Russell Davies

This week in references: Techno Techno Techno Techno

Wired shownotes: thumbs

I think I mostly made this up out of my own head. Which is why it's two very slight observations bolted together.

The best outcome is this idea from Henry, which is absolutely brilliant and necessary:

 

 

The last people who don't do presentations

I went to a talk at the Almeida last night (I know!). The event description (as captured in the Google search cache) was "Have politicians lost the art of persuasion? in association with the New Statesman...A speech can inspire crowds, set out a vision – and change hearts and minds. But in the era of Trump's tweets and social media soundbites, is there a place for great oratory? "

It was interesting. Lots of good thoughts about good speeches. But the question I've been burning to understand for years didn't get discussed.

Why are politicians the last people on earth to do speeches?

(Apart from, I guess, actors)

Everyone else in the world does presentations. They combine a powerful thing (spoken words) with other powerful things (written words and images). Politicians don't. I've never understood it.

Interestingly, there was a screen on stage to play an introductory video. It wasn't used for anything else but the powerful effect of a screen was evident. I'm not saying it's always a good thing, but it's undoubtedly a powerful communicative tool and I don't understand why politicians never use it.

 

 

curate.tv

Yesterday's newsletter:

"Angus asked me to contribute to curate.tv, which was fun. It's a nice thing; "Desert Island Discs for internet video". Putting it together reminded me of Kim's video from Interesting which is easily the most powerful of my selection.

Partly because of the subject, partly because of Kim's incredible delivery but partly, also, because it's not a straight video of the talk. It's the slide show she used for the talk (a stream of images) plus the audio straight from the PA mic. This seems more 'natively internet' than any of the others. A stream of images + a stream of audio. Slideshow + podcast. It fits more naturally with my sense of 'media in a browser' than a retransmission of a music video or a film of a talk. Jenn Schiffer's talk, for instance, was clearly brilliant in real life, but succeeds on YouTube despite the medium, not because of it. It still really succeeds though. Well worth watching. They all are."

This week in references: jazz, maps, 1967, 1945

Speechificationing

Steve's caught the Speechification nostalgia bug,

Way more than 5,000 hours

Putting this here to remember a day

Fake news

I'm putting this here because I'll need it one day. For a presentation. Or to remind me what 2018 was like.

Disintegration ops

I misread this and now I can't get 'disintegration ops' out of my head.

Job title of the future.

Wired shownotes: URLs etc

I done wrote another thing for Wired. About URLs and the psychogeography of domain names. Or something.

I always want to have a credits page for things I write. For everything that didn't get in there and all the people I stole the ideas from.

So, for this one: all the actual ideas came from conversations on Slack with Chris and James. And the apparently detailed recall I have about what suck.com was like and how they changed writing was all based on an Amazon 'look inside' of Steven Johnson's Interface Culture.

So, thanks to them!