Perry
Hewitt
We want people to care about design as much as we do, but how can they if we speak to them in a foreign language? It’s important that, as we do with any user, we find a shared vocabulary and empower everyone else to become evangelists for our cause.
— Inayaili de Leon in A List Apart with a great reminder that even if we spend all day communicating across platforms, there’s a lot to be gained by building a narrative and a shared vocabulary.
Don’t do something 90 percent well and hope that it’ll slide through. Don’t rely on luck. You have to make your own luck. The only thing you can do is try your absolute best to do the right thing. And then if it doesn’t work out, you know there’s nothing else you can do
It is the entire state system of the Russian Federation which is on trial and which, unfortunately for itself, thoroughly enjoys quoting its cruelty towards human beings, its indifference to their honour and dignity, the very worst that has happened in Russian history to date.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s closing statement in the trial of Russian punk band Pussy Riot
Conjure me up a guy who talks science winningly, who shows you that everything is transparent, and does it in a self-help-y spirit,” [Gitlin] said. “In our age, a guy who looks cute and wonky is better positioned to get away with this than others.
Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia, said in an interview that not only had Mr. Lehrer carved out a career in the popular niche of brain science, but he had created a persona that is perfectly suited to a 21st-century media environment. (The New York Times)
Many a linguistic commentator would have us (misleadingly) believe that technology is ruining language. Every mangled text message and misspelled Facebook status update, they cry, is a dagger through the heart of proper usage. But such grousing ignores increasingly symbiotic ties between linguistics and technology: Some of the most exciting developments in the use and exploration of language have been occurring this year on the front lines of technology.
Voicing Concerns, The Economist
The early Web radically democratized culture, but now in the media and elsewhere you’re seeing a flight to quality. The best American colleges should be able to establish a magnetic authoritative presence online.
David Brooks, The Campus Tsunami
Interpreting the dynamic between Stanford and Silicon Valley, as broken down by Auletta’s article, is a bit like watching “Wall Street,” a movie that was meant as a polemic on what was wrong with finance but which inspired kids everywhere to become bankers.
Sarah Lacy, Stanford, Silicon Valley, and John Hennessy’s Real Legacy
Most of all, we need to remember — in between texts and e-mails and Facebook posts — to listen to one another, even to the boring bits, because it is often in unedited moments, moments in which we hesitate and stutter and go silent, that we reveal ourselves to one another.
The Flight from Conversation, an essay by Sherry Turkle (and don’t miss the irate comment thread of readers dividing themselves into evangelists v. Luddites). The fallacy is that live conversation and digital connections will always be mutually exclusive. Her points are well-taken and beautifully articulated, but we’re at one end of the pendulum swing as society adapts to the new technology.
The dominant [element] next to the piece of technology is some woman who’s scantily clad. It creates a hostile environment, and it also doesn’t reflect back onto the female audience that ‘You can be a founder’—but ‘You can be an object.’
Leslie Bradshaw, JESS3 founder, quoted in Inside the Silicon Valley Gender Gap
How can we harness this [digital] revolution we’re living through to provide a better account of the world around us?
Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian speaking last night on open journalism at the 2012 Goldsmith Awards. See also their contemporary take on the Three Little Pigs…