Clay Shirky, a writer on media and technology, posts essays on the future of news, education, publishing, and voting.
HN commenters link his essays, such as the newspaper piece "Last Call" and the laptops-in-class post, when discussing media decline, with some noting Medium rendering problems.
Relevant commentary, which I think cuts through much of the nonsense about the future of hard copy news:
When the Tribune Company recently got rid of their newspapers, the New York Times ran the story under a headline “The Tribune Company’s publishing unit is being spun off, as the future of print remains unclear.”
The future of print remains what? Try to imagine a world where the future of print is unclear: Maybe 25 year olds will start demanding news from yesterday, delivered in an unshareable format once a day. Perhaps advertisers will decide “Click to buy” is for wimps. Mobile phones: could be a fad. After all, anything could happen with print. Hard to tell, really.
Meanwhile, back in the treasurer’s office, have a look at this chart. Do you see anything unclear about the trend line?
<Graph showing newspaper ad revenue dropping from >$60 billion in 2000 to <$20 billion in 2010. Click link below to see it.>
- Clay Shirky, "Last Call", 19 Aug 2014
https://medium.com/@cshirky/last-call-c682f6471c70
> Voting 3rd party exercises your right to say you don't like either of the other 2 candidates
You can say whatever you want, but no one is listening. Voter turnout is so low that the signal of voting 3rd-party is completely lost in the noise of passive non-voting. 3rd-party votes might feel good, but pragmatically (and what is voting except a pragmatic attempt to advance your preferred policy), they are useless.
I encourage everyone on this comment chain to read Clay Shirky's "There is no such thing as a protest vote" [0], and really take it seriously, instead of jumping to thought-terminating cliches by angrily denouncing him as a sheep or whatever. He's right.
[0]: https://medium.com/@cshirky/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-protest-vote-c2fdacabd704
I listened to this episode yesterday. Several interesting points and discussion, and the political industrial complex is real, but I'm not 100% convinced by the argument that the two parties are a duopoly therefore they do not serve the public. While the political system basically ensures that there are only two parties, they rotate over time and adopt or discard ideas as the public needs them to.
Clay Shirky discusses this argument in https://medium.com/@cshirky/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-protest-vote-c2fdacabd704
TV already lost. It will just take the world a few years to realize it.
This remainds me of Clay Shirky and his "the future of print remains what?"
https://medium.com/@cshirky/last-call-c682f6471c70
All I have running is Ghostery, too. A page like this loads with header and footer intact, but no rendered text:
https://medium.com/@cshirky/last-call-c682f6471c70
For some reason the article didn't link to the actual Medium post: https://medium.com/@cshirky/why-i-just-asked-my-students-to-put-their-laptops-away-7f5f7c50f368