April 17th, 2007
My Virginia Tech posts: apologies and clarifications
Yesterday, in my first post on the lack of availability of indexed and searchable video about the Virginia Tech tragedy I started out by writing in part:
Evil. Pure evil.
The sheer numbers inform a tragedy that is so much more profound than any discussion of the technologies used to stream it to the Web- where workaday Americans can watch it.
Then, in my followup post, I delved into the digital rights management issues. I know now that if I had prefaced that discussion with a re-iteration of my feelings that I had stated in the previous post, my sensitivities to the horrible events would have been clearer. I apologize for not devoting the appropriate sensitivities to these events, and their consequences.
I could have done a better and more sensitive job explaining the overarching belief that I presented in the rest of the post.
Once again, the Virginia Tech tragedy was a moment of deeply personal and of course, national pain and national news- and that for hours, the broadband-Internet-using public's right to know, and to see, was thwarted by digital rights management exigencies/fine print that one might argue ought to have been waived.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
