These are some of the things that have caught my attention lately. It’s a more eclectic mix than just the news business, but then so’s life:
- The US Air Force: Armed with social media | Web Ink Now — “I particularly like the detailed Air Force blog assessment flowchart that Capt. Faggard shared with me. It provides, in simple to understand, but in a detailed and specific way, how to react to blog posts. Everyone should take a look at this and consider applying something similar in your own organization.”
- Behind Fortune’s Smile | The American Prospect — [T]he plural of “anecdote” is not “data.”
- Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold | Roger Ebert’s Journal — A movie reviewer writes: “I dreamed, we all dreamed, for years that the future held vague visions of progress and prosperity, and that our problems would be “solved” by science. How many of us are so sure about that now? I wonder if we are living in the End of Days. I do not mean that in a biblical sense. I mean that we seem to be irrevocably screwing things up…”
- Better | kung fu grippe — “Gumming the edges of popular culture and occasionally rolling the results into a wicked spitball has a noble tradition that includes the best work of of Voltaire, Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde, and a handful of people I count as good friends and brilliant editors. There’s nothing wrong with fucking shit up every single day. But you have to bring some art to it. Not just typing.
What worries me are the consequences of a diet comprised mostly of fake-connectedness, makebelieve insight, and unedited first drafts of everything. I think it’s making us small.”
- The IAF, bullies of the clear blue skies | Haaretz — Israel News — The Columnist and the Commenters: “Our finest young men are attacking Gaza now. Good boys from good homes are doing bad things. Most of them are eloquent, impressive, self-confident, often even highly principled in their own eyes, and on Black Saturday dozens of them set out to bomb some of the targets in our “target bank” for the Gaza Strip.
They set out to bomb the graduation ceremony for young police officers who had found that rare Gaza commodity, a job, massacring them by the dozen. They bombed a mosque, killing five sisters of the Balousha family, the youngest of whom was 4. They bombed a police station, hitting a doctor nearby; she lies in a vegetative state in Shifa Hospital, which is bursting with wounded and dead. They bombed a university that we in Israel call the Palestinian Rafael, the equivalent of Israel’s weapons developer, and destroyed student dormitories. They dropped hundreds of bombs out of blue skies free of all resistance.”
- The Long Decline of Reading | Mssv — I completely disagree with the notion that videos are a superior, or even a desirable, way in which to convey intellectual ideas. At least talks and lectures have the advantage of interactivity, through questions and answers, and through physical presence and scarcity, unlike videos. Assuming that the audience can tolerate reading, the written word will almost always win out in terms of the quantity and quality of information conveyed.
Sitting in front of a camera and answering a question for a minute or two is far easier, and much more fun, than sitting down and writing. You chat for a little while, and poof — you’ve just created a piece of content that anyone in the world can watch! Who wouldn’t prefer that? When you write, you have to be far more considered, because you know that people will inspect it more closely, and that you can be easily quoted; whereas with video, it feels as if there is a lower threshold of quality to reach.
