Interrelativity

Category: Media

  • The Gaps, Crap and Gumption Traps in Creative Work

    The poster above reflects hard-won wisdom acquired and shared by Ira Glass, host of PRI's This American Life, emphasizing the importance of perseverance in developing mastery of creative production. While Glass focuses on storytelling for radio and television, his insights and experiences about the gaps between ambitions and realizations – and the connections between quantity…

  • Nothing brings people together like ignoring each other to stare at their phones

    Last night, on the Colbert Report, near the beginning of the segment on Fear for All, Part I, host Stephen Colbert announced the new Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear app for the iPhone (also available in the Android store). The app was developed by MTV Networks for the upcoming combined Rally to Restore Sanity…

  • The Starbucks Digital Network, Engagement, Enlightenment and Third Places

    In a recent interview at TheGrill media and entertainment conference, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz extolled the virtues of video streaming and other proprietary media that will soon be made available via free Wi-Fi on the Starbuck Digital Network. At the end of the interview, he briefly mentions the unique opportunity that Starbucks offers as a…

  • The “Boopsie Effect”: Gender, Sexiness, Intelligence and Competence

    Last Thursday, I heard segments of a KUOW interview with Deborah Rhode, Stanford law professor and author of The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law, in which she spoke of the Boopsie effect, wherein women in upper-level positions in historically male-dominated professions find that “attractiveness suggests less competence and intellectual ability”.…

  • The further commoditization of Twitter followers

    A few months ago, I wrote about the commoditization of Twitter followers, after discovering a number of automated, semi-automated and manual strategies that people – and non-human systems – were employing to artificially boost their Twitter follower counts. My earlier discovery was sparked by noticing some unusual numbers in the profiles of some recent followers…

  • Applying the One Percent Doctrine to Climate Change

    I remember hearing an NPR Fresh Air interview with Ron Suskind, author of The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of It's Enemies Since 9/11, shortly after the book came out in 2006, in which he explained that the title came from a statement made by [then] Vice President Dick Cheney about the Bush…

  • Twitter: a witness projection program

    Twitter has become the ultimate (or at least current favorite) tool for addressing the fundamental human need to matter, to have a witness. The increasingly popular web service "for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?" is, more…

  • NPR Freeloading Considered

    It's pledge week at both of our local National Public Radio affiliate stations: KPLU and KUOW. I've been growing increasingly angry about the interruptions in news programming required to raise money to support the stations: every "pledge break" means one less news story I get to hear. I understand – and support – this practice,…

  • Hope and Dreams trump Fears and Smears

    The speeches of the two U.S. presidential candidates Tuesday night were hopeful and inspiring, a welcome change from the fears and smears that dominated much of the campaign … or, at least, one side of the campaign. John McCain delivered the most gracious concession speech I have ever seen, and Barack Obama delivered yet another…

  • Conservativism, Liberalism and Independence

    As the campaign draws to a close, two classic Doonesbury cartoons have been regularly recurring to me, a visual analogue to the aural experience of a song I can't get out of my head. One of them was the pithiest summary of the differences between conservatives and liberals I've ever read; the other was a…