This is in a rare place of being extremely funny and extremely serious. Just watch it.
Tagged with Media …
Fox News and Fried Chicken
Information Diet | Fox News and Fried Chicken
Fox News is a lot like fried chicken. We all know it’s terrible for us, but we eat it because it tastes so good.
Don’t Just Watch The TV, Direct The TV
“I finally cracked it” – Marco.org
My wife and I watch TV shows on a TV set, but I wouldn’t say that we “watch TV”.
To me, “watching TV” means turning on a TV set to watch whatever is “on”. More specifically, turning on the TV set and a cable box (and, for many people, a standalone audio receiver as well), to watch whatever is being broadcast on cable TV at the moment, possibly flipping through channels regularly, in order to kill time. It’s an inherently passive activity: infinite entertainment passes by with no effort or interaction required. When one show ends, another begins.
It’s funny. My wife and I recently moved to a new apartment. Well, we moved in but haven’t really moved in totally. We’re waiting on furniture, painting, cleaning, organizing, etc. You know, first world problems. We’re going the same route of just getting internet service and stream things from the web through Netflix and others. But we’re doing it more because we have to, than we want to. Cable TV is too expensive and it’s just not so simple to get just internet. Cable companies make it very difficult for you. To get a justifiable monthly price for just internet, you have to bundle the service with TV, and/or phone lines. Shit you don’t want. Plus your choices are limited when it comes to “shopping around”. A cable provider is usually in control of one particular area or county. Your limited, or in my case you just have plain bad luck. Like not being able to get TV through satellite like Dish or DirectTV because of the location of the building and associations prohibiting putting antennas on the roof, or the phone line wiring being to old and not being able to transmit a TV signal. Yep, those things happened to us.
So that’s my situation. I’ll probably just get an antenna to get the local channels and “watch tv” in that traditional sense Marco refers to, but I’m sure I will be doing it way less and I’m looking forward to doing it way less. It’s time to really direct the tv and not let it direct you.
Cognitive Surplus – Review
Cognitive Surplus is written by the author Clay Shirky. He is also a teacher at New York University, where he teaches “New Media” at the Interactive Telecommunications Program. His previous book is called Here Comes Everybody where he tackled the subject of the power of the web for groups to organize. Shirky has also written for publications like The New York Times and Wired.
My first exposure to Clay Shirky was a talk he gave about the so called problem of information overload. In the talk he explained that the problem is not really information overload. We have had an over abundance of information for centuries. The problem, he said, is a filtering issue. He explains that since the cost of publishing on the web is zero, there’s no loss if you don’t filter for quality. In traditional publishing the costs are high thus the need to filter for quality before taking that risk. In this book he writes about this subject when he gets to the history of the printing press.
My first impulse to read this book was because I wanted to hear the good news first. What I mean by that is that it was either Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows or this one. For the last couple of months, there’s been this debate going on on how the web is doing x to us. Mostly negative. How it’s robbing our attention, our ability to concentrate, etc. Now that I read Cognitive Surplus, I wouldn’t say the it has an opposing view to The Shallows. Carr’s is about psychology and the web and Shirky’s is about sociology and the web. But one is definitely viewing the glass half empty, and the other is viewing the the glass half full. While Clay Shirky is definitely a techno optimist, don’t confuse him with a social media 2.0 guru enthusiast.
If I could sum up the book with one idea it would be this: “The stupidest possible creative act, is still a creative act.” This quote comes from the first chapter of the book we’re he discusses LOLCATS. Here Shirky is acknowledging that sure, there’s a lot of crap on the web, but it’s better than having nothing. And it’s not just about a content creator making something for an audience, but about creating something to share with a community. For that purpose, the quality is secondary.
The key idea in the book though is free time and television. Television is so embedded in our culture that we don’t realize how much time we actually spend on it. Shirky started looking at this because of the frequently asked question, “Were do people find the time.” The time has always been there since industrialization and the 40 hour work week. It’s that for the last 50 plus years or so, we have spent that free time passively staring at a light emitting box. The so called boob tube. Shirky’s conclusion is that the people who have opted to watch less television have made Wikipedia possible, as well as LOLCATS.
Through out the book Shirky also answers why we’re doing this for free and what motivates people to do it. The short answer: because we can. The opportunity is there. People just don’t want to be a passive consumer anymore. They also want to create and more importantly, to share with people. Now we can. He also writes about the impact and the potential that social media can have with civic service.
This is a big deal. It’s an interesting time to be in. We still watch a lot of television, but while we’re watching it, we look up info on IMDB from our smart phones. We listen to music, but look for what people are saying and we rate them. We are no longer just an audience, we are the people formerly known as the audience.
The Mind Over Mass Media
I was starting to get worried on how the “coin is starting to get flipped” in terms of web/tech criticism. This is natural since the “web revolution” has had more champions than detractors. A web idealist critic was frowned upon. It still is. See Andrew Keen. But the contrarians are starting to gain some traction. Mostly because they’re actually making valid arguments. There’s Nicholas Carr’s recent book The Shallows and the debates it has started. There’s those recent NyTimes articles about how technology is making us impatient, unfocused, and changing us in not so good ways.
But how bad are really these bad things that the web is doing to us? Steven Pinker smacks some sense in the fear mongering tone of how the web is rewiring us.
Critics of new media sometimes use science itself to press their case, citing research that shows how “experience can change the brain.” But cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk. Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill the wiring of the brain changes; it’s not as if the information is stored in the pancreas. But the existence of neural plasticity does not mean the brain is a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience.
It’s All About Voice
This is what it all boils down to:
I think a lot of news organizations are throwing things against the wall to see what’ll stick. They believe getting input from audience is the key, or hopping on the Tumblr bandwagon, or starting up a twitter account. The problem with all those things is that they function just like a photo of a sexy model. It’s enough in the short term to get some dumb kid to flip through the pages, but it’s not enough to win a reader. It’s not enough to get two college professors to pay for another years’ subscription.
Less Talk, More Rock
I know this one has already played the rounds, but this is superb. Fascinating essay about the audio visual language of video games.
Remember when Miyamoto made that videogame about those plumbers? The real revolution with that videogame was in the style of communication. It was a tremendous leap forward in how articulate synesthetic audiovisual could be. Coins looked like they sounded and they sounded the way they behaved in the context of the mechanics. Each element — the brick, the turtle, the pipe — was a well-formed, understandable audiovisual videogame unit.
Food For Thought Links
Nicholas Carr refutes the idea that progress in media technology is “accidental”.
When you describe an event or a thing as an accident, what you are doing is draining it of all human content. You are saying that human intention and will and desire played no part in its occurrence. A volcano is an accident in human history (if not natural history), and if it’s a big enough one it may well influence the course of that history. But the the book, the printing press, the publishing house, the newspaper, and the newspaper company are not volcanoes. Their development was guided not just by blind circumstance but by human intent and desire. They represent, not just in the abstract but in their concrete forms, something that people wanted and that people consciously brought into being, for human purposes.
Why Are Russians So Good at Chess?
Because they are obsessed with it at a nationalistic level. From the Slate article:
Chess has long been popular in Russia—Czar Ivan IV is thought to have died while playing a match in 1584. After the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, it became a national pastime. Soon after the revolution, Vladimir Lenin’s supreme commander of the Soviet army, Nikolay Krylenko, laid the foundations for state-sponsored chess: He opened chess schools, hosted tournaments, and promoted the game as a vehicle for international dominance. The first state-sponsored chess tournament was held in Moscow in 1921. Six years later, chess prodigy Alexander Alekhine became the first Russian to win a world tournament. By 1934, 500,000 amateur players had registered with the state chess program. When Mikhail Botvinnik won the international title in 1948, he kicked off an era of Soviet domination that extended unbroken—except for a four-year streak by American Bobby Fischer—until the fall of the USSR.
The author of the article literary claims:
Given two people with comparable levels of intelligence and technical skills, the one with less-reputable external marks of status will be more likely to display outward signs of elitism, arrogance, and snobbery.
via HN
Pixelated Brains and New Media
Popmatters has been running a feature called Pixalated Brains and New Media which are a series of articles that deal with the web, reading, our short attention spans, online social networking, and many other digital concerns, worries, hopes, and dreams. I started with Scratching the Surface: Your Brain on the Internet via Metafilter. Here’s a snip to the intro of the series:
There’s a great deal of concerned talk, talk, talk out there about our shortening attention span, and it seems our demise (because let’s be frank – the overall tone is that whatever is happening to us is bad for the species) is all thanks to the advent of New Media. You know, all those pixel bits of blog entries, TV news quips shouting at us between blaring 30-second commercials, three-line gossipy blips under BIG PICTURES in glossy mags, proper grammar and punctuation lost to text messaging, sound bytes bouncing along the airwaves at varying decibels … Via these methods we nibble from an array of fast foods for thought, taking from what’s presented that which we like, eschewing the rest and flitting off, or perhaps Twittering off, to the next pretty shiny thing.
