Alan Miller's blog for a Brave New World!
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Ancient Writing
- What does the Internet really mean?
- Paper written for a communication studies course (1998)
- While today it is clear just how much influence the Internet has had on everything from politics, social organization, our collective experience as human beings, as it was emerging, there was a lot of speculation about what the Internet meant for us all. This is a paper I wrote for one of my communication classes that discussed the Internet in a more academic sense. Perhaps a dry read for some of you, but an interesting read considering how far we have come.
- Created: November 16, 1998
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- Waltrip to retire
- News article written for The Voice (May 1995)
- I had the honor of writing the story about the president's retirement from the college after 20 years of service. I was fortunate in that as a reporter, I had wide open access to the president of the college and we developed quite a rapport in the time I was there.
- Created: May 08, 1995
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- Ethics, schmethics, don't blame the media for sleaze
- Editorial column written for The Voice (April 1995)
- While sensationalistic tabloid television news shows are an accepted and possibly even ignored staple of everyday network television today, they came on with a vengeance from what seemed like out of nowhere. Spurred on by three events in particular that captivated the attention of Americans, Tanya Harding, Joey Buttefuco, and John Bobbit, not to mention the rise of Jerry Springer. These stories dominated the media landscape for months and only fueled the family values debate that was still lurking from Dan Quayle's famous attack on the fictional TV character Murphy Brown. I wrote this editorial in an effort to address what I saw as troubling; not that I was so troubled by the media lurking around in the gutter, but the vehement attack from those who were actually bringing about this shift in Television, the viewers themselves. It seems though today, we are still in the gutter, only now we are obsessed with the likes of Paris Hilton and Brittney Spears.
- Created: April 10, 1995
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- District approves $2 tuition increase
- News article written for The Voice (April 1995)
- This is one of many articles I wrote about the ever increasing costs to students of their education. The Maricopa Community College District did not always charge tuition, a little known fact today. However, I was old enough to know better and as a student journalist, this was one issue that I was passionate about and covered frequently. To think we were fretting over tuition at $32 a credit hour almost seems surreal when you consider today that the tuition has increased to over $70 a credit hour and shows no signs of slowing down. But then this is only one of a series of articles that served nothing more than to fill the columns of our student publication.
- Created: April 10, 1995
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- District trims fitness from degree
- News article written for The Voice (April 1995)
- I find this article interesting mainly because as a teenager growing up in the United States, I witnessed a national fitness movement come and go. I vividly remember Arnold Schwarzenegger side by side with the first President Bush as they pushed fitness as a national agenda. The events in this article really brought home the idea that the nation's attention to fitness had ended.
- Created: April 10, 1995
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- Faculty catches glimpse of computing to come
- News article written for The Voice (September 1994)
- Pretty straightforward article here. However, what I find interesting about this article is that when I was assigned this story, I knew nothing about Oracle, GUI's, relational computing, nada, nothing. Hell, we did not even have the Internet yet on campus, aside from limited access to the Lynx browser in the High Tech Center. It is almost funny to me to read this article today and think how big of a deal it was to get rid of the old proprietary computing systems that we all loved to hate. I am assuming that the upgrade process went ahead and is in full force.
- Created: September 30, 1994
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