My son Cole, pictured here as a goofy kid many years ago, is now six feet six inches tall and in college. Cole needed a letter of recommendation recently so he turned to an old family friend who, in turn, used ChatGPT to generate the letter, which he thought was remarkably good. As a guy who pretends to write for a living, I read it differently. ChatGPT’s letter was facile but empty, the type of letter you would write for someone you’d never met. It said almost nothing about Cole other than that he’s a good kid. Artificial Intelligence is good for certain things, but blind letters of reference aren’t among […]
2015 Predictions: It’s about the money, stupid!
It’s time, finally, for my long-delayed 2015 predictions. Things just kept changing so fast I had to keep re-writing, but have finally stopped. 2015 will definitely be the Year of Monetization, by which I mean it’s the year when the bottom line and showing profits will become a key motivator in almost every market. And while profit — like beer — is generally good, it isn’t always good for everyone. So here are my 10 predictions in no particular order.
Prediction #1 — Everyone gets the crap scared out of them by data security problems. In many ways this was set up by 2014, a year when, between Edward Snowden and Target, […]
Metternich and Mubarak
There is supposed to be something of an Internet revolution going on right now in Egypt, but have you noticed that the Internet isn’t directly involved? Oh there’s plenty of Twittering going-on, but it is all about the demonstrations and civil unrest in Cairo — not from those crowds. The Internet was turned off, you say, along with the mobile phone networks, but that misses my point. I think the Internet component of this social movement is being overblown. While it may be easy for a reporter to say that the Internet or texting or Facebook or Twitter is at the heart of what appears to be a multinational revolutionary juggernaut, I don’t think that’s […]
Teens Don't Twitter
Rodney, an artist/poet/landscaper who also happens to be my wife’s old boyfriend, got his mobile phone bill the other day and was shocked to see that Echo, his 16 year-old daughter, had the month before sent or received more than 14,000 SMS text messages from her mobile phone. Yes, Echo has unlimited texting, but among her friends this behavior isn’t unusual and it says a lot about how media habits — good and bad — are changing in our culture.
If a typical month has 30 days that’s 720 hours, a third of which we’ll guess Echo spends asleep, giving her 480 hours of texting time per month. Fourteen thousand texts (the number was actually higher, […]
