Price of Twitter ‘disease and early death’

The revenge of the geeks will be short-lived if their social networks kill them. Just ask the BBC, who invited academic Aric Sigman onto the Today program to explain why digital chatter is no alternative to physical interaction…

Newsnight, meanwhile, lined up Bad Science’s Ben Goldacre to face off with Sigman in front of the cameras - cue much confused head scratching but no real debate from the mild-mannered quack-hunter, who ended up reluctantly agreeing that if twitter wont actually kill you, sitting on your arse all day very probably will…

February 24, 2009 | Filed Under Digital Media Business | Leave a Comment 

Trying too hard

Amazon’s apple-style video trailer for the newly launched Kindle 2 manages Jobs-era friendly futurism until roughly 37 seconds in, when this breathless announcement nearly kills the whole ad:

Images display in a super sharp 16 shades of grey

I’m still laughing fourth time round…

February 12, 2009 | Filed Under Digital Media Business | Leave a Comment 

Read books. Write poetry. Kiss Girls.

I try my best not to like Giles Coren. Smug, arrogant, preening - but the man can write. And I found myself cheering silently at his latest Times column, which suggests ‘Generation Crunch’ should stop complaining quite so loudly about the imminent implosion of the graduate jobs market:

Do not curse your fortune, but rather thank your lucky stars. You have been saved! You’re an arts graduate, for heaven’s sake. You didn’t want to be a banker anyway. You wanted to read books and write poetry and kiss girls…

…For the past 15 years or so, graduates have emerged blinking into the white light of a witless and capricious boom time. The “milk round” was in full flood at the major universities, allowing corporate raiders to rape the best and the brightest of each new generation. Men and women who might have made great academics, teachers, writers, doctors and scientists sold themselves, like a thousand Fausts, to the corporate Mephistopheles with his shiny brochures and six-figure starting salaries.

And they are the lost generation, believe me, not you. They work now for monstrous institutions that came to get them when they were 19 or 20, before they were able to make any sort of informed choice, fed them money with which to have fun at college, and then threatened to withdraw the supply - like drug dealers - unless they gave them two, five, ten years of their lives afterwards. And so the very best of the best, for the first time in history, became salarymen - dull, acquisitive, witless, bloated….

Read the full article here.

February 7, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment