“No communication technology has ever disappeared, but instead becomes increasingly less important as the technological horizon widens.” –Arthur C. Clarke
Future of newspapers, TV, radio, et al
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Category Archives: Quotable & Notes
A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken
I am part of the first TV generation. Thousands of hours of my life were spent watching. Just watching. These days, like many others, I spend many of my hours online, creating, sharing and consuming media. Clay Shirky explains why this “social surplus” is a very big deal:
“Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.”
If you are in any way connected to the business of “media,” you need to read –and understand– what Mr. Shirky has to say.
“The web is your future”
“A lot of experienced news people — whether broadcast or print — feel like they’ve been baited and switched, that they were trained and hired to do one thing but are now being required to do something else. That’s understandable, but it’s also completely irrelevant.”
— Terry Heaton
“Happiness Is A Choice”
I’ve been thinking some about fear and happiness recently, so these excerpts from an article by Roger Fransecky (“Happiness Is A Choice”) caught my attention:
“Dan Baker’s book, What Happy People Know, confirms the wisdom of the research into what (Dr. Martin) Seligman calls “authentic happiness” and “learned optimism.” Baker notes that a major barrier to happiness is fear. He writes, “We all have a neurological fear system embedded deep within our brains, a neural network that once helped us survive as a species, but now limits our lives. The biological circuitry of fear is the greatest enemy of happiness.”
We’ve written about how fear binds us, edits our hopes and diminishes our potential for happiness. Baker reminds us that fear is the repository for our past traumas, our fear of the future and our archaic instinctual terrors. Fear can be a gift, our way of staying out of the darkness and moving into the light of awareness and new beginnings. But if our fears own us, we have to break free…by awareness of those fears, and through the courage to challenge our fears to see if they are still real.”
For additional information on “neurological fear systems embedded deep within our brains,” reference the work of Dr. Warren Chapin. Additional insights on Happiness.
“Freedom is a shitty business model”
“(Blogging is) headed everywhere, because the underlying pattern of cheap amateur publishing is what’s important, not the current manifestations. The word blog itself is going to fade into the middle distance, in the same way words like home page and portal did. Those words used to mean something relatively crisp and specific, but became so overloaded as to be meaningless.
So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this — the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.
The thing that will change the future in the future is the same thing that changed the future in the past — freedom, in both its grand and narrow senses.
A lot of the fights in the next 5 years are going to be between people who want this kind of freedom in their technologies vs. business people who think freedom is a shitty business model compared with control.
The internet means you don’t have to convince anyone that something is a good idea before trying it, and that in turn means that you don’t need to be a huge company to change the world.”
From Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The
Power of Organizing Without Organizations.
“The slow swarm of spinning things” (Count Zero)
The Sprawl trilogy is William Gibson’s first set of novels, composed of Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). One of the “characters” in Neuromancer is Wintermute, “one-half of a super-AI entity.” On page 274 of Count Zero, we find a description of Wintermute creating art.
“She caught herself on the thing’s folded, jointed arms, pivoted and clung there, watching the swirl of debris. There were dozens of the arms, manipulators, tipped with pliers, hexdrivers, knives, a subminiature circular saw, a dentist’s drill … They bristled from the alloy thorax of what must once have been a construction remote, the sort of unmanned, semiautonomous device she knew from childhood videos of the high frontier. But this one was welded into the apex of the dome, its sides fused with the fabric of the Place, and hundred of cables and optic lines snaked across the geodesics to enter it. Two of the arms, tipped with delicate force-feedback devices, were extended; the soft pads cradled an unfinished box.
Eyes wide, Marly watched the uncounted things swing past.
A yellowing kid glove, the faceted crystal stopper from some vial of vanished perfume, an armless doll with a face of French porcelain, a fat, gold-fitted black fountain pen, rectangular segments of perf board, the crumpled red and green snake of a silk cravat … Endless, the slow swarm of spinning things…”
I love the image and I love the idea of an artificial intelligence creating art. In this story, futuristic Joseph Cornell style boxes.
This story is embargoed. Right.
“Here’s the deal with Twitter as it applies to fast-breaking news: All it takes is one person with knowledge of a big-deal news event (in this case, anyone in the NBC building who learned about Russert’s death) to instantly blast it out via Twitter to blow apart any notion you may have of holding back the tide for a few minutes.”
— Steve Outing, E-Media Tidbits
Character
A man of character in peace is a man of courage in war. — Sir James Glover
When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends. — Japanese Proverb
Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as by the latter. — Paxton Hood
Watch your thoughts, they become words. Watch your words, they become actions. Watch your actions, they become habits. Watch your habits, they become your character. Watch your character, it becomes your destiny. — Unknown
Civilizations in decline are consistently characterised by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity. — Arnold Toynbee (1889 – 1975)
The character of a man is known from his conversations. — Menander (342 BC – 292 BC)
People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character. — Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)
Microsoft’s Ballmer on future of media?
“In the next 10 years, the whole world of media, communications and advertising are going to be turned upside down — my opinion. Here are the premises I have. Number one, there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.”
Next generation radio
Jerry Del Colliano shares a few ideas on “next generation radio” he’ll be presenting to an interactive session for radio executives next month:
“My view is that terrestrial radio is now a destination entertainment medium for available listeners – older members of Gen X and the baby boomers.”
“…there is no need to produce 24/7 programming online. … But the radio station of the future may only provide three hours of programming a day – that’s right, a day – and deliver it on a cell phone or mobile device.
“Podcasting will be the new radio for Gen Y.”
“The successful content provider in the future will have to unlock the genius of Steve Jobs in understanding a generation they are not in – and Jobs, arguably, knows Gen Y better than they know themselves.”
“In the past, a radio station had to be on-air, all the time and doing the same format over and over again. But in the future, new media will require radio broadcasters who want to play in this arena to be many things for which it does not presently have skills.”
If you’re interested in where radio might be headed, I encourage you to read the full post. Companies that provide programming to radio stations — like our company– are sure to be affected by the same forces. Are we ready?