My friend Robin Mejia just published an essay on learning to shimmy. It’s a really fun read — I love lines like “a woman can possess both brains and push-up bras” — and gets one to musing about the brain. I’m not sure I buy the reductionist idea that we are our brains, but we definitely have to wrestle with our self-conceptions.
So says Bob Garfield, in this piece on Ad Age that goes on (and on) about the death of media as we know it, because we stupidly gave away all our content in the 1990s and now no one will pay for anything. I think he’s a little caught up in the depression. There are not millions of 14-year olds who are capable of creating their own content networks, no matter how good the technology might seem.
Oddly, if he’s right, it may be that the only thing that will work for most media dwellers is live performance. Write a book, hit the speaker’s circuit. An updated version of the town crier of yore.
Hey, some thing has to work. Thanks to my friend Ellis Booker for pointing out this piece.
My good friend Kathy Kleiman had a great moment recently, when she and one of the early ENIAC programmers, whose memory has been kept alive largely by Kathy’s efforts, went to Silicon Valley for a couple of major events: the programmer, Jean Bartik, was given a Fellows Award by the Computer History Museum, and then spent a chunk of time at Google.
Here’s Kathy’s post about the event, complete with video. And a link to the ENIAC Programmers Project site, which Kathy maintains.
MediaShift’s Mark Glaser has me shaking my head. He sent a journalism student ‘undercover’ to blog about her social media class, without being upfront with her teacher or her classmates. Then he rides to his own defense by penning a piece of quasi-journalism, NYU Professor Stifles Blogging, Twittering By Journalism Students. Bad professor, bad! Bad Mark, more like.
Do we need an expose of a journalism class? And what happened to the tenets of journalism?
In “The Elements of Journalism” Kovach and Rosenstiel have these five points about reporting:
Granted, they published this in 2001, before the rise of blogging and the like. But when did it become the default to not tell someone you’re a journalist? I don’t understand why Mark would encourage her to do this, and then why Mark he would try to trump it up into some kind of ethics/censorhip dilemma. Besides, the only audience who would possibly be interested in her posts would be her class, and she clearly deceived them.
There is a question as to whether in the world of blogging and other digital media, the old rules still apply — I’ve been to conferences that were ‘off-the-record’ for journalists, but other attendees could disclose whatever they liked, and did. That’s frustrating, to say the least. But privacy in the journalistic sense is not irrelevant, even though it may not be convenient to actually ask people to go on the record. When journalists disclose what they do professionally, it’s an alert to everyone else that what is said and done may be exposed to a community of readers or listeners or viewers, and that it may be vetted by other people beforehand, people they don’t know, people who aren’t there. So people who knowingly talk in front of a journalist is doing so with a tacit understanding that they are actually engaging in a kind of public conversation. Blogging without disclosure is not journalism — it’s a kind of gossip. That’s true even if it’s accurate in what it reports.
Dan Gillmor saw this coming in “We the Media,” where he wrote of a couple of early examples of the potential dilemma, including one involving a meeting someone had with President Bush. Gillmor wrote that “The growth of grassroots journalism has been accompanied by serious ethical issues, including veracity and outright deception.” (emphasis mine) He raises the question of whether traditional journalistic ethics are compatible with blogging, but doesn’t answer it in the book (he probably has since it was published, in 2004. Maybe someone can post a link…)
I commented on Mark’s story, challenging him for leading a student astray and for trying to pass off his mistake as an example of a big institution stifling a student — he shouldn’t have written about it in a journalistic way. I don’t want to throw stones; I’m in no position to do that. But I do think he made a mistake, and he needs to address it. We’ll see whether he has anything more to say about it.
UPDATE: Mark posted this comment in response to the one I posted on his original item:
Michael F.,
I agree with you that Alana should have got her teacher’s point of view for her first story. But she told me that she didn’t think she would be able to give an honest assessment of what happened in the class if she had told her teacher ahead of time. I said the only way I would run that initial post was if she would go to her teacher and other faculty at NYU and get their side of the story for a follow-up post.When she tried to do that after the first post, she was told not to ever write about the class again and the teacher refused to be interviewed by her. I think once Alana hit a wall and didn’t feel comfortable writing about the class, it was fair game for me to write about what had happened to her. I didn’t pretend that I was an impartial observer, and was clear about my own involvement in the story.
I posted back that I didn’t understand why he would publish it as journalism when it didn’t do journalistic basics, like give the source a chance to respond, which she could even have done after the fact. There’s nothing wrong with what she wrote, if it’s on her personal blog. It’s taking it and calling it journalism without holding it to the standards of journalism that I object to.
My friend Rivka Tadjer has just published her novel, Two Weeks Under, an exporation of just what we’ll do to look ‘perfect.’ Congrats, Rivka! It sounds like a timely book, what with the cosmetic adjustments people now consider routine.
I expect plenty of cloaking technologies will emerge for the mass market, things that use technology to help us block or evade technology. Wade Roush has just posted this article on a rather simple one: the Slydial stealth voice messaging service, which “offers the illusion of communication.”
Wade’s write-up is a grabber. He starts “Sartre said “Hell is other people.” A local startup seems to be banking on that sentiment.”
Have to read on after a lead-in like that.
Andrew Brown, who was one of the Templeton-Cambridge journalism fellows with me last year, has a new book out, “Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future that Disappeared.” It got a great review from The Economist, Potential Turbulence (registration is required).
A couple of samples: “Mr Brown’s prose is as clear and bewitching as the lake waters in which he learns to fish.”
“Readers who know the Nordic countries will delight in the author’s keen ear and eye for the nuances of language, landscape and social customs.”
Having learned about fishing and many other things from Andrew, I’m eager to go read the book.
Do we think better when we set aside time for it?
Ellis Booker, a friend and former colleague, blogged in the affirmative, saying Take the time to let big ideas grow.
In his post, he described an unexpected five-hour layover at LaGuardia Airport, which he spent disconnected. “…[U]ninterrupted blocks of time… are the gardens where big ideas, imaginative, even playful what-ifs grow and then flower into innovative new products, services, organizations and business models.”
He used his time to make a list of ideas, though unfortunately the one he shared was to book a scuba diving trip.
His post sent me off to my pile of business books. I pulled out Think Better,, a book published earlier this year by the consultant Tim Hurson.
Alas, Hurson does not explicitly address how much time one should set aside for just thinking (it’s probably unknowable but unlikely that five hours at LaGuardia works as well as Bill Gates’ fabled Think Weeks), but he does walk through his system for thinking more effectively, which does demand some time. In my friend’s favor is list-making. In the book, Hurson calls list-making an important tool in coming up with ideas, and in particular if you use a “Wind Tunnel” process, a period of time dedicated to just making lists of ideas (Hurson suggests coming up with 50 ideas or spend five minutes). The first third will be conventional, he says, but by the last third, there may well be gems that go in a new direction.
I like this quote from the book, too:
“It probably seems as though you’re thinking all the time, but like the rest of your body, your brain uses a variety of strategies and tricks to minimize the energy it requires. And its most effective strategy for conversing brain energy is actually not to think at all. In fact, most of the time your brain is involved in just one of three activities: distraction, reaction or following well-worn patterns.” [italics mine]
Hurson has devised a model to actually help you think. It takes him 250 pages to explain it and show how it can be applied, so I’m not going to condense it here, other than to say that I liked his structuring of ideas into reproductive (similar to current things) and productive (going in new directions), and shows examples of both types of thinking and how they apply to businesses. If your business needs new ideas, and is struggling to come up with them, his Productive Thinking model rates a look.
Maybe on the Internet we don’t die. We just become static. I say this because Classmates.com has as one of my featured members an old high school friend who passed away earlier this year.
I can see that his interests were walking and golf, and he had two children. Classmates is encouraging me to ask my old friend to be one of my online friends. I want to say to Classmates, ‘he’s dead.’ It wants me to ask him to post a photo. I want to say to Classmates, ‘he’s dead.’ It reminds me that as a Gold member, I have everything I need to reconnect with my friend. There would be a nice trick. A little online seance action. It points me to my friend’s story, only there isn’t one there, and he won’t be adding one. Maybe I’d better hurry and add mine.
Classmates isn’t the only site on the Web that has immortalized him in some small way. Several sites list his name and work address — he was a recruiter. Oddly, I can’t find his obituary.
The Web really can make us immortal.
My friend Brendan Koerner’s book is out. Now the Hell Will Start
tells a tale lost in the mists of history, a World War II manhunt in Burma. I’m looking forward to reading it.