A REVEALING TALE ABOUT MISDIRECTED ATTENTION IN THE MEDIA
As I sat down to write a new article for the Flipside, I went to do my so-called “research.”
Today, I decided, the perfect topic to write about was this so-called “Balloon Boy.” When balloon boy came up in our meeting and we brainstormed ideas about it, I realized this was just an unbelievable topic to satirize. Mainly–when things that happen in the real world seem fake, you know the opportunity is ripe for irony and satire.
Let me explain a little more.
I went to go read more about what happened with this balloon boy so I could come up with some sort of coherent viewpoint and a set of ideas and a perspective for my writing. I searched Google for balloon boy and started to read some articles, and while doing so, realized how this event is extremely meta.
My one sentence take: The balloon boy incident is really about how a hoax fooled the media, and then fooled the rest of us, and in doing so, succeeded in its publicity stunt.
So why was reading the news on this meta? Well, the news is exactly what caused and blew up the problem in the first place. I was reading these reports which were the source of all the fuss initially.
So where to look for credible information? I think the answer to this very important question is not where to look, but how to look. We look when someone points, that is kind of a given of human behavior. But I think the thing we can control and the thing we should work on is to look carefully. Look slowly and think over the timing, the source, and the motivation of the information.
At the end of this, I am still unsure what to make fun of about balloon boy, but it is a very interesting topic to think about how the media can lead us astray. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no… it’s Balloon boy!
See my research paper on critical reading here
See an article with similar ideas from the wall street journal here
This is not really a long story, but I think it’s sort of interesting. I was going to turn in my physics problem set with my friend, and on my way there, I saw a crew of three or four people with a very large camera doing something. It looked sort of interesting, so I casually asked them what they were filming. They said they were from BBC and shooting a documentary on the web. I said ‘cool’ and then as I was leaving, one of the main guys asked, ‘hey would you like to be interviewed?’ I agreed and about 15 minutes later I was being interviewed for (possible) inclusion in BBC documentary about the web.
So, why was this funny?
1) Because there’s always all this random stuff going on here.
2) Because when they started to interview me and then my friend Eric, they had this whole twist about how corporations may be involved in the CS department, how does it affect you that the CS department has billionaires, or what do you think about the companies… etc.
After thinking about this for a little while afterward, I think the thing that was funniest to me is that I feel the CS department here is very traditionalist, and really looks down on pandering to industry. This is why they have been slow to adopt classes about the web, because it is looked down upon by real computer scientists. This was rather ironic, since many Stanford computer science students go from “pure academia” right out to cs industry. Just something to think about.
I recently watched a very interesting video that Google made about what people think a browser is. The general sense you get from the video is that people generally have no idea. See the video here: (Don’t worry its short enough to watch)
I also read a really interesting post by my friend Feross (read here) where he talks about technology making things so easy that people no longer have the vocabulary to fix their problems. It’s a very interesting idea, especially as the web becomes more and more powerful. I’m not sure if the sample in the video is representative of the country or the general web community, but it is very intriguing that much of the web and much of technology is used without any knowledge of what is going on behind the scenes.
This is I think a very interesting question. With the emergence of countless startups and big changes from majors players — Google Wave, Facebook Connect — an important questions seems to be how these new technologies will impact web use.
I read an interesting article ( here ) about how Facebook should “adopt” Google Wave. I’m going to go ahead and say this is an unbelievable idea. First, although I think its a little sad, Google Wave is not really catching on as it should. It is still a part of smaller niche circles. This could change in the future, but really now, the problem is that there is no impetus to switch to Google Wave (even though it is awesome).
This is why the Facebook idea is amazing. Facebook could be the next big email. They have everyone on the web on their site for hours at a time, but unfortunately have a horrible inbox and mail program. This could easily change if they gave everyone an @facebook email, and made their inbox a full fledged real-time email client. It’s easy to connect to your friends on Facebook, and people are all there anyways. A searchable, organizable email program is the best thing Facebook could do right now.
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But to answer the bigger question about what’s next for the web, it seems to me that everything is just getting to be really easy, as it should be. Facebook Connect now has a three-step wizard (admittedly a little harder than that, but still cool). Video chat is now a given, and sites like tinychat.com are just making it even easier.
This is hardly scratching the surface, but for me the overriding idea for the changing web is ease of use. What do you think?