Tag: media

Memetic engineering

Right now people in my professional world (content platform pontificators) are avidly discussing the traffic garnered by a single picture of a blue-and-black dress that could also—depending on how your neurons are firing—look white-and-gold. “It’s the perfect meme, can never be topped: (1) Putting people on 2 teams, (2) a hint of magic, and (3) some science.”

Memetics

nk’s #1 export are rumors

When the country isn’t issuing condemnations of purged elites, complaining about forbidden ski lifts, or threatening World War III, it’s getting caught Photoshopping military exercises in an attempt to inflate its hovercraft arsenal. The mixture of genuine threat and laughable incompetence shapes our perceptions, and opens the door for greater lies and claims to take hold in our imaginations. It creates ideal conditions for rumors that paint the country in a negative and often mocking light.

NK messes with Sony

To be clear, the real act of terrorism is that sony pictures still employs Adam Sandler.

The new message made demands regarding the distribution of the controversial comedy film The Interview—which has been the target of the North Korean regime’s ire since it was first announced earlier this year. The Interview was “a film abetting a terrorist act while hurting the dignity of the supreme leadership of the DPRK by taking advantage of the hostile policy of the US administration towards the DPRK.”

Pierre Omidyar Insurgency

Even before the turmoil, Temple hinted that a strategic reconsideration was under way. “It will be more complex than an organization of iconoclasts.” Omidyar sees journalism as “the third phase of his professional life,” bringing together his technology experience and philanthropy, and is prepared to be patient, even if it perplexes outsiders. There is no incongruity between Omidyar’s communitarian ideals and his financing of an insurgency. “It’s not all about civility. It’s about having a healthy and open society.” There’s a tangible insight buried in that amorphous sentiment: Omidyar’s interest in journalism is mechanistic. He wants to aggregate to himself the power to declassify and to bring about the “greater good”.

Website timestamps are unreliable

In theory, our publishing tools could capture timestamps for the creation and modification of pages. Our web servers could encode those timestamps in HTTP headers and/or in generated pages, using a standard format. Search engines could use those timestamps to reliably sort results. And we could all much more easily evaluate the currency of those results.

In practice that’s not going to happen anytime soon. Makers of publishing tools, servers, and search engines would have to agree on a standard approach and form a critical mass in support of it. Don’t hold your breath waiting.

4th estate doesn’t exist

My friend Ed Lyons is taking investigative reporting into his own hands because media can’t be trusted to not screw up their 4th estate duties that they always trumpet when questioned about their value to society:

When the government said everything was fine, it was easier to believe them than ask questions. Coverage was scattershot, especially at the Globe where there were more than 20 stories about the Connector failure, and several reporters doing them. The stories shifted from health policy reporters to general interest reporters, and there didn’t seem to be a coherent, continuous narrative about what was happening. The press didn’t seem to understand the consequences of the state not being able to process website applications.

Media is self-obsessed

between the endless navel-gazing with stupid “tweets” and this:

When the Tribune Company recently got rid of their newspapers, the New York Times ran the story under a headline “The Tribune Company’s publishing unit is being spun off, as the future of print remains unclear.” The future of print remains what? Try to imagine a world where the future of print is unclear: Maybe 25 year olds will start demanding news from yesterday, delivered in an unshareable format once a day. Perhaps advertisers will decide “Click to buy” is for wimps. Mobile phones: could be a fad. After all, anything could happen with print. Hard to tell, really.

i’m surprised they’ve held on so long.

Hypocritical culture

you’d hope this hypocritical society would have moved on, but you’d be quite wrong.

She tried public appearances. She tried being reclusive. She tried leaving the country, and she tried finding a job. But the epic humiliation of 1998, when her affair with Bill Clinton became an all-consuming story, has followed Monica Lewinsky every day. She critiques the culture that put a 24-year-old through the wringer and calls out the feminists who joined the chorus.