Ben Thompson’s well-written, fascinating website might not interest you. He probably doesn’t care. That’s because Thompson lives up to his own advice: technology’s rapid evolution means media producers should target specific audiences, not try to appeal to as large a number as possible. And that’s just what he does with his website. In his own words, Thompson and his blog, “provide analysis of the strategy and business side of technology

This week, I spent some of my time home in the Midwest playing Playstation Virtual Reality (PSVR) for my first time. Funny enough, I just spent the last three weeks investigating and researching virtual reality for this same class, and despite all my reading about it, I’d never actually experienced VR. It was terrific. It was sublime. It was the future. To me, VR is the perfect representation of “the

The overwhelming sense I got from this week’s readings was a rising tide. Humans never got a chance to figure out how to handle one another online and in digital spaces. Now we’re getting AI that can produce in a day everything every human online has ever created. This isn’t far from what we learned last week about beauty companies’ responsibility when marketing abroad and Vietnam’s responsibility while rapidly expanding

We Haven’t Arrived at the End of History It’s easy to forget that right now only matters because we’re the ones noticing it. Relative to literally everything else, it’s not actually that important. Believe it or not, we’re not at the start of history or the end of it — we’re not even the most important moment in it. This is just a brief moment, and it’ll pass. It’s easy to

The costs of full digitization are myriad and legion. There are barriers to getting everyone in the world full internet access that are macroscopic, applying to economies of scale. And there are barriers that are personal and closer, like when companies fail to embrace their social and global responsibility. This week had articles from a gamut of publications that each touched on the cost of internet. “The digital divide” used to

Let’s Outlaw Advertising and Other Lofty Goals Ramsi Woodcock at the University of Kentucky suggests that a core problem with television and mass media is that advertising represents a monopolistic hold on competition and effectively strangles free speech of companies that don’t provide sugary death water to 60% of the planet. His solution seems to be to lobby the FTC to ban mass advertising, or at least have the FTC

When They Spoke, People Used to Listen. History before the Internet was about pillars. pillar: there were only a handful of newspapers, and everyone read them. pillar: there were only a handful of TV channels, and everyone watched them. pillar: there’s only one Hollywood, and everyone watches its movies. These pillars are collapsing. The question is what those pillars were holding up. Was the roof “an informed populace capable of productive democracy?” Because

Responsibility. Do internet companies have a role in mediating conversations online? At its heart, this question is fundamentally about responsibility. Which is unfortunate. Because “responsibility” sucks. Responsibility has two things going against it. One: way too many syllables to be taken seriously. Two: since it usually feels thrust upon us, everyone hates it. Maybe the number of syllables isn’t that important. But I just feel like truth (1), justice (2),

Looking Back, or Last Week’s Lecture(s): So it turns out the internet’s actually a pretty big deal. What I took away from Dr. Radcliffe’s presentation last Monday is that “media” has been disrupted. Internet tore into the field, mobile phones are in everyone’s hands (who knew?), and there has been a sea change of who produces, who consumes, and how it’s consumed. But most importantly, we’re all still trying to figure