Things found and ideas about technology, business, music, culture and more — a blog of sorts by Shawn Yeager.
Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired Magazine, describes the impact of DVR on his kids in The Decade of DVR
(via Mike Hudack)
Ann Trubek, “Handwriting is History”
(via Christopher Butler)
Though I cling to the nostalgia of handwriting and still get great satisfaction from seeing elegant, cursive writing, I confess that mine has devolved over the years to the point of embarrassment. I simply don’t write enough to maintain the skill, save the occasional notes scribbled in my Moleskin during meetings or the annual batch of Christmas cards — less legible every year.
But to Trubek’s main point, I’m not sure I agree. Does it truly allow us more time to think, or do we merely rush on to the next thought or task with the time saved by typing?
So, yes, the record industry may yet have to comprehensively reinvent itself, or implode…
But for now, this is a truly golden age — the era of the teenage expert, albums that will soon have to be full of finely-honed hits and the completely infinite online jukebox.
There are 4 billion RFID tags in the world. They may soon outnumber the people. Readers and tags are increasingly embedded in the things and environments in which we live. How do readers see tags? When we imagine RFID and their invisible radio fields, what should we see? Immaterials explains the experiments we have performed to see RFID as it sees itself.
(via Warren Ellis)
NPR:
Author Andrew Keen, who wrote a book about how blogs and user-generated Web sites are destroying the culture, says those who want to remain anonymous are increasingly being “marginalized” online. On sites like Twitter, he adds, anonymous users who are indiscriminately nasty rarely accumulate many followers.
“In the future, I think there will be pockets of outrageously irresponsible, anonymous people who will congregate in dark corners of the Internet, like on dark streets in disreputable parts of cities in the middle of the night,” says Keen, who wrote The Cult of the Amateur. “But for the most part, we will have cleansed ourselves of the anonymous. It will increasingly be something like smoking, which is looked down on.”
(via infoneernet)
In 1971, the oft-quoted political scientist Herbert Simon predicted that in an information age, cultural producers (that’s designers, but also filmmakers, theater types, musicians, artists) would quickly face a shortage of attention. “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients,” he wrote. The more information, the less attention, and “the need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
Matt Langer has written a passionate piece on the lost art of conversation — simply knowing how to talk to a fellow human being. Here’s an excerpt:
Sometime back we all forgot how to talk to each other. We coveted that McMansion at the end of the cul-de-sac and we put a big screen TV in the living room and bought an SUV to ferry us the two miles to the pharmacy and piled up countless other material additions to our lives that helped set up barriers between us and other people.
We subscribed to news weeklies that told us what we wanted to hear and got national newspapers delivered to our stoops that best reflected our tastes and we got cable packages to let us watch what we wanted to watch and internet access to let us read what we wanted to read and in the process we all became a little more focused, a little more narrowed, a little more myopic.
Read the full post.
Mike Elgan on the rise of the digital nomad
I’m a big proponent of broader adoption of the Entertainment industry’s project-based approach to work: individuals with specialized skills come together around a shared idea and objective to achieve a well-defined outcome, then disband and move on to the next project.
At present, most find themselves in settings where the Industrial Age still has a surprisingly strong influence on the way they work; where they clock in at an office and work as an individual- or team-based black box, await input, churn, produce output and repeat the cycle. This is largely a result of the fundamental way businesses organize — by function, rather than by project — and will take considerable will to change.
