What’s troubling is the way that time interferes with gaining any insight from our media-making. As it was for Henry Bemis, time is the ultimate factor. It’s the thing that obliges us to let people know how long it will take them to read the thing we wrote. It’s why we make fancy status bars […]
“A different way of looking at the way the computer age evolved is sort of Ada Lovelace’s way which is that computers and humans will evolve symbiotically. They’ll be partners. We will get more intimately connected to our machines and the machines will amplify our intelligence and our creativity will amplify what the machines could […]
Jasper Morrison on MUJI: There is an English importer of wine which has been selling Bordeaux wine in England for more than 300 years, and besides all the expensive wines that they offer, there’s one which they call “Good Ordinary Bordeaux,” which costs much less than the others but which is fine to drink as an everyday wine. […]
There’s something about the popcorn analogy. The dominoes one has been so over-used that this struck me as a particularly smart way to put the Lehman crisis. Andrew Ross Sorkin quoting Ed Lazear in this piece on the 5th anniversary of the financial crisis: Ed Lazear, chief economic adviser to President George W. Bush, told a […]
I’m not sure I agree with this, though Mele actually touches upon the real problem separately in the chapter, when he quotes Jason Sondhi who reveals that in 1981, 7 of the top 10 movies were original and in 2011, NONE: The danger of the personalization of entertainment becomes clear when we remember entertainment’s traditional […]
Often the problems that are least worked on are the problems that have the characteristic that they’re important, but they don’t seem to be something which is the biggest or fastest or most profitable. And if it’s really important but it’s none of the above, then who does it? And But the idea of having […]
Every time technology changes, it changes what people in the plot can do. – Margaret Atwood, no less, in an interview with Pando Daily. This is true not just of writing and films, but of life in general. In the interview she talks about how the fear of the new is more or less the […]
“When a lot of ideas come into circulation, it changes society. When there are more ideas in circulation, there are more ideas for any individual to disagree with. More media always means more argument. That’s what happens when media space expands.” – Clay Shirky, quoted in this TED post by Helen Walters, on his talk at TED GLobal […]
“Every eye in the planet can see with great fidelity what is happening elsewhere.” – Navi Reshet, ‘Internet Prophet‘, in the documentary ‘Internet Rising‘.
“To understand a company’s strategy, look at what they actually do rather than what they say they do,” the book quotes Andy Grove as saying. The same logic applies to one’s life. For example, ambitious people will reliably tell you that family, or being a mother or father, is the most important thing in their […]
One Size Fits One 