Tag: media

Is information or ignorance stronger?

In the Web 2.0 age, when many see 100s of articles every day, are we more informed than previous generations were?

this is fascinating. i especially liked this tidbit about how high culture used to be disseminated:

In cigar-making factories in New York City, lectors sat on high stools reading Shakespeare, Marx, Engels, Darwin, Hugo, Balzac, and Tolstoy as cigar rollers performed their work.

The eagerness of kickstarter producers

Spending his Tuesday office hours meeting individually with each student in his Screenwriting II class at the University of California, Los Angeles, part-time lecturer Sam Albrecht, 33, told reporters that the eagerness and optimism in his students’ gazes had become too much for him to bear. “There’s this earnest twinkle in their eyes when they look at you, like they really believe they have a chance, and—I’m sorry, but it just tears me to pieces,

kickstarter, craigslist, the coop message board, community centers are full of ads like: i am doing a movie, looking for actors, producers, a script, editing, marketing, social media. i have an idea for a great title!

Media credibility

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect:

You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories.

You read with exasperation the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.