Tag: media

Becoming a disney character

Our posthuman future made cute by disney.

Disney is teaming up with Open Bionics to provide royalty-free use of various character hands for children who’ve lost a limb! Open Bionics is thrilled to announce the next generation of bionic hands for young amputees. From the Marvel Universe, hot out of Tony Stark’s workshop, the Iron Man hand. Now kids can get excited about their prosthetics. They won’t have to do boring physical therapy, they’ll train to become heroes. They’re not just getting medical devices, they’re getting bionic hands inspired by their favorite characters. The Walt Disney Company is generously donating the time of its creative teams and providing royalty free licenses. More designs coming soon!”

Content Farms

Dumb people are ruining everything

The highbrow internet is based upon the misguided idea that there is a certain consumer who turns to the internet for well-written, informative content in the form of thinkpieces, #longform, podcasts and ‘well thought out glorified blog posts.’ Eventually, an authority in the niche provides a website with the ability to perform sustainable day to day farming. Based on an audience of ‘educated’ people who ‘spend money,’ you would think that the relative scale of these niche content farms with ‘an interesting take’ on culture + niche would be sustainable. They aren’t. They’re all going to die because of the toxic byproducts of viral supernova sites.

The Awl

Founded in 2009 by Choire Sicha and Alex Balk, The Awl stands counter to the prevailing trends in the media industry, commenting skeptically on the conventions of the wider web while running a mix of stories that are both wide-ranging and unabashedly specific: writerly reviews of the previous day’s weather, deconstructions of minion memes, tirades against negronis and the Moon, personal essays, deadpan lists, poetry. The site’s tone, knowingly smart and aloof from the news cycle, is especially popular among people who work in media, and it has become a farm team for larger publications. Lately, under the editorship of Herrman and Matt Buchanan, it also publishes some of the most incisive criticism about the ongoing collision of media and technology.

Teen “Influencers”

get off my lawn! etc etc

Hayes doesn’t seem to have any of the qualities that one might equate with sell-out-a-theater stardom. He doesn’t sing or act or play an instrument or tell great jokes or even play sports exceptionally well; he just is, and that is far more than enough

CSI Cyber

cop shows are some of the dumbest material tv has to offer, and this one is among the worst.

I only 2 short months, CSI: Cyber has quickly become one of the most magnificently absurd police procedurals being aired by a major television network. To be fair, its problems are mostly a matter of circumstance: It’s actually just about as brain-dead as any other CSI series, but this go-round comes off especially bad since it was ostensibly designed specifically to follow technology-related fictional crimes. As a result, the gap between the content of the show and the knowledge it is supposedly built upon is much more dramatic than any other major Jerry Bruckheimer undertaking of the past few decades.

Future filter bubbles

how we’ll deal with a future where you’ll only be exposed to what you want to see.

I think most people, if asked “Is it important to listen to arguments by people who disagree with you?” would answer in the affirmative. I also think most people don’t really do this. Maybe having to set a filter would make people explicitly choose to allow some contrary arguments in. Having done that, people could no longer complain about seeing them – they would feel more of an obligation to read and think about them. And of course, anyone looking for anything more than outrage-bait would choose to preferentially let in high-quality, non-insulting examples of disagreeing views, and so get inspired to think clearly instead of just starting one more rage spiral.