Category: Media

  • 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…

  • 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!”…

  • What Fox News Should Have Said

    A new campaign by Check My Ads to get advertisers to stop supporting the conservative news network prompted an entirely inadequate response.  On Thursday, the folks at Check My Ads received widespread coverage about their new campaign to stop advertisers from supporting Fox News. The three Check My Ads founders—Claire Atkin, Nandini Jammi, and Mikel…

  • A Simple Test for What Counts as “The Metaverse”

    Lots of walled gardens and videogame platforms are now touting themselves as part of the metaverse, but there’s an easy way to tell if it’s true. Plus, revising Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” Two shorter (although slightly connected) main stories this week… 1. Revisiting Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” If you subscribe to…

  • The Web3/Creator Paradox

    The latest phase of the digital revolution is a Read/Write/Own structure where more culture creators can join a new Artistic Middle Class… maybe. Calling something “Web3” makes it sound like everybody agrees on what it means. That’s not the case: we’re at the start of our Web3 journey. It might be more accurate to call it Web3.001.…

  • 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…