Posts tagged as:

Media

Lost in The Shallows

by Bill on July 14, 2010

“According to an extensive 2009 study conducted by Ball State University’s Center for Media Design, most Americans, no matter what their age, spend at least eight and a half hours a day looking at a television, a computer monitor, or the screen of their mobile phone. Frequently, they use two or even three of the [...]

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Listen to the silence and pay attention

by Bill on July 12, 2010

Noise is a common complaint about social media. We often say there is too much worthless chatter. When we say this, we’re complaining about content. It’s of no value to us; it’s all noise. For people like myself who work in social media, we’re usually referring to the tsunami of tweets and posts and updates [...]

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I feel better now — and at least for now. I finally changed something that has been bothering me for a long time. My header use to say Writelife and below it, “Musings on the craft of writing, technology, social media and whatever else comes along.” Apart from being a bit pretentious with words like [...]

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Breadth, depth and brains

by Bill on June 15, 2010

I’ve always liked Nicholas Carr for his skepticism. Unlike contrarians, who take opposing views for their own sake, Carr as a skeptic asks questions, the kinds that challenge assumptions. Challenging assumptions is good for the brain. I’ve just picked up his latest book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains and I’m [...]

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‘Emotions are contagious’

by Bill on June 8, 2010

I wrote a review of a book I’m currently rereading, Exuberance: The Passion for Life by Kay Redfield Jamison. (You’ll find it over at Thoughtwrestling.) This morning, I was looking over a chapter titled “Throwing up rockets,” a phrase from P.T. Barnum and it started me thinking about a few other things, like school murals [...]

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Many businesses, especially small businesses, are wary of social media and for a variety of reasons. The reasons are legitimate given that owners are wrapped up in the business of actually running their business, so they are often in uncharted territory with very little time. One of the biggest reasons, and biggest pitfalls, is: What [...]

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Quotes are signage

by Bill on April 9, 2010

The internet is full of epigrams, aphorisms and quotes. I used a few in my post yesterday. You see them every day in tweets and status updates. They’re all over the place. Why is that? What are they for? They’re signage. That’s the simple answer. They’re wayfinding information. As with anything, excess turns them into [...]

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