#mediaquote

"mass media, the mother tongue of the twentieth century"

The professor is not merely an information dispensing machine, but a skilled navigator of a complex landscape

Engagement can lead to a variety of positive outcomes like social media engagement, listener-driven questions, attendance at your events and new relationships between your newsroom and the public, among others. Equipping, however, is about agency. It’s about providing access and opportunities for public participation and production. Equipping is about teaching and interconnected learning. It’s about exchanging skills and resource. It’s a redistribution of power between institutions and individuals.

From a standpoint of starting as a comics writer, working in other media... well, I've come to think of it like this. The first stage is an exercise in withholding information. In comics scripts, we need to find the picture for the artist --  even if the picture is demonstrably stupid and wrong, we need to find it first, so the artist isn't left thrashing around trying to work out what we want or need, which is a waste of their valuable time and energy. So there's some particular specificity in describing the visuals, written in a pretty informal way. In screenwriting, that's called "directing on the page." In prose, it freezes the image so it can't take flight in the reader's mind. So there's a certain stepping-down of the informational load in order to take advantage of the effects that other media afford. That's the craft-based example I use when I'm asked about this, just to illustrate that every artform operates in a different way, and effects don't always translate between them.

we do need an aesthetic, because an aesthetic is how you convince other people that the beauty has arrived.

There’s a thermodynamic cost to storing information about the past that has no predictive value for the future, Still and colleagues show. To be maximally efficient, a system has to be selective. If it indiscriminately remembers everything that happened, it incurs a large energy cost. On the other hand, if it doesn’t bother storing any information about its environment at all, it will be constantly struggling to cope with the unexpected. “A thermodynamically optimal machine must balance memory against prediction by minimizing its nostalgia — the useless information about the past.’’

If you change your business model you also have to change your editorial model. Changing one and not the other is like walking about with only one of your two legs in your pants.

«Au même moment, n’importe où sur la planète, chacun peut ressentir la même terreur, la même inquiétude pour l’avenir ou éprouver la même panique. C’est quand même incroyable! Nous sommes passés de la standardisation des opinions – rendue possible grâce à la liberté de la presse – à la synchronisation des émotions (...) Nos sociétés vivaient sur une communauté d’intérêt, elles vivent désormais un communisme des affects.»