Billg in his first year at Harvard.
Fact or comment?
Hmmm… There are two ways of reading this headline. Is the last word comment or fact?
Partition blues
From J.K. Appleseed, writing in McSweeney’s:
How awesome would it be if you could partition your brain in the manner of a computer’s hard drive?
You could devote 7% of your brain to operate in foreign languages, 5% to cooking Italian food, 5% to knowing kung fu, and let’s say 23% to seduction techniques, just for starters. The sky’s the limit! Especially after you devote 5% of your brain to learning how to pilot a helicopter.
A modular brain would be so much easier to manage. You could selectively delete all unnecessary pop lyrics, reality TV show trivia, and the films of Zack Snyder. I would, however, suggest retaining the meta-memory of hating his movies, even though you no longer remember what they were, so as not to repeat your mistake. With the cleared up space, you could now set aside 5% for learning to play blues piano!
We’re only up to 50% at this point. The world of your brain is your oyster!
Right.
Meanwhile, your actual noggin is an undisciplined soup of useless details. You don’t remember where your car keys are, but you can’t get that stupid lick of Katy Perry’s “Roar” out of your head. You know the one. It goes, “Whoa, whoa! Oh, oh, oh, ohhh!”
Tony Blair’s Big Question
“Have you figured out how I can be on the right side of history without being on the wrong side of now?”
New Yorker cartoon showing a politician querying his staff.
Quote of the Day
“Many of history’s great inventions are really great appropriations — middling ideas if used as intended, brilliant when reoriented or co-opted.”
Kathryn Schultz, The New Yorker, April 7, 2014.
The unknown known
This I want to see.
What Zuckerberg is really up to
Very perceptive post by Felix Salmon. The gist:
Is it too early to declare that Zuckerberg has ambitions to become the Warren Buffett of technology? Look at his big purchases — Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus. None of them are likely to be integrated into the core Facebook product any time soon; none of them really make it better in any visible way. I’m sure he promised something similar to Snapchat, too.
Zuckerberg knows how short-lived products can be, on the internet: he knows that if he wants to build a company which will last decades, it’s going to have to outlast Facebook as we currently conceive it. The trick is to use Facebook’s current awesome profitability and size to acquire a portfolio of companies; as one becomes passé, the next will take over. Probably none of them will ever be as big and dominant as Facebook is today, but that’s OK: together, they can be huge.
Zuckerberg is also striking while the iron is hot. Have you noticed how your Facebook news feed is filling up with a lot of ads these days? Zuckerberg is, finally, monetizing, and he’s doing it at scale: Facebook’s net income grew from $64 million in the fourth quarter of 2012 to $523 million in the fourth quarter of 2013. At the same time, his stock — which he is aggressively using to make acquisitions — is trading at a p/e of 100. If you’re going shopping with billions of dollars in earnings multiplied by a hundred, you can buy just about anything you like.
Eventually, inevitably, Facebook (the product) will lose its current dominance. But by that point, Facebook (the company) will have so many fingers in so many pies that it might not matter.
Hmmm… We’ll see.
Why Snapchat is interesting
As usual, danah boyd nails it:
Snapchat offers a different proposition. Everyone gets hung up on how the disappearance of images may (or may not) afford a new kind of privacy. Adults fret about how teens might be using this affordance to share inappropriate (read: sexy) pictures, projecting their own bad habits onto youth. But this is isn’t what makes Snapchat utterly intriguing. What makes Snapchat matter has to do with how it treats attention.
When someone sends you an image/video via Snapchat, they choose how long you get to view the image/video. The underlying message is simple: You’ve got 7 seconds. PAY ATTENTION. And when people do choose to open a Snap, they actually stop what they’re doing and look.
In a digital world where everyone’s flicking through headshots, images, and text without processing any of it, Snapchat asks you to stand still and pay attention to the gift that someone in your network just gave you. As a result, I watch teens choose not to open a Snap the moment they get it because they want to wait for the moment when they can appreciate whatever is behind that closed door. And when they do, I watch them tune out everything else and just concentrate on what’s in front of them. Rather than serving as yet-another distraction, Snapchat invites focus.
Furthermore, in an ecosystem where people “favorite” or “like” content that is inherently unlikeable just to acknowledge that they’ve consumed it, Snapchat simply notifies the creator when the receiver opens it up. This is such a subtle but beautiful way of embedding recognition into the system. Sometimes, a direct response is necessary. Sometimes, we need nothing more than a simple nod, a way of signaling acknowledgement. And that’s precisely why the small little “opened” note will bring a smile to someone’s face even if the recipient never said a word.
Snapchat is a reminder that constraints have a social purpose, that there is beauty in simplicity, and that the ephemeral is valuable. There aren’t many services out there that fundamentally question the default logic of social media and, for that, I think that we all need to pay attention to and acknowledge Snapchat’s moves in this ecosystem.
My idea of a perfect blog post. It’s insightful, thought-provoking and beautifully written.
More NSA fallout?
Nearly half the nation’s adults changed their behavior online because of the National Security Agency’s NSA snooping programs, according to a new poll.The Harris Interactive survey found that 47 percent of adults were thinking more carefully about what they do, what they say or where they go on the Internet in light of the spying revelations that began emerging last summer.ADVERTISEMENTMore than a quarter of the 2,000 people surveyed said they were doing less banking online, and 24 percent said they were less inclined to use email.
[Source].
Balance as Bias — redux
Apropos the discussion of the latest IPCC climate change report, there was a discussion on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning about the media’s role in public (mis)understanding of the problem. I’m glad to see that the travesty of having Nigel Lawson on the programme recently to ‘balance’ a leading climate scientist was discussed. It was an example of the old “balance as bias” problem.
The guy who really nailed this in words of one syllable is Paul Krugman. When the topic of media bias came up in a session he did with Harvard students years ago, he said something like this (I’m paraphrasing):
Here’s the problem. Dick Cheney [then US Vice President] says that the earth is flat. Here’s how the New York Times reports it: “VP says Earth Flat; Others Disagree”.
This is where American journalism’s concern with not having a point of view becomes pathological. The earth isn’t flat. Never was. And there’s a high probability that human intervention is warming the planet.