BradBerens.com
Thoughts about where our real and digital worlds collide.

  • Frontiers of Live Experience

    New forms of live media experiences are cropping up at different scales, but what are the differences between live and on-demand anyway, and why does it matter? Since the arrival of the VCR and DVR, home video, VOD, podcasting, and streaming, the last few decades have shifted our media consumption from live shared experiences in…

  • Misinformation & “Prebunking,” Experience Stacks & Physical Objects

    A study suggests that inoculating internet users against misinformation might be more successful than fact checking later, but I’m not so sure. Plus, a price sticker triggers a trip down memory lane. The Limits of “Prebunking” in the Fight Against Misinformation A new study in the journal Science Advances, “Psychological inoculation improves resilience against misinformation on…

  • Surveillance Capitalism Bedtime Stories…

    … if you don’t want to get much sleep. Although the privacy issues are paramount, another problem with companies compiling vast amounts of information about us is that we don’t know what they know. Companies spying on Americans for our entertainment and their profit is nothing new. How else can we understand Candid Camera, the show…

  • The New York Times’ Moral Lapse

    The Gray Lady blew it when it decided to review Jared Kushner’s new memoir, no matter how scathing the review. Your correspondent also blew it by posting about the review.  When people learn that I’m an atheist often the first thing they say is, “oh, so you don’t believe in God?” “No,” I push back…

  • Why Walmart Should Buy Paramount

    Note: I wrote and first published the following column on Sunday, August 14, before the rumors came true the following day: Walmart had signed an agreement with Paramount. You can find a review of that news here. However, nothing about the news changes my argument that Walmart is missing a bigger opportunity, which is the topic of what follows. …

  • Experience Stacks, Movie Stars, and the Problem with Facebook

    How we experience the work of movies stars is different than how we experience the work of actors, and that difference also helps to understand what we lose when we spend a lot of time on Facebook. The job of an actor and the job of a movie star are similar—they overlap—but they are not…

  • Experience Stacks: Top Gun, Star Trek, Spider-Man

    What are Experience Stacks? And why is it important for businesses and customers for a wide range of industries to understand them? Many companies refer to their selection and arrangement of software and hardware as a “Tech Stack” that focuses on the creation, management, production, and tracking of business activities.  On the reception side, we…

  • Why it’s so hard to think

    Digital technologies crowd out our analog ability to make connections. That’s a problem since analogical thinking is what makes us human. In the middle of the night, Sting’s song “Moon over Bourbon Street” went through my head. I hadn’t thought of it in years, maybe decades. I love Sting, but I hadn’t listened to his…

  • What Twitter should do next (after Musk)

    Now that the Tesla CEO is riding off into the sunset, the social media company needs to skip the protracted court battle and focus on what’s important. On Friday, Elon Musk made official his desire to wiggle out of his Twitter acquisition. Many Dispatch readers kindly and gratifyingly reached out or posted saying “Brad, you called this one!”…

  • The world in April, 2023

    In 2011, my near-future science fiction novel Redcrosse came out. The action was set in 2023, which is just a few short months from now. How clear was my vision? Last week at a film festival, I was trapped in an endless concessions queue that (bonus!) doubled as an internet dead zone. After I had…