The Offline Report

It's forming in bars, dinner parties and sixth grade quads. Emily Post called it the "social cut." A history.com article, 'Cutting' Was the Brutal Victorian Version of Throwing Shade , said it was used judiciously, "a weapon to be wielded with extreme care, preferably in situations of dire social peril." With no more aggression intended in the digital era than the Victorian, the social cut has resurfaced, and it's a move many now struggle to abstain from. "Etiquette guides warned against the practice , advising gentlemen to 'slow fade,' or gradually ghost someone, instead of using a full-blown cut, which 'is not only very harsh, but is often attended with dangerous consequences,'" Erin Blakemore, the history.com author wrote. Blakemore's 2004 article is worth revisiting in 2018. Without knowing it, we all who adopted early and dutifully the smartphone -- an expanding recursion on 2007's iPhone wave -- dropped ...

Dear Employees of The Last Blockbuster and/or Dennis Perkins , I am looking for a specific movie that brilliantly conveyed the perspective of people in early the social media age. It was a thriller/chase movie that I saw on cable, maybe DVD, in the year 2011 or possibly 2014. One protagonist was a young white female, brunette, around 18-21 years old. Many scenes showed the perspective of the principle characters from their homes or motel rooms catching on a screen slices of conversations, most incomplete. The curtailed and incomplete communiques were a broad theme of the film. Please let me know if you know the title, it is one I cannot remember. No major stars (of the time) acted in this film. Thanks, Me. ------------------------------------ Further Reading: "Our experience and movie expertise helped us make informed, intuitive leaps to find and fulfill entertainment needs they didn't even always know they had. I've had parents hug me for introducing their kid...

The most lethal suggestion one can "give" an ally in this sharing-economy information overload age is: "don't take that job, take some time off and think. About what you REALLY want to do with your life." God save us all from that avalanche of answers -- some accurate, most reductive -- only a siri, google duplex or alexa query away. The discipline to wonder is what now separates the winners from the rest of the pack. It's a technique for re-routing a juice-sapping boundary behavior. (Definition from slideshare.net .) And where discipline fails, try a "Stay Focused" browser plugin . ----------------------- Further Reading: (Animated gif from physicsclassroom.com .) Carve Space for Insight: Just Sit There:     offlinereport.net . Lewis Lapham on Web Writing says "Absent the force of the human imagination and its powers of expression, our machines cannot accelerate the hope of political and social change, which stems from language....

Every American college student learns in the first week of economics 101 our currency is backed not by gold bars but by faith. Trust. Which is why fraud, something people do throughout history and often get caught doing, is illegal. Here is a definition of "fraud" from investopedia.com : Proving that fraud has taken place requires the perpetrator to have committed specific acts. First, the perpetrator has to provide a false statement as material fact. Second, the perpetrator had to have known that the statement was untrue. Third, the perpetrator had to have intended to deceive the victim. Fourth, the victim has to demonstrate that it relied on the false statement. And fifth, the victim had to have suffered damages as a result of acting on the intentionally false statement. Why is this an important law? So we can have a thriving marketplace based on merit. If success is not based on merit it starts to be based more and more on tribal affiliations or the whims of some autoc...

Nothing solidifies a new friendship like a thoughtfully assembled playlist, loaded for posterity to a physical object, retrievable from a keepsake box. No internetting required. Paper surface area displays an item's passive advertisement. Insert J-cards for cassette tapes and CDs can be customized with pens stickers, imagination and inspiration. Spotting a cassette or CD or vinyl case from across the room sparks a mood to play its content . But the case-free cassette far surpasses the naked CD in terms of customization possibility. And without a popular media form so easily altered *and finalized* at the lay level as the cassette, how is today's music culture nurturing and nudging budding sound artists? Is it our imagination - or was the cassette age more conducive to homemade experimentation than peak CD? This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

A collection of Disney shorts played on Netflix last month, and before each was a DVD-like easter egg: interviews with the animators. This viewer was surprised to learn two-dimensional line drawings enhance the theme and texture of love story CG short "Paperman." Why would lines make this film ... more? We love the sound of this flat medium. It won Disney the 2012 Oscar for Best Animated Short. "Paperman"'s head of animation, Patrick Osborn, and producer Kristina Reed: PATRICK OSBORN:    "Paperman" looks a little bit different than most CG animation. John Kahrs, the director, was inspired by coming to Disney as the head of animation on "Tangled" and seeing all of the hand-drawn artwork around all the line work, all the design. And thinking, "could we get some of that into our CG animation somehow?" KRISTINA REED:    What's incredible to me how the experiments you and Jeff (Turley) were doing, and the line work th...

Another day, another journalist who didn't want to admit fault in being very slow to cover Zuckerberg with skepticism, blames congress for asking stupid questions of the Facebook CEO in April 2018. In fact those very April 2018 congressional hearings shifted the public's view of Facebook just enough that journalists could finally cover the social media giant with sufficient skepticism without being mocked as Luddites by the public or other media members. Exactly which journalist committed this sin today is less important. What is important is that an institution in an age of eroding institutional trust, actually performed. Performed better than it usually does, and accomplished a shift in public perception of a growing problem in a way no other entity hitherto had been able to do. Institutions matter. The most common example journalists or members of the public cite as proof of the false notion that congress was "unprepared" when they questioned Zuckerberg in 201...

Technologies declared dead make an under-radar U-turn. A thread on the virtues of newspaper erupts on twitter. #paperistechnology I bought a newspaper this morning. It’s really great. Tons of information. Portable. Browsing friendly. No pop up ads, autostart videos or surveys about how many tractors you own. — Mike Sisak (@mikesisak) October 4, 2018 Subtweets: We started getting a print paper last year. My kids fight over it! — Susan Thibeault (@SusanFThibeault) October 4, 2018 Comprehensive reading is difficult online: With a newspaper you know you've physically scanned every single item, and not missed something that sits on an unseen tab, buried in another story or link. fwiw I can never feel 100% certain I've seen everything in a digital edition unless I've clicked thru pages multiple times. — LA Resident Tourist (@LA_Res_Tourist) October 4, 2018 Coda: And you feel good for reading them instead of being guilty for staring at your phone all d...