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The iPhone One Year Later – Captive Audience or Willing Prisoners?

June 26, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Your Life in Your Pocket - iPhone

It's one year since the iPhone reports Tom Krazit at CNET. He believes there are two types of people who anted up the bucks to be an early adopter - die hard techno geeks who love new cool gadgets and smart phone newbies who suckered in at the first "hello" (Media tribute to Jerry Maguire) and discovered all they'd been missing in their pre-smartphone lives. Krazit talks about the cost and the repricing strategies that have boosted iPhone sales and their new launch at $199/$399. Okay, if cost is an issue, how come no one ever talks about the carrier? Personally, I am entangled in a Verizon family plan that renews everytime any one of us buys a new phone. The emotional costs of moving (not to mention penalty fees) are staggering. Either we have to all get new numbers (no way that's going to happen) or we have to simultaneously port four numbers to a new system and hope we don't miss a call since all of us now connect to the world via cellphones in lieu of landlines. And what … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Emerging Technologies, Psychology Tagged With: , , ,

Dynamic Linking of Political Discourse: The New Party Line

June 25, 2008 By 1 Comment
Map of Political Blogosphere

I mean party line like the 'old days' on a telephone--no political pun intended. A colleague sent around this Presidential Watch 08 Map of the Political Blogosphere. I like it because it shows the interrelatedness and dynamic linking of professional and nonprofessional discourse on the Internet. It is a wonderful--and aesthetically beautiful--example of the integration of information technology with information distribution. We are no longer having conversations in isolation, we are on the ultimate party line, albeit with radical improvements from when my Grandmother used to holler at eavesdroppers to get off the line. We can all hear what each other has to say, professionals and nonprofessionals alike, without risking the wrath of my grandmother. And as this mapping shows, everyone does listen to everyone. The flows do not go only one way. When we are using the internet to watch internet information flows, it is no longer about the technology, it’s about people and what … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Culture & Society, Psychology Tagged With: , ,

The transformation of journalism

June 15, 2008 By Leave a Comment

A friend in the news industry sent me this blog posting by Robert Niles (USC Journalism School) that I just got around to reading, "When journalists hate journalism" Niles’ reports that unlike other industries, such as music, where professionals in the industry are the biggest fans of the industry, that: Many journalists despise TV news. They hate watching it, they hate producing it, and, given the opportunity, they turn it off and ignore it. My journalism students this semester went off on this topic in class one day, raging about the rigid format, the simplistic reporting and cynicism that they found in TV news reports. I had assigned my students to produce a multisource, multimedia feature story on a topic of their choice. Several incorporated video segments, and the influence on these students' video storytelling was clear... It turned out to be the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, and The Onion.. When asked why not local or cable news, the students complained about … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Psychology Tagged With: , , ,

Google is making me smarter. How about you?

June 11, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Nicholas Carr has an  interesting article on The Atlantic.com site called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr laments that he is no longer able to read a lengthy book without getting a serious case of the fidgets.  Aside from other mediating factors, like age, how busy life is, and if the book is any good, a neglected question might address the quality of life (intellectual and otherwise) that comes of having a broader reach. Carr recalls the historical worriers and worries (writing, printing press, etc.) and notes McLuhan remarks on media shaping the process of thought. Nostalgia aside, however, we don’t exist independently of media; our interaction with all these information flows impacts the technology and the content as well.   Carr quotes Taylor’s 1911 treatise “The Principles of Scientific Management.”  Taylor’s quest was to create perfect efficiency and is quoted as declaring, “In the past the man has been first, in the future the system must be … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Emerging Technologies, Psychology Tagged With: , , ,