The Offline Report

In the last decade digital technology has pushed analog off the cliff, and we're still tying up the loose ends from the severed analog connections. People over a certain age (40) remember analog telephones never needed a battery or any kind of power adapter. Among the half of households still using landlines these days, few of them realize their home lines won't work when the power is out, regardless of what kind of phone they have, because the underlying analog telephone networks have been replaced with digital networks . In 2018 KQED combed through 9-1-1 logs to identify some evacuation communications failures from 2017's fires , many of which have been fixed since their report. The L.A. Times this week reported more communications and alert failures in this article: Camp fire evacuations failed to reach more than a third of residents meant to receive calls . The L.A. Times also reported more state legislature calls to action toward closing the feedback loop in this ar...

Carole Masson, 68, one who successfully evacuated the Paradise, CA, town recently leveled by wildfire, told the SFWeekly that landlines in the area have been converted from analog to digital. A Harvard Business Review in 2014 reported the FCC was coordinating the replacement of analog telephone networks with digital ones . Analog phone networks worked when the power was out. Apparently digital phone networks don't: The main problem with the Camp Fire, she says, is that PG&E warned people they were going to turn off the power in the days leading up to it. When it did go out, it was because the fire blew out the transformers and knocked down power lines, but many residents thought it was simply their energy company taking precautions. As landlines are digital now, the minute the power goes down so do the house phones, destroying communication for those who don’t own cell phones. “We need either some kind of a landline system with remotes in people’s houses, because if they d...

Yale historian and On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder says in one lecture that variegated news displaces fake news. Do you hear people say your home city is more "bleached out" compared to five or ten years ago? Maybe it's less "variegated." Or maybe it's variegated but we have to re-discover what regional news is available to us. Here's a transcript from part of his lecture, beginning at 3:00 mark (video below): ...The Russian attack on the US took place primarily through the media. And it gives us a chance to ask what has actually happened to our media in the last decade. In fact even the fact that I’m using the word media, and you’re all nodding your head media media we’re thinking we use the word media … that itself reveals the basic problem. Because what has happened we’ve shifted from being a country where there were lots of regional and local newspapers which provided you know an imperfect but nevertheless a shaded a variegated a specific v...

In an age of option overload it's hard to believe there is something you can't find, but it happens: I want a friendlier, more up-beat alternative to the NPR morning radio signal we receive now. NPR is very high quality radio, but if I and others can start the day being entertained ... the economy will tick up and we'll all be better off. I don't want podcasts because ... there's something about starting the day and needing to hear the local weather and needing to tune in together . In the morning, especially, you need to feel present and really alive as you shower and dress for work. Ronn Owens , a San Francisco Bay Area radio host who once was the only local broadcaster to outperform Rush Limbaugh in the same timeslot, is "back on iTunes" in this household. By "back on iTunes" I mean  for the last month we can hear Owens' shows more clearly in our podcast-downloading system because his terrestrial radio show -- now shortened to jus...