The Offline Report

Saturday, Feb 2, 2019 "I can't imagine a better advertisement than someone reading my book on a subway," David Sedaris told KQED Forum last year.    kqed.org Drivers in Canada play hockey while stuck on highway:     6abc.com Phases of evolution of the connected car.     deloitte.com : Thursday, Jan 31, 2019 "I’m really not sure where this came from because it’s essentially a Reporting 101 truism but still really helpful: Report against your own biases."    cjr.org Hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio: 'Capitalism basically is not working for the majority of people':     cnbc.com Wumo comic is topical.    gocomics.com : Ad tech ad buyers filter story by story, in granular categories, like "tragedy."    digiday.com "The investors who pumped money into the new media companies now realize, as a few others quietly did back when they were investing that money, that with h...

In Part 1 of January's Paper Media Poll, we met Steve, a retired accountant reading online news from his smartphone, and the San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday Pink section on a Monday. Steve buys and reads the paper edition, the hard copy, the "dead tree" edition of the San Francisco Chronicle on Fridays now. He used to read it every day, was once a paid subscriber, then dropped to purchasing the paper almost daily from the corner bodega. Now Steve buys just the Friday edition. Online, Steve reads news that is "free. Everything I read now is free." When asked if he gets as much information reading this way as he did before, his answer changes. "Yes." "Well, no I don't. I miss things, it's not as comprehensive." Still, Steve tells of no plans to change his habits. He's a lay reader who speaks like a media insider. "You've got McClatchy, the Chicago Tribune, which owns the L.A. Times," he tallies three. The ...

SAN FRANCISCO -- Steve, a retired city government accountant, sat in Mission Street Peet's on a rainy Monday before lunch. On his table was an unflipped copy of San Francisco Chronicle's "Sunday Pink" section, aside his power bank and smartphone. He stopped subscribing to home delivery "in '17" he estimated. Still, on Fridays he buys the analog edition. "When Michael Jackson died, the L.A. Times' home page didn't have anything," but the Daily Mail did. Steve's been reading a handful of British papers on his phone for years. "It's too expensive" he said, naming the price jumps that sloughed him from the Chronicle's daily reader rolls. "One dollar, two dollars, two and a quarter." (Steve was surprised to hear the Sunday bundle dropped back to two dollars flat.) Price drops aside, Steve only reads three sections now: Sports, the "Pink" (Datebook/Entertainment,) and Travel. "I stopped re...

Tuesday, Jan 22, 2019 What would an "internet" emoji look like? 🔗     emojipedia.com "A newspaper: how people used to read news from the previous day prior widespread internet access."   . [Editor's note: Let's try this again, "A newspaper: how people used to read news from the previous day prior widespread internet access when they are offline."]     emojipedia.org "In response to Facebook’s announcement this week, UK journalist James Ball argued in CJR that not only was it wrong for technology companies to fund journalism, it was also unnecessary for them to be paying reparations to an industry which had been too slow and arrogant to save itself."    cjr.com Life After Working Remotely: "In fact, researchers have found that a face-to-face request can be as effective as sending 34 email requests, meaning you might be more productive now that you can pop over to a co-worker’s desk and ask in person for whatever you ...

Friday, Jan 11, 2019 moses znaimer figured it out in the 70s with cityTV in toronto ontario. — Erich Nolan Bertussi @ClearExpanse C/D (@ENBertussi) January 11, 2019 🔗 🔗 🔗🔗🔗🔗🔗 🔗 🔗 This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Beethoven and the new year 2019 both mark official dawns of cultural eras. In music, a transformation sprouting from the end of Mozart's and Hayden's careers was punctuated and pronounced with the beginning of Beethoven's work - the emotional Romantic music era. Romanticism of the 18th and 19th centuries was a reaction to, a quasi-rejection of, the rational Enlightenment. Romanticism in music, and the culture-at-large showed these characteristics, among others : a new preoccupation with and surrender to Nature ; a fascination with the past, particularly the Middle Ages and legends of medieval chivalry ; a turn towards the mystic and supernatural, both religious and merely spooky; a new attention given to national identity ; In 2019, digital technology will continue to progress. But within the Digital Romantic Era we'll reject the over-cerebral, no longer living lives as easily manipulated "disconnected heads." We'll refine, define and integrate ...

When one person talks to another, sound waves mobilize the recipient's ear follicles. Talking, like live singing, is a form of touch. As such, don't skip over this important passage in Wired magazine's article on one writer's year with a flip phone : Later, my mom would admit this: My voice sounded so much clearer through the Kyocera than it ever did on my iPhone. Makes sense—telephony was its primary purpose. And I was, for once, talking into the phone, not near-ish a fancy multipurpose brick. Didn’t help the cause, though. To her, my flip phone was not only proof of insanity but ... Re-routing all communiques from voice exchanges to typing on a screen deprives the senses. Engage someone's ears to break through the digital haze. #soundistouch -------------------- Further Reading: Disruption and Disconnection Amplify Post Traumatic Stress:     offlinereport.net This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 I...

We made it to 2019! We're still living in times of rapid change. But now, unlike early 2018, we acknowledge it. Out loud. What a year 2018 was - this writer decided on February 14th to unfriend my remaining Facebook contacts, extricate myself from that platform, and redirect that energy and time to blogging objectively about Facebook's pros and cons from out here on the open web . The editors of this site dedicated to a few months of full time blogging after seeing too many repetitions of false memes in the media such as: " paper is going away " or "it would be improper to hold Facebook executives accountable for what its algorithms do" !?!?!? Other false memes were " people over 26 don't understand how computers work " and " there are more H1B visa workers in College Station, Texas than in Silicon Valley ." And a favorite " humans, who created climate change, are too stupid and powerless to reverse it ." Some writer...

Mozart's parents lived to see him succeed as a musician. So did Michael Jackson's parents, and Prince's parents and Joni Mitchell's parents. You can make it in the music industry without dead parents. But... But ... particularly if your mother dies or abandons you or is sent away when you're young, like: Johann Sebastian Bach , whose mother died in 1694 when he was 9 years old and father died in 1695 when Bach was 10 : "He [Bach] lost his parents at the age of ten. And I think that drama, that shattering experience, formed his outlook on the world for the rest of his life. He felt abandoned. He felt the world would be a deceitful, untrustworthy place. This worked very well with his religious understanding as a Lutheren where the same attitue towards the world was preached. "In many ways what he was going to do with his music was to create his own world, his own better world, the perfect world. In a sense he himself was going to become a creator."...