- Inventor Saul Griffith learns the limits of technology: Shame the full text isn’t online: Great article on “the inadequacy of addressing complex societal issues with technological ingenuity alone. Nowhere is this problem more apparent than with Griffith’s main preoccupation these days: energy use and global warming.”
- Reverse engineering the perfect (or worst) TED talk – Boing Boing: Somewhat amusing talk is based on “analyzing data” from past Ted talks to isolate the phrases, words, themes, even slide-color-schemes that are and are not effective with the TED audience. My favorite observation is that “it’s okay to fake intellectual capacity,” which can be achieved, for instance, by saying “etc., etc.” instead of “I don’t understand.” Haw.
- Bad writing: What is it good for?: “The secret weapon of many writing workshop: Students often don’t get much helpful advice from critiques of their own work, as more than one teacher has confided to me. Instead, they learn the most from identifying the mistakes made by others.”
- The hunt for universal music: “Psychologists are putting universality back on the agenda, and are investigating whether certain elements of music are hard-wired into the brain.”
- For musicians, economy is the mother of invention: “Enterprising music makers are turning to the Internet and micro-financing through donations.”
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- ‘One Hour Photo’: Exhibition of images that will “be disposed of” after one hour. “By forcing a shelf life on an art object [the show] takes aim at a Facebooking, Twittering world of mediated experience. We’re so busy reading about other people’s experiences that we have fewer and fewer experiences of our own. In “One Hour Photo,” you either see the picture or you don’t.”
- The Limitations Of Today’s Soundproofing Magic & The Perennial Noise of Marketing: A note on trying to buy quietness.
- Disabled Alt poses in risque photos for anti-American Apparel themed art project: Carles weighs in at Hipster Runoff.
- The Year of the Drone: “Our study shows that the 129 reported drone strikes in northwest Pakistan, including 34 in 2010, from 2004 to the present have killed approximately between 898 and 1,336 individuals, of whom around 609 to 958 were described as militants in reliable press accounts. Thus, the true civilian fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 30 percent.”
- Twitter: No matter what Hollywood thinks, it’s totally uncool for kids: “I don’t know one high schooler that uses Twitter,” says teen. Friend adds: “It’s something for adults who feel like it makes them hip or something. Meanwhile: Twitter archive at Library of Congress could help redefine history’s scope.
- When Fans Become Advertisers: Interview with Smallville superfan about efforts to fund, produce, and air a “professionally filmed” commercial on behalf of the show.
- Webism: “From the first, and in no small part because of its fervent supporters, it has felt less like a technology and more like a social movement—like communism, like feminism, like rock and roll.” Some priceless stuff in this monumental essay. Also some junk, but it’s worth wading through that. (Bonus: A very rare CORRECT usage of the word eponymous!)
- Surviving the Age of Humiliation: “All of us now live under the threat of easy and instant humiliation. It’s no longer just celebrities and business executives who need to think about aggressive reputation-protection and face-saving techniques. ‘Google yourself at least once a week,” advises Richard Levick, who heads a strategic communications firm in Washington, D.C. ‘You need to track what’s being said about you’ on blogs, message boards and social-networking websites.” While there’s a bit of a cranky worrywort tone to this piece, I think in places it’s getting at something legitimate.
- Nothing can stop the spendthrift American: “Spending rose 0.6 percent, but income rose only 0.3 percent. For the third straight month consumer spending rose faster than income. Not uncoincidentally, the personal savings rate has declined to the lowest point in 18 months.”
- A special report on television: The lazy medium: “There turns out to be an enormous gap between how people say they watch television and how they actually do. This gap contains clues to why television is so successful, and why so many attempts to transform it through technology have failed.” I look forward to the marketing guru class continuing to ignore this sort of information, and sticking with meaningless poll results to make their arguments.
- How to Design Like You Give a Damn in 5 Easy Steps: The funniest headline I’ve seen in a while. Here’s a thought: If you need a “5 easy steps” primer on giving a damn, you don’t actually give a damn.
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Too many links. This is what happens when I skip a linkpile post. Sorry.
- Top Executive Declares That NYT, Using Personal Data, Must Turn Its Readers Into “Leverageable Assets.”: “Identity is, in my view, a fundamental building block for engagement.”
- Promiscuous online culture and the vetting process: “At the intersection of promiscuous online culture and easy access to search lies a world where it’s impossible to hide. And these days, you look suspicious for trying, or even forgetting something innocently.” I agree with Marginal Utility — this post describes a terrifying drift.
- The Safety of Objects: Design and “Inverted Totalitarianism”: “A symptomatic reading of Objectified reveals an urge for impeccable order, an incurable desire to purge from public view the irregular, the odd, the heteroclite, and even the excessively ornate or strictly utilitarian, in order to place in their stead a whole array of everyday things boasting clean lines and soothing orbicularities — a regime of Platonic functionality, in other words, vouchsafed to an auxiliary of designers equipped with the latest drafting software and laser-guided precision instruments. Objectified comes across as a fever dream of the sort which brings the sufferer visions of the world to come: namely, the dictatorship of the creative class.”
- Some Twitter data: 87 percent of Americans are aware of it. 7 percent use it. Facebook has similar awareness, six times as many users. Just over half of Twiter users don’t tweet, they just treat it as “broadcast content.” 24 percent of Twitter users are African American.
- Costco prank: Shopdrop variation: Shelf tags for fictional objects stuck in Costco. Okay.
- Los Angeles Times Adds Paid Links in Articles – Media Decoder Blog – NYTimes.com: “These post-publication links to sites such as Amazon and TicketNetwork will serve as both a reader service and a revenue opportunity for the company.” Via PSFK.
- When multi-tasking, each half of the brain focuses on different goals | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine: Researchers “have found that the part of our brain that controls out motivation to pursue our goals can divide its attention between two tasks. The left half devotes itself to one task and the right half to the other. This division of labour allows us to multi-task, but it also puts an upper limit on our abilities.” Didn’t we know this already?
- The Evolution of Advertising in Sports Video Games: From 1983 to 2006.
- Play’s the Thing: “A new book argues that play may be the primary means nature has found to develop our brains.”
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- Teaching Youngsters How to Read Advertising: “The initiative seeks to educate children in grades four through six — tweens, in the parlance of marketing — about how advertising works so they can make better, more informed choices when they shop or when they ask parents to shop on their behalf.” Get an “ad-ucation” at admongo.gov. Ugh.
- Priest’s “sermonettes” offer daily dose of spirituality through the iPhone: “There are now hundreds of religious-themed iPhone apps. There’s the Azan Alarm Clock, with Islamic prayer times. There’s the Buddha Buddy, allowing you “to access the wisdom of the Buddha conveniently on your iPhone.” There’s the Daily Tao, the Daily Jesus, the Daily Krishna, the Daily Kabbalah and the Daily Joan of Arc. There’s even the Mobile Atheist, with an inspirational “freethought” of the day.”
- Play’s the Thing: “A new book argues that play may be the primary means nature has found to develop our brains.”:
- Why People Are So Cynical: “How do people come to believe that others are so much less trustworthy than themselves?” Via Mindhacks.
- Fruit With an Obnoxious Streak Stars on YouTube: The business of Annoying Orange.
- Geekend 2010: Want to present at Geekend in Savannah? Submit your idea here. (Organizer is an acquaintance; did a solid job last year.)
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- Brief meditative exercise helps cognition: “Some of us need regular amounts of coffee or other chemical enhancers to make us cognitively sharper. A newly published study suggests perhaps a brief bit of meditation would prepare us just as well.”
- Motivated Multitasking: How the Brain Keeps Tabs on Two Tasks at Once: So this study suggests that under some circumstances, “rather than being totally devoted to one goal at a time, the human brain can distribute two goals to different hemispheres to keep them both in mind.” But then the story quotes an expert contending that “the new work does not, however, show that the brain can actually execute two distinct tasks at precisely the same time.” Huh? Well is this evidence of something new or just the same continuous partial attention framework that’s already been established? I don’t get it.
- The “recycled suit” totebag: From Poketo.
- Dept. of startling cynicism: Art Fag City in retracting its (apparently false) accusation that Wooster Collective “had to be” getting money to hype the Banksy movie: “It never occurred to me that anyone would so aggressively promote a movie over twitter and [a blog] without payment.” Wow, is that what it’s come to?
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- Constriction to force ourselves to create: Jack White: “Only having red, white and black colors on any of the artwork or presentation of aesthetics of the band, guitar drums and vocals, storytelling melody and rhythm, revolving all these things around the number three, all these components force us to create.” Related post on rules, creativity, and book cover design, here.
- Monocle magazine funds foreign bureau on sales of tote bags: How did I miss this?
- What’s a YouTube phenomenon worth?: David after Dentist guy: “We’ve made in excess of $100,000. Significantly over that, you know, low six figures.”
- Luce and Time vs. Harold Ross and The New Yorker: Excellent piece by Jill Lepore, who is becoming one of my favorite writers.
- Web Coupons Tell Stores More Than You Realize: “While the coupons look standard, their bar codes can be loaded with a startling amount of data, including identification about the customer, Internet address, Facebook page information and even the search terms the customer used to find the coupon in the first place.”
- I Am Not An Artist: “An animated gif paranoia about nonstop design workers.” Pretty spectacular.
These links compiled via delicious, and repurposed here with plug-in Postalicious. Not enough stuff? Not the stuff you wanted? Try visiting unconsumption.tumblr.com, murketing.tumblr.com, and/or the Consumed Facebook page.
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