Murdoch’s big business aims in transforming the web from a free-for-all to subscription-based, it is tempting to repent. But has Mr Job’s vision been transformative enough to convert this blind Lazarus into a true believer? And, if it ever does take off as the media have hyped it to pass, will it be the answer to the incessant squabbles between sinner and sinned against?

Not only is the iPad a colour eReader, it is also a music/video player and games console. Add to the list Apple’s online stores and this device could prove to be a winner, especially for newspapers, magazines and books.

To date, consumers have been highly reluctant to pay for online content and advertisers have been hamstrung by eReaders that cannot display their ads. In contrast, the iPad now offers this and more and gives multi-industries the opportunity to bring their corporate online strategies into the 21st century.

According to The Economist: “Apple has already attracted some blue-chip media brands…with leading publishers such as Penguin and Simon & Schuster…” and gives users “access to electronic versions of newspapers such as the New York Times.”

But with all the fizz in The Economist this week, Doubting Thomas’s abound. The newspaper, of course, has a vested interest in getting paid-for content into people’s heads, but it seems as if consumers don’t entirely share their optimism.

Within hours of Job’s introducing the “internet-changing” iPad, it was reviewed and instead of beseeching Jobs with praise from on high, they delivered a list of its pitfalls. This permeated the internet community very quickly and the general reaction to it was negative. From a former rise, Apple’s shares dropped over three per cent.

Mike Gartenberg, vice-president of strategy and analysis at research firm Interpret, told BBC News: “Everything they [Apple] have done up until now is in this device — the iPod, iTunes, multi-touch, the applications. And then they added new features like the iBook store and productivity.”

However, on the dark side, Blogger and TechCrunch took a different view: “Is it a must have? The quick and dirty answer is: for many people, right now, no. Unlike the iPhone, which filled an already well-established need, there is no existing need the iPad fills.”

One comment on TechCrunch  went even further: “I cringed at the hate being directed its way on sites such as Slashdot and Digg. Even the guys at Penny Arcade, whom I normally agree with, said ‘that iPad presentation had to be the worst thing I’ve even seen on on the Apple stage’ and that Apple had failed to make a case for the device.’ If you believe them, the iPad is going to be a massive flop. Well, the unwashed masses on the internet also predicted that the iPod would be a failure. They were wrong then, and they are wrong now.”

So, perplexing and contrasting views on the subject. It all made perfect sense to me as someone who is keen to see resolution in the newspaper and magazine industries. And yet, consumers seem not to agree.

With the infiltration of Google customers’ email accounts, allegedly from the Chinese authorities in search of information on human rights activists, Google said it would pull out of China. But doesn’t Google employ the same data mining surveillance services itself?

David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, announced on its official blog last week, there is to be “a new approach to China”, which means, we want out. What the ultimate outcome of this furore will be is not yet clear, but according to sources China is said to have persuaded Google to stay on and announced that: “Beijing is trying to persuade Google to stay and give up plans to pull out its Chinese version from the country.”

On the same blog, Google said: “Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google.” Therefore, we quit? That simple? Not quite.

China’s foreign ministry said last Thursday that: “China welcomed international internet companies to conduct business within the country according to the law”. Well, that’s all well and good if the Chinese authorities are protecting users from viewing porn and overt sedition but the assumption of the foreign Press has been that the hacker attacks were orchestrated by the Chinese government to carry out investigations against human rights activists.

That sort of practice is, of course, unacceptable to us in the West, but doesn’t it smack of hypocrisy? There’s something awkwardly deceiving about Google’s moral stance on China when its corporate motto “do no evil”, an anachronism now but perhaps a catchy shibboleth in its time, is an almost obscene declaration of double standards while it retains data mining to service ad revenues, coupled with surveillance, digital profiling and personal intrusion.

Getting ever more involved, the issue has now become politicised, with the US government saying it will lodge a formal complaint with Chinese officials to express its concern about cyber attacks on Google’s Gmail service in China after Google announced it will no longer censor its content.

In the spirit of appeasement, China Internet Network Information Center, another official agency, said on Saturday that the number of internet users had reached 384 million by the end of 2009, a 28% jump in one year. In January last year, China also issued 3G licenses to major telecom operators, resulting in a massive hike in internet users. Now, around 8% of all internet access in China is through mobile phones, and growing exponentially.

Google is also apparently in trouble for copyright theft of Chinese writers without obtaining permission. Add to this the valid criticism by censors for allowing its site to be used for the distribution of pornography: Google should know better than to let that type of content through in China.

According to Techcrunch last week, “Google has had more success in China than a lot of other big Valley names, but [it] isn’t and will likely never be the market leader…Valley elites erupted into applause on Twitter and blogs saying Google was showing more backbone than the US government and was a model of integrity for the world.” Moral integrity and Google? A non-sequitur if there ever was one, surely?

But perhaps there are other factors at play: Google was not making a lot of money in China and played second fiddle to Baidu; and it was never going to make any substantially increase in its market share. Maybe economics was at the forefront of its decision, as last year China accounted for just under 1-2% of Google’s US$21.8 billion revenue.

This is not just a Google issue though: all foreign media companies have found it very difficult to penetrate the Chinese internet market; they make only modest returns. What the backlash may be within the country and without is yet to be revealed, but media censorship is deeply unpopular, even with the Chinese people themselves, and some have suggested  that if Google goes ahead and pulls google.cn, the Chinese may yet stage protests against the government, citing Google as the catalyst.

One statement I read that came out of Google’s statement of intent was from Warren Cowan, CEO at Greenlight, a UK-based search engine marketing agency, who told TechNewsWorld: “China doesn’t need Google as much as Google needs China . China’s got the sophistication, the strength and the will to do whatever it wants.” Not so, methinks, or China would not have held out the olive branch this weekend; the “need” is perhaps better described as mutual.

But surely there must first be some resolution between Google and the Chinese authorities, as blocking access to sites such as Blogger, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and millions of other “undesirable” websites, is excessive use of their censorship “laws”. It was perhaps the hacking attack on Gmail that was the last straw.

The Chinese are still very sensitive about images of Tiananmen Square, the footage of Chinese police beating up Tibetan monks and the social unrest in Qinghai. It was these scenes that prompted the shutdown of foreign social-networking sites. Also, the scare of the footage on Twitter about the Iranian election protests saw them further retreat into their protective shells.

All this, together with the political overtures of President Barack Obama’s sharp slap on the wrist in his thinly-veiled criticism of Chinese internet censorship during his recent visit, and that the US is to receive the Dalai Lama and to sell arms to Taiwan, doesn’t exactly aid Google’s cause.

Of course, there is also the argument that whether or not Google leaves China, the Chinese have become adept at circumventing these Orwellian blocks to foreign websites with the installation of “virtual private network” software.

But let’s look at some social and economic perceptions of the international press: it has recently taken up the mantle of China’s economic ascendancy on the world stage and of its future dominance. But there are negatives in this narrative. First, intransigence was China’s hallmark during the recent climate change talks in Copenhagen which turned to condemnation; and there has been an international outcry about the jailing of a human-rights activist and the execution of a mentally disturbed British drug-smuggler.

China’s strongest asset, its booming economy, has also been damned by many a reliable source, with one describing it as “Dubai times 1,000, or worse”. According to the Economist, “China’s smooth ascent is exploding because its economic miracle has proved partly illusory. In fact, China’s government may be right to see the economic gloom as in part wishful thinking from outsiders repelled by its repressive political system… China is no Goldilocks economy. Bank lending is growing too fast, which may be fine if it is flowing into useful investments, but not if it is fuelling asset prices. The risk of bubbles and excess capacity will grow unless policy is tightened soon.”

Analyses have drawn a mixed crowd: there are those that think Google is morally right to withdraw from repression; others view it as financial suicide; others still see China’s ascendancy on the world stage as an entity it simply must engage with at whatever cost.

But let’s look at a few excerpts of Will Hutton’s “China, the West and the Credit Crunch”, regarding this new utopia: His lecture reversed some common expectations that the 21st century belongs to China and asserted that its extraordinary growth has been taken out of context. He contends that China’s growth offers no new paradigm for development, and its success is based solely on high savings and low-tech manufacture, having come about as a consequence of its One Child Policy, which effected a phenomenally high savings rate of around 40% as means to ensure old age financial support.

The other point to mention here is Chinese businesses mask pervasive state control. According to Mr Hutton: “Of the 1,105 enterprises floated on the stock exchange, 81% are actually state controlled; of the 6,000 restructured state-owned enterprises, the members of communist party committees have become non-executive directors in 70%.” These figures go a long way to explain Google’s and other multinationals’ treatment by the state.

And talking of economic growth and what the board of google.cn might have realised is, as Mr Hutton states: “…economic growth requires an educated and productive workforce, discerning consumers, property rights and the capacity to innovate. A telling statistic is that China currently accounts for only 0.1% of international patents.”

To conclude, this appears to be a Mexican standoff, with reports that Google’s China operations may be “officially terminated” in February, leading the Chinese government to block the company’s main site, according to Credit Suisse Group. But their decision to withdraw should rather be a precursor in raising a meaningful dialogue with the Chinese authorities. If not, who else is to contribute in becoming a “key enabler of a better-informed world” in China?

The West has a lot to learn from the Chinese and vice-versa, but it will not be an easy task while the Right continue to hold political and economic sway in the country. Although Google will hold more talks with Chinese authorities “in the coming days”, it would also do well to remember its own fuzzy logic: don’t be evil; in other words, be up-front about what personal data you collect. People in glass houses, and all that…

If it does eventually go sour, the biggest losers in this fiasco will be Google and China; both would lose face if the withdrawal proves to be true, with China deprived of Google’s innovation, international visibility and respect and Google’s visible global hand will be impaired.

An imagined analogy of decline in an exchange between George Monbiot (of The Guardian) and Franz Kafka, on the speech delivered at the Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen by the US energy secretary, Steven Chu, who shows how America’s unquestioning belief in the free market has held back technological innovation.

Kafka: Gregor awakes one morning in his family’s apartment to find himself inexplicably transformed overnight into a gigantic beetle. Gregor does not immediately recoil from his insect form, but instead chooses to lament his job by saying, “How am I going to get to work?” and the general misery of the rainy weather outside. Indeed, the narrative establishes the poor conditions as the cause of his bed-ridden state. Gregor works as a travelling salesman, and, as it is usual for travelling salesmen to move constantly from place to place, he is accustomed to waking up in unfamiliar surroundings and various circumstances.

Monbiot: On “US left behind in technological race to fight climate change”. The occasion was a speech by the US secretary of energy, Steven Chu. He is, of course, a Nobel physicist, brilliant, modest, likeable, a delightful contrast to the thugs employed by the previous administration. But his speech was, in the true sense of the word, pathetic: it moved me to pity.

Kafka: Because Gregor can’t provide financially any more, the other family members get jobs: Gregor’s father comes out of retirement to work at a bank, his mother sews fine underwear for a fashion house and his sister works in a shop and gets a position on a secretarial course. One day, when Gregor emerges from his room, his father chases him around the dining room table and pelts him with apples. One of the apples becomes embedded in his back, causing an infection.

Monbiot: Yesterday afternoon in Copenhagen – where the UN climate talks are entering their second week – Professor Chu unveiled what would have been a series of inspiring innovations, had he made this speech 15 years ago. Barely suppressing his excitement, he told us the US has discovered there is great potential for making fridges more efficient, and that the same principle could even be extended to lighting, heating and whole buildings. The Department of Energy is so thrilled by this discovery that it has launched a programme to retrofit homes in the US, on which it will spend $400m a year.

Kafka: Although he imprisons himself within his room voluntarily at first, his family later become the jailers, locking Gregor in from the outside, partly to hide him from their new lodgers. Devoid of human contact, Gregor alternates between concern for his family and anger at them for neglecting him.

Monbiot: It can’t all be blamed on George Bush: this technological backwardness pre-dates him. The real problem is the terror of all modern US governments of being seen to interfere in the free market. It’s ironic that the lack of effective regulation in the US has not ensured – as the free market fundamentalists prophesied – that the US came out in front, but that it has been left far behind. Just ask the car manufacturers. The truth, too uncomfortable to be discussed by US officials, is that government regulations are among the main drivers of technological innovation.

Kafka: The sister then determines with finality that the insect is no longer Gregor, since Gregor would have left them out of love and taken their burden away. Gregor returns to his room and collapses, finally succumbing to his wound and to his starvation. The point of view shifts as, upon discovery of his corpse, the family feels an enormous burden has been lifted from them, and start planning for the future again. The family discovers that they aren’t doing financially badly at all, especially since, following Gregor’s demise, they can take a smaller flat. The brief process of forgetting Gregor and shutting him from their lives is quickly completed. The final sentence echoes the first.

Not to be out-manoeuvred by its search rivals, Google has announced its very own “Real Time Search”, which will focus on social, mobile and real time. This is due to be rolled out over their search engines very soon.

For a quick peek into its usefulness, I took a look at the Copenhagen Climate Summit as an example.

In the twenty minutes or so I had real-time results updating, there was slurry of entries, including:
•    Bangladesh to seek 15 percent of any climate fund – Reuters
•    Copenhagen climate summit issues: money – Telegraph
•    US rock star sings to save shrunk Kashmiri glaciers – Xinhua
•    They opened climate talks in Copenhagen today and not a single polar bear showed up. If they’re not worrying, why should I? – StephenAtHome

But topping the bill was a story published on the Telegraph’s website – Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges.

Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen’s largest limousine company, said that during the “summit to save the world”, the total number of limos in Copenhagen had already broken the 1,200 barrier. She remarked: “We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand…We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.”

What’s even more alarming is that the number of electric and hybrid cars totals a paltry five: “We don’t have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it’s very Danish.” A very Danish sense of humour is it, to have organised a critical environmental event that prices out alternative energy? Anyway, the result is that the conference, including participants’ travel, will create a total of 41,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, equivalent to the sum produced by a small European city over the same period.

Not to be discouraged in their efforts to avoid the next Armageddon, Denmark is expecting up to 140 private jets, which is so far above its capacity to cope,  the planes will have to be parked next door in Sweden. To soften the effect, perhaps the limos being driven in can give hitchhiking participants a ride?

Unlikely though, as in attendance will be 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists, 98 world leaders, Leonardo DiCaprio and Prince Charles, who are said to be already mulling over their sustainable scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges. The Great Unwashed (a term coined by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, describing the protagonists), will be tactfully located elsewhere carrying out a “funeral of the day” to mark their deep contempt for the Great Satan of all “heatist” concepts, economic growth.

According to the Telegraph, “Denmark has taken delivery of its first-ever water-cannon…plus sweeping new police powers. The authorities have been proudly showing us their new temporary prison, 360 cages in a disused brewery, housing 4,000 detainees.” Sounds promising.

To top it all, Ed Miliband, Britain’s Secretary of State at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, delivered a speech in which he said: “If Martin Luther King had come along and said ‘I have a nightmare’, people would not have followed him.” But no doubt they will follow those that declare: “I have a limousine (because my private jet’s parked in Sweden)”. At least the billowing hot air that will fire the conference’s central heating systems this week will be personally sustainable.

But I digress. This story is surely about real-time results and how useful this addition is to Google search. I have to say that Spiked Online’s Tim Brown, who once remarked Twitter was “…a seething mass of self-affirming emotional incontinence…” was mostly filtered out and the information was relevant to subject. And after pressing the pause-button to stem the flow and analyse the results, the entries came variously from the Twitter accounts of the major dailies.

Google’s “Real Time Search” does, after all, seem rather useful.

The Phoney War, also referred to as the Twilight War by Winston Churchill, was the description given to first few months in World War II following the German invasion of Poland, marked by a lack of military operations in Europe. The same could perhaps be said of News Corp in 2009.

Only last week we heard of an “exclusive deal” to list News Corp’s content on Microsoft’s Bing, but today a happy compromise has been suggested by the plaintiff. To many, dropping the company’s content from Google’s indexes was slated as a septuagenarian not understanding the concept behind the internet, while Hooray Henry newspaper chiefs curtsied in front of the great agitator-in-chief for taking on the titan of search.

Google, meanwhile, mused over the “kleptomania” furore and, according to a report in the NYT, said it, “provided news organizations’ websites with 100,000 clicks a minute, every one of which offers a business opportunity for the publishers to show ads, win loyal readers and sell subscriptions.”

As I have argued before, it is not easy for online news to make much revenue and an advertising model is perhaps the best anyone can ever achieve with regard to the established modus operandi of content provision and the monetisation of it.

In support of this and in a recession such as the one that has just descended on the world, vast volumes of online traffic do not necessarily translate into significant advertising revenue. Furthermore, news is a fickle business in that unless the entire industry pulls together in the same direction, people will read the news somewhere else — and that has been Mr Murdoch’s major gripe about the BBC.

So, with ad revenues slashed, Mr Murdoch’s great new architectural plan was unveiled to introduce subscriptions, which also flies in the face of how people use the web. This week Google seems to have softly entered the debate, looking at ways to appease Mr Murdoch and accommodate paid content.

As the NYT dismissively commented: “Critics of News Corp said last week that Google should just let Mr Murdoch walk away, and that he would be shooting himself in the foot by doing so. News is a commodity on the web, and the loss of one of many sources of it will make little difference to internet users…”

A Guardian article (you see how much I need the web for quotes and information that is published for free?), quoted Josh Cohen of Google News saying: “Media companies that want to erect paywalls around their online content still need to be visible on search engines. In fact, they have an even greater need for their content to be listed.”

He added that: “Google had achieved this by updating its First Click Free programme, so that publishers can limit Google News users to looking at no more than five pages of content a day without registering or subscribing.” The Financial Times is also using this service.

However, as always, there is a hitch: all a user needs to do is to go back to Google each time; and it is this “loophole” that Google is seeking to address so that it will limit you to five pages per day before registration, regardless of how you get to the website.

Arianna Huffington, whose site is largely known for aggregating content, said at a recent Federal Trade Commission workshop on “Journalism and the Internet Age”: “Murdoch is confusing aggregation with theft…” and added: “Aggregation is part of the web’s ‘DNA’ and that Murdoch plays both sides, noting that some of Murdoch’s own sites also aggregate or ’steal’ content.”

Others think the move is a significant initial victory for publishers, as Rory Cellan-Jones of BBC News said: “By playing hardball, [Murdoch] appears to have got Google to blink.” But as Mark Cuban, an HDNet exec, put it: “Platforms allow news sources, like Newscorp, to post breaking news and gain value from their brand. Google does not.  In other words, if I trust a newspaper, TV or any brand, I can follow it on Twitter and expect the news to come to me…Having to search for and find news in search engines is so 2008.”

So, the phoney war may just stay that way if the compromise is broad enough to placate Mr Murdoch. All said and done, the changes put forward by Google seem fair enough given the territory that’s at stake. But some observers have commented about the long-term sustainability of the model. One said: “The internet is open source at its core, is it not? So is content. Revenue models back to the drawing board…” Maybe, but the draughtsman’s contract has been gathering dust for over a decade now, still with no firm resolution in sight.

It is now becoming apparent that Tim O’Reilly’s vision of the web being “One Ring to Rule Them All” and “Small Pieces Loosely Joined”, is coming apart at the seams as the big media company News Corp and Microsoft join hands to threaten Google and, in turn, Web 2.0 itself.

In “O’Reilly: The Web is at war, and it’s making me sad” (see http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10399710-36.html), we have seen over the past few months that News Corp has stepped up the stakes in its battle to block Google from indexing content from Rupert Murdoch’s online media titles, and that now Microsoft is said to be willing to pay Time Warner and News Corporation, among others, to make these sources available exclusively through Bing, it’s new search engine.

During this time, and many articles later, Rupert Murdoch has criticised Google for “kleptomania” and has threatened to cut them off from all his online publications. That is not quite as easy as he thinks, though, as nearly a quarter of all traffic to the Wall Street Journal’s website, for example, comes via Google. Microsoft, for their part, is willing to spend up to 10% of its operating income over the next five years, which could add up to a sum somewhere around $US11bn. Tim O’Reilly, who coined the term Web 2.0, questions the war for the control of the web, which directly contradicts his “interoperable platform” concept.

Not all agree though, as the Economist argues that, “a handful of well-funded and powerful platforms, locked in heated competition, could be better for consumers and generate more innovation than Mr O’Reilly’s vision of an internet made of many ’small pieces loosely joined’.”

The bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2001 was a turning point for the web and, with it, the concept of “Web 2.0″ was born. Its web pioneer Tim O’Reilly warned an audience at a recent Web 2.0 Expo that he thinks “we’re headed into another ugly time”, meaning that the corporates are ganging up on Google’s dominance, with Rupert “Dr Evil” Murdoch leading the charge and threatening to pull News Corp’s content carpet from under Google’s feet.

In the same CNet article, it says that: “O’Reilly’s attitude isn’t ‘bring it on, and get me a large popcorn with extra butter, while you’re at it’. Rather, he hinted that at least in some cases, he’s willing to embrace Google as a big, cuddly, benevolent dictator in the midst of it all.” Rather like Stalin dressed up in a Winnie The Pooh fancy dress outfit, maybe?

But with all fancy dress parties there are reactionaries in the mix, as Barbarian Group executive Rick Webb announced: “Setting aside the boo hoo, the internet is becoming a bunch of walled gardens arguments, when rational people have conversations about how to make the web actually usable and not 95 percent piracy, spam, and fraud…”

All this aside, it is becoming clearer by the day that the web is heading into a full-frontal period of bloody competition that could kill the concept of the web’s interoperability as we know it today.

In radar.oreilly.com, Mr O’Reilly clearly states that: “And so we’ve grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopaedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we’ve been readying ourselves for one dominant social network…

“It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we’ll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we’ve enjoyed for the past two decades. But I’m betting that things are going to get ugly. We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.”

In a postscript, he predicts that: “Microsoft will emerge as a champion of the open web platform, supporting interoperable web services from many independent players, much as IBM emerged as the leading enterprise backer of Linux.”

Last night my friend was again giving me a ticking off for not having looked at his beloved TED website. Today, though, I did. The videos on its home page display an array of interesting subjects, but the one that caught my eye was Stefana Broadbent’s discussion on the universal use of IM, texting, Facebook and Twitter and the “spoiling of human intimacy”.

As an opener, let’s look at this lady’s credentials and then find out what she has to say on the subject: Stefana Broadbent is a digital ethnographer who, over the past twenty years has been investigating the evolution of digital activities in the workplace and at home to monitor the changes in social practices. Her TED biography describes her as: “a cognitive scientist, [who] has spent decades observing people as they use technology, both at home and in complex workspaces such as air-traffic control towers…that speaks volumes on the way we think about our relationships.”

Here I summarise five main aspects of Stefana’s research:
•    A typical user spends 80% of his or her time communicating with just four other people;
•    People use different communications technologies in distinct and divergent ways;
•    There has been a diminution of voice communication and an increase in written channels;
•    Instead of work invading our private lives, our private communications are now invading the workplace;
•    People in general do not like to work while on the move: hotel rooms and airports are not valued as appropriate environments for substantive work and are mainly used for email.

Based on her in-depth research about the changing relationship between work and social relationships that has irreducibly altered, there are now around one billion people in continuous technological contact. However, as Ms Broadbent’s research shows, up to eighty percent of these exchanges, regardless of the channel, are with only five people.

Among the psychological community, the worry is that these new forms of communication has led to emotional dependence, which for the obsessive is perhaps true; while the concerns of the sociologists are that “tele-cocooning” has bred a “retreat from public engagement”. Personally, I enjoy extreme use of communications technology during my time at work and then leave it alone entirely (except for the mobile in arranging venues with friends) and then enter entirely into verbal dialogue in the evenings and at weekends. What, may I ask, is so dependent and introverted about that?

Thankfully, I work for my own company so I can choose what method of communication I like, but that is not the case for the majority whose companies have long been concerned about the excessive use of company time to catch up with people using their own, private, digital space.

In Ms Broadbent’s video, she points out that workplaces, administrations and schools have for a very long time set limits and regulations on the amount of time employees are permitted to use devices and websites to communicate with their friends and family.

Being that an employee is paid to be there, that comes as no great surprise. But introducing penalties ranging from confiscation, fines, blocking access to social networking sites, instant messaging, private email accounts and cell phone usage, it all seems a bit stringent in this age of advanced digital communications.

Socially, what seems to be happening is that today’s employees are challenging the need for companies to block their digital interactions, in direct contradiction to company policy that forbids it in order for them to be “productive and effective”. But does that necessarily mean companies are subverting people’s relationships?

Subversion, Ms Broadbent argues, has been going on over the last 150 years, and that the private sphere has always been banned from the workplace. Society in general, she says, has functioned on the inculcating principle that “attention, isolation and productivity” are all interrelated and that employers have enforced these principles so that communications can only be directed towards the external rather than internal. So is it now the case now that private communication is somehow threatening these entrenched “ethical” values of the school and workplace?

The revolution of the personal perhaps started in earnest from the mid-1990s when people started to use email on their PCs, followed by mobile phones. It has since advanced into strands of a social media milieu that so threatens the educational and corporate hierarchies that they have moved to restrict access to such usage. Not in my back yard but I believe what she says is true.

Her research seems to empirically demonstrate that personal communication at school and in the workplace is more about trust than lost production. Perhaps it has always been that way, but haven’t people always found ways to circumnavigate the status quo?

Following all the shenanigans of late about News Corp threatening to put their content behind paywalls and blocking Google from using its content, the last few days have seen them courting Microsoft in a deal where their content would only be found on Bing.

According a story in weblogs.hitwise.com, the two companies are in negotiations for Bing to become the “exclusive indexer” of their news content. All well and good but do the figures add up? The article shows that: “As of last week, WSJ.com’s referred and non-referred traffic from Google and Google News amounted to 15.3% and 11.0% respectively…The potential loss of Google News traffic is potentially more serious. As reported here, over the three years, WSJ.com’s traffic from Google News has grown from 2% to over 11%…Bing, a potential News Corp suitor for search exclusivity provides less than half of Google News’ volume…”

The story broke a couple of days ago in the Financial Times’ website, saying, “Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company being paid to ‘de-index’ its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.”

One of the more interesting slants on this story is that: “the Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine.” It appears then that, “Microsoft’s interest is being interpreted as a direct assault on Google because it puts pressure on the search engine to start paying for content.”

We all know that the newspaper industry is still trying to construct an online business model that somehow stems the descent of print revenues, but now Microsoft’s deals are being evaluated by antitrust regulators. This is a company desperate to catch up with Google in internet search with the release of Bing this year, as we all know.

With much ado about, well, something, and with other news media outlets all supplying content for free, this deal to block Google in exchange for cash cannot surely be a viable way for News Corp to improve the bottom line for their media outlets? Even more troublesome for News Corp, these deals may not even be legal.

According to DailyFinance.com, several of their legal experts have concluded that: “It could violate anti-trust laws, says to Michael J. Thomas, a principal at the St. Louis law firm Harness Dickey. ‘Anti-competitive behavior is where you’re trying to impair or eliminate someone’s ability to compete against you,’ says Thomas. The fundamental principle is that competition is good for consumers. For Microsoft to pay News Corp (NWS) specifically to withhold its content from Google while making it available to other search engines ’strikes me as more anti-competitive than competitive’.”

The article continues: “Another possibility is that Google could argue that, by inducing News Corp to sever its existing relationship with Google, Microsoft is committing so-called ‘tortious interference’. Typically, that’s when two parties have a contract and a third party induces one of the two to breach that contract. [Although] there’s no contract that entitles Google to index News Corp’s stories, Google could make a case that its longstanding access to those articles creates a ‘valid business expectancy’, which in some instances is sufficient to allow a tortious interference claim to go forward.”

Even if the antitrust lawsuits give Microsoft the green light, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has said before: “In general these models [paying for online content] have not worked for general public consumption because there are enough free sources that the marginal value of paying is not justified based on the incremental value of quantity. So my guess is for niche and specialist markets…it will be possible to do it but I think it is unlikely that you will be able to do it for all news.”

It is highly unlikely that other online publishers will follow Mr Murdoch’s lead or they would have done so by now, but it looks likely that the Microsoft-News Corp deal is an attempt to undo the big men of search. Some hope.

On its release last weekend, the Hollywood doomsday blockbuster “2012″, the ultimate disaster movie, has caused a storm at box offices. Latching on to the world’s climate change concerns, the film suggests the world will end on 21 December 2012 at the end of a 5,125-year cycle known as the Long Count in the Mayan calendar. The story is a disturbing marketing ploy on the part of the filmmakers, but is it a portent of Man’s future?

The hype cycle of the film “2012″, working full tilt, about the Earth’s impending destruction has been so powerful that Nasa representatives have been shunted out to appear on American talk shows to reassure viewers that it simply that: hype. However, they have far from soothed the general public’s propensity for panic.

The timing of its release has been impeccable, with only a few weeks left before the Climate Conference in Copenhagen convenes. It is said that the conference, although unlikely to reach international agreement due to perceived unfairness over the burden of responsibility facing the undeveloped world, is essential and that the world’s governments must reach a consensus so that a Copenhagen Protocol can be agreed upon, thereby committing all nations to reduce carbon emissions dramatically to prevent further instability over “global warming” and climate change.

On the ground, however, public concern about doomsday in December 2012 has grown exponentially and is spreading internationally, causing almost mass hysteria.  Indeed, some Mayan and Nostradamus believers, who predict Earth’s ultimate extinction in three years’ time, assert that this date will be the dawn of a new age and “spiritual growth” for survivors. Jokingly, a recent New York Times article mocked these soothsayers with: “It is kind of depressing if you were looking forward to taking a vacation from mortgage payments to finance one last blowout.”

Today, there are literally mountains of conspiracy theories that inhabit YouTube on the subject, most of which suggest an alignment between the Sun and the centre of the galaxy that will bring about a “radical event”, with maximum emission activity storms on the Sun’s surface which will pour out massive subatomic particles, known as neutrinos. All of this, astronomers say, is objectionably absurd, akin the putative black hole at CERN. Moreover, they argue, the Sun and the galactic centre will not coincide, as doomsday theorists would have us believe, in 2012.

The essence of this end-is-nigh school of thought is tied in with predictions that Nibiru, a planet supposedly discovered by the Sumerians, is headed toward Earth. The fallout from this, to paraphrase David Morrison, a CSI Fellow and Senior Scientist at the NASA Astrobiology Institute, is that associated attributes to this event encompass a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field, create severe solar storms associated with the eleven-year solar cycle, cause the reversal of the Earth’s rotation axis, long with bombardment by large comets or asteroids, and with a fanciful bit thrown into the mix about the Sun aligning with the galactic centre on December 21, 2012, subjecting us to potentially deadly forces.

This now populist theme, based on the Mayan calendar and ways to survive the coming apocalypse, seems to be causing havoc with the minds of the irrationalists and the huge hordes of the psychologically unhinged. According to one website, many people in Russia are saying they are “anxious by problem Nibiru”, with one woman asking: “Why doesn’t your government put a ban on the TV shows and report telecasting about Nibiru and 2012. If [the] US can [take steps] to protect the world physically from terrorism, why can’t it protect us mentally from [this] news, if they are hoax?”

If it’s clearly a hoax, then mentally we should ignore it. However, according to Wiki: “There are a variety of popular beliefs about the year 2012. These beliefs range from the spiritually transformative to the apocalyptic, and centre upon various interpretations of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar. Contemporary scientists have disputed the apocalyptic versions.”

Whilst the film’s impact on the human psyche is building up to the “event” in 2012, let’s not be too hasty about denying the affects of climate change altogether though. While the world’s leaders assemble in Copenhagen next month, James Lovelock, a respected voice in the scientific community, said in an article in The Guardian newspaper, “Enjoy life while you can”, and talks about the catastrophe that will “inevitably happen” (for the full article see (http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2008/mar/01/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange). For interest’s sake, let’s look at some of the extracts:

“Working alone since the age of 40, Lovelock invented a device that detected CFCs, which helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer, and introduced the Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary theory that the Earth is a self-regulating super-organism. Initially ridiculed by many scientists as new age nonsense, today that theory forms the basis of almost all climate science.”

Lovelock has been dispensing predictions with consistent accuracy since the 1960s, which have earned him “a reputation as one of Britain’s most respected — if maverick — independent scientists.”

“His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be under water. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic language — but its calculations aren’t a million miles away from his.”

“Somewhat unexpectedly, Lovelock concedes that the [Daily] Mail’s plastic bag campaign seems, ‘on the face of it, a good thing’. But it transpires that this is largely a tactical response; he regards it as merely more rearrangement of Titanic deckchairs.”

Then the pièce de résistance: “There have been seven disasters since humans came on the Earth, very similar to the one that’s just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we’ll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That’s the source of my optimism.” Why then, I plausibly ask, after seven “events” already, weren’t we the source of our ancestors’ optimism?

However, seven disasters already of this magnitude? Is he saying that the micro disaster scenario, that is to be debated by the world’s leaders next month in Copenhagen, is a complete waste of time? Well, I suppose he is, yes.

He argues in the piece that: “Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won’t make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable. It’s just too late for it. Perhaps if we’d gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don’t have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing.”

In this quote there is no allusion to a cyclical macro pattern, but in his interview with The Guardian newspaper (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2009/apr/22/james-lovelock-gaia-space-biochar) he reiterates the coming of the “Eighth Event”:  “Don’t forget that in the Earth’s history, while humans have been on the planet — that’s about a million years — there have been seven major climate events of this kind. And I think the geneticists say that at one of those events, we were reduced to a mere two thousand individuals; a genetic bottleneck. If that is true, then they are very violent events indeed. And the one up ahead looks every bit as violent, if not more so than the ones that have happened in the past…”

He continued: “As soon as the system grows unstable, it goes into positive feedback. And as the positive feedback strengthens, then any small perturbations, in either direction, get amplified. So the tendency to cooling will give you a really cold winter,” he suggests. “More extremes are likely because the system is becoming stressed.”

While the greenists run about suggesting that we all plant trees to alleviate the impact of climate change, he warns: “This is the trouble with climate science and green actions: they theorise all the time and never do experiments. Now, people have seemed to have forgotten that experiment and observation are at least half of science.” When he planted 1,000 trees years ago he found out it really wasn’t a good idea at all, because “you can’t plant an ecosystem”.

So, while the film “2012″ is an obvious and clever marketing hoax — one that is based on the exploitation of human fear in return for quick returns — dig a little deeper into both the micro level (Earth’s biosphere) and the macro level (the course and interaction of all celestial bodies) and the conclusion is that we really haven’t got a clue about what could potentially become reality; unless, of course, you believe in the stern warnings of Mr Lovelock.

Recent articles in the Guardian newspaper have suggested that reality has finally sunk in with News Corp’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, as paywalls have been deferred indefinitely and his charges against free online news have now come crashing down.

As a recent example of charging for online news, the furore over British MP’s expenses bore out the fact that as far as “exclusive” stories are concerned, this scandal was re-reported on many assorted websites that were free, within half-an-hour of the story’s release. So, why would anyone choose to go to the Telegraph website, if it sat under a paywall, when you could get the same information from alternative sources?

Obviously, by setting a date for the advent of paid-for content, Murdoch was hoping that other news corporations would follow suit. But even if he had sat down with all the world’s newspaper execs to hammer out a deal, wouldn’t this have amounted to a cartel, which of course is illegal in most countries.

I have argued for the past few weeks that a report by Peter Horrocks, Director of BBC World Service, which promotes speciality publishing in response to declining newspaper revenues, is the correct view of the future of online news. Rupert Murdoch, on the other hand, would have found it almost impossible to introduce micro-charges for readers browsing his newspaper websites.

On November 5th, Mr Murdoch admitted, in a report published in the Guardian newspaper that, “last night the schedule was slipping for the start of online charging at papers including the Sun, the Times, the New York Post and the Australian. The initiative, which has divided the media industry, is an attempt to recalibrate the business model for struggling print media.”

In July, Murdoch launched a massive and prolonged attack against the BBC, which can never charge for online news, as it’s a state-run institution. Since that date, his son James has gone into action against the corporation to strengthen his father’s diktat that News Corp was not going to “give news away for free”.

As of last week, he has climbed off of his trusted steed and addressed his audience more honestly, and from the ground, saying that although initially he fully intended to lock his news up behind paywalls from the end of the company’s financial year, ending in June 2010, “I wouldn’t promise that we’re going to meet that date.”

According to the Guardian newspaper: “News Corp revealed an 11% increase in profits to $571m for the three months to September…but [it] continues to struggle with its digital offerings. Murdoch revealed that the social networking website MySpace has failed to deliver on a minimum level of web traffic it guaranteed under an advertising tie-up with Google three years ago. As a result, it will not receive all of the $900m that Google had agreed to pay for the right to offer search and advertising on MySpace.”

So, what are the figures that may have inspired this retreat? And how much advertising revenue does News Corp derive from the average newspaper reader? Well, from buying the physical article, $150; from newspaper advertising, $100; and from the web: a derisory $8.

Another pertinent question Mr Murdoch seemed to overlook as he was attacking the very foundations of the BBC, how much time does the average reader spend on his papers: 12 hours a month in print; 10 minutes a month online, or 1/720th.

The difficulty in understanding both models is that newspapers are tactile and dense to read; online is the opposite. I would be interested in finding out if anyone, anywhere, ever, has read an entire newspaper online. It just doesn’t happen. Also, when you look at the typography of online news (the BBC is a perfect example), journalists write in bite-sized chunks, as we all know that reading dense tracts of text on-screen is too wearing an experience. Therefore, it’s can only be modelled as an add-on, not as an entity in itself.

For as long as newspapers have been publishing online, owners have accepted that charging for it was never going to work, and concluded a long time ago that advertising plus free access was the preferred model. But then came the credit crunch and with it the negative effects on the profits of publishing; and publishers needed to find a way out. Murdoch decided to go back a few paces, if not a hundred miles, in re-introducing the idea of the paywall. Now, it looks as if this re-enactment of the past — one that would never have come to fruition — is quietly being fazed out.

According to another article by the Guardian newspaper: “His Times/Sunday Times duo has dropped off the pace in Britain, adrift of the Mail, Guardian and Telegraph. His New York Post is down to 27th place in the league table of US online news resources. Fox, of course, is a palpable presence, but still trailing Yahoo News by 26 million users a month. How — the Wall Street Journal apart — do you start building paywalls around that?”

Murdoch ran the risk of trying to lead the newspaper industry towards a pay-per-view model when he said: “I believe that if we’re successful, we’ll be followed fast by other media.” He wasn’t, and the deal that has caused such a stir over the last three months seems dead in the water, with Mr Murdoch having been forced, at last, to eat humble pie.

When he said “change was inevitable” and “we’re certainly satisfied that we can produce significant revenues from the sale of digital delivery of newspaper content,” he spoke volumes about how, rather than becoming “the saviour of online news”, he severely miscalculated the market and today’s generation of readers.

So, for now, while the argument for fortress journalism abates, maybe we can return to normal and stop worrying about its consequences. In conclusion, it certainly seems that the Times has not kept pace with the times; and that if the Times wants to succeed in the future, it will have to reinvent itself with the times.

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In a recent development today, the Guardian’s article, Murdoch could block Google searches entirely, where he admits to an “online charging delay” and that “Murdoch’s plan for paywalls ‘raises questions of anti-trust law’”, Murdoch’s lieutenants “have stepped up their war of words with Google, accusing it of ‘kleptomania’ and acting as a ‘parasite’ for including in its Google News pages. But asked why News Corp executives had not chosen to simply remove their websites entirely from Google’s search indexes - a simple technical operation - Murdoch said just such a move was on the cards.” So, we’ll just have to move left, and leave him to address his “parasite” overlords.