Perry

Hewitt

Tag: quotation

  • On jazz hands and ad networks

    On jazz hands and ad networks

    Everybody is very enamored by Google’s self-driving cars, you know, Google making glasses. That’s all jazz hands. It’s a big, huge distraction. They’re an advertising network. They’re putting a 25 to 50 percent advertising tax on everything created in the world. That’s all their doing. It’s a huge ad network. They’re going to subsume all advertising into their network.

     

    And that’s what Facebook is building. That’s why Sheryl Sandberg, who was at Google and helped build that advertising business, was brought into Facebook by Zuckerberg. It’s to re-create that playbook. They’re all huge advertising marketing firms. All they’re doing is collecting data and then selling it, and they have an interface that’s wildly efficient, wildly efficient — unprecedented in its efficientness. …

    — Insightful interview with Jason Calicanis on the digital landscape for brands touches on content marketing, advertising networks, the role of data, and the importance of social media profiles. Read the whole interview on PBS Frontline.

     

  • On death and online culture

    On death and online culture

    As Facebook knows, a digital world raises new problems. To be sure, Facebook made a mistake not considering enough the mortality of those who would use their product. But to be fair, when have inventors or designers ever had to before? Think of other classic American brands—Ford or Coca-Cola, for example—whose products are not so intimately linked with their customers’ fates. Cokes and cars are disposable or easily transferable after death. But Facebook, whose product is your own identity, deals in an individualized item that’s nontransferable after death.

     

    — Alexander Landfair in the Missouri Review, discussing the emerging and problematic ways we acknowledge death through social media

  • Digital world and humanity

    Digital world and humanity

    It is not enough to be passersby on the digital highways, simply “connected”; connections need to grow into true encounters. We cannot live apart, closed in on ourselves. … Media strategies do not ensure beauty, goodness and truth in communication. The world of media also has to be concerned with humanity, it too is called to show tenderness. The digital world can be an environment rich in humanity; a network not of wires but of people.

    — Pope Francis, who recently referred to the internet as a gift from God, reflecting on the nature of digital and social connection for World Communications Day

     

  • Coming to terms with tech proliferation

    Coming to terms with tech proliferation

    The virtuality of the debate has made it difficult for us to grapple with the consequences of the proliferation of the world outside of this bubble …Now that the effects of the tech world invade the physical environment, we have to figure out the necessary philosophical and intellectual framework to deal with it.

    — Evgeny Morozov quoted in From Example to Excess in Silicon Valley

  • Digital afterlife data policy

    Beyond the variability among states and companies, it’s worth asking if access to data post-mortem should extend beyond family members and enter some kind of publicly accessible data repository, which data scientists and presumably anyone else could explore. In presenting this concept, Brubaker used the word “donate,” not unlike a person permitting organ donations after death.

    – Jordan Novet, Dealing with data after death ain’t easy. Here’s why.

  • Digital afterlife

    Who gets the photographs and the e-mail stored online, the contents of a Facebook account, or that digital sword won in an online game?…“There can be painful legal and emotional issues for relatives unless you decide how to handle your electronic possessions in your estate planning.”

    — Anne Eisenberg in yet another useful piece on practical estate planning for digital assets post-mortem. As we all accumulate more and more curated digital assets like blogs, social accounts, and photos, how do we pass them along?

  • Boston Marathon, and the value of social

    Please keep checking in.

     

    People often complain about social media. Facebook is time-consuming and pointless and self-aggrandizing and there’s no real connection — yes, all right. Twitter is a constant, exhausting, too-cool-for-school barrage. And both of them leave you feeling a little more distant from everyone, at the price of keeping a line open to everyone you’ve ever met.

     

    But when awful news hits like the explosions at the Boston Marathon, suddenly all of this feels less like a nuisance and more like a social network. Everyone I know has gone dashing to Facebook. The newsfeed, for once, is full of the bits of news that matter. I’m okay. Are you okay?

    — Read more in The explosions at the Boston Marathon and the Facebook huddle, the terrific latest piece from Alexandra Petri in her Washington Post blog

  • How to navigate child consent in the digital era

    With college students, obviously, we assume that they are young adults–even there, we still need to do a lot more to educate them as they, too, struggle deal with the ramifications of privacy in a networked world where exposure can get out of control much quicker and in hard-to-anticipate manner.

    — Your Children are not Your Children, a post by Zeynep Tufekci in response to recent exposure of children in the media by their parents and journalists. Tufekci objects to the widespread oversimplification of privacy that if there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just fine to make it public, and points to the risks of exposure for children far below the age of reasonable consent.

    Many adults are now diligent documenters of their own milestones and minutia through images on social networks and newly-quantifiable data captured through apps and wristbands. Young hipsters transform seemingly overnight into dads who post everything from in utero shots to Vine video of their toddlers daily. Was the 2009 David After Dentist video intended to be exploitative, or a way to share an amusing parental anecdote in a contemporary way?

    It’s a more complex world in which parents now navigate child consent. Parents receive pressure from schools to sign blanket image consent forms, which meant a lot less when the biggest risk was a flattering shot in a private school marketing brochure or a spelling bee win on the cover of the community weekly. There’s a structural lag for both individual parental and social/institutional approaches to privacy in the internet era, and most are making it up as they go along. And, as Tufekci points out above, college students are not magically immune, but face similar challenges figuring out privacy boundaries and the ramifications of broad exposure.

  • Pick your collaborators wisely

    I have learned that when it comes to successful idea translation, whether in labs, ateliers, or startups, it is not only the breakthrough eureka ideas, but the chemistry of the team, that determines success or failure. Venture and academia are not polar opposites, as some might have you believe. After all, serial entrepreneurs and productive labs are known for their ability to rapidly re-assemble teams to exploit new opportunities. Pick your collaborators – your tribe – wisely.

    — from Hugo Van Vuuren’s blog re the 2014 launch of the Lab Cambridge, but applicable to any project where people need to use ideas to build stuff.

  • Raju Narisetti in a Q&A with Nieman Labs

    I think Twitter — unlike all the fears people had that it’s going to turn us into short attention-span people because we were so focused on the character limit — Twitter actually brought serendipity back into my life in a major way. I now encounter and experience so much more interesting content from around the world that would have been impossible in the days when we had a lot of time and bought a bunch of magazines and a bunch of newspapers.

    –  Raju Narisetti in a Q&A with Nieman Labs on journalism and mobile and his role with New News Corp. This excerpt encapsulates for me why participation in the social web is worth all the time and effort. And Android keeps me up at night, too.