Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Friday, April 2, 2010
Old Media Reaches For An Inhaler
Over at Bottom-up, Timothy B. Lee links to an excellent Clay Shirky post that gets to the root of the old media disconnect:
About 15 years ago, the supply part of media’s supply-and-demand curve went parabolic, with a predictably inverse effect on price. Since then, a battalion of media elites have lined up to declare that exactly the opposite thing will start happening any day now.
To pick a couple of examples more or less at random, last year Barry Diller of IAC said, of content available on the web, “It is not free, and is not going to be,” Steve Brill of Journalism Online said that users “just need to get back into the habit of doing so [paying for content] online”, and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp said “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use.”
Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:
“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”
When your basic premise is so detached from the reality of how people want to consume information, no amount of wishing or arm-twisting will save your business model.
My newspaper was late hitting the driveway this morning. I picked it up when I returned from driving my son to school, and it's laying on the kitchen island, still in its translucent orange bag. Since it didn't arrive in time for me to read it with my breakfast, I doubt that it will ever leave that bag until it arrives at the recycling facility.
Not surprisingly, I've been online since 8 AM and am significantly more informed as to what's happening in the world than I would have been had I read the paper in its entirety. How is old media going to fix that?
The Lost Art of Solitude
Zenhabits has a thoughtful piece on what's happened to the concept of solitude in this age of hyper-connectivity.
The hustle and bustle of everyday life is exacerbated by technology devices that allow us to always be doing something, whether it's productive or not.
In a non-scientific, completely random sampling of friends and family, I found that seldom is someone alone for any significant period of time without performing some action that either connects us to the outside world or occupies our time for no good reason.
As an example, I'm up to Bejeweled level 307 on my iPhone. Sighs.
The article describes some of the benefits of solitude:
It takes courage to be alone - completely, utterly, painfully alone, even for a devoted introvert like me. Alone to the point where there are no thoughts or influences other than your own. And it takes an incredible amount of focus to clear your mind of what you need to prepare for dinner, or which work deadlines should be prioritized, as you cease being a puppet to past conversations and conflicts while being present in the now, the future unknowable and unimportant.
A couple of years ago I took my son, then 7, out on our back deck, and we played a game where we didn't talk for three minutes. Instead, we listened, the goal being to identify the sounds of as many different things as we could on a typical warm Saturday morning.
The results were amazing - more than fifty distinct sounds and activities going on in the world around us, the majority blissfully ignored on most days, but not on that day.
On that day, we were present, and engaged in the world around us, making us privy to a universe we'd grown accustomed to ignoring. Sadly, it's a world that often ignores us in return.
Solitude. Go get yourself some of that.
In a non-scientific, completely random sampling of friends and family, I found that seldom is someone alone for any significant period of time without performing some action that either connects us to the outside world or occupies our time for no good reason.
As an example, I'm up to Bejeweled level 307 on my iPhone. Sighs.
The article describes some of the benefits of solitude:
It's pretty clear why some of us avoid solitude at all costs. We face our demons? Find our own voice in a world where we're constantly being messaged and directed on what to do? Get to know ourselves? How scary is that?
- time for thought
- in being alone, we get to know ourselves
- we face our demons, and deal with them
- space to create
- space to unwind, and find peace
- time to reflect on what we’ve done, and learn from it
- isolation from the influences of other helps us to find our own voice
- quiet helps us to appreciate the smaller things that get lost in the roar
It takes courage to be alone - completely, utterly, painfully alone, even for a devoted introvert like me. Alone to the point where there are no thoughts or influences other than your own. And it takes an incredible amount of focus to clear your mind of what you need to prepare for dinner, or which work deadlines should be prioritized, as you cease being a puppet to past conversations and conflicts while being present in the now, the future unknowable and unimportant.
A couple of years ago I took my son, then 7, out on our back deck, and we played a game where we didn't talk for three minutes. Instead, we listened, the goal being to identify the sounds of as many different things as we could on a typical warm Saturday morning.
The results were amazing - more than fifty distinct sounds and activities going on in the world around us, the majority blissfully ignored on most days, but not on that day.
On that day, we were present, and engaged in the world around us, making us privy to a universe we'd grown accustomed to ignoring. Sadly, it's a world that often ignores us in return.
Solitude. Go get yourself some of that.
Sarah Palin's Real American Stories Sucked
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| I'll get you, my pretty. And your little dog, too. |
Well, she's not going to be the next Oprah. Big surprise here, but no one liked it. Not even the Daily News. Some of the words used in reviews of the show: "overly-scripted," "flat" and "boring." The results are in!
Perhaps an old LL Cool J interview was the glue intended to hold the whole show together, and when LL objected to having a pre-taped segment from yesteryear presented as Palin material and the bit was dropped, the SS Sarah veered off rudderless.
When critics opine that Palin makes goober-in-chief Mike Huckabee "seem like Jerry Lee Lewis" by comparison, it's time to begin scratching your head as you wonder what exactly Palin brings to the table besides big hair and canned pander.
Perhaps Palin and Ollie North could team up on a program that would essentially involve nonsensical arguments chasing each other around the studio amid a backdrop of angry spittle and legal defense funds.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Titty Titty Bang Bang
Female homicide bombers are being fitted with exploding breast implants which are almost impossible to detect, British spies have reportedly discovered.
How exactly did they discover that, and was the research partially funded by the American Republican National Committee?
Schneier notes:
Perhaps we should just give up. When this sort of hysterical nonsense becomes an actual news story, the terrorists have won.
I'm pretty sure this wasn't an April Fool scenario, but one never knows.
Patriotic citizens everywhere should remain on high alert for TNT-laden terrorist teats.
Image via Caveman 92223's photostream on flickr
Rep. Hank Johnson Thinks Guam Floats
Via Balloon Juice:
Since we live in a representative democracy, what does this say about his constituency? If they don't find a new congressman, I guess we'll have our answer.
Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) is afraid that the U.S. Territory of Guam is going to “tip over and capsize” due to overpopulation.
Johnson expressed his worries during a House Armed Services Committee hearing on the defense budget Thursday.
Addressing Adm. Robert Willard, who commands the Navy’s Pacific Fleet, Johnson made a tippy motion with his hands and said sternly, “My fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.”
Willard paused and said: “We don’t anticipate that.”
Since we live in a representative democracy, what does this say about his constituency? If they don't find a new congressman, I guess we'll have our answer.
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