Archive for March, 2009

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Ask a Flowchart: Which Blowhard Am I? [Wired]

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

As I was shelving 16-plus years of Wired magazines on the shelves in my office at Medill today, I saw plenty of memorable cover stories … and, in some remarkably thick back numbers from the late 1990s, plenty of evidence of memorable ads for forgotten Internet startups. Rather than be nostalgic, however, here’s a cheerful graphic from issue 17.04.

Ask a Flowchart: Which Blowhard Am I? .

(Oh, why do I still have the dead-trees editions, you ask? Well, when I remember a long story to which I want to refer, it’s actually easier to search for it on wired.com, then pull the actual issue off the shelf. With the bonus that I generally get to see some of those remarkable pre-bust ads.)

(Bonus No. 2: it’s a very colorful way to brighten up a wall of bookcases.)

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Back at the scene

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

Last Thursday I was at the corner of Chicago and Dempster in Evanston to meet a couple of Medill undergrads at Starbucks.  They have asked me to serve as adviser for their summer project, which I won’t reveal here but which manages to combine my interests in social media, economic news, and cold, windswept climates.

It was September, 1974, and I was heading back to school after buying a birthday gift at the Practical Tiger in Evanston.  I remember it as a watering can.  Anyway, the car radio was loud, and as I sailed into the intersection of Chicago and Dempster, I was broadsided by an Evanston police car, lights flashing (and, evidently, siren wailing).

The cop wasn’t happy, and I soon was summoned to court.  And summoned, and summoned, because the cop also seemed too busy to appear and the City of Evanston kept getting continuances… (more…)

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Growing Up on Facebook [NYT Mag]

Friday, March 20th, 2009

 

Time spent on FB by age cohort (NYT)

Time spent on FB by age cohort (NYT)

 

Well, apparently there’s a new reason to fret about social networks.  Will they eliminate teen-agers’ incentive, and opportunity, to grow up?

 

“For all the discussion Facebook has prompted, its most profound impact may be to alter, even obliterate, conventional notions of the past, to change the way young people become adults.  … [S]omething is drowned in that virtual coffee cup — an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness.”

via The Way We Live Now – Growing Up on Facebook – NYTimes.com.

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Why deliberate, or talk, when you can tweet? [NYT]

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

The assumptions and conventions of today are grinding against those of the day before yesterday. All that’s needed now is somehow to tie in the AIG bonuses…..

  • The use of BlackBerrys and iPhones by jurors gathering and sending out information about cases is wreaking havoc on trials around the country, upending deliberations and infuriating judges. … [J]urors might think they were helping, not hurting, by digging deeper. But the rules of evidence, developed over hundreds of years of jurisprudence, are there to ensure that the facts that go before a jury have been subjected to scrutiny and challenge from both sides. 

via As Jurors Turn to Web, Mistrials Are Popping Up – NYTimes.com.

  • Twitter entered the lexicon two years ago here when it was the darling of the South by Southwest conference, and it is now the event’s dominant platform, seeming to overtake actual conversation. Why talk when you can tweet?
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The ambiguity is inherent

Monday, March 16th, 2009

We’re on a journey from Gutenberg to Google to God knows what. – Gregory Favre, ASNE convention, 2008.

I miss civilization, and I want it back. – Marilynne Robinson, “The Death of Adam” [introduction]

The ambiguity is inherent. – ORY, 1971 (one of 716 citations on Google)

 When did the ground start to shift?

Was it when I had my first online chat in real time, with Howard Witt in Moscow, back in the 1980s?  Or was it before that, when The Source and CompuServ seemed like good excuses to own a 1200-baud modem?

Was it in the early 1990s, when angry readers of the Tribune business section, unhappy because we had omitted some thinly traded gold stocks in a redesign of the listings pages, found me through AOL and demanded the patching of their morning safety net?

Was it in 1994, when I posted a “home page” on the World Wide Web, using Telnet and Gopher and Eudora and Fetch?

It matters little, since digital tinkering has long ago given way to digital strategy in the halls and bowels of the world’s media businesses.  (Or what passes for digital strategy, or what pass for media businesses.  It was also in 1994 that I heard a European news executive say that, for newspapers, the “information superhighway” was evolving from a zero-million-dollar business to a zero-billion-dollar business.)

I have always sought to expand my own knowledge and then, immediately, someone (and everyone) else’s.  Now that I am a professor, that is my job as well as my aspiration. (more…)

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