mink

Truth is increasingly shaped by media actors, therefore the ethical responsibility over Truth cannot only be left to media actors. It is inevitable, as long as everyone else seeks integrity in Truth, that everyone else needs to do more to think about, investigate, and share or not share media according to what information is most important to be consumed at that place and time.  "Most important" is relative and everyone will have a different compass for this, yes, but that is unavoidable. It may be regional, or chronological, or set in any other anchor, but we cannot afford to have more than one version of Truth in any one of these anchored times/places. 

"We explore creation as we sense it, but there is no known example of a creature in the world that has the mind of a human. For some, it is the ability to choose destiny, to forge past what is right versus what is wrong. For others, it is the ability to love, to care for another in the most unique of ways. But, we cannot fathom a uniform definition of humanity except in the face of each other. To be human is to be the same as one another."  Rajabu glanced at his phone. 3 minutes left. The old man was small, sitting on a chair with his back to the campus wall. His diction was clear, like Rajabu's great grandfather. Rajabu knew the English those men spoke was immaculate and came from a very systematic and colonial education. He had never seen this old man... Read more of my submission to the 2016 NUHA Blogging Prize here.

Sometimes I think we are extremely loud online but only a fraction of it is valid, true, logical and factual, the rest is spam. What if every once in a while, we all agreed to stay quiet on all social networks? Or what if there was a rule that, unless you were licensed, you could only publish a maximum of 3 sentences on any digital platform?

Are habit-formulation and disruption mutually exclusive? I read a lot about how successful people (Pending: Definition of "success") attribute much of their success to well-formulated habits; things they do day in, day out that are fixed in a schedule bound by time. Yet, I also read about unconventional activities that lead to changes in the way our world works that were previously unprecedented. So, in a world where "habit" implies consistency and "disruption" breaks it, what's a 3-year old to choose?

Here I will refer to "traditional" content as content that is translated via TV, newspapers and radio; it is centrally produced and once published cannot be changed. I will refer to "digital" content as content that is translated via the Internet; it can be produced by any number of people and can be changed even after publication. The primary difference between traditional and digital content is that the reader cannot know how many times the digital content has been edited over, or by who. In order to build an audience that trusts digital content, digital content creators (including curators, editors, etc) need to be open in their approach to their content. This requires transparency with both, contributors as well as readers. It also requires a consistent editorial policy, such that content is edited in the same ways, following the same rules, across all articles. These are developing thoughts.

"Any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours, it belongs to you... its yours to take, rearrange and re use. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head." - Banksy

I always knew our radio industry could be better, but today it got a bit more real. I see two scenarios: 1) We take global fun-talk (eg: fashion, Gaga and Cadillacs) and try to replicate it in TZ; something of a cosmopolitan-slanted-Westwards approach. 2) We take our talk (eg: corruption, Kubanda and Toyota) and try to understand the world through those lense.  ie: Should TZ radio bring the world to TZ, or take TZ to the world?

Met MG Vassanji at Moto last night. Should have reread The Gunnysack before showing up, but it may have been difficult to bring up specific questions anyway. He had read some of the groups' work and mostly advised on writing logically. For example: No need to describe every detail and context as the story happens because that's not how humans typically live. The story should unfold just as our senses observe life unfolding. Tenses also need to be consistent... but I didn't quite understand that, and asked if all these "rules" around the logic of writing apply to poetry. He said some rules do but not all. He did also say that if you cannot live without writing, don't write. I'll be thinking about that one for a while. 

In the first post of these series, I basically asked how people will choose what they read in the future. In the second post , I asked what will information will be available when they go looking. Now I would like to ask: What will be an 18-year-old's motivation to read about a random status update from his or her's counterpart on the opposite side of the world? There is a ton of information out there these days. You can hardly avoid it when you log into your social media accounts, even after all the filtering and careful choosing of "friends". You might have logged on in search of something specific, but you tend to get distracted by the waterfall of everything else. So, if this grows, what will motivate one to check on the waterfall at all? Will there be mechanisms to further customize one's content to their own tastes? Will we develop an interest in peer-to-peer learning that is complimentary to formal, productive, more industrial learning? My gut te...

One of my friends sent me this link to an essay by George Orwell from 1946. In it, Orwell critiques modern uses of English words. Particularly, he makes the argument that while words will always carry their meanings, their combination in sentances is poor and remains poor because we imitate eachother. It's worth reading the essay for yourself. So far, my favorite extract from this essay is this: In the case of a word like democracy , not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite diffe...

I was browsing an archive by UCL of George Orwell 's work today, and came across this: Ghastly feeling of impotence over the India business, Churchill’s speeches, the evident intention of the blimps to have one more try at being what they consider tough, and the impudent way in which the newspapers can misrepresent the whole issue, well knowing that the public will never know enough or take enough interest to verify the facts. This last is the worst symptom of all – though actually our own apathy about India is not worse than the non-interest of Indian intellectuals in the struggle against Fascism in Europe. The exact writing can be found on Folio 85 in this political diary . Another archive is Orwell Diaries 1938 - 1942 . The mentions of airpower and propaganda is particularly intriguing, considering the current state of affairs in the world today.

A couple of posts ago, I asked: How will we assess information in the future? Today I am thinking of another question: What kind of content will people pick up 10 generations later? The question assumes that we will not be able to archive every post, every status, every piece of content that is put on the Internet in a clear manner. It would be very interesting to discuss our options should we find that this is in fact possible (step back: how would different companies harmonize their privacy policies?). And the question also has at least 2 implications: What will be important to people in 10 generations' time? And what systems will be used to govern what content is relevant?

Yesterday, I found the following video on more than one channel of communication I maintain, including e-mail and social media timelines. The video is a Fox News interview with Reza Aslan on his new book on Jesus. I find Fox's "critical" questioning of Aslan's work quite uncritical. I also find Aslan's defense graceful yet exactly the kind of critical that the discussion as a whole should have been. As Aslan points out, instead of targeting the 8 or so questions over 10 minutes towards the author's personal life, Fox should have targeted the questions towards the arguments put forth in the literature. In any case, I think the discussion on social media has been lazily unfair. How many people who are cajoled into ridiculing Fox news as "ignorant", "bitchy", "low", "illiterate", etc. have actually read Aslan's book and genuinly understand him? Further, how many people actually make informed judgments as Asla...

While real estate concerns space on land, virtual estates concern spaces in the media. "Media" here refers to broadcast media (radio, print, TV, etc.) as well as digital media (the Internet, mobile networks, satellite, etc.). Spaces in the media are not as scarce as spaces on land, particularly because more space can be created in the media than on land. Yet, because human beings have limited attention spans - much like we have limited needs for space on land - the media cannot possibly be consumed in its entirety by any one human being. Therefore, securing virtual estates could mean that you secure your content for future generations to observe. How well these estates are secured could foretell how long they will last before they are taken over. And how long they will last could foretell how many future generations could observe this content. 

On May 11 last year , I briefly discussed Amartya Sen 's recommendations for how media could be more useful in the promotion of justice . One of these recommendations was to use the media as a tool for public reasoning. "Reasoning" can be defined here as the act of thinking logically, rationally and/or analytically. Public reasoning, then, can be understood as logically, rationally and/or analytically thinking as a group or as the citizenry. For this to happen, two things need to be in place: There need to be people who are thinking, and there needs to be a way for them to deliberate on thoughts collectively. Everybody has thoughts, so I will assume that there are thinking people wherever you look. But not everybody has a way to deliberate their thoughts with other actors in the public sphere. Sure, they may be able to exchange thoughts with their neighbor, local storekeeper or family members. But will this really be "public" or private? In order to...

I'm trying to brainstorm what kinds of analyses people want from news media and how these analyses can be useful to them. Some points of data for media analysis might be: Most frequent word in headlines Most frequent subject/topic in headlines Most frequent personality appearing in headlines Number of articles per day Diversity of topic areas covered per day Total number of people affected by each day's news Some factors influencing media critique might be: Truth: To what level can facts be verified? Setting: What is the geographic spread of reporting? Process: How was the information collected? Sources: Who or what was consulted to gather information? To my seemingly (and possibly intentionally) non-existent audience: Your feedback is welcome! Otherwise, more on this soon. 

In recent years I have been interested in how media and learning are related. Language has a lot to do with this; not just particular world languages, but all lexical forms through which we express our ideas. Today I came across an interesting BBC article about language studies on Twitter : "The question of how language changes and evolves has occupied linguistic anthropologists for several decades. What determines whether an innovation will propagate throughout a culture, remain just a local variant, or be stillborn? Such questions decide the grain and texture of all our languages – why we might tweet “I’m bored af” rather than “I’m bored, forsooth.” Nice! Full article and links here .

Information that is fed out needs feedback; that is, it needs to be fed right back with further information about whether the original stuff was relevant/useful/worthy. Otherwise there is no movement from the original source. And where there is no movement, how is change defined ?

The problem with contemporary information systems for the public sector is that they rely on older models of "new public management" that rose around the turn of the century. New public management was a field where the affordances of technology were combined with the objectives of public administration. Two concerns follow from this  theoretical combination: First, how has the distribution, production and consumption of new media and information technology systems evolved since the year 2000? Second, how are public values  translated into technology rules? The challenge of contemporary information systems for the public sector lies in these two concerns.

If we can accept that different communication systems are embedded in different cultural arrangements, then the social relations which make the arrangements up become a central concern. We may borrow from concepts explored in political economy as well as community development literature. Amartya Sen [1] outlines five critical functions of the media in society: To enable direction contribution from the public; To enable information to be disseminated to the public; To protect public voice; To facilitate the formation of public value; and To enable public reasoning. Here, Sen does not attempt to theorize communication. He assumes much of it: That it is increasingly 2-way, that sometimes the public talks and other time the public is talked to, and that values are inherent in these relations. By these assumptions, he makes a strong argument of the media in support of democratic, just societies.  Similarly, Paolo Friere [2] assumes that modes of communication -...