“News is to the mind what sugar is to the body. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind.”
“News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. The daily repetition of news about things we can’t act upon makes us passive. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitised, sarcastic and fatalistic.”
“If the public can speak directly to one another in large groups and with high visibility, then the self-definition of a journalist as a privileged translator takes a big hit. If you think of yourself as a member of the only class allowed to find and explain information, you find yourself in a very uncomfortable position.“
“The easiest way to get people in institutions to do interesting new things is for that institution to go bankrupt and for those people to change jobs.”
“Anything in the news business that can be commodified will be commodified. The people who cling to the idea that humans are required to rewrite wire service copy are spending money that no longer needs to be spent.”
From an interview with Clay Shirky by The Europlean Magazine
That’s what Nielson calls folks who “fall outside the traditional definition of a TV home. There are 5 million of these residences in the U.S., up from 2 million in 2007. […] The number of people signing up for traditional TV service has slowed to a standstill in the U.S.”
And then there are the “cord-nevers.” Young people who move out on their own and never set up a landline phone connection or a TV subscription.
“We tend to exist in a distracted present, where forces on the periphery are magnified and those immediately before us are ignored.”
“The minute the ‘now’ is apprehended it has already passed. […] The more forcefully we attempt to stop the passage of time the less available we are to the very moment we seek to preserve.”
“Which ‘now’ is important: the now I just lived or the now I’m in right now?”
“Digiphrenia – the way our media and technologies encourage us to be in more than one place at the same time.”
“Not only have our devices outpaced us, they don’t even reflect a here and now that may constitute any legitimate sort of present tense. They are reports from the periphery, of things that happened moments ago. […] By dividing our attention between our digital extensions, we sacrifice our connection to the truer present in which we are living.”
“Humans once lived without any concept of time at all. In this early, hunter-gatherer existence, information was exchanged physically, either orally or with gestures, in person. People lived in an eternal present, without any notion of before or after, much less history or progress. Things just were. […] While they had to worry about where their next meal was coming from, they felt no pressure to succeed or to progress, to achieve or to improve. They had nowhere to go, since the very notion of a future hadn’t yet been invented. This stasis lasted several thousand years.”
“Like a digital file, a spelled word is the same everywhere it goes and does not decay.”
“Where calendars led people to think in terms of history, clocks led people to think in terms of productivity. Only after the proliferation of the clock did the word ‘speed’ (spelled spede) enter the English vocabulary.”
“Digital technology is more like a still-life picture. A sample. It is frozen in time. Sound, on the other hand, is audible only over time. We hear sound as it decays. […] The digital universe is a visual one: people staring silently at screens, where the only sounds in the room are the keys and mouse clicks.”
“While there is tremendous value in group thinking, shared platforms, and networked collaboration, there is also value in a single mind contemplating a problem.”
“We must retrain ourselves to see the reward in the amount of time we get to spend in the reverie of solo contemplation or live engagement with another human being. Whatever is vibrating on the iPhone just isn’t as valuable as the eye contact you are making right now.”
“In the space of one childhood, we can learn what it took humanity many centuries to figure out.”
“Catching up with Twitter is like staying up all night to catch up on live streaming stock quotes from yesterday. The value was in the now — which at this point is really just a then.”
“When everything is rendered instantly accessible via Google and iTunes, the entirety of culture becomes a single layer deep. The journey disappears, and all knowledge is brought into the present tense.”
“Our recorded past competes with our experienced present for dominance over the moment. […] What isn’t coming at us from the past is crashing in at us from the future.”
“Big data companies collect seemingly innocuous data on everyone, such as the frequency of our text messages, the books we’ve bought, the number of rings it takes us co pick up the phone, the number of doors on our cars, the terms we use in our Web searches, in order to create a giant profile. They then compare this profile against those of everyone else. For reasons no one understands, the data may show that people who have two-door cars, answer the phone in three or more rings, and own cats are extremely likely to respond favorably to ads for soup. So these people will Ье shown lots of soup advertisements. The market researchers don’t care about the data points themselves or the logic connecting one behavior to another. They only care care about predicting what a person is statistically likely to do.”
“For the first time, people engaged with products completely divorced from the people who actually made them. Technologies masked not just the labor, but also the time that went into an item’s production. […] This new way of interacting with things defined a new human identity for the very first time — that of the consumer.”
“Consumption makes up about half of all economic activity in America.”
“In a digitally enhanced consumer reality, we not only work to keep up with the latest products and service options, we purchase products and services that serve no purpose other than to help us better keep up. Our iPads and Adroids are nothing like the productivity-computing tools on which they may once have been based but are instead purchasing platforms designed to increase the ease and speed with which we consume.”
“We are so good at making stuff and providing services that we no longer require all of us to do it.”
“It is now usually cheaper to just try something than to sit around and try to figure out whether to try something.” — Joichi Ito
“The individual is flow, and the community is storage. Only the individual can take actions. Only the community can absorb their impact over time.”
“Fractalnoia – Relating one thing to another, even when the relationship is forced or imagined.”
“Ideas don’t generally emerge from individuals, but from groups (liquid networks).” – Social critic Steven Johnson
“In a networked ideascape, the ownership of an idea becomes as quaint and indefensible a notion as copyright or patents. Since ideas are built on the logic of others, there is no way to trace their independent origins. It’s all just access to shared consciousness. Everything is everything.”
“Consumers don’t want to speak with companies through social media; we want to speak with one another. We don’t even think of ourselves as consumers anymore, but as people.”
“As long as people didn’t engage with one another and were instead kept happily competing with one another, their actions, votes, and emotions remained fairly predictable.”
“The human body is a space suit for something that could be stored quite differently.”
“I find myself unable to let go of the sense that human beings are somehow special, and that moment-to-moment human experience contains a certain unquantifiable essence. I still suspect there is something to quirky, too paradoxical, or too interpersonal to be imitated or re-created by machine life.”
“…the implicit assumption is that radio’s past must be sustained into the future, and with a few tweaks here and there we can dial up our relevance […] and dial down our risk. This is equivalent to the consumer products company that asks “how can we make a new product that we can successfully sell?” – as long as that product is envisioned, made, and sold to fit with all the previous products the company has sold in the past.” — Mark Ramsey
Heavy snow knocked out power to our house yesterday so as darkness fell, I built a fire, turned on some solar LED lamps and dug out a transistor radio. I didn’t sample a lot of stations but the ones I listened too sounded… quaint?
I probably haven’t listened to a full hour of “terrestrial radio” in the last 5 years so what I heard felt strange in my ears. The phony DJ voices; snatches of Alice Cooper’s syndicated show (shudder)… but the most jarring was the lack of control over my experience. Don’t like a song? Well, tough shit, just gotta wait till it’s over and hope you like the next one better.
I’m going to take it on faith there are radio stations (somewhere) breaking new ground and reinventing themselves for the new media world in which they find themselves. If you know of one, drop a link (or just the call letters) in the comments.
“Going forward, no other sport will ever have a run like this, because the TV-cash part of the connection can’t be recreated. Mass TV built many elements of our culture, but mass TV (except for tonight) is basically over. The new media giants of our age (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.) don’t point everyone to one bit of content, don’t trade in mass. Instead, they splinter, connecting many to many, not many to one.” — Seth Godin explains »
From remarks by Eric Schmidt to audience at Cambridge University:
“We could see virtual kidnappings – ransoming your ID for real money,” Schmidt said. “Rather than keeping captives in the jungle, groups like Farc [in Colombia] may prefer a virtual hostage. That’s how important our online ID is.”
“But the future will be much more disruptive to terrorists than everyone else. I can’t see them operating out of caves in Tora Bora” – as al-Qaida did after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. […] Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad reportedly raised suspicions because it didn’t have any internet connection.”
“Our online identity will become such a powerful element. Laws to protect anonymity – we may even see rise in black market where we can buy pre-made or real identities, with all their shopping and background all completely ‘real’ – verifiable online, that is. […] Both drug smugglers trying to evade police and political activists looking to hide from repressive regimes would find those useful, he said: “you’ll be able to buy an identity with fake friends and a history of purchases.”