BradBerens.com
Thoughts about where our real and digital worlds collide.
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Trust is Analog
A handshake is worth a thousand Zoom calls. This has implications for going back to the office, building corporate culture, and democracy. You’re on a short elevator ride with one other person. Neither of you speak, but you get a lot of information. Does the other person politely keep a distance? Make momentary eye contact?…
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2007 Post about a new “Artistic Middle Class” plus Web3 in 2022 and beyond…
My first blog was called “Mediavorous,” and it’s long gone and therefore hard to find but for the noble work of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Lately, with the rise of Web3, I’ve been thinking about an old post from 2007, “Yes, box office is up this summer, but don’t get comfy“, which I’ve re-published…
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“Change Your Life” Productivity Apps & How to Use Them!
Recently, in Distraction Audits & Why to Do One, I discussed how information and attention are inversely proportional. Or, as the great 20th Century polymath Herbert Simon put it, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” The earlier issue was about throttling back distractions. This week’s issue is about managing the super-soaker of…
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Amazon’s New Pay-With-Your-Palm Tech and its Implications
If you live in Austin and love experiencing the sharpest edge of technology, then head to the Whole Foods at Arbor Trails. There you can use a new service called Amazon One to pay for your groceries simply by putting your palm on a scanner. Here’s an excerpt from a fascinating piece in last week’s…
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Musk, Trump, Twitter, and New Media Math
It’s a good thing for the commonwealth that Elon Musk was born in South Africa; that fact bars him from seeking the U.S. presidency. Otherwise, it’s a sure bet that he’d run as a third party candidate in 2024. He’d win, too. Musk understands the media better than all but one other person. That one…
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Distraction Audits & Why to Do One
It’s never been harder to pay attention to the things we care about. The world is bursting with information. The designers of the devices and applications that we use to get that information work hard to turn us into stimulation addicts, doom scrolling and clicking to get another dopamine hit of input regardless of its…