From AT&T backs Trump plan, demands “neutrality” on Facebook, Amazon, and Google
AT&T is exploiting trump-sown confusion by attempting to re-define “neutrality.”
Tag: Marketing
From Trump’s big show of opening the US economy will hide the real story – CNNPolitics
This is not how to handle an on-going crisis. This is marketing, not leadership.
The fact that it is constitutionally superfluous for Trump to authorize states to open up suggests his real intent is an election-year political device that positions him as leading the resurgence and those who oppose him as laggards holding America back.
“We’re going to be announcing guidelines, and we’ll be talking about various states, and it’s very exciting,” Trump said in another rambunctious Rose Garden news conference Wednesday.
“We will be the comeback kids, all of us, all of us. It’s incredible, what’s going on,” Trump said. “Tomorrow is going to be a very big day … We will have some openings that will … exceed our expectations, and they will be safe.”
“Luminary is not alone in trying to usurp the term “podcast” for proprietary audio shows … “ but it sure is pushy. A dead-end. Signified by the need to appropriate the term.
“These companies are trying to usurp the word podcast for one simple reason: people love podcasts. What I think and hope they are missing is that part of what people love about podcasts is the openness. It’s one of the last remaining areas of the internet that works exactly as the internet was intended to work.”
The thing about marketing is – it’s pretty much a lie. The thing about political exchange is – it’s pretty much an exchange. When marketing replaces political exchange, we swap an exchange for a lie.
Which leads to this question: When Trump comes before the public to ask for another term, what’s the story he’ll tell about the economy? That his unparalleled dealmaking prowess led to prosperity of a kind the United States has never seen before? That’s what he says if you read his Twitter feed, but like much of what he says, it has zero relationship to reality.
- There is no perceived IT generation gap: Young people really are thick • The Register – The middle-aged Register speaks to the medicare-aged retiring. There’s more time to stay further in front of the curve when you’re old.> The kids of my day bantered in rhyming slang and Nadsat; these days they speak StartUp and DipShit.
> Age has nothing to do with the definition of culture.
> In fact, the whole age thing is overrated if you ask me. All my neighbours are long retired but they are completely up to date on modern culture, from AI in healthcare to Facebook’s naughtiness. OK, admittedly one of them thought Stormy Daniels was a rapping conjurer but that’s what you get when you strike up conversation in the automated till queue at Waitrose.
> It’s simply because most people are thick. I realise now that I’m not an old geezer worried that modern culture has left him behind. I’m just a snob. Phew! I can live with that. – (culture )
- [toread] An Apology for the Internet — From the People Who Built It – – (history )
- [toread] Fandom, Feminism, and Maker Pedagogy – – (maker_pedagogy making )
- Civil war erupts at top of FCC over Sinclair’s creepy grasp on US telly – > “We need to stand up, speak out, and call out when government is being used as a tool to attack the conditions that make it possible for news to serve as a check on power,” said Rosenworcel. “We cannot allow the cry of fake news to extinguish our inquiry into hard subjects, diminish our willingness to seek truth, or temper our support for the First Amendment.” – (fcc freespeech )
- 25 Years of EdTech – 2003: Blogs – – (#en3177 )
- RSS is undead – Reasons to love RSS: no branding, no user analytics, no ads, user rather than provider curation. Content. – (socialpractices reading marketing rss )
- The Final Surrender of Anti-Trump Conservatism – “An authoritarian can be a Republican in good standing.” Not really a novel conclusion. But conservative support for Trump has revealed the anti-democratic ideology at its core. – (authoritarianism politics trump )
- The Fall of the TV Family in Trump’s America | WIRED – The TV family sitcom never was a forum for debate. The Beaver never sat dow with Wally and had it out. Rosanne has was a Snidely Whiplash melodrama.> rushed through on the way to the next joke – (none)
- 25 Years of EdTech – 2000: Learning objects – LO couldn’t die fast enough. Locally, they were pushed top down by admins looking for standardization. Pedagogically, the problem was decontextualization that drained them of worth outside of training. – (open_learning learningobjects )
- Better than the Printed Page: Reading on an iPad – Modding the iPad for reading. – (ipad reading visual_perception )
- Language Log » Cultural diffusion and the Whorfian hypothesis – Co-diffusion as a mechanism – (Linguistic_change classification linguistics )
Categories
digital media: why think?
From The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan, 1967 (1951″>caption id=”” align=”alignleft” width=”299″] From The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan, 1967The Mechanical Bride haunts the interwebs.Both texts myopically focus on readers as bored passive consumers and writers as lackeys to the market. While they both cover (rather than question”>/caption]I just looked over two texts from Rutledge for possible use in digital writing and rhetoric courses, and came away disappointed. Saddened. Without anything good to say. Both books give an unintentionally clear look into the cold heart of darkness that is written mass media. Neither delivers what they suggest they will. Both have a distinctive ordour of journalism-as-marketing-the-brand shaping both the texts themselves and the advice they present as understanding.Writing and Editing for Digital Media is misnamed. Its emphasis is on writing and editing for digital marketing.Digital Innovations for Mass Communications has a similar problem in the title: There aren’t any real innovations in the book so much as continuations of the what McLuan critiqued in the 1940s. The Mechanical Bride haunts the interwebs.Both texts myopically focus on readers as bored passive consumers and writers as lackeys to the market. While they both cover changes in media distribution, they do so superficially, and without concern for semiotic changes in affordances, rhetorical function or situation. They build their work on the purported commonalities: this web thing – it’s not that different when you get right down to it, and Good Writing is Universally Good Writing, as it was codified, variously, by StrunkNWhite, Orwell, and Confucius. Their own directive is poorly worded, oddly aligning “a person writing” with “the principles are”: “Whether a person is writing a news story, novel, letter to the editor, or advertising copy, the principles of good writing are the same.” (Writing for Digital Media, 1.) Gertrude Stein is just below the surface:
Whether a person is writing. A news story novel, letter, to the editor or advertising. Copy the principles of good writing. The same.
Not far off from How To Write.
In keeping with the easy emphasis on The Universal, the text gives the typical (copy and pasted) lists of Advice (active! verbs!). What seems new are tricks of how to generate heads using Wordle, and how to lace up stories with words planted for SEO. But the goal of the advice betrays the mindset of a marketeer, c 1955: Drugstore shelf space and the cover photo used to be the magic for selling pulp; today, keywords are the new currency.
As for readers: Here’s Digital Innovations’s simplistic sense of audience as content consumer motivated by desire: bored, superficial, but thrifty.
noindent”>And here is the obligatory nod to convergence culture – the very idea that makes both these texts untenable. Digital Innovations gives a nod to Henry Jenkins’s, keeping the focus on his head-shot rather than his ideas:
noindent”>But with the next paragraph, they change the direction, away from Jenkins’s emphasis on the activity of the consumer driven by unnamable desire and towards the institutionalized presentation within museums.
noindent”>This is less a remix of Jenkins than a selective appropriation. Jenkins’s focuses on pro-sumer agency with “A whole range of new technologies enable consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content and in the process, these technologies have altered the ways that consumers interact with core institutions of government, education, and commerce.” But there’s nothing like the institute of a museum to say Hands Off the Content! Stay behind the velvet rope, children. These artifacts are fragile. They need to be handled by the professionals.
noindent”>Digital rhetoric is at cross-purposes with these examples of digital marketing-journalism. So where are these two texts useful? In courses that look at how the print market is driven. In courses engaged in media archaeology. In courses looking at digital rhetoric in order to question what is being presented as mainstream values. In courses that aim at authorizing the digital reader, that aim at giving the digital reader some agency other than consumption.
Categories
on pinboard for May 16th, 2014
- New Impressions of Africa. hypertext version Hugill trans – – (dh pataphysics hypertext )
- Social Media Influence: 10 Theories to Know For Greater Persuasion – An unpersuasive blip attempting to connect Science! to rhetoric. Ha ha. – (rhetoric marketing )
- The Digital World Demands a New Mode of Reading – Academic Workplace 2012 – The Chronicle of Higher Education – Sweet bit of short-fluf to start a discussion in FYC or among the lit majors who enjoy their paper Harry Potter and side-step 19th century syntax. – (reading fyc )
- The Myth of the Tech-Savvy Student – The Digital Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education – Two uses: a) to counter the tech eddies claim that we need to move faster, and b) to signal the need for more literacy focus in FYC et al. The myth was cooked up by admins and eddies mistaking marketing surveys for educational surveys. – (wcw fyc marketeering marketing )
- Designed by Apple in California – (37signals) – only a starting point for analysis – (marketing rhetoric semiotic visual_rhetoric )
- What’s wrong with (M)OOCs? – Seimens sketches his concerns about MOOCs. They arw becoming more popular. – (ple mooc twwt )
- 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web – Shiny Google People promote their vision life, the universe, html5, and everything in the guise of a children's book. More myopic than Microsoft, heavier-handed than a railway baron, more condescending than Bill Buckley. It's all about revision and Manifest Destiny, wrapped up in a shameless rip of Dr Seuss figures. Sure, it shows what they can do with html5, but so would an html version of The Wasteland. Meh. – (book revisionist_history google marketing ebook death_by_google )
- Social networking: teachers blame Facebook and Twitter for pupils’ poor grades – Telegraph – The opening claim – "Children who spend much of their time online find it harder to concentrate in class, are permanently distracted and have shorter attention spans, researchers found." – turns out to be perceptions and beliefs by teachers. The article tells us more about misconceptions than what student are doing. Shame on Telegraph. – (Fyc myths facebook twitter )