The Web Is a Customer Service Medium
The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a result, people in the newspaper industry saw the web as a newspaper. People in TV saw the web as TV, and people in book publishing saw it as a weird kind of potential book. But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It’s its own thing. And like other media it has a question that it answers better than any other. That question is:
“Why wasn’t I consulted?”
By Paul Ford, FTrain
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Capital New York: 7 great longreads by Tom Robbins
capitalnewyork:
I was introduced to Tom Robbins while I was in college. My mentor at the time was the editor of the Industrial Workers of the World’s newspaper and he printed packets of reporting for me. I gobbled it up, especially Mr. Robbins’ muckraking at the Village Voice.
By Gillian Reagan
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The Tyranny of Defense Inc.
For those at the top, the American military profession is that rare calling where retirement need not imply a reduced income. On the contrary: senior serving officers shed their uniforms not merely to take up golf or go fishing but with the reasonable expectation of raking in big money. In a recent e-mail, a serving officer who is a former student of mine reported that on a visit to the annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army—in his words, “the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Military Industrial Complex”—he was “accosted by two dozen former bosses, now in suits with fancy ties and business cards, hawking the latest defense technologies.”
By Andrew J. Bacevich, The Atlantic
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The Man Who Spilled the Secrets
On the afternoon of November 1, 2010, Julian Assange, the Australian-born founder of WikiLeaks.org, marched with his lawyer into the London office of Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian. Assange was pallid and sweaty, his thin frame racked by a cough that had been plaguing him for weeks. He was also angry, and his message was simple: he would sue the newspaper if it went ahead and published stories based on the quarter of a million documents that he had handed over to The Guardian just three months earlier. The encounter was one among many twists and turns in the collaboration between WikiLeaks—a four-year-old nonprofit that accepts anonymous submissions of previously secret material and publishes them on its Web site—and some of the world’s most respected newspapers. The collaboration was unprecedented, and brought global attention to a cache of confidential documents—embarrassing when not disturbing—about American military and diplomatic activity around the world. But the partnership was also troubled from the start.
By Sarah Ellison, Vanity Fair
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Michelle Legro: Top Longreads for Animal Behavior
michellelegro:
They ignored the signs: 100,000 fish floating belly-up in an Arkansas River, 5,000 blackbirds falling out of the sky. Please feel free leave your cat with me when the rapture comes. Until then, enjoy these three longreads about animals and their uncanny behavior.
Darcy Frey, “The Bears…
Early Adopter Michelle Legro of Lapham’s Quarterly breaks out a superb new #longreads #list.
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The Web After You’re Dead
Mac Tonnies’s digital afterlife stands as a kind of best-case scenario for preserving something of an online life, but even his case hasn’t worked out perfectly. His “Pro” account on the photo-sharing service Flickr allowed him to upload many — possibly thousands — of images. But since that account has lapsed, the vast majority can no longer be viewed. Some were likely gathered in Plattner’s backup of Tonnies’s blog; others may exist somewhere on his laptop, though Dana Tonnies still isn’t sure where to look for them.
By Rob Walker, New York Times
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Infopocalypse: The Cost of Too Much Data
“Going digital” was supposed to be an environmentally conscious way for governments to cut costs while improving efficiency. But it hasn’t quite worked out that way yet. Storage capacity is increasing, but the volume of data is also increasing, perhaps just as quickly. Over the next decade, the world will produce the informational equivalent of nearly 100 million Libraries of Congress per year, according to Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group. Most of what the government stores are public records, which means that by law they must be made available to anyone who requests them. But while there are ambitious efforts underway to improve storage methods, the sheer bulk of information is alarming.
By Chris Faraone, Boston Phoenix
(via thesmithian)
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