Audiences Don't Pay for Content
Andrew Spittle said: Audiences have never and will never pay for content. What they will pay for is the effective and rapid distribution of that content.
The Social Media Bubble
Andrew Spittle said: Umair Haque gives a well-reasoned rebuttal to the types of relationships created by social media.
The social isn't about beauty contests and popularity contests. They're a distortion, a caricature of the real thing. It's about trust, connection, and community. That's what there's too little of in today's mediascape, despite all the hoopla surrounding social tools. The promise of the Internet wasn't merely to inflate relationships, without adding depth, resonance, and meaning. It was to fundamentally rewire people, communities, civil society, business, and the state - through thicker, stronger, more meaningful relationships. That's where the future of media lies.
Dense and Thick
Andrew Spittle said: We need another web revolution to transform into a world-as-a-database.
Something should be keeping track of this. Something that can watch and record and use that recording to build a model. Something that can connect the real world of objects with the intangible set of goals that I have for myself. Something that could do that would be exceptionally desirable. It would be as seductive as the Web.
Driveby culture and the endless search for wow
Andrew Spittle said: What are we losing in the endless search for wow and how can we addresses this?
Culture has been getting faster and shallower for hundreds of years, and I'm not the first crusty pundit to decry the demise of thoughtful inquiry and deep experiences. The interesting question here, though, is not how fast is too fast, but what works? What works to change mindsets, to spread important ideas and to create an audience for work that matters? What's worth your effort and investment as a marketer or creator?
Techno-utopian fail
Andrew Spittle said: A critical perspective on the role of technology in political movements.
The case for context: my opening statement for SXSW
Daniel Bachhuber said: Systemic knowledge makes the episodic much more valuable.
This is bullshit
Andrew Spittle said: Jeff Jarvis rails against traditional models of education and media. A brilliant critique.
So we need to move students up the education chain. They don’t always know what they need to know, but why don’t we start by finding out? Instead of giving tests to find out what they’ve learned, we should test to find out what they don’t know. Their wrong answers aren’t failures, they are needs and opportunities. But the problem is that we start at the end, at what we think students should learn, prescribing and preordaining the outcome: We have the list of right answers. We tell them our answers before they’ve asked the questions. We drill them and test them and tell them they’ve failed if they don’t regurgitate back our lectures as lessons learned. That is a system built for the industrial age, for the assembly line, stamping out everything the same: students as widgets, all the same.
One-Third of U.S. Without Broadband
Andrew Spittle said: The headline from a recent NY Times article about broadband use in the U.S. is a bit misleading. Turns out many in that 1/3 are without broadband by choice.
A more accurate headline might be “One-Third of U.S. Without Computers, Mostly By Choice.” This is fascinating and worthy of discussion in our industry. Collectively, we’ve screwed up. Badly. What can we do to make computers attractive to the third of our country who don’t use any of our stuff?
Ones Guild
Andrew Spittle said: Stewart Brand with a short but very clear and to the point statement about what the internet means for him.
Thanks to my guild's Internet-mediated conversation, my neuronal thinking is enhanced immeasurably by our digital thinking.
Is Google Good for History?
Andrew Spittle said: Very well thought out and well put piece concerning the concerns over the Google Books project. Well worth reading.
But then we historians, like other humanities scholars, are natural-born critics. We can find fault with virtually anything. And this disposition is unsurprisingly exacerbated when a large company, consisting mostly of better-paid graduates from the other side of campus, muscles into our turf. Had Google spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build the Widener Library at Harvard, surely we would have complained about all those steps up to the front entrance.
