Don't make me move, Google

I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to move.
Move from my house, that is.

The reasons are, I think, fairly acceptable to most people: My wife and I just put the mortgage to bed — a prodigious accomplishment in this economic climate.

We recently rehabilitated the house's federalist-style facade, giving our 126-year-old abode the look of something worth saving through the 21st century.

And, with other urban renewal inching forward again around the neighborhood, I finally feel confident about walking to the grocery store and not see someone pull a gun on me before I get there (Yes, this has happened to me once already).

The one thing I'm not so confident about is Google appearing to prowl around like a stalker, snapping photos of me while I'm bending over the begonias or picking up the dogs' latest expression of intestinal relief. I have seen the Great Aggregator traipse through here twice, quietly, snapping pictures like a tourist on a two-day trip through 10 cities, and leaving me to wonder whether the photographer got my good side.

But then I go back to what I was doing, unabashed and accepting of the scratch Google just made on the patina of my privacy. I mean, it's not as though Google knocked on my front door and asked if I wore matching socks.

However, I also accept that not everyone takes Google's passing picture-taking with similar grace and indifference. For some people, the sight of themselves or their property in a satellite photo via Google Street View compares to getting caught with their pants around their ankles. They didn't ask to have their picture taken and nobody sought their permission, and so they rail against the slightly surreptitious photography as if the camera operators performed an invasive procedure with the snap of a shutter — like removing a person's spleen without first asking the patient to sign a waiver.

Besides, there's an ethereal sense of presence borne by seeing the results of one's personal space captured by satellite — the creation of a connection that our innate sense of individuality needs time and attuned perspective to process.

This is why an offhanded statement by Google CEO Eric Schmidt this week rubbed all these concerned citizens the wrong way. On CNN's "Parker Spitzer" show Monday, he suggested, with humorous intent, these people "just move" after his company comes through with their Street View cameras. He insisted the shooters pass through neighborhoods once only, that this is not a "monitoring situation," thus making it impossible for Google to track comings and goings from homes and businesses and perhaps allaying the concern voiced by CNN's Kathleen Parker that Google can show others when her car is parked in front of her house.

"They cannot" see that, Schmidt told Parker. "The (image) resolution does not allow it."

In fact, it does, as my own experience demonstrates. After Schmidt spoke, I reviewed Google's visual accounting of my own house, and my car shown parked in front. The photos depicted the same blue car I have driven for years, and though apparent care was taken to distort the image just over my license plates I had no problem making out the bag of groceries sitting in the passenger's seat. Google's Street View shutterbugs passed by that day as I was unloading from a trip to the supermarket.

As for Schmidt's insistence that Google makes just one pass, a screen capture I grabbed about one year ago from the result of a previous Street View photograph proves otherwise. In that image, my other car is on display, and there is evidence for everyone including my mother to see that my yard can indeed look better than it does right now.

If I were I on the lam, or if I knew for certain that my mother had been checking the condition of my yard, this revelation might unnerve me. To a lesser extent, I feel uneasy regarding Google's ability to put faces with places, or connect real with virtual addresses and read license plates, unlike anything we have seen in public record-keeping to date.

In Germany, this ability has fostered outrage and prompted more than 200,000 citizens, or about 2 percent of the total population, to request their places of home and work be obscured ahead of Street View's debut in that country, where history has cultivated a delicate sense of individuality that's difficult to comprehend among self-aggrandizing cultures.

Schmidt told CNN his company acts responsibly at all times with the information at its disposal, but that's not what worries me. The people unaffiliated with Google who view the same photos cannot all be similarly responsible. And that kind of makes me want to just move.

One last word about trivia

On Friday, the St. Louis Pro Chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists turns trivial for a few hours to again sponsor its annual "Hacks vs. Flacks" trivia competition.


Despite the title, anyone with a mind for mundane facts and figures is welcome to participate, at $20 a head or $150 for a table of eight. There will be munchies, cooked up by SPJ faithful, plus beer and wine to facilitate trivial thinking and help start the weekend right. And there will be the added benefit of watching the cream of St. Louis-area media and public relations try to show how much they really know. (Hint: their knowledge varies greatly.)

But the reasons for this trivia contest belie the name. The chapter's chief goal is to raise money for student scholarships and programs such as a monthly luncheon series where special guests speak about new ideas and current events. It's hoped these scholarships and luncheons give the media and other communicators additional tools to do their jobs — or just find jobs. Because today, every little bit we can do to help the protectors of civic fairness and democracy is welcome.

So, please, come by at 6:30 p.m. tomorrow to Immaculate Conception at 2934 Marshall Avenue in Maplewood, Mo., to lend some wisdom and have good cheer, all for a very good cause.

The dad who never died

It was odd timing that two socially relevant icons of popular culture passed away within the week. Barbara Billingsley, the mother on "Leave It to Beaver," died Saturday. Tom Bosley, the father on "Happy Days," died today.

Both represented characters who were stereotypical of their television times — the doting, devoted housewife and the insightful but lovably stern father. Both symbolized elements of a stereotypical family norm that neither existed in the 1950s nor is pervasive today. And though the roles were not meant to be permanent, the impact of June Cleaver and Howard Cunningham continue to impress decades later.

I arrived on the world scene a little past the point of understanding or appreciating who June Cleaver was. Howard Cunningham, however, was central to my life in the 1970s because "Happy Days" dominated the Nielsen ratings about the time TV turned for me from being noisy living room furniture into societal touchstone. My friends talked about the show the mornings after each episode aired, their friends talked about the show, and over time we began dressing like the characters at special school events and parties. In sixth grade, I did a long project with written report, photos and a slide show of the 1950s' impact on the 1970s, inspired no doubt on the impression "Happy Days" left on me.

It was during this time, while conducting interviews for the project, that I learned about June Cleaver, the "Leave It to Beaver" craze and how the show seemed to make a cultural impact on people similar to what "Happy Days" did on me and my generation. And what I came away with from those interviews was this: TV alternately unifies and divides us. It can show us the faith, hope and compassion of humanity through worldly characters such as June Cleaver and Howard Cunningham while portraying an ideal of life we can't hope to emulate. Life is life and Hollywood is Hollywood, and though Hollywood may imitate life the reverse cannot be said with any certainty.

My grade-school friends who watched "Happy Days" — those in particular who came from broken homes — on occasion wished aloud they had dads just like Howard Cunningham, a guy who seemed to trust that his children would learn valuable lessons from their mistakes, and when they didn't would ride to their rescue dispensing the kind of earthy wisdom they didn't expect him to have. They believed in him, because he believed in them.

How many children of the '70s, or today, can say that or would admit it about their own parents?
That's why for me and my generation, Tom Bosley's role as Howard Cunningham — or "Mr. C," as The Fonz called him — remains as rich and relevant now as 35 years ago. Many of us still wish, deep down, we had a dad just like him and wonder, as parents, if we'll be anything approaching him.

That's why Tom Bosley may be gone, but Howard Cunningham lives on.

Taking my work with SPJ one step further

As president of the St. Louis Chapter for the Society for Professional Journalists, my job is simple: assist journalists in doing their jobs and trumpet their successes. As a committee member with SPJ national, I work with others around the country to do the same on a much broader stage.

A portion of that stage will be here, on Posterous, one of the must-visit lifestreaming sites on the Web, and another trumpet heralding new ideas and experiences. Journalists the world over are encountering new technologies and challenges in their jobs — among those challenges, the rise of social media and public newsgathering. Some would say this rise creates interference for traditional newsgathering practices that defined credibility and dependability in the larger media. Others welcome the broader reach of information sharing by everyone, not just traditional media, hastened by fast-evolving technical innovation.

Regardless, both views will find a voice in this space, and perhaps other voices will have their utterances recorded here as well. The key is finding ways to make social media and technology work for journalists, not the other way around. Because when it comes to being heard in the 21st century, intellect must trump ignorance, facts must trump fallacy, and sound judgment must trump noise; otherwise, our wonderful and varied means of communication, no matter how advanced, will devolve from tools into toys. And our republic will follow suit.

Return engagement

This wasn't what I expected — a big gap between my previous post and this one. At least not a gap of such prodigious size, prompting friends to wonder aloud if I dropped off the planet.

In response to all of them, no. I'm still here but my list of obligations has been reordered. That gaming blog I wrote? Gone. The technology writing for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch? Not a daily thing anymore. I continue to edit sports, or try anyway, though the still-tenuous state of newspaper journalism has made the job seem as essential as buckboard repair.

So, what prompted the shift in status? Look down a few dusty entries to the one marked "SPJ," the moniker of the Society of Professional Journalists. I went from local programming director to chapter president in one leap and now have much more on my mind than gaming and gadgets.

There remains, however, some space in my head for those things, and when they spill out a couple blogs should catch them. One encompasses a concept that remains in development. The other involves a national SPJ committee I joined while attending the society's annual convention in Las Vegas.

In time, you'll see more of my musings in this space, just not with yawning spaces in time between them. If your opinion of me is favorable, this is a good thing.

Right?