The following clip from an interview Samir Husni did with Bob Guccione Jr. betrays a what I see as a key blind spot in the the contemporary journalistic field of vision – a notion that story telling is somehow a non-technical act.

If I had to guess I’d say that this notion is fed by these journalists coming of age in a time when the dominant tools of their trade – the technology that drove their stories for centuries – was fundamentally invisible.  This invisibility mislead them into thinking that the art of story telling was somehow a ethereal act of creation – as mysterious and graceful as human existence – something that spewed forth from the muse – natural, organic, and clean.  This mistaken assumption makes me think of a recent essay by Douglas Rushkoff in which he writes:

Like those failed media renaissances before this one, we remain one step behind the capability actually being offered us. Only an elite—sometimes a new elite, but an elite nonetheless—gain the ability to fully exploit the new medium on offer. The rest learn to be satisfied with gaining the ability offered by the last new medium. The people hear while the rabbis read; the people read while those with access to the printing press write; we write, while our techno-elite program. As a result, a majority of people remain one dimensional leap of awareness and capability behind those who manage to monopolize access to the real power of any media age.

What’s happening in journalism today is that the journalists are being overrun by a wave of technology that is bringing the unwashed majority into what was once a formerly elite world. The ability to write – a level of technical competence that was at one time the ace tool in the journalist’s tool kit – is slowly becoming a widely distributed skill.

Still, elite story telling survives. Surfing that wave is the new breed – programmers building worlds with profound and powerful new tools. Without a doubt we are at the very beginning of the shift, but one thing is already crystal clear – if you’re concern is “seeking truth and telling the story” you will have to know how to code.

All spokes and no hub - I love that. It’s also one of the truest, most insightful, and accurate statements I’ve read in a while.  The destination web is dying - at least for content producers.  I think I have pounded this drum before but I think it’s a point that needs pounding.

The following is cut from an email exchange I had recently (in relation to this article) - it outlines a misreading that I think most legacy publishers are caught in the throes of - namely the misreading of the bound to unbound media shift as a print to digital shift:

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Thinking of the transition that’s underway as a shift from print to digital is dangerously misleading. This is more than a simple shift in output technology - it’s a slow yet dramatic rewiring of the information ecology in such a way that the previous command and control model becomes less effective and less profitable with each passing day.  In order to combat that traditional media companies should re-frame the transition.  Publishers need to stop thinking about managing a transition from print to digital media and start thinking about managing a transition from bound to unbound media.

The primary implication of a shift from bound to unbound media is that previously precious publishing real estate no longer matters - at least not as much as it did in the past. Ink on paper, websites, forums, every space once controlled and parceled out for dramatic profit will steadily lose value as the transition continues.  Emerging tools will give readers (now also producers) the power to create their own spaces. As they become more sophisticated in the construction of their own media spaces media participants will look for content chunks - disembodied and unbound atoms of thought provoking and viscerally pleasing stimulation - that they can remix in a way that makes sense to them.  Publishers who can provide that - whether through RSS, XMPP, pubsubhubbub or some other pushbutton technology - will be extremely well positioned. With that in mind smart publishers should be experimenting with those types of technologies today and stop wasting their time creating Flash heavy, video laced, bound publications.

Stowe Boyd is pushing for re-conceptualizing and (more expressly) re-naming what we commonly refer to as Enterprise 2.0 — and I couldn’t agree more. As anyone who is in the thick of this change can tell you there are a lot more layers to it than the tech layer.  Technology may indeed be the cause, but the sociological, anthropological, and cultural effects are without a doubt the intriguing plotlines in this story.

Here’s an interesting clip dealing with the nature of reality and different ways of assessing and accessing it.  I realize the chemical element or “drug” thing turns a lot of people off - ironically many of the same people who run to the doctor for an antibiotic when their nose goes liquid - but it is something we as a society need to come to terms with.  Our current relationship to altered states - typified by our complete surrender to the corporate pharmacology - is symbolic of how disconnected we have become from Emersonian Nature.

This post by Joshua-Michéle Ross resonates deeply with my own experience inside the print media industry.  It’s easy to sit back and give suggestions as to what this newspaper or that magazine should do to save themselves, but all of these suggestions miss one crucial point: massive organizational structures that took decades to build have a very difficult time re-structuring to meet an exponential pace of change.

What gets me most about this whole “FastFlip” thing is this line from Google:

“Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles.”

Not. Even. Close.

When will people finally figure out that you will never be able to reproduce the “print experience” online?  They are two totally different media!!! What makes print profound is the warmth of ink on paper - period.  Being able to flip quickly through a sequential listing of content is a bastardization that only a company bent on digitizing all the worlds information could dream up.  After looking at this POS I have to question whether ANYONE at Google has ever read a magazine - let alone LOVED one.

The only real quality of the magazine that does translate to the networked world is context - which for some reason is absolutely missing in this attempt.

Maybe it’s just me… maybe I’m paranoid or something… but FastFlip seems to be more about placating an increasingly angry, disillusioned and dying old school media sector.  Rather than go to court and deal with the bullshit copyright assault of clueless print publishers, Google went to the labs and built this monster.

While the images in this story from The Daily Mail are interesting in their own right - and the idea of thousands of mostly empty ships anchored in the middle of nowhere doing nothing has a slightly creepy Scooby Doo kind of vibe to it - what I find most disconcerting about this story is how it completely contradicts almost all media coverage of the recession in the US.  Is the flood of stories about birthers, death panels, teabaggers, Kanye West, and Joe Wilson blinding us to the real story? Is it by design? Or defect?

This clip from the blog of Helge Tennø (Strategic Director and Digital Planner at digital agency Screenplay in Oslo, Norway) does a really good job at pinpointing something I have been fumbling around with lately.  Yesterday I tried to articulate what I’ve been thinking in a blog post but all that came out was this:

Forget about the transition from print to digital – the real switch is from bound to unbound.