Author: bradberens

  • My dystopian vision of the future and TODAY’S terrifying NPR article about health care and your personal data

    My science fiction novel Redcrosse came out in 2011: the question behind Redcrosse was, “what would happen if your credit card company and your health insurance company became the same company?” Got high cholesterol? Then don’t order that pepperoni pizza and pay with your credit card because your health insurance premium will go up. In…

  • AQ: The President’s No-Lose Media Equation

    Here’s a thought experiment: what if the White House held a press conference and nobody came? What if the president tweeted and nobody saw it? What if late-night talk show hosts didn’t mention the president once during their monologues? These things would disturb the president more than the sharpest satirical barb because the president understands…

  • What is a movie and why does it matter?

    Is the definition of a movie only a video presentation of a certain length, or is there more to it than that? The June 30th issue of The Economist featured an excellent cover story and short lead article about how Netflix is changing the entertainment industry with one disturbing sentence: “This year its entertainment output will far…

  • The half-life of brands: Amazon’s algorithmic strategy

    Although what comes next will offend generations of power-mad English teachers, red-pen-wielding copy editors, and Spelling Bee conquistadores, these days most people don’t need to learn how to spell. Spellcheck saves us from having to do work that we don’t care about and that we don’t have time to do anyway. Plus, more and more…

  • Will Oculus Go kill the TV set?

    Smart glasses, heads-up display, augmented reality, mixed reality, virtual reality: no matter what you call them, computer screens that you wear on your face are poised to change how we interact with information, the media we consume, and how much reality we share with people around us. It’s reasonable, for example, to expect that the…

  • The future that’s already here

    The digital revolution is just getting started: more changes to more facets of our everyday lives are coming. In the same way that it would be challenging for us to explain life in 2018 to somebody in 1968 (what — no phone booths?) my kids’ kids will look back on our lives today as if…

  • The challenge of OOOIO: opting out of information overload

    I keep a list of nagging questions like, “why can’t Google organize all my different video services (HBO, Starz, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, etc.) so I can browse through all of my viewing options at the same time?” The obvious answer is that Google wants users to watch movies on YouTube and subscribe to its…

  • Marvel’s new “Avengers: Infinity War” movie and the structure of special experiences

    Although at first this column will seem like a movie review, what I’m really after is a sense of what makes experiences special because we often mistake one part of an experience for the whole: we over-focus on the new thing, the concrete feature, and in doing so we miss the total shape of an…

  • Why it’s easy to label things as “fake news”

    On March 10, a MarketWatch story, “How biased is your news source? You probably won’t agree with this chart,” featured the remarkable Media Bias chart created by patent attorney Vanessa Otero. (go here FOr a larger version.) This is the third version of Otero’s chart. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with how she rates…

  • Apple and original TV: a strategy teardown

    The world’s most valuable company is spending more than a billion dollars on new TV shows. The question is why? Last week, the New York Times published, “Apple Goes to Hollywood. Will Its Story Have a Happy Ending?,” a useful but incomplete article by John Koblin. The article is useful because it describes how Apple…