10th September 2016
Facebook’s New Feed is 10 years old. Created by a bunch of engineers ten years ago, they thought they might be on to something big. Turns out they have created a behemoth. Facebook, and it’s management of content, continues to court controversy as it bans the infamous ‘napalm girl’ picture from the Vietnam War, and suspends the writer.
Shane Smith from Vice gave the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Festival. He had some forthright views that did not go down at all well with the media establishment – ‘The baby boomers have had a stranglehold on media and advertising for an entire generation and that stranglehold is finally being broken by a highly-educated, ethnically diverse, global thinking, hard-to-reach generation — and media is having a hard time adapting to this rapid change. Media today is like a private club. So closed that most young people feel completely disenfranchised. You have to hand it over to the kids.’
Really great piece from The Long + Short, which de-bunks the myth that technology is destroying creativity and suggests instead it is democratising the tools of creation. This is The Creation Myth.
Here is Google’s plan to stop aspiring ISIS recruits. ‘The Redirect Method is at its heart a targeted advertising campaign: Let’s take these individuals who are vulnerable to ISIS’ recruitment messaging and instead show them information that refutes it.‘
You may suggest we have had enough of the democratic process post the Brexit vote. Not Jeremy Corbyn, who wants a tool for ‘massive multi-person online deliberation’. Here are some of the ways he could do it.
The very smart Charles Vallance in Campaign on the importance of ‘Storytelling vs Storydoing’. ‘In an age of super-saturated communication, we need to start thinking less about brand narrative and start thinking more about brand drama. Put simply, the most important question for 21st century communication isn’t ‘what is our brand saying?’, it’s ‘what is our brand doing?‘
The wonderful Simon Schama in the FT ‘On Art in The Media.’ ‘How does art translate to television and other broadcast media? What are the challenges and discoveries?‘ (video, sub may be needed)
So, apparently twelve minutes past eight (08.12) is the key moment in the day. ‘A new survey claims that most British people know how the next 12 hours will pan out before it’s even quarter past eight, with bad weather and troublesome hair among the harbingers of doom.‘
As the NFL season kicks on in full this weekend. Here are how all the teams got their names
Apparently these animals, in North America, kill between 6.3 and 22.3 billion mammals, between 1.3 and 4 billion birds, between 95 and 299 million amphibians, and between 258 and 822 million reptiles. This then, is the case against Cats.