Offline Reports Sited in Culture; An Offline Reports Report

-
In early May, I decided we'd reached a milestone in our culture when the front page of our regional newspaper critiqued the big tech companies— a rare event for a newspaper which is courting advertising dollars and pursuing prominent source access. These last few weeks, I've wanted many times to say "my work is complete" which of course it isn't. The goal of this site is not strictly to critique big tech companies. It's to look at them objectively, celebrate the upsides, and mitigate the downsides. Or mitigate our human downsides in the wake of big tech's upsides.

Still, it was not the beat I chose originally. In 2008 I was so sure someone else would pick this topic area and report on it for a series, that I let lapse my registered domain offlinereport.com eleven years ago. I finally registered the remaining offlinereport.net version in February 2018. This way, I thought last year, I could clarify some edge cases for anyone who cared to read.

An incomplete list of Offline Reports sited in our culture:

  • Review: The Human Voice vs. the Internet in 'Octet'   nytimes.com
  • Album: Hive Mind by the band The Internet
  • Meric Long's track Isn't Love about smartphone addiction, on his album Barton's Den
  • More to come...






This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Popular posts from this blog

60 Minutes Segment From May 2017 - How to Fire Proof a Home

-
Image
A 60 Minutes segment called In the Path of Fire that ran just last year in May 2017, but many wildfires ago, described and showed the enormous difference fire-proofing a home can make. Just clearing a home's perimeter of debris goes a long way, as does installing ember-proof vents. Circled in the photo above is the unscathed California home of retired firefighter Fred Roach. Fred Roach: This house here was prepared. And did not need ... the air tanker full of retardant ... or the helicopter full of water ... or all the engines to protect it. It, it was, it protects itself. Voiceover: Fred Roach thought about fire when improving his home. And says anyone can do what he did. FR: The house was stuccoed about five years ago. And we stuccoed everything under the eaves, the entire thing. Steve Inskeep: Stucco's basically fireproof? FR: Uh basically. Close to it. And then we took all the redwood decking off the deck and replaced it with synthetic. SI: Which doesn't...
Read more

Why Ad Tech Can't Build Brands (Yet)

-
Image
In April this site published " Ad Tech Primer " to lend this writer's background in ad tech to the democratic conversation around social media ads and market surveillance finally taking place in our public sphere. Today this site brings you a transcript of a podcast that explains why ad tech may nudge you toward a conversion event, but has yet to be effective at building brands. It may never be effective if tight surveillance remains the norm. The Ad Contrarian produced this podcast episode " I Finally Understand Why Online Advertising Doesn't Build Brands " and the title immediately caught this writer's eye. This episode falls squarely inside this site's beat. Begins "Ad Contrarian" Bob Hoffman: For years I've been writing about a mystery that should perplex any clear-minded marketing person: the mystery is why online advertising seems to be incapable of building customer-facing brands . We've had 20 years of phenomenal gro...
Read more

DrawDown #4: MicroGrids and Industrial Recycling

-
Image
Greetings virtual friends. We made it to this website's final March 2018 episode of the DrawDown bookclub, meeting #4. Should we keep going? I. Review II. Microgrids, page 5 III. Industrial Recycling, page 160 IV. Next Week: Spring Break Should we bother? Meeting #1 began with reading the essay on page 52 of the DrawDown book, an essay also available at this no-paywall link: " Why Bother? "  And really, why bother hosting a club to discuss a textbook that talks about drawing carbon down - it's hopeless, right? Climate change, assault weapons, war, widening inequality, housing shortages, disruption, disaster capitalism, the dark web, corruption, the Panama Papers, ID thieves, cynicism, shouldn't we put down the textbook and party? Dinosaurs roamed the earth for so much longer than we've walked upright. And yet we could wrap this life on earth gig right quick. Foresters and geologists tell us we were due for another ice age beginning around 1960. Bu...
Read more