So you have to figure out what your own aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don’t, you’re going to lose. And that’s as close to certain as any prediction that you can make. You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge. And you’ve got to…
Steve Jobs famously observed that “technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.” The device, the electronics, the particulars — all those things should recede into the background as the experience of the thing “makes our heart sing” in the way…
The speed of communication has accelerated. Actually, no. That’s not quite right. Communication hasn’t accelerated, in the sense of truly occurring more rapidly, but communications is losing its affectations — the formality of letters, or structured periods of the day for acceptable telephone calls as two examples. Affectations carry real costs, not simply in money, but critically…
Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court justice, has abstained for six years now from asking any questions during oral arguments. At the University of Kentucky on Thursday he gave his perspective: “I don’t see where that advances anything,” he said of the justices’ questions, according to the Associated Press. “Maybe it’s the Southerner in me. Maybe it’s…
In the tug-of-war between traditional and new media there so often seems to be this attitude of put-upon world weariness toward the transition to digital communication. I was speaking with a very nice young, and clearly reform-minded person in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia recently who said something to the effect of (in regard to getting…
Pete Schuster wrote about something I’ve been grappling with for a while now. Namely: what good is a great website without great content? One of the first and most important steps in content strategy is defining needs. Defining the needs of the customer, user, etc should be at the forefront of every feature. Answering the…
I’m on the boards of a few different nonprofits with varying proximity to activity strategy. What I encounter again and again is an overwhelmingly reactive approach to the mission. In the age of the social web there’s an attitude that the group needs to define its response in relation to the news cycle in order…
We prize qualifications. It’s why we emphasize formal education. It’s why we like being able to check off community service activities as distinct parts of our lives. And it’s why we’re compelled to join (if not really use) things like LinkedIn that allow of to categorize, classify, and taxonomize our professional, academic, and volunteer selves….
This, from Rey Junco, is fascinating: These findings are from my latest paper “The relationship between frequency of Facebook use, participation in Facebook activities, and student engagement“ to be published in an upcoming issue of Computers and Education. I asked students to estimate (using a few different indices) their frequency of using Facebook and what they did…
Fred Wilson posted this video of George Colony, CEO of Forrester, speaking at Le Web this week on the next phase of the internet (or, the end of the web), and the present and future of the social web. I’m interested in highlighting his observations on what in his presentation is “Thunderstorm #3,” or the…
Tom Shakely runs Pastoral Media Formation, a media services, content strategy, and consulting service.
