Category: web 2.0

Friday Five: Creative distraction

I was planning to write on a different topic for this week’s Friday Five. But I got distracted.

easily-distracted-by-shiny-objectsWhat did me in was this Guy Kawasaki tweet directing me to an article about how easily distracted people are more creative than those who are more focused.

Being easily the easily distracted type, I was naturally happy to hear this and immediately approved of this finding, which apparently was from some study conducted at some university somewhere. I don’t know. I didn’t bother to read beyond the headline, though, because…

1. Can you believe these high-quality videos were all shot on an iPhone 4? Pretty awesome, eh? Not that I bothered to watch all of them, because…

2. … I had a sudden urge to check Gmail, and there I found a note from Paste linking to the music mag/website’s list of the 50 best albums on 2010. Which reminded me that…

3. … I and several of my fellow higher ed music lovers are about to embark on my favorite year-end distraction: creating a list of favorite albums from the year almost finished. We’re going to compare notes and compile our collaborative effort on this blog we created last year for the purpose of counting down the top albums of the past decade. Stay tuned for more about that. But first…

4. … You should check out some of these 220 videos from PopTech. They’re educational, I think. (Hat tip: @LenKendall.)

5. What were we talking about again? Oh, yeah… WEEKEND!

Image from Loving My Add (post).

Are we making the Internet stupid?

Mama says, Stupid is as stupid does. - Forrest Gump
Mama says, Stupid is as stupid does. - Forrest Gump
Earlier this year, Nicholar Carr’s book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains drew a lot of attention from the news media and bloggers. The reason: Carr’s contention that the Internet is rewiring our brain and, according to one headline over a Carr essay, making us stupid.

But after following a non-news story that developed on Black Friday, I think the opposite may be happening.

I think people are making the Internet stupid, not the other way around.

I offer as evidence Exhibit A (with a hat tip to @JohnFMoore):

Mediaite.com: FoxNation.com Reposts Anti-Obama Article From The Onion, Doesn’t Mention It’s A Joke (click image for article).
Mediaite.com: FoxNation.com Reposts Anti-Obama Article From The Onion, Doesn’t Mention It’s A Joke (click image for article).

On Black Friday, The Onion (which you probably know is a parody news site) posted an article headlined, “Frustrated Obama Sends Nation Rambling 75,000-Word E-Mail.” Some editors at FoxNation.com, apparently thinking the satirical article was real news (and that The Onion was a real news site), “reposted the first two paragraphs in their culture section with nary a sign as to its fictional nature,” as Mediaite.com reported. (FoxNation.com is part of the conservative, anti-Obama news organization Fox News. The link to that Onion parody has since been removed from FoxNation.com site.)

I’m not too surprised that the dullards at Faux News were taken in by the Onion. And I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that their readers assumed that FoxNation’s presentation of the shenanigans was real news. As Mediaite reports, “at the time of this post’s writing [11:55 a.m. Nov. 26, 2010], you have to scroll through 20 comments to find someone who realizes the story’s fake. Five comments below that there’s actually someone (sarcastically?) saying they emailed The Onion for confirmation on the story.”

Dear readers of FoxNation.com, please limit your Internet activities to email forwards about stolen kidneys and Neiman-Marcus cookie recipes. You’re dumbing down the Internet.