Commentary: Carpe Diem

(Des Moines, Iowa, February 16, 2008) We are told to seize the new day. Rely upon the Internet. Pursue advanced degrees. Do everything to reach for the stars, except actually reaching for the stars. We need to be careful not to toss aside those tools of yester-year that helped us make sense of our surroundings.

Regular readers of my posts on AroundDesMoines.com have probably observed that I toss in the full day, month, and year of events about which I write. As a person who spends hours each week reading material both online and off, I am frustrated by the lack of basic information provided in many documents. Even when I can find locations and years, there is no consistency as to where they are placed.

In newspapers, the date of publication is usually printed at the top of each page. Articles not written locally will have a dateline indicating where the action took place. If a wire service provided all or part of the information, that will be noted at a few select points. Well into the 20th century the dateline also included the date. In the Internet age, I would like to see a return to some use of a dateline with an emphasis on location and date.

For readers who want the latest news as quickly as possible, news outlets with an online presence are very good at identifying at what time an article is posted. That doesn’t help when the article may be read two days or two years later. Some of those news outlets add to the confusion by putting the date of viewing on the screen thereby forcing the reader to scour the fine print to find the date of publication. With blogs, the date of publication may be a day or more after the event. With many bloggers, including those with dedicated news sites, writing content gathered by other sources, the use of datelines could indicate where the writer was when he or she reported the information.

Another tool of the past that we need to keep in use is the secretary or administrative assistant. However, we need to toss aside the attitude that these are dead-end jobs and that only unambitious women take them. There is a reason that some receptionists in New York City companies worked there for decades and were well-compensated. Those women may not have been managers, but the offices would not have run nearly so smoothly without them. As Iowa and the rest of the country become more and more obsessed about jobs that call for masters degrees and Ph.D.s, we need to remember that not everybody likes college or not everybody wants a 60-hour week job that goes home with them. We also need to remember that those highly-educated workers need intelligent people to read their e-mails, answer their phones, keep their files, and clean up their computers for them.

Look to to the future but do not abandon the past.

M.R. Field is editor of Leading Voices: Iowa.