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Tuesday, April 16, 2002
What does "justify" mean, anyway? Just a question. 
| | Fahrenheit 451 is not simply about book burning. This is a world where the culture of censorship has permeated the public and the where the culture of censorship has permeated the public and the private. There is no intellectual life. There is no political life. Interactive broadband technology provides endless entertainment through the full-screen images that appear on the walls of a parlor room. Words of meaning cannot be transmitted in any physical media. They must be memorized and passed on as they were before the printing press, before the written word. |
Same for Journalism
| | It is a myth that the success of science in our time is mainly due to the huge amounts of money that have been spent on big machines. What really makes science grow is new ideas, including false ideas. |
| | No permalink, of course. Soon enough, it will scroll away. |
Ask what you can do for the Net AND for yourself, sort of
| | Amy Wohl seems to agree with David Coursey (and not with David Berlind) about IBM-Microsoft cooperative efforts to create de facto standards that rely on those companies' patents. |
Survey
"Synergy" unter alles
| | - Subscriber growth is slowing, in spite of giveaway CDs in every magazine, pizza box and underwear package in the known universe — all promising more free hours than a newbie dialup customer will use in a year, easily offsetting the effects of the company's recent membership price increase.
- The company remains synonymous with dial-up. "You've got mail!" is not a broadband greeting.
- Advertising revenues are falling, and would look far worse if they didn't include sweetheart cross-promo sales to Time Warner properties.
- The company (using the TV-trained brain of Robert Pittman) thinks its users are consumers rather than customers: America Online's far larger audience of families and technophobes, Mr. Pittman argued, still tends to find broadband too expensive. Since the company makes roughly the same profit margin from its narrowband and broadband offerings, AOL has no incentive to push broadband except to keep customers from defecting.
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| | "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public," H.L. Mencken said. But that was when NBC and Procter & Gamble were partnering to co-invent mass media and The Consumer. If Mencken's point still held today, there would be no Target, no Costco, no Trader Joe's and no Starbucks. We'd still be shopping at A&P and K-mart, and drinking Maxwell House. |
A whole new angle on "branding"
There are responses to this message:permalink, Ryan Irelan, 4/16/02; 4:54:26 PM Re: Tuesday, April 16, 2002, Tom Poe, 4/16/02; 4:22:15 PM Re: Tuesday, April 16, 2002, Brian Cheesman, 4/16/02; 10:04:23 AM
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