deadmedia
Will Tablet Computers Save Us From Vampires?
I don’t know what to say about the state of publishing anymore except to tell you that Penguin sent me (I’m on their blogger list) a list of 10 of their hottest titles for summer 2010. 40% of which concern Vampires.
Blood Oath (Christopher Farnsworth, May 2010, HC): The ultimate secret. The ultimate agent. The [...]
Fax machines, and PDFs, kicking off the deadmedia watch for 2010
The fax machine was obsolete 15 years ago. When someone says “fax it to me,” I always feel like I’m being punk’d. A fax machine is nothing more than a printer, scanner and an obsolete analog mode that work together to waste time, money, paper and electricity. Documents that are faxed usually start out in [...]
Dead Media Watch #297 – Hyphens
About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
No one has time for the poor hyphen anymore. It seems to be going the way of the semi-colon semicolon into the club of beleaguered punctuations. OTOH perhaps it’s high time [...]
Will QR Codes Save the National Post?
If you are a reader of Canada’s (other) national newspaper the National Post, you may have noticed that they are trying out something neat with 2D barcodes a.k.a QR Codes. They don’t quite look like normal QR codes but this is incidental. The idea is that the codes are a printed link between the ink-on-flattened-wood-pulp [...]
In reality, SXSW Interactive 2009 was a long drunken wake for the death of print
[Last of my notes from SXSW, these on the recurring theme of death of many media, but one we may particularly miss, the death of books and long form fiction]
The econoclipse has totally hastened the demise by digital soil erosion of the already shaky foundations of almost every old-media business model. And what’s crazy is [...]
The long slow death of Media
Internet usage isn’t killing TV; in fact, TV watching has hit record levels in the US. So why aren’t broadcasters rolling in fat autumn piles of cash?
“An audience member was confused about how viewership could be up but ad revenue could be significantly reduced; top network execs patiently explained that just having eyeballs wasn’t much [...]
And then somebody remembered that the oceans are full of free wind
On the theme of ‘Old media don’t die. They just pine for the Fjords.’
French vineyard owners are returning to a slower pace of life by starting to export their wine by sailing boat – a method last used in the 1800s – to reduce their carbon footprint.
This month 60,000 bottles from Languedoc will be shipped [...]
Dead Media Watch: Polaroid film
So you may have seen the news that Polaroid is discontinuing Polaroid film. For all it’s greatness, that little 2.5 inch screen on the back of your digicam, has killed that old analog analogue. It’s a known law of media that all new new media must replace an old. But every new media [...]
“…it’s critical to remember that these changes were happening for the first time ever, accelerating human life into the modern age at a pace that barely allowed time to gain vantage on the present before hurtling into the future, all the while changing the expectations of what that future might hold.”
In case you missed it, this is from a great post last week by Michele on the reaction of artists, crafts people and designers to the disoriented changes in, wait for it, Victorian england as spurred by the industrial revolution.
She is pointing out the strong parallels between historical change drivers like the industrial revolution, [...]
Thomas Purves
is a technology designer, futurist and sometimes entrepreneur living in the great city of Toronto. Thomas not currently available for hire (though you are always welcome to try).
