Category Archives: Video

Journalism in the Age of Data

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I keep reading how data visualization is the future of journalism but it didn’t sink in very far. This documentary (?) turned on the light bulb in several ways.

I remember (sort of) the first time I inserted some audio into a story that aired on the radio station I worked at. Zowie! How cool is that? Well, better than no sound at all (maybe).

As I watched this, I realized how little understanding is communicated by the sound bite or some TV Ken/Barbie sticking a mic in someone’s face. Real depth, real insight and understanding will happen online (although we’ll soon stop making that distinction if we haven’t already).

I was also struck by the really smart men and women featured. They are not pretty faces. You don’t get on TV unless you look good. I sure hope J-Schools are paying attention to this.

The news organizations (if in fact it turns out to BE news organizations) the bring these skills to the party will win and we’ll all be better informed.

[via Cool Infographics]

TED Talk: What Technology Wants

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I finished Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants this weekend. I rank this book up there with Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near in terms of importance. I won’t attempt to review the book, since I’m still try to absorb some of the mind-bending ideas. Like the evolution of technology:

Here are a few ideas that got some highlighter:

Technology and life must share some fundamental essence. … However you define life, its essence does not reside in material forms like DNA, tissue, or flesh, but in the intangible organization of the energy and information contained in those material forms. Both life and technology seem to be based on immaterial flows of information.” – pg 10

Technium – The greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us. – pg 11

How many neurons do you need to have a mind? – pg 13

We can think of technology as our extended body. – pg 44

Ideas fly in flocks. To hold one idea in mind means to hold a cloud of them. – pg 45

Even the tiniest disposable item with a bar code shares a thin sliver of our collective mind. – pg 48

For most humans, for most of time, real change was rarely experienced. – pg 73

“What was impossible billions of years ago becomes increasingly inevitable.” — Simon Conway pg 126

There is only one life. All life today is descended along an unbroken line of duplication from one ancient molecule that worked inside one primeval cell that worked. – pg 127

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