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HomeCraigE2022-12-14T17:26:26+07:00

SCARIER THAN SKYNET: AI AND PERSUASION

Most dystopian fantasies concern monsters we can see conquering us. But with new
technologies, asks Center strategic advisor Brad Berens, will we even know if
we’ve been conquered?

You can tell a lot about a culture by its dystopias: its fantasies of fear. When
you have dueling fantasies, you can tell even more by what they agree on and
what they miss.

Our most common dystopias are still analog: an enemy takes over, and we fight or
we don’t, but everybody knows who the good guys and bad guys are. The classic
example of this is George Orwell’s 1984 (it came out in 1949), which shows how a
regime takes over both the world and the minds of its citizens through constant
surveillance: “Big Brother is Watching You.” Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s
Tale (1985) is similar, but in Atwood’s Gilead a male regime enslaves women.

On the surface, it looks like the technological versions of these dystopias are
digital, but they’re still analog: in The Terminator movies (starting in 1984),
Skynet is a machine regime seeking to eradicate humans. In The Matrix movies
(starting in 1999), the machine regime uses humans as Duracell batteries to
power their VR world. In both, there is still a clear dichotomy: good guys
versus bad guys.

The real digital dystopia happens when you don’t know you’ve been conquered and
you don’t know that any alternatives to captivity exist.  (more)



EXPERIENCE STACKS, COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE, AND NETFLIX’S “WEDNESDAY”

The new Netflix series about the daughter from The Addams Family going to a
Hogwarts-style high school doesn’t ignore the earlier versions of the story: it
embraces them — which, says Center strategic advisor Brad Berens, is part of why
it succeeds.

One difference between artificial intelligence and the human kind (at least for
now) is that AI is amazing at pattern recognition while humans are terrific at
pattern forging.

We can’t help ourselves. We use analogies to understand the world around us,
asking of any new experience, “OK, what is this like?” and then using a rapid
compare-and-contrast to figure out how the new thing is similar to but also
distinct from the old thing. It’s not just inside our heads where this sort of
forging happens: businesses can channel that pattern forging energy for their
customers or (with entertainment) audiences.

The delightful new Netflix show Wednesday, starring Jenna Ortega as Wednesday
Addams, is a master class in this sort of channeling. It elegantly deploys
references to 85 years’ worth of other versions of The Addams Family stories, as
well as references to other horror and teen supernatural television (Sabrina the
Teenaged Witch, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and movies (Harry Potter, Twilight).

For the viewer who recognizes these references, there’s an extra level of
cognition that sparks, amplifying the overall experience.  (more)




WHO CAN WIN THE NEXT CABLE NEWS WAR?

As CNN and FOX News pivot in the face of turbulent times, four other cable news
organizations are waiting to grab big audiences: One may disappear, one is
waiting to be noticed, one is happy where it is, and one faces a big
opportunity. Center Director Jeffrey Cole explains.

In the forty-year history of 24/7 cable news networks, the ground is shifting
like never before.

At the two biggest news networks, CNN and FOX News, there is profound change
that may disorient and confound their audiences, forcing them to the left or
right.

CNN, under strict budget cutbacks from its new owner, is forsaking its slightly
left position and racing toward the middle. For the first time, it is
fact-checking President Biden.

FOX News (and all the Murdoch properties), which built its programming over the
past six years around Donald Trump, has abandoned the former President and
embraced Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. The day after Trump recently announced
his third presidential bid, Murdoch’s New York Post covered the story with a
small banner across the bottom of page one: “Florida Man Makes Announcement
(p.26).” Ouch!

While these two channels, which I discussed at length in my last column, make up
more than 50% of the audience for around-the-clock news, there are four other
players. At least two stand to benefit, perhaps significantly, from the
makeovers at the two behemoths.  (more)



THE GROUND UNDER THE 24/7 NEWS CHANNELS IS SHIFTING LIKE NEVER BEFORE

After a surprise-filled mid-term election, CNN is moving to the right and FOX
News is moving away from Trump. What’s going on? What about the other channels?
Center Director Jeffrey Cole digs into big changes in cable news.

What a roller coaster!

Last week began with us expecting, as history shows almost always happens, the
party in power to lose a large number of seats in the midterm elections. The
only question—in an overused metaphor—was whether it would be a red wave or a
red tsunami. Even worse was the fear that democracy would unravel as “don’t
confuse me with the facts” election deniers and ignorant candidates won their
elections.

The week finished on a different note. Although troubled by inflation and crime,
Americans could see past these transitory issues and voted to protect our
constitutional democracy. As a nation we might not know much about civics, but
we can discern a real threat when it is upon us.

The ground has shifted in our politics as the Republican party debates its
future direction. At the same time, the Democrats are mulling over whether to
retire their leader: a surprisingly successful President who is also now the
oldest man ever to occupy the White House. If re-elected, at the end of his
second term Joe Biden would smash the record by eight years.

It is not just the ground under the political parties that has shifted.  (more)




THE FRONTIERS OF SCALE

As media continues to fragment in the face of changes in legislation and
technology, where will new big audiences come from? Center strategic advisor
Brad Berens explores.


Recently I explored how changes in legislation and technology are signaling the
end of cheap digital scale for media. (Don’t worry: you don’t have to read that
issue to understand this one.)

If I’m right that digital scale will only get less massive and more expensive,
then where will people go to find new big audiences to spread the word about
whatever they’re selling?

In other words, where are the frontiers of scale?

One recent frontier of scale is Retail Media, which you experience every time
you go to a retail website (like Walgreen’s, Best Buy, or Target) and see ads
while you’re shopping… not just ads for things that the retailer sells but also
ads for other things like movies and cars. Advertisers love retail media because
retailers know a lot about their customers and can match ads to customer
interest (we hope in a non-creepy way).

App stores, like the one you use to download or buy new apps on your smartphone,
make up another frontier of scale because the stores have massive and
identifiable audiences, just like retailers. Already, app developers pay to
promote their apps in app stores, but I suspect that over time we’ll see
non-app, non-digital products advertising in app stores. This is a big
opportunity for the 2024 election cycle.  (more)



A NEW SCAM: THE “MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT” CALL

A call from your burglar alarm company turns out to be something else entirely.
Center strategic advisor Brad Berens explains what you can do to protect
yourself from clever criminals.

One of the most popular things I’ve ever written is “Beware the Words with
Friends Scammers” about how predators were targeting lonely older women who
played this online equivalent of Scrabble.

Here’s another scam to watch out for: the “Middle of the Night” call.

We were having dinner with my parents when my Dad mentioned an odd call from
their burglar alarm company that day. The phone rang at 2:00am, and when Dad
picked it up the person on the other end, talking quickly, said that she was
calling from the alarm company about a medical emergency.

No, we’re fine, Dad said.

The caller then asked for the address, which Dad provided. “No, that’s not the
right address,” the caller said. “We’re calling about another address” (a mile
or so away). Then, the caller asked for the alarm abort code, which Dad
provided. The caller then apologized for the mistake and ended the call.

The number on Caller ID was the number of the alarm company.

Dad went back to sleep. Remember: this was at 2:00am, when most people are
groggy rather than suspicious.

When I heard this story, something about it had a wrong shape: as a practitioner
and researcher I’ve done a lot of work on phishing schemes and other scams;
plus, I personally get dozens of scam texts a week with increasingly creative
angles of approach. I’d never heard of a burglar alarm company calling about a
medical emergency, and it sounded like Dad had given more information than he’d
received.  (more)



ON STRATEGY: THE POWER OF WITDO

It’s fine to look for answers, but often you don’t find them. Instead, says
Center strategic advisor Brad Berens, if you’re lucky, you wind up with better
questions. WITDO is one of them.

One of my first corporate gigs was as the digital editor at EarthLink, an early
dial-up Internet Service Provider (ISP). We scrutinized every move that AOL and
Microsoft made. They were our closest competitors selling identical dial-up
products. AOL was the biggest; when AOL raised prices so did Microsoft and
EarthLink. It was an apples-to-apples world, and we were all selling apples.

We kinda/sorta saw broadband coming (DSL and Cable), but we thought our members
would value their @earthlink.net email addresses and the EarthLink software
package enough to stick around and buy their broadband through us. This did not
happen. Broadband was selling customers a five-course gourmet meal while we were
still selling… apples.

We no longer live in a world where apples to apples comparisons make sense much
of the time. The problem is that business thinkers love to overfocus and break
problems down to fruit on fruit comparisons even though doing so misses crucial
context.

One powerful way to dodge this problem is to get in the habit of asking
different questions, questions that change the context of your endeavor and let
you focus on the things that matter rather than the things that happen to be in
front of you. This is the difference between focusing on what’s urgent versus
what’s important, a.k.a. the Eisenhower Matrix.

Here are three of my favorite change-the-conversation questions (more):




THE END OF CHEAP SCALE?

More important than who owns Twitter is whether anybody can create a massive new
social networking service. Also, asks Center strategic advisor Brad Berens, what
would a non-profit version of Twitter—let’s call it Quack—look like?

As I wrote last time, I’m taking a break from the endless hand-wringing around
Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. The more interesting question is whether
anybody can do anything to prop up any massively-scaled social networking
service in an age of ever-increasing fragmentation?

In other words, is this the end of cheap scale?

By “cheap scale” I really mean cheap digital scale where a service can quickly
and profitably reach billions of people (users, audience members, customers,
consumers) using hardware that people already own (smartphones, tablets,
computers) and bandwidth that they already buy.  (more)




EVEN DEATH GETS DISRUPTED

The funeral business can prey on a family’s darkest moments, but the internet
has begun to change this. Center founder Jeffrey Cole explains.

Disruption even finds you in death.

Ben Franklin’s quip that “in this world nothing can be said to be certain,
except death and taxes” aside, if ever there was an industry that would seem
immune to disruptive change, it would be the funeral business.

Yet, the funeral industry is experiencing a tidal wave of disruption that it
does not like one bit. As usual, it is the customer rather than the established
business who has the most to gain.

Many, not all, but many, mortuaries take advantage of grief-stricken families in
their time of need.

When a loved one dies—particularly if that death was unexpected—the family is in
no frame of mind to make considered financial decisions. This is the moment when
the funeral business pounces, framing an expensive series of decisions—how much
they spend on the casket, the burial plot, the funeral—as a reflection of how
much they loved the family member who just died.

For many families, a funeral is the third most expensive financial transaction
they will ever make after buying a house or a car. But we do not approach
funeral expenditures the same way. It would seem ghoulish or inappropriate to
visit five funeral homes (as we might visit car dealers), get prices, and then
negotiate with the first by saying, “another funeral home said they could do it
for less.”

At least funeral directors (we hope) do not try to close a deal by asking, “what
would it take to get your loved one into a casket today?”  (more)




MUSK & TWITTER: CAN WE CALL PLEASE CALM TF DOWN?

Nothing crazy has happened in the hours since the world’s wealthiest individual
took control of the world’s oddest social media company, says Center strategic
advisor Brad Berens, and nothing crazy is likely to happen.

A bunch of things—some nutty and some not—happened once Elon Musk’s acquisition
of Twitter closed on Thursday:

 * Musk fired the CEO and a bunch of other executives.
 * Musk walked into Twitter HQ carrying a sink and tweeted a video of it with
   the caption “let that sink in.”
 * Late night hosts dunked on this mild dad joke in ways that were way less
   funny than the not-terribly-funny dad joke itself. (BTW, if I’d made that
   joke, my kids’ eyes would have rolled so hard you would have thought somebody
   was playing Ping Pong.)
 * Musk, the free speech absolutist, tweeted a letter to advertisers in which he
   said that he would absolutely moderate content on Twitter. This is because
   advertising is currently Twitter’s sole source of revenue.
 * Advertisers and media agencies adopted a wait-and-see attitude, except for
   General Motors which paused its advertising… in part, perhaps, because Musk
   owns Tesla, a rival car company.
 * Musk also followed Facebook’s lead and formed a “content moderation council”
   that would make the tough decisions about who to kick off the platform. “No
   major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that
   council convenes,” he said in a tweet.
 * He did this because hate speech exploded across Twitter right after the deal
   closed.
 * I saw a tweet allegedly from the 45th president saying, “I’m back! Thanks,
   Elon!” But it was obviously from a newly created account from somebody else.
   Twitter deactivated the account. But the folks I was with when this happened
   didn’t know to look at the Twitter username and almost freaked out.
 * A bunch of pundits and people I follow on social media wrung their hands,
   deactivated their accounts, and acted as if it we had reached the end of
   days.

We can still measure how long Musk has been in control of Twitter in hours. It’s
way too soon to fret about what is going to happen.  (more)




SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE BANALITY OF EVIL

As Center strategic advisor Brad Berens explains, Max Fisher’s new book The
Chaos Machine shows the downside of what happens when companies pursue growth at
all costs.


In her 1963 book about the trial of Adolph Eichmann, one of the chief architects
of the Nazi murder of six million Jews during the Second World War, Hannah
Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe Eichmann’s failure
to see the consequences of his actions because he was just doing his job.

I’m always hesitant to compare any group to the Nazis except for the Neo-Nazis
who embrace the label. However, as I finished reading Max Fisher’s excellent new
book, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds
and Our World, Arendt’s phrase about the banality of evil kept coming to mind.

To be clear, I am not comparing Facebook, Instagram, Snap, TikTok, Twitter and
YouTube to the Third Reich. But I am comparing the indifference of those
companies to how their pursuit of profits has destroyed lives to the
indifference of Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Fisher is a talented reporter for The New York Times. For years, he has been on
the ground chasing the stories that make up the book’s main argument: social
media companies use sophisticated software (algorithms) that deliberately
provoke extreme emotional reactions in users. The algorithms do this by putting
agitating content in front of users even though that content is often
misinformation or disinformation. More agitated users spend more time on social
media and spread the lies, which means that the social media companies can sell
more ads and make more money.

Facts move slower than lies, so corrections or comments or warnings to think
first and share later don’t do any good.

What are the consequences that the social media companies ignore?  (more)



INDUSTRY EVOLUTION BY METEOR STRIKE

Two recent developments in the world of comic books have lessons for all
businesses in the age of digital transformation.  Center strategic advisor Brad
Berens explains.

From the “Big Story You Haven’t Noticed” department: this month, two things
happened in the world of comic books that combine to make a huge inflection
point. My friend Peter Horan calls this sort of thing a “meteor strike” where
“the expected only wounds you; the unexpected kills you.”

First, GlobalComix and Ox Eye Media announced a new joint venture: an on-demand
comics printing service called GC Press:

GlobalComix has announced it will partner with Source Point Press parent company
Ox Eye Media starting in 2023 to form GC Press, an on-demand comics printing
service. This will be the first of its kind in the comics industry, allowing
readers to purchase any comic in physical form (regardless of retail
availability) and have it shipped directly to them, anywhere in the world.

Readers can’t buy Print-On-Demand (POD) issues of big publisher characters like
Spider-Man, Batman, or Hellboy comics via GC Press (although I am amused by “The
Scintillating Spider-Squirrel,” which seems more homage than parody). Instead,
this is a niche service that enables niche writers to monetize their work via
POD.

Second, the already ridiculously named DC Universe Infinite digital comics
service got an even more ludicrous name for its new top level subscription: DC
Universe Infinite Ultra. (What’s next? DC Universe Infinite Super Bat Ultra
Plus?) For $99.99 per year, readers get digital access to DC comics one month
after they hit comic book shops and the bookstores and newsstands that still
carry comics. Prior to this, for $74.99 per year readers got digital access to
DC comics from six months ago.

So what’s the problem? Why do these two things make a meteor strike?  (more)



QUESTION: WHAT DOES TIM COOK WANT APPLE TV+ TO BE?

Answer: anything he wants. The CEO of the world’s most valuable company doesn’t
need his streaming service to be the biggest. Center director Jeffrey Cole
explains.


What’s Tim Cook up to?

When Apple makes a move, the Earth usually shakes.

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at one of Apple’s must-see, splashy
product announcements in 2007 (wearing his iconic turtle-neck sweater and
jeans—all in black) there were four large players in the handset world: Nokia,
Blackberry, Motorola, and SonyEricsson. Within four years, all had become
irrelevant. The introduction of the iPod (2003) and iPad in 2010 had similar
impact on the competition and consumers’ imaginations.

Apple does big things. Even the Apple Watch (not the iWatch) introduced by Tim
Cook in 2014, three years after Jobs’ death, immediately captured the smartwatch
market.

When we think of Apple’s products, retail stores, impact on our culture, and
much more, we see a company whose goal is always to dominate the marketplace and
our imaginations.

Therefore, it was surprising when the most valuable company in the world entered
the streaming world in a small way. It has stayed small. Is this the plan: to
have a small toe in the streaming door? Or is Apple TV+ merely an early Trojan
horse foray before reinforcements and massive budgets change the entertainment
world?

Warner, NBC, Paramount, and Disney built streaming platforms to protect their
core businesses of producing content and ensuring it had a place to be seen.
Their fear was that streaming would be completely dominated by Netflix, which
was growing at an alarming rate and devoting as much as $20 billion to
production.

Apple had no such fears. It didn’t need to produce entertainment to sell
hardware. Apple had no markets to protect.  (more)




WHY MUSK IS STALLING

Elon Musk seems to have accepted that he will have to do what he promised and
acquire Twitter, but now he is delaying the close of the deal. He has a good
reason, says Center strategic advisor Brad Berens, but it’s not the one you
think.

The late Steve Jobs was so persuasive that people said he had a “reality
distortion effect” while you were in his presence. But Jobs couldn’t charm his
way out of cancer, and it killed him.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen other persuasive people’s reality distortion
effects falter and fail, albeit with less fatal consequences. Alex Jones has
learned that while you can get away with lying about the Sandy Hook massacre for
years and make millions of dollars doing so, you cannot simply ignore the
demands of the U.S. court system. He is now facing huge legal penalties.

While my persistent fantasy of seeing Donald Trump’s favorite color on a
jumpsuit he’s forced to wear may never happen, he has learned that ignoring the
law when you’re a former president and holding onto classified documents will at
the very least cost you millions in legal fees and be a big pain in the neck.

Which brings us to Elon Musk and his endless, on-again-off-again acquisition of
Twitter. I’ve argued before that Musk never wanted to own Twitter. Instead, he
wants to sell more Teslas.

The only question that matters around Musk buying Twitter is “what’s best for
Tesla?” Tesla is the main source of Musk’s wealth, and he’s the richest
individual on the planet.  (more)




MEDIAPOCALYPSE 2025

Peak TV is here, but it’s not going to last because there isn’t enough audience
to go around. The collapse and consolidation is just a bit more than two years
away. Here are predictions from Center strategic advisor Brad Berens.

What happens after you reach a peak, any peak? You descend from the height…
whether it’s summiting Everest, climbing that hill near your home, or what
people have been calling “Peak TV” for the last few years.

There’s an amazing amount of great television out there, but it won’t last.

Advertising won’t save it. There isn’t enough audience attention to support all
the channels and services out there spending lots of money on lots of
programming. Netflix and HBO Max (Warner Bros. Discovery) are both embracing ads
to make their shows available more cheaply, but that’s mostly just a story to
keep Wall Street from panicking and devaluing their stocks.

A collapse and consolidation is coming, but it’s a bit more than two years away.
This is beyond the range that’s easy to see according to a famous notion from
Bill Gates in his 1996 book The Road Ahead: “People often overestimate what will
happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten.”

Nothing much will change between now and the next Presidential election in
November of 2024: the campaigns will pour money into any ad supported service,
and that will delay the Mediapocalypse for a few months. The Paris Summer
Olympics in 2024 will also help the entire advertising industry, particularly
NBC.

But after Inauguration Day in 2025, regardless of who the new President is, we
can expect to see big changes.

The real battle isn’t among the different creators of media: it’s between two
different business models.  (more)



WHEN A.I.’S COMPETE WITH HUMAN ARTISTS

Last week, the CEO of Getty Images pushed all AI-generated pictures off the
platform, but the real reason he did it isn’t the reason he shared. Center
strategic advisor Brad Berens explains.

Images of fake faces generated with artificial intelligence.

The great Twentieth Century polymath Herbert A. Simon had a trenchant
observation about decisions: Before we make a decision — and I’m wildly
paraphrasing here — we need to make a decision about the decision that we need
to make.

That might sound alarmingly like a Russian nesting dolls exercise, or a science
fiction cliché where an infinite loop appears, we fall into it, and then we’re
be trapped forever like Lazarus in that original Star Trek episode, but it’s
pretty simple. The prior decision concerns how much effort we’re going to put
into the decision. What are the stakes? Are we going to optimize or satisfice?

“Satisfice” is Simon’s neologism for “make satisfactory.” Readers who took high
school Latin already know that “satisfactory” comes from the words “to make
enough” as in “good enough but not great.”

Most of us already know what “optimize” means, although it’s now used so often
in bloodless business discourse that it has lost some of its original zest that
conveyed, “this decision is worth thinking hard about, worth the mental sweat
that results in the best decision.”

We satisfice most of our daily decisions both because we have to make a lot of
them, and also because most of our decisions just aren’t that important.
Moreover, we have a limited amount of decision-making energy each day; if we
squander it on what shoes to wear, then we’ll find ourselves making crappy
decisions later.

What does any of this have to do with AI-generated images?

I’m so glad you asked.  (more)




IS CIVIL WAR ON THE HORIZON?  HOW BAD COULD IT GET?

With polarization at a dangerous high, is the United States facing a second
civil war? Center director Jeffrey Cole digs in.

By Jeffrey Cole

The January 6, 2020 Capitol attack. Credit here.

In just the past three months, political tensions have moved perilously close to
the breaking point. The Red and Blue visions of what America should be have
become even more divided. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision banned a
constitutional right to abortion. For now, a woman can exercise a right in
California or New York that could lead to a felony conviction or forced delivery
of a pregnancy (under all circumstances) in the South.  The lawful search of
Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents has already put the Department of
Justice and the FBI on the enemies list for some Americans.

And, in the past week, to score political gains and photo opps in conservative
media, the governors of Florida and Texas have transported (at state expense)
migrants crossing the border to deep Blue places like Martha’s Vineyard and the
front of the Vice-President’s residence in Washington, D.C. in order to “own the
libs!”

Both sides are now openly frightened about what could happen if Donald Trump is
indicted. One side demands it. The other considers it the product of a personal
vendetta and a broad overreach of Federal power. This is yet another example of
looking at the same thing and seeing something completely different based on
which tribe we belong to.

The country will not face the possibility of an indictment and its fallout for
another two months due to the precedent of not making a decision with such
enormous political reverberations within two months of a national election. Had
James Comey, director of the FBI at the time, honored such a moratorium in 2016,
there might not be a former-President Donald Trump.

An indictment of a former president (common in Europe, Israel, and much of the
world) might well be the thing that fully unleashes our pent-up anger and leads
to violence. If the Proud Boys have been “standing by,” then this is why.

Looking back years from now, we might see January 6, 2021, as the dress
rehearsal for what may be coming.  (more)




FRONTIERS OF LIVE EXPERIENCE

New forms of live media experiences are cropping up at different scales, says
Center strategic advisor Brad Berens, but what are the differences between live
and on-demand anyway, and why does it matter?

Since the arrival of the VCR and DVR, home video, VOD, podcasting, and
streaming, the last few decades have shifted our media consumption from live
shared experiences in real time (synchronous) to on-demand experiences on our
own time (asynchronous).

While this shift to on-demand makes what we watch, when we watch, and where we
watch more convenient, it also causes the decline of shared, real-time media
experiences. This decline has other costs like a loss of what Russian
philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin called “eventness” (sobytiinost’) and what science
writer Daniel Goleman calls emotional looping.

I suspect that another cost is the increased polarization that plagues the world
because without shared, real-time experiences how can we understand that other
people can see the same things differently than we do?

These are high stakes, so it has been gratifying over the last few years to
watch the growth and evolution of new live experiences.  (more)




EXPERIENCE STACKS AND PHYSICAL OBJECTS

A price sticker triggers a trip down memory lane for Center strategic advisor
Brad Berens…and an explanation about how Experience Stacks can help us to
understand how physical objects function in our memories.

One of my ongoing topics in this column is what I call Experience Stacks, which
are the improvisational things that customers do over time with and around the
things that companies make.

Experience Stacks are hard to talk about because we know their general shape but
not their specific contents.

It’s a bit like the famous pointillist painting, “A Sunday Afternoon on the
Island of La Grande Jatte” by Georges Seurat. The closer you get to the canvas,
the less sense the picture makes as it dissolves into tiny dots: to see the
whole you need to stand back.

Experience Stacks are also hard to talk about because they apply idiosyncratic
external context to a shared experience. These applications overlap with fan
references (e.g. Easter Eggs in DVDs) or broadly recognizable cultural
references, but they aren’t the same.

In earlier columns, I’ve mostly used Experience Stacks to talk about media
experiences (movies, television, social media), but the idea of an Experience
Stack is also a useful tool when talking about physical objects.  (more)



THE LIMITS OF “PREBUNKING” IN THE FIGHT AGAINST MISINFORMATION

A study suggests that inoculating internet users against misinformation might be
more successful than fact checking later, but Center strategic advisor Brad
Berens is not optimistic that this will help much in the fight for truth in
journalism.

A new study in the journal Science Advances, “Psychological inoculation improves
resilience against misinformation on social media,” suggests that “prebunking”
online misinformation is more effective, cheaper, and more scaleable than trying
to debunk misinformation via fact checking once people have already seen it.
Prebunking tries to inoculate audiences ahead of time, like a vaccine, while
debunking fights misinformation after exposure, like antibiotics.

The study provoked a small flurry of articles and posts, including:

 * “Google Finds ‘Inoculating’ People Against Misinformation Helps Blunt Its
   Power” by Nico Grand and Tiffany Hsu (New York Times, 8/24/22)
 * “Prebunking is effective at fighting misinfo, study finds” by Seth Smalley
   (Poynter Institute, 9/1/22)
 * “Prebunking Might Be the Solution to the Misinformation Problem” by Rohit
   Bhargava (Non-Obvious Insights Newsletter, 9/8/22)
 * “When Teens Find Misinformation, These Teachers Are Ready” by Tiffany Hsu
   (New York Times, 9/8/22)

The study finds that people who watch videos explaining various misinformation
techniques (emotionally manipulative language, incoherence, false dichotomies,
scapegoating, and ad hominem attacks) are less susceptible to those techniques
when they later encounter them.

This seems like happy news because it means that if we can flood the internet
with witty videos explaining how to spot misinformation we can stop
misinformation from spreading.

I am not so optimistic for two reasons.  (more)



SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM BEDTIME STORIES…

…if you don’t want to get much sleep. Although the privacy issues are paramount,
says Center strategic advisor Brad Berens, another problem with companies
compiling vast amounts of information about us is that we don’t know what they
know.

Companies spying on Americans for our entertainment and their profit is nothing
new.

How else can we understand Candid Camera, the show that for nearly 70 years put
people in embarrassing situations, filmed those situations, and then broadcast
the footage on TV?

One of the most popular things I’ve ever written online was a single sentence
piece called “You Are Where You Live.” It featured a link to a site where you
could enter your zip code and get the disturbingly accurate Claritas/Prizm
profile for your neighborhood. This was when I was the digital editor at
EarthLink, the ISP, and ran a weekly newsletter called eLink.

“My TiVo Thinks I’m Gay.” Back in the early 2000s, a story circulated about a
straight guy who liked a show that straight guys don’t typically like. His TiVo
(remember TiVo?) concluded that he was gay and started recording gay-themed
programming. The guy then started recording more straight-seeming content
(sports, military history) in an effort to change the TiVo’s mind. This became a
plot in a couple of sitcoms. (Here’s a WSJ summary from 2002.)

Relatedly, for years the Amazon algorithm must have thought that I suffer from
Sybil-like dissociative identity disorder because my entire family uses the same
Amazon Prime account, which is under my name. This also used to be the case with
Netflix, but now the streaming service has profiles for different users.

In 2012, Charles Duhigg reported a New York Times story about how an angry
father confronted the manager of his local Target because his teen daughter had
started receiving coupons for a first-trimester pregnancy. It turned out that
the daughter really was pregnant but hadn’t shared the news with Dad. Target had
data scientists tracking purchases (like unscented skin lotion) closely
associated with early pregnancy and then sending coupons. What’s unsettling is
that Target didn’t stop doing this sort of thing after the incident: instead,
the retailer started hiding pregnancy-related coupons inside a “nothing to see
here” mass of other coupons.  (more)




THE NEW YORK TIMES’ MORAL LAPSE

The Gray Lady blew it when it decided to review Jared Kushner’s new memoir, no
matter how scathing the review. Your correspondent also blew it by posting about
the review.

By Brad Berens

When people learn that I’m an atheist often the first thing they say is, “oh, so
you don’t believe in God?”

“No,” I push back gently. “That’s not what atheism means.”

Defining atheism as “you don’t believe in God” keeps God at the center of the
conversation. It reinscribes God’s importance, defying God’s authority but
accepting it as the thing to defy. This is the territory of literary characters
like Milton’s Satan and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus who try to rebel against God and
fail.

In contrast, what atheism really means is “I am skeptical about the value of
belief in a supreme being.” It asks, what does the notion of a supreme being get
people in the first place? Are the benefits worth the cost either to the
individual or to society? Atheism puts aside the questions around the actual
existence of a supreme being because there’s no scientific evidence either way.
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” as the saying goes, but
neither is it evidence of presence.

Stepping away from the unanswerable (scientifically speaking) question of a
supreme being’s existence allows us to ask different questions.

The difference between the conventional definition of atheism and the one I’m
describing here is like the difference between immoral and amoral. An immoral
person does things that he or she believes to be wrong (and feels guilty about
it). An amoral person doesn’t let moral questions get in the way of doing things
(and feels no guilt).

Don’t get me wrong: there is no connection between amorality and atheism besides
the Latin prefix “a.” I’m a deeply moral person—I believe in right and wrong in
the world and strive to do right things. I am also an atheist.

Ideally, we’d have separate words for the two things I’m talking about:
anti-deity (for the people who reject God’s authority but accept God’s
existence) and atheism (for the people like me who question the benefit for
individuals and society of a belief in a supreme being).

By now, you’re probably wondering what any of this has to do with The New York
Times, which is fair.  (more)




WHY WALMART SHOULD BUY PARAMOUNT

We heard rumors last week that the retail giant wants to add a subscription to a
streaming service to its Walmart+ rival to Amazon Prime. Walmart needs to think
bigger.

By Brad Berens

Note: I wrote and first published the following column on Sunday, August 14,
before the rumors came true the following day: Walmart had signed an agreement
with Paramount. You can find a review of that news here. However, nothing about
the news changes my argument that Walmart is missing a bigger opportunity, which
is the topic of what follows.
__________

We humans are cognitive misers, which is a term psychologists use to describe
how we think as little as possible about the things we don’t want to think
about. When behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman talks about System 1 and System
2 in his famous book Thinking, Fast & Slow, nimble System 1 is the cognitive
miser side of the mind. It uses shortcuts to get at the fastest answer rather
than the best answer to a question.

I suspect that only about 10% of advertising depends on System 2, the
lazy-but-methodical, data-driven side of the mind that sifts data, builds pros
and cons lists, and makes good decisions but not fast ones. That first 10%
(System 2) hacks its way into our awareness, and then the remaining 90% (System
1) works to automate that awareness into reflexive, routine use and purchase.
Brands, as I’ve discussed before, exists to excuse people from thinking.

Amazon is unparalleled at creating no-brainer value propositions. Amazon Prime
encourages us not to think about the $139 annual subscription cost: the service
provides so much value (two-day shipping, a video service, a music service, free
books and magazines and videogames, discounts at Whole Foods) that it repels
thinking like a forcefield. Plus, for just about any individual purchase you
know that—even if it’s not the best price—Amazon will have a fair price, and you
don’t have to worry that it will take too long for your purchase to get there.
(more)



EXPERIENCE STACKS, MOVIE STARS, AND THE PROBLEM WITH FACEBOOK

How we experience the work of movies stars is different than how we experience
the work of actors, says Center strategic advisor Brad Berens, and that
difference also helps to understand what we lose when we spend a lot of time on
Facebook.

The job of an actor and the job of a movie star are similar — they overlap — but
they are not the same. The actor helps to tell a convincing story, and we forget
that it’s an actor pretending to be somebody else. The movie star never lets us
forget that we’ve seen that star pretending to be other people at other times.

Sam Rockwell is a terrific actor: for years I did not recognize him from role to
role, only to sit up in my seat (“That guy??”) as the end credits unspooled. Tom
Cruise is a movie star. Yes, he is also a talented actor who has been nominated
for and won many awards, but you never forget that you’re watching Tom Cruise…
even when he is buried in makeup and a fat suit like he was as Hollywood agent
Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder (right).

Actors and movie stars create different kinds of immersion that ask us, the
viewers, to perform different kinds of cognitive work. With the actor, we are
immersed in the story. With the movie star, we move back and forth between being
immersed in the story and being immersed in the telling of that story.

Another way of putting this is that the Experience Stack an actor helps us to
create is different than the Experience Stack that a movie star helps us to
create.  (more)




A NATIONAL MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS

Data from the Center’s COVID Reset Project suggests that long after the virus
disappears, Americans will still be wrestling with the psychic damage of the
last few years. Center director Jeffrey Cole explains.


How long does it take before the painful memories of a national trauma fade
away?

Long after we settle the sticky issues around return to work (probably with most
of us returning to the office most of the time), the mental toll of living
through the COVID pandemic (even if we never lost a loved one or caught it
ourselves) will linger.

Decades from now, today’s teenagers will recount for their grandchildren the
year or more we moved our lives inside, afraid of contact with anyone except
those living with us. They will revisit the pain of what we have all lived
through.

The Center’s COVID Reset Project shows that the toll on our mental health will
be, by far, the most important legacy of COVID. It will cast the longest
shadow.  (more)



EXPERIENCE STACKS: TOP GUN, STAR TREK, SPIDER-MAN

What are Experience Stacks? And why is it important, asks Center strategic
advisor Brad Berens, for businesses and customers for a wide range of industries
to understand them?

Many companies refer to their selection and arrangement of software and hardware
as a “Tech Stack” that focuses on the creation, management, production, and
tracking of business activities.

On the reception side, we can think of the activities that people do over time
with and around the things companies make and sell as an Experience Stack.

“Over time” are two important words in that last sentence because Experience
Stacks sit between Customer Experience and Brand.

Customer Experience is about in-the-moment usability with a focus on whether or
not the customer buys something. Brand is about a synthesis of the rational and
non-rational reflexes a user or customer gradually builds up about a product or
service. Brands exists to save people from having to think.

In contrast, Experience Stacks organize and connect different moments of
thinking. Although synthesis occurs over time, the individual moments stay
active in a thinker’s memory. Different thinkers have different, although
overlapping, Experience Stacks around the same products.  (more)




WHY IT’S SO HARD TO THINK

Digital technologies crowd out our analog ability to make connections. That’s a
problem, says Center strategic advisor Brad Berens, since analogical thinking is
what makes us human.

In the middle of the night, Sting’s song “Moon over Bourbon Street” went through
my head. I hadn’t thought of it in years, maybe decades. I love Sting, but I
hadn’t listened to his music recently. Why did this song wake me up?

Some context: I had opened my eyes to cloudy skies. I was in a sleeping bag, no
tent, on a warm summer night. This was day two of a glorious, five-day white
water rafting trip on the lower Salmon River in Idaho. Here’s one image:

We were off the grid: no electricity, no internet. I bought a solar charger for
our phones so that we could continue to use the cameras, but the phones didn’t
connect to anything.

“Moon over Bourbon Street” is from Sting’s 1985 debut solo album The Dream of
the Blue Turtles. It’s a dramatic monologue told from the point of view of a
predator who might be a werewolf, but it’s ambiguous. The song was not the
album’s biggest hit (“If You Love Somebody Set Them Free”), and there was no
reason for it to be in my mind.

Or was there?  (more)



RETURNING TO WORK: THE WAR THAT IS COMING

Employers and employees are at loggerheads about whether and how often to come
back to the office, and the situation is likely to get worse. Center Director
Jeffrey Cole explains.

Five of the seven sectors of life that we track in our COVID Reset
Project (communities, shopping, learning, travel and entertainment) are sorted
out and resolved as we come out of the pandemic (and we think we are indeed
coming out, no matter what anyone at the CDC might have to say about it).

This time: the workplace

Far from being close to settled, a war is brewing over returning to the
workplace, with different parties already drawing battle lines. Elon Musk, who
is never a good barometer of normal behavior but a good bellwether for change,
previewed the war when he said to Tesla workers reluctant to fully return to the
office, “Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum
(and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla.”

Few workers are ready now, or perhaps ever, to return full-time to the office.
The Center’s work in the early days of COVID showed that only 10% wanted
pre-pandemic work schedules, while 30% never wanted to return to the workplace.
A few months into the pandemic was enough to convince 60% of workers that they
would like a hybrid future—coming into the office only some of the time.

Over two years without a workforce in the office was enough to convince most
employers that they want everyone back. Some bosses want to walk the hallways
and see the troops. Some believe less work with worse quality occurs at home.

This proposition needs to be rigorously evaluated.  (more)



WHAT TWITTER SHOULD DO NEXT (AFTER MUSK)

Now that the Tesla CEO is riding off into the sunset, says Center strategic
advisor Brad Berens, the social media company needs to skip the protracted court
battle and focus on what’s important.

On Friday, Elon Musk made official his desire to wiggle out of his Twitter
acquisition.

Many readers kindly and gratifyingly reached out or posted saying “Brad, you
called this one!” Why? On April 17, a few days after Musk announced his bid to
buy Twitter, I argued that he wasn’t serious. It wasn’t a narcissistic,
adolescent bid for attention: it was a savvy earned media play to sell cars.
Then, on May 1 after the board accepted Musk’s offer, I doubled down saying he
still wasn’t serious.

Even if the market hadn’t tanked and Twitter’s stock price hadn’t dropped to
$36.81 (losing nearly half its value from a year ago), Musk still wouldn’t want
Twitter. There is no bid to renegotiate: he has never wanted to own the company.

Since Friday, pearl-clutching pundits have busied themselves speculating about
how much Musk will have to pay to get out of this. Will it be the $1B kill fee
articulated in the bid? But wait! He waived diligence. Will he have to pay the
full $42B and still acquire the company? Or pay the difference between his offer
price and Twitter’s market cap today? I’m confident that the answers are “maybe”
on the first and “heck, no” on the other two.

But who cares?

The important question is not “how much will Elon pay?” but “what should Twitter
do next?”  (more)



LEARNING, SHOPPING, COMMUNITIES, TRAVEL, AND ENTERTAINMENT: COMING OUT OF COVID,
WHICH CHANGES WERE TEMPORARY AND WHICH ARE PERMANENT?

Five sectors of human life have been changed permanently by the pandemic. Center
Director Jeffrey Cole digs into what’s different forever.


As millions of Americans celebrated Independence Day by pouring onto to
airplanes and heading to beaches, parks, sporting events, and concerts, we also
celebrated independence from the COVID pandemic.

This pandemic is over — whether it really is or not. It doesn’t matter what
science or common sense say, even as cases and hospitalizations are climbing
again.

We need COVID to be over.

At the Center, we believe this is a once-in-a-lifetime disruption (hopefully
something worse doesn’t come along). First graders many years in the future will
regale their grandchildren with stories of scrubbing mail, wearing masks, and
quarantining at home for months at a time.

Two months into the pandemic, we launched the COVID Reset Project that tracks
seven sectors of life to understand how they may or may not permanently change. 
(more)



THE WORLD IN APRIL 2023

In 2011, my near-future science fiction novel Redcrosse came out. The action was
set in 2023, which is just a few short months from now. How clear was my vision?


By Brad Berens

Last week at a film festival, I was trapped in an endless concessions queue that
(bonus!) doubled as an internet dead zone. After I had exhausted small talk with
my fellow prisoners (“Wow, long line.” “This is going to take a while…”
“Yeah…”), I dug around in the Kindle app on my phone for something to read.

I alighted on Redcrosse, the near-future science fiction dystopia I wrote that
came out in 2011. It had been some years since I visited that world and that
place in my head. In the intervening time two things happened: first, I could
read it without focusing only on the things that I’d change. Second, the story
of Redcrosse starts on April 27, 2023, which is just 10 months from now. Gulp.
Yikes. Zoinks. But wait…

I had a scorecard! I could see how right and wrong I’d been in my predictions
about where life in this country was headed. Hence, this column.  (more)



NFTS, 5G, HUD: COLLIDING TRENDS AND THE INTERMEDIATE FUTURE

In 2022, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are just the latest speculative craze, but
if you combine them with other trends and squint, says Center strategic advisor
Brad Berens, then you can see a much different future.


I’m an NFT skeptic. They seem like digital litter—cybernetic landfill that will
clutter the e-commons like plastic bags blowing across a public park. This
skepticism is unusual for me. I’m usually an early adopter, as the elephants
graveyard in my garage of once exciting/now vanished tech will attest.

Blockchain makes sense when it comes to smart contracts, although thinking about
cryptocurrencies gives me migraines. But NFTs? Do we really need to keep more
things forever? The internet is already written in indelible laundry pen. Even
the name “Non-Fungible Token” seems like an idea that can’t quite lurch into
focus.

The use case for NFTs today is weak, but some people felt that way about
smartphones back around 2007. “I have a perfectly good feature phone. What do I
need with all those app things?” Skeptics had to play around, live inside the
tech in order to discover things like the endlessly useful flashlight app or
built-in kitchen timer that make life easier, let alone having an entertainment
center, telecommunications hub, and movie studio that all fit in a pocket.

So when it comes to NFTs I try to bear in mind one my favorite quotes about the
future. It’s from Bill Gates and the 1996 edition of his book, The Road Ahead:
“People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and
underestimate what will happen in ten.”  (more)



SEE NO EVIL. EXCEPT WHEN WE NEED TO

Sometimes the cost of not showing something horrific is too high. Would gun
legislation move faster if people could see the violence of Uvalde and other
mass shootings? Center director Jeffrey Cole explores.

The news coming out of Uvalde, Texas in late May was horrific. Nineteen
elementary school children and two teachers were murdered by a lone, crazed
gunman. Only by entering the deep recesses of a diseased soul of unimaginable
evil could we understand how someone could tell a 10-year-old “it is time to
die,” then look into their eyes and pull the trigger.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, reporters told the stories of the twenty-one
human beings who did not make it out of the classroom. Earlier in the day,
several of the fourth graders had been honored at a ceremony for academic
distinction. Parents shared heartbreaking details of the lives of the children
they would never see again.

From the same reporters we learned of the damage that an AR-15 assault weapon
does to a human body. It is manufactured not just to stop someone but to inflict
irreparable damage, making recovery nearly impossible. It tears the body apart
so much that the families could not make visual identification of the remains.

Instead, the authorities had to rely on DNA and clothing to identify loved ones.
The images we conjured in our minds were so devastating that it has led to the
first bi-partisan discussion of even minor revisions to gun laws and policies in
twenty years.  (more)



ANALOG LIVES IN A DIGITAL WORLD

What makes things special, memorable, satisfying, says Center strategic advisor
Brad Berens, often has less to do with the things themselves than with the
context where we experience them.

Some mysteries are eternal.

If the Coyote can afford all those expensive items sold by the Acme Company,
then why doesn’t he just visit a desert KFC to eat plumper poultry than the
scrawny Roadrunner? Why doesn’t Charlie Brown ask somebody more trustworthy to
hold the football? Why does Mr. Darcy jump in that river? Why can’t a genius
Professor who can make internal combustion engines out of bamboo fix a boat to
escape from Gilligan’s Island? And why do AirBNB hosts always have thimble-sized
coffee mugs in their kitchens?

That last one gets me every time.

I prefer coffee mugs large enough to double as hot tubs. More times than I care
to confess, when staying at an AirBNB, I’ve dashed to a nearby store that sells
adequately-sized mugs and purchased one so that the rate of my early morning
coffee intake need not change.  (more)



WHAT FOX NEWS SHOULD HAVE SAID

A new campaign by Check My Ads to get advertisers to stop supporting the
conservative news network, reports Center strategic advisor Brad Berens,
prompted an entirely inadequate response.


On Thursday, the folks at Check My Ads received widespread coverage about their
new campaign to stop advertisers from supporting Fox News. The three Check My
Ads founders—Claire Atkin, Nandini Jammi, and Mikel Ellcessor—believe that Fox
News has created and disseminated disinformation about the 2020 Presidential
Election and other topics. (You can see representative coverage here and here.)

Regardless of whether or not you agree with Check My Ads, the statement Fox News
put out in response was inadequate.

The Check My Ads Campaign

What’s unusual about Check My Ads is that they’ve gone after online advertising
exchanges instead of advertisers themselves or their advertising agencies. 
(more)



WILL ADVERTISING MAKE STREAMING LOOK LIKE BROADCAST TELEVISION?

With most streamers already accepting advertising and Netflix joining by the end
of this year, what does that mean for programming? Will creativity be stifled to
satisfy the demands of advertisers? Center director Jeffrey Cole digs in.

The party’s over.

Imagine The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, or even the recent four-hour tribute to
George Carlin appearing on broadcast television. All were on HBO. Carlin’s most
famous routine is “the seven words you can never say on television.” Even The
Marvelous Mrs. Maisel or Ted Lasso could not be shown on network television
without so many edits for language or nudity that they would be unrecognizable
to fans.

We pay up to $20 a month to watch content that is not censored and only
available on pay-cable or streaming. The fact it is not interrupted by ads is
important, but it is the lack of a nanny deciding what we are allowed to see and
hear that has really driven the rise of pay channels.

All that is about to change. (more)




A SIMPLE TEST FOR WHAT COUNTS AS “THE METAVERSE”

Lots of walled gardens and videogame platforms are now touting themselves as
part of the metaverse, says Center strategic advisor Brad Berens, but there’s an
easy way to tell if it’s true. Plus, revisiting Neil Postman’s “Amusing
Ourselves to Death” in our digital age.

Two shorter (although slightly connected) main stories this week…

1. Revisiting Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death”

If you subscribe to Audible, then you should know that terrific audio content
comes as part of the subscription—originals, podcasts you can’t get anywhere
else, and audiobooks. Right now, one of the included-with-subscription
audiobooks is Neil Postman’s 1985 masterpiece, Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. (You can find the paper/ebook
version here.)

Descriptions like “prescient” or “ahead of its time” don’t capture the
importance of Postman’s thinking. Re-reading or listening to the book today
helps to explain Fox News, Trump, and our hyper-polarized society.

Postman’s argument is that, as the USA moved from a print-based culture to a
television-based culture, American attitudes toward news shifted from a desire
for information to a desire for entertainment. Americans had been afraid of the
world turning out like the dystopian dictatorship of Orwell’s 1984, but it had
really turned out like the self-medicating society of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New
World.  (more)




TRUST IS ANALOG

A handshake, says Center strategic advisor Brad Berens, is worth a thousand Zoom
calls. This has implications for going back to the office, building corporate
culture, and democracy.

You’re on a short elevator ride with one other person. Neither of you speak, but
you get a lot of information.

Does the other person politely keep a distance? Make momentary eye contact? If
you’re a woman and the other person is a man, does he look at parts of your body
in a creepy way?

If you’re a black guy, do you see the other person uncomfortably pull a bag
closer or shift a package to the other side, thinking that you don’t notice the
racism?

If you can smell the other person, then is it because she or he just went
running? OK, the person is health conscious. Can you smell perfume or cologne?
OK, the person is going out. If the person smells bad, then your Spidey sense
tingles: am I trapped in an elevator with somebody who isn’t stable?

None of that information comes through on Zoom.  (more)



“WELL, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO NOW?”

The recent crypto currency downfall eerily echoes the dot-com bubble of 2002 —
two moments when disruption failed or at least appears to have failed. Why do
many cheer when they believe disruption has failed?  Center Director Jeffrey
Cole explains.

“Thank God I never invested in Crypto!”

“See, it was always a scam. Now the laws of nature have been restored.”

“Those who thought they would get rich quick have gotten what they deserved!”

“Now it’s back to business as usual.”

“Maybe the name Crypto.com Stadium will be removed, and it will be Staples
Center again.”

It has not been a good year for investors. Even Amazon and Apple — and
especially Netflix and Facebook — are down, more than just an adjustment.

But the year has been particularly harsh for those who invested in crypto
currencies like Bitcoin, whether they saw them as extraordinary investments or a
new and digital way of moving money around and eventually becoming a currency.

This month, crypto currencies lost over $200 billion in one day. By some
estimates the world of crypto has lost over $3 trillion from its highest point.
These are investments that can grow by 90% one day and be down 80% the next day.
Perhaps this is just a blip on their way to economic dominance.

But that’s unlikely.  (more)




THE WEB3/CREATOR PARADOX

The latest phase of the digital revolution, says Center strategic advisor Brad
Berens, is a Read/Write/Own structure where more culture creators can join a new
Artistic Middle Class…maybe.

Calling something “Web3” makes it sound like everybody agrees on what it means.
That’s not the case: we’re at the start of our Web3 journey.

It might be more accurate to call it Web3.001.

There are different shapes of Web3, including DeFi (Decentralized Finance),
Cryptocurrencies, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), and digital
goods like Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). This boosterish PDF from Andreessen
Horowitz, a Venture Capital (VC) firm that has invested heavily in Web3, is
useful if a bit uncritical.

In this column, I’m focusing on creators—artists—and how they might and might
not use Web3 to make a living.

Web3 in Context

It’s important not to talk about trends in isolation because trends tend to
collide. Here is my current, most optimistic model for how Web3 fits with other
trends. (more)



THE FRAGILE GLORY OF “STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS,” PLUS…

…WHY APPLE IS THE RIGHT ACQUIRER FOR TWITTER

Two smaller stories this time from the Center’s strategic advisor Brad Berens.


The Fragile Glory of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds”

I’m a nerd. A big nerd. Across many directions. (Just ask my kids.) One of my
biggest and longest-term nerdy interests is Star Trek. For just one piece of
proof, in the 1980s I went to a design-your-own t-shirt store called “Chicken
Shirt” in my home town (Encino, California) and created a t-shirt that said
“Trekkie” on the back.* (This was from the heart but—shocker!—did not win me
cool kid points at school.)

You can imagine my joy when Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiered two
Thursdays ago on Paramount+.

The show is fantastic!

It’s a prequel to and stylistically hearkens back to The Original Series (TOS,
from the 1960s) with self-contained adventures rather than season-long arcs,
although the character development arcs do extend from episode to episode.
Strange New Worlds has the breakthrough racial and gender diversity of the
original (although it’s strangely devoid of LGBTQ+ characters, unlike its
sibling show, Discovery, and why are there no Jewish characters?), and shares
the original’s “we can build a better future” optimism.

We really need that now.  (more)



“CHANGE YOUR LIFE” PRODUCTIVITY APPS & HOW TO USE THEM

So much information comes at us all day, every day, that it’s a wonder we ever
get anything done. Center strategic advisor Brad Berens describes a collection
of apps, products, and services to help you manage the torrent.

Recently, in Distraction Audits & Why to Do One, I discussed how information and
attention are inversely proportional. Or, as the great 20th Century polymath
Herbert Simon put it, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
The earlier issue was about throttling back distractions. This week’s issue is
about managing the super-soaker of information squirting at your face all day,
every day.

(Note: I first wrote about the suite of applications, services, products and
gadgets I use to keep my head above water in 2012, then updated it in 2015, but
so much has changed that it’s time for an update.)

Here are my “Change Your Life” productivity apps and how I use them.

This is a long piece, but, unlike my usual, it’s skimmable. I’ve divvied up the
apps into sections, alphabetized within each section:  (more)



WHAT NETFLIX MUST DO TO SURVIVE

Three years ago, Center director Jeffrey Cole predicted that after a charmed
decade, Netflix, faced with rising competition, might be navigating treacherous
waters. Cole’s prescription for what the streaming giant needed to do in 2019 is
even more relevant today.

Until two weeks ago, Netflix has led a charmed life. It successfully transformed
itself from a DVD-by-mail competitor to Blockbuster Video (which turned down the
opportunity to buy Netflix for $50 million) into the first superstar streaming
service.

For years, Netflix had complete access to the best product from all the
Hollywood studios. Its unparalleled success in attracting subscribers across the
globe then gave it massive budgets to create original programming exclusively
for Netflix.

Disney, realizing that by selling its content to Netflix it was creating a
competitive monster, decided to stop making its content available outside the
company. The other studios followed suit. Soon, it became clear they would start
their own streaming services. Still, Netflix had a budget of $20 billion (this
year) to fund its own content; Netflix grew like a prairie weed when it had
almost no competition for the consumer’s wallet.  (more)



ELON MUSK STILL DOESN’T WANT TWITTER

Although the Twitter board accepting Musk’s acquisition offer seems to settle
the issue about the Tesla founder’s true motives, Center strategic advisor Brad
Berens suggests there’s a lot more to this story under the surface.

Two weeks ago in Musk, Trump, Twitter, and New Media Math, I argued that Elon
Musk doesn’t really want to buy Twitter: he just wants to use the earned media
to help him sell more Teslas.

Then, on Monday, to my surprise the Twitter board accepted Musk’s $44 Billion
offer, for which Musk had arranged the financing. I thought, “Boy, did I call
that one wrong,” and contemplated sending out a mid-week, “mea maxima culpa”
special issue.

But by Wednesday I was back on the fence. That was the day Musk criticized
Twitter’s chief legal officer, Vijaya Gadde, over her handling of the Hunter
Biden story. This is just one of many of Musk’s tweets criticizing the company
that he is trying to acquire.

This violates the terms of the takeover agreement filed with the SEC, which
includes: “the Equity Investor shall be permitted to issue Tweets about the
Merger or the transactions contemplated hereby so long as such Tweets do not
disparage the Company or any of its Representatives.”  (more)



AMAZON’S NEW PAY-WITH-YOUR-PALM TECH AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

Biometrics aren’t new, but a fresh payment technology turns Amazon into a
competitor to Apple Pay, Google Pay, Square, Venmo, the Cash App, PayPal and
others.  Center strategic advisor Brad Berens speculates: can the Bank of Amazon
be far behind?

If you live in Austin and love experiencing the sharpest edge of technology,
then head to the Whole Foods at Arbor Trails. There you can use a new service
called Amazon One to pay for your groceries simply by putting your palm on a
scanner. Here’s an excerpt from a fascinating piece in the April 19 edition of
Progressive Grocer:

Customer enrollment in the Amazon One service takes less than a minute, which
involves linking credit/debit card info and creating palm signatures for one or
both palms. A palm signature is created when a customer holds their palm over
the Amazon One device, allowing the technology to evaluate multiple aspects of
the palm. With no two palms alike, vision technology analyzes all aspects to
select the most distinct identifiers on a palm to create a unique palm
signature.

Once they’re enrolled and done shopping, customers come to the checkout counter
or point of sale, hover their hand over the Amazon One device for about a second
or so, and the card linked to their palm will be charged for their purchase.
Customers don’t have to worry about fumbling with their wallets and handbags
anymore to pull out credit cards at checkout counters.

Some things worth noting:

The service is called Amazon One, not Whole Foods One. Amazon always has at
least two reasons for everything it does (I call this “the two-strategy
strategy”), so expect the service to roll out first to other Amazon
brick-and-mortar retail environments and then as a service that other businesses
can use.

However, caveat emptor: when other businesses do enable Amazon One, then they’ll
be sharing some of their purchase data with Amazon, which might not work out so
well for the other businesses.  (more)



THE SLAP HEARD ROUND THE WORLD — EXCEPT ON ABC?

Since Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at The Oscars, everybody has had an opinion
about Smith’s action, but what about ABC’s decision to censor Smith’s post-slap
profanity? Center founder Jeffrey Cole weighs in.

What did he say?

The adult audience viewing the 94th Oscar Broadcast on March 27 could tell that
something had happened when Will Smith got out of his seat and approached Chris
Rock as he was about to list the nominees for best documentary feature film.

Smith appeared to slap the comedian. It was difficult to tell if it was a staged
bit or if something completely unprecedented had occurred. After Smith returned
to his seat he was shouting at Rock, but it was impossible to hear what Smith
said because ABC bleeped out the entire exchange.

Had the viewers at home been able to hear what those in the Nokia Theater heard
(especially Lupita Nyong’o, sitting next to Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett
Smith), they would have known something intense and unpleasant had happened.
Watching from afar, we could see the stunned look of Nyong’o and know it was not
good.

If the Smith-Rock verbal altercation not been completely censored, viewers would
have quickly realized that the slap was not comical. It was a physical assault.
They also would have seen a side of Will Smith that might have been a
once-in-his-lifetime outburst or a reflection of a deeper anger running through
his personality that he has kept hidden until that moment.

In short, without bleeping, the audience would have understood what it saw.
Instead, it had to wait for others to interpret it for them or go to YouTube or
other places on the internet to see what they missed on the broadcast.  (more)



MUSK, TRUMP, TWITTER, AND NEW MEDIA MATH

Looking at the Tesla CEO’s offer to buy Twitter through the lens of AQ
(Attention Quotient), says Center strategic advisor Brad Berens, makes Elon
Musk’s real motives clear.

It’s a good thing for the commonwealth that Elon Musk was born in South Africa;
that fact bars him from seeking the U.S. presidency. Otherwise, it’s a sure bet
that he’d run as a third-party candidate in 2024. He’d win, too. Musk
understands the media better than all but one other person.

That one other person is Donald Trump.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not a Trump fan. I loathe the man and think that he was
the worst president in the history of this great country. But I recognize that
Trump is the greatest marketer the world has seen since the early Catholic
Church (in its world domination days before the Protestant breakaways).

Musk is a better person than Trump across nearly all criteria:

 * Trump inflates his net worth (he’s a fake billionaire); Musk is the world’s
   richest individual
 * Trump’s products are terrible and fail; Musk makes best-in-class products
   (disclosure: I drive a Tesla 3; it’s the greatest car I’ve ever had)
 * Trump makes the world smaller and worse; Musk creates technologies that make
   the world bigger and better, even planning to take humanity to Mars
 * Trump famously doesn’t read; Musk reads voraciously
 * Where the two men are the same is when it comes to playing the media like
   Joshua Bell plays his Stradivarius: they are virtuosos.

In a column a few years ago, I posited a new metric for attention called AQ, for
“Attention Quotient.”

If IQ (Intelligence Quotient) measures raw intellect and EQ (Emotional
Intelligence) measures self-awareness and empathy, then AQ measures how much raw
attention an individual can pull towards him or herself.  (more)



APPLE, ALASKA AIRLINES, TACO BELL & SWEETGREEN: THE TROUBLE WITH SUBSCRIPTIONS

Typically, people explain new subscription models as a way of stabilizing
monthly revenue. But as Center strategic advisor Brad Berens suggests,
subscriptions also point to a massive failure in advertising.

Two recent articles caught my eye about a new vogue for subscriptions for
products that are typically transactional.

The first has a misleading title: “Apple Is Working on a Hardware Subscription
Service for iPhones” (Bloomberg, March 24th) is misleading because the planned
service actually covers all Apple hardware software.

In the March 29 episode of The Pivot Podcast (to which I am devoted), Kara
Swisher and Scott Galloway talked about the customer experience side of an Apple
subscription in what I can only call twin arias of self-involved entitlement
that nonetheless had savvy observations (it starts at 27:00… I laughed and
thought at the same time, a neat trick).

The second article’s title is accurate: “Airlines, Restaurant Chains Join the
Subscription Bandwagon” (Wall Street Journal, March 30th). The subscriptions
covered are odd. (more)



“THE GREAT RESIGNATION” — IT’S NOT ABOUT JOBS, IT’S ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH

Although 50% of Americans want a new job, that’s only one part of a bigger
story. Center founder Jeffrey Cole explains the broader context.

As we come out of the greatest disruption of our lifetime, half of us want to
find another job, and half of those in a different industry. The toll the
pandemic has taken on our lives is producing a mountain (actually, an entire
mountain range) of statistics. None is more compelling than the 50% that make up
what social scientists are calling “The Great Resignation.”

The last time we witnessed such a seismic shift in the employment market — with
massive job openings and transitions — was in World War II when millions of
soldiers went off to Europe and Asia. To fill those jobs, millions of women
entered the workplace for the first time.

It should come as no surprise that we have not all come through COVID equally. 
(more)




HOW RISK IS CHANGING

What do Tinder, Free-Range Kids, Wattpad, CoComelon, and the movie business all
have to do with each other, asks Center strategic advisor Brad Berens

The world seems more dangerous today than it ever has before, but study after
study shows that we’re safer now. Hans Rosling’s Factfulness, Matt Ridley’s
Rational Optimist, and Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature are three
books that dig into this.

In part, life feels more dangerous today because we have so much information
about bad things that happen via the news and social media, both of which are
incentivized to lead with what agitates us. Don’t get me wrong: horrible things
happen to people all over the world all the time, like Russian atrocities in
Ukraine. For most people reading this piece, though, things outside your front
door aren’t deadly.

Life also feels more dangerous because as individuals we have less practice
taking everyday risks today than we did a few years ago.  (more)




MORE COVID WINNERS

From Zoom to cannabis, from telemedicine to leisure travel, Center director
Jeffrey Cole analyzes the industries coming out of the pandemic stronger than
ever.

This is the third of a three-part series about the winners and losers as we
start to emerge from the COVID pandemic.

In Part 1, I covered COVID losers: cash, Uber and Lyft, in-person shopping,
commercial real estate, business travel, and mental health.

Fortunately for all of us, there are more winners than losers, so I started
reviewing the winners last time in Part 2, talking about Amazon, Disney,
Netflix, and Labor.

Let’s continue with more winners.

(more)




WHY AMAZON WILL BUY STARBUCKS

The ecommerce and grocery store giant, predicts Center strategic advisor Brad
Berens, needs expertise that only America’s favorite coffee shop can provide.

I’m not usually one for predictions with due dates. I see the trends, where the
dominos are falling, but spotting precisely when a trend will happen is harder.
This time, though, I’ll go out on a limb because two events this week have
combined to make me think that Amazon will buy Starbucks within the next two
years.  (more)




COVID’S BIG WINNERS

With infection levels dropping and the end of COVID seeming to be here, what
companies were big winners because of how they reacted to the pandemic? Center
director Jeffrey Cole digs in.

Last time, we looked at the industries and companies that lost ground during the
COVID Pandemic. This week we look at the winners, those who emerged stronger
than ever before. We often resist finding new ways of doing things until its
necessary. During COVID lockdown, it became absolutely necessary.

Trends accelerated, some by years. A few well-placed and nimble companies
benefited.

Amazon

How do you find the right superlatives?

In the first nine months of 2020, Amazon saw its earnings increase 70%. No big
deal for a startup experiencing explosive growth, but at the beginning of 2020
Amazon was already a trillion-dollar behemoth. The stock price — at a record
high of $1,785 on March 13, 2020 — almost doubled to $3,401 in a little over
five months!

You can’t make these numbers up!  (more)



CENTER RELEASES 17TH STUDY ON THE IMPACT OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY IN AMERICA

February 19 — The Center for the Digital Future has released the 2021 Digital
Future Project, the longest-running study of Americans and their behavior and
views about computers and mobile technology, internet use and trust, and the
effects of social media.

The report continues the Center’s work as one of the first research studies to
explore the impact of digital technology on internet users in the United States.
The Center was the first to develop a longitudinal panel study of these issues,
beginning in 2000.

For more on the 2021 Digital Future Project and to download the report, click
here.




AT A GLANCE: THE CONSEQUENCES OF ONLINE PRIVACY VIOLATIONS

From the Center’s 2021 Digital Future Project

Infographic by Michael Bronstein.

See all of the Center’s infographics here.




AT A GLANCE: ONLINE BULLYING AND HARASSMENT

From the Center’s 2021 Digital Future Project

Infographic by Ani Tookoian.

See all of the Center’s infographics here.



CENTER STUDY FINDS CNN AND ANDERSON COOPER LEAD AS AMERICA’S PRIMARY CABLE NEWS
SOURCES ABOUT COVID-19; POLITICAL STANCE POLARIZES VIEWS ABOUT CABLE MEDIA

October 8 — More Americans rely on CNN as their primary information source about
COVID-19 than other cable outlets, and Anderson Cooper is trusted by more
Americans than other cable commentators, a study by the USC Center for the
Digital Future (CDF) has found.

The CDF study also reports extreme differences in views about cable news
channels and commentators based on political viewpoint of the respondents.

CNN’s popularity declines, but still leads as cable news source

The CDF study, conducted twice since the pandemic began (April and June), found
CNN continues to be the primary source for pandemic news for the largest
percentage of Americans – 40% in the June study, down from 49% in April. Fox
news held steady with 33% reporting the network as the primary source about the
pandemic, the same as in April. The popularity of MSNBC grew in the June study –
now 24% of Americans, up from 14% in April.  (more)




RELATIONSHIPS AT HOME DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC CONTINUE TO IMPROVE, REPORTS
CENTER STUDY

October 1, 2020 — In spite of the stress from COVID-19 and stay-at-home
restrictions, many Americans continue to say the relationships with their
spouses and children have improved during the pandemic, a study by the USC
Center for the Digital Future (CDF) has found.

The CDF study, conducted twice since the pandemic began, found in its first
survey in April that large percentages of Americans say that relationships at
home are better since the pandemic began – and those percentages increased
during the Center’s second study in June.  (more)




MANY AMERICANS CONTINUE TO MAINTAIN UNHEALTHY LIFESTYLE HABITS DURING COVID-19;
OVEREATING, ALCOHOL DRINKING, AND MARIJUANA USE INCREASES WHILE EXERCISE
DECLINES, REPORTS CENTER STUDY

September 24, 2020 — After more than six months of living in a pandemic, large
percentages of Americans continue to indulge in unhealthy lifestyle habits,
including overeating, and increased use of alcohol and marijuana – all while
many are exercising less, according to a study of the cultural impact of
COVID-19 conducted by the USC Center for the Digital Future (CDF).

The CDF study, conducted twice since the pandemic began, found in its first
project in April that indulging had increased while exercising declined; the
behavior persisted into the Center’s second study in June.  (more)




CENTER STUDY FINDS MANY AMERICANS STILL IGNORE SAFETY PRECAUTIONS FOR COVID-19,
ONE-FIFTH WILL REFUSE A VACCINE

September 16, 2020 — Six months into the most severe global pandemic in more
than a century, are Americans complying with basic precautions to avoid
infection and spread of the coronavirus? And will they be vaccinated when a
proven treatment for COVID-19 is released?

For many Americans, the answers are no.

A study of the social impact of COVID-19 by the Center for the Digital Future
found that while large numbers of Americans do indeed use recommended
precautions against infection and spread of the disease, alarmingly high
percentages do not participate in these safety programs, and one-fifth will
refuse to receive a vaccine.

Do you wear a mask and participate in social distancing?

The Center’s study found many people – but not everyone – take precautions to
avoid infection with the coronavirus.

Eighty-three percent of Americans said they participate in social distancing.
However, only 77% say they wear a mask.  (more)




ONLINE COLLEGE INSTRUCTION HAS IMPROVED SINCE THE PANDEMIC BEGAN, SAY COLLEGE
STUDENTS, BUT INSTRUCTION ON THE INTERNET SHOULD COST LESS, REPORTS CENTER STUDY

September 9, 2020 — A growing number of college students like their online
instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic, but many want reduced tuition if their
education is online and not in person, reported the second study on the social
and cultural impact of the coronavirus conducted by the USC Center for the
Digital Future.

The Center’s study found an increase in college students who reported
satisfaction with their instruction on the internet: 43% of college students say
they enjoy remote learning better than in-class instruction — up from 34% in the
Center’s first study in April. While a majority of college students in the
current study (52%) say they prefer in-person classroom learning, that number
was down from 63% in April.

Fewer students say their teachers are good at adapting their courses for online
instruction — now 46%, down from 51% in April. A slightly smaller percentage say
they learn less online than in person – 52% in the current study, down
marginally from 54% in April.

How do students feel about the online learning environment? A majority of
college students in the current study (54%) say they have to work harder when
learning online, down slightly from 56% in April. Although a large percentage of
college students say their online instruction makes them feel more isolated from
their learning community (55%), that number was down from 61% reported in
April.  (more)




ANXIETY AND LONELINESS DECLINE SINCE THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC BEGAN, BUT MORE THAN
ONE-THIRD OF AMERICANS REPORT INCREASED DEPRESSION, CENTER STUDY FINDS

September 2, 2020 — Increased levels of loneliness and anxiety reported early in
the COVID-19 pandemic have declined in recent months, but about one-third of
Americans say they are more depressed since the pandemic began, according to a
study by the USC Center for the Digital Future.

The second study of the social and cultural impact of the coronavirus conducted
by the Center also found two-thirds of Americans who reported increased anxiety
are concerned about the future of the world – higher percentages than those who
reported being anxious about their own health, politics, their jobs, or safety.

Anxiety and loneliness drop

The study reported 32% of Americans say they are feeling more lonely since the
beginning of the pandemic, down from 37% reported in April. Forty-nine percent
say they are feeling more anxious, down from 62% reported in April.

However, more than one-third say they are more depressed: 35% of Americans say
they are somewhat or much more depressed since the beginning of the pandemic.

Nearly twice as many women (11%) compared to men (6%) say they are much more
depressed since the pandemic began.  (more)



NINETY PERCENT OF AMERICANS DO NOT WANT TO MAINTAIN A TRADITIONAL WORK SCHEDULE,
AND ALMOST ONE-THIRD WOULD NEVER GO BACK TO AN OFFICE, REPORTS NEW CENTER STUDY

August 26, 2020 — Almost all Americans want to change their work life when the
COVID-19 pandemic ends, with large percentages ready to shift to a permanent
home office, according to a study by the USC Center for the Digital Future.

The study found that working from home during the pandemic has created unique
opportunities as well as unprecedented challenges for millions of Americans,
including reduced visits to an office, increased working from home, or not going
to a traditional office at all.

The study found:

• Many Americans want to change their careers and work from home – More than 40
percent (42 percent) want work from home to be permanent, while 25% disagree.

• More than one-quarter could adapt all of their job to working from home — For
many, working from home could be a permanent reality; 26% could adapt all of
their job to work from home; 22% most of their work, 17% some, 9% a little, 26%
none.

• Work after the pandemic — More than one-third of employees anticipate they
will work more from home when the pandemic is over (38% would work more from
home, 43% the same, 18% less).  (more)




CENTER STUDY FINDS FEW AMERICANS ARE WILLING TO RETURN TO PUBLIC ACTIVITIES
DURING THE PANDEMIC; MANY WILL DO NOTHING OUTSIDE THE HOME UNTIL A VACCINE IS
FOUND

August 19, 2020 — In spite of efforts to re-open the nation’s economy during the
COVID-19 pandemic, most Americans are not comfortable resuming daily life
outside the home, and one-quarter say they will do nothing in public until a
vaccine is available, reports a study by the USC Center for the Digital Future.

Low percentages of Americans are ready for return to public activities

The study found that other than grocery shopping, most people are uncomfortable
doing anything outside their homes right now. For example, only 41% are willing
to see a doctor for a non-urgent appointment, and 39% would shop in retail
store.

Even fewer said they would dine in a restaurant (25%), stay in a hotel (19%),
use public transportation (14%), go to a movie or play (11%), travel by plane or
train (11%), or go to a live sports event or concert (8%).

One-quarter will wait for a vaccine to do anything in public.  (more)




SECOND STUDY BY THE CENTER ON THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF COVID-19 REPORTS FAUCI STILL
CONSIDERED #1 SOURCE FOR PANDEMIC INFORMATION

Study finds reliance on Trump drops; public support of government response to
the coronavirus declines

August 5, 2020 — A growing number of Americans say federal, state, and local
governments are doing a poor job of responding to COVID-19, and Anthony Fauci
continues to be the nation’s most relied-upon source about the coronavirus,
reports a new study by the USC Center for the Digital Future.

Fauci still #1 source for pandemic information; Trump slumps

The Center’s second survey of the social impact of the coronavirus, conducted
during the fourth week of June as follow-up to an initial study in April, found
more Americans (44%) rely on Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute
of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, than any other individual for information
about the pandemic.

After Fauci, individuals rely on New York governor Andrew Cuomo (19%), CNN
medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta or the respondent’s own mayor (16%), and
Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx (15%).

The June survey found President Donald Trump is relied on by 12% of Americans
for pandemic information, down from 20% in the Center’s survey in April. In the
June survey, 29% of conservatives and 2% of liberals said they rely on Trump.
The largest level of reliance on Trump was 40% of those who identify themselves
as very conservative.  (more)



IT’S A WONDERFUL INTERNET: WHAT IF THE INTERNET HAD NEVER BEEN BORN?

The coronavirus pandemic has produced unprecedented disruption of our
generation, but it could have been So. Much. Worse. Jeffrey Cole explores what
our pandemic experience would have been if — like George Bailey in “It’s a
Wonderful Life” — the internet had never been born.

The internet won!

In the middle of March, with little warning or preparation, we moved our lives
online.

What couldn’t be transferred online simply stopped. Movie theaters, concert
halls, and theme parks closed. Baseball and basketball suspended their seasons,
and it is still not clear if they will resume, or if the football and hockey
seasons will ever start.

Almost all dining in restaurants stopped, and many people were hesitant to eat
even at outside tables at the small number that stayed opened. Travel came to a
standstill with airlines barely operating and hotels facing little occupancy.
Cruise ships will not see passengers for a very long time.

If it couldn’t happen on the internet, it didn’t happen. If it could, it did. 
(more)



STARTING COLLEGE IN YOUR PARENTS’ BASEMENT

The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated many trends that already existed,
teaching us to stream more and forcing us to reconsider how much we need offices
or stores. But as Center director Jeffrey Cole describes, one environment that
has resisted evolutionary pressure, though, is college.

> This column focuses on how the coronavirus pandemic and the move to learning
> online has affected the lives of traditional college students under the age of
> 25 who live on or near campus. A later column will look at less traditional
> students who may be older, attending part-time or working full-time and may
> not live near campus.

It’s the middle of June: all across America families are celebrating high school
and college graduations. This year it’s very different. Graduates of the class
of 2020 will be forever remembered as the Covid Grads, finishing school during
the pandemic.

In 2020, there were no proms, grad nights or graduation ceremonies. Some
graduated on Zoom—celebrating virtually with their classmates—while others stood
in the street in front of their homes while friends and families drove by
honking from a safe distance.

Most college students living away, whether they were seniors or not, finished
the last months of the school year by packing up their belongings and moving
back in with Mom and Dad.

As bad as it was for those finishing the school year, it will be even worse for
the high school grads starting their first year of college in the fall. Forget
summer travel before starting college. Forget freshman orientation as they get
introduced to their living arrangements on a new campus.

The only travel in their future will be to their parents’ basement, where they
will not need an orientation. All of the experiences of moving to college,
making friends and meeting roommates, regulating their own hours and behaviors,
and sitting in a classroom soaking up knowledge may have to be deferred for a
semester or more.  (more)



TECHNOLOGIES OF GRIEF

How much of our lives can we squeeze through Zoom and other videoconference
services? A recent funeral marked out a boundary.

By Brad Berens

When a family member dies, the script is clear: you scramble the jets, cancel
your appointments, lean on a friend to watch the dog, and get there. For me,
that means getting to Los Angeles from Portland.

My aunt, Marlene Meyer, my mother’s sister, died on May 15th. She was 86,
vibrant, still working as an insurance agent days before her death, not ready to
die. Our family wasn’t ready either. We do not know if she had contracted
Coronavirus — a maddening ambiguity — but we do know that Coronavirus changed
her decline, death, and funeral.

I’ve lived in Oregon since 2009, always aware that the biggest challenge of
being far from where I grew up and where my first family still lives would be
moments like these.

The script is clear, but Coronavirus changed the script.  (more)



CORONAVIRUS DISRUPTION PROJECT FINDS DIFFERENCES IN BEHAVIOR BETWEEN MEN AND
WOMEN DURING THE PANDEMIC

May 21, 2020 — While many Americans agree that the coronavirus is changing life
at home on an unprecedented scale, men and women report significant differences
in their views and behavior, according to the first comprehensive study of the
social and cultural impact of the pandemic conducted by the Center for the
Digital Future at USC Annenberg and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

“We are seeing many differences between how men and women are experiencing life
during the pandemic – especially in their levels of concern about the effects of
the coronavirus, what they miss, and what they enjoy,” said Jeffrey Cole,
director of the Center for the Digital Future.

The overall findings released April 29 in the Center’s study, “The Coronavirus
Disruption Project: Living and Coping During the Pandemic,” revealed many
changes in views and behavior – both positive and negative – reported by
Americans since the pandemic and safer-at-home restrictions began.  (For an
overview of key issues found in the study, go here.)

Looking more closely at the study’s findings about life at home reveals some
sharp differences between men and women and how they are experiencing the
pandemic.  (more)

(For comprehensive material about the Coronavirus Disruption Project Study —
reports, PDFs, and releases — go here.)



GOING TO WORK: A COMMUTE OF TEN MILES OR TEN FEET?

Data from the Center’s new Coronavirus Disruption Project suggests that many
Americans will never go back to daily commutes to work in offices, and as Center
director Jeffrey Cole explains, that’s not a bad thing, either.

The phrase “going to work” has taken on an entirely new meaning.

Two months ago, most of us had never heard of Zoom. Now, for those who are
working at home during the Coronavirus pandemic, Zoom is a way of life.

Zoom has moved into a rarefied atmosphere of the tiny list of companies whose
brands that have become verbs: Google, Xerox, Uber. The invitation is not, “do
you want to join me in a Zoom Meeting,” but rather, “let’s Zoom.”

The latest unemployment figures, the highest since the Great Depression, show
that about 15% of Americans are unemployed. Other than essential workers (health
care, delivery, police, supermarkets), the rest have moved much (if not all) of
our jobs online. We made this move in a matter of days without preparation. Many
of us did it without any prior experience doing our jobs online.

Data from the Center’s new study with the Interactive Advertising Bureau, “The
Coronavirus Disruption Project: Living and Coping During the Pandemic,” shows
that moving our work lives online has been a success — particularly compared to
other activities we have been compelled to move online, such as school work. 
(more)



STUDY OF THE CORONAVIRUS’ IMPACT BY THE CENTER FOR THE DIGITAL FUTURE AND
INTERACTIVE ADVERTISING BUREAU FINDS RAPID LIFE CHANGES AND CONCERNS — AS WELL
AS ENTHUSIASM — WHILE AMERICANS CONFRONT THE PANDEMIC

April 29, 2020 – Americans coping with the coronavirus are reporting changes in
their lives occurring in days that previously took months or years, a
wide-ranging study of life during the pandemic conducted by the USC Center for
the Digital Future and the Interactive Advertising Bureau has found.

The study shows Americans report many concerns about their lives as well as
increased loneliness and anxiety since the outset of the coronavirus pandemic,
but they also describe strengthened relationships and enjoying the benefits of
working at home.

Titled “The Coronavirus Disruption Project: How We are Living and Coping During
the Pandemic,” the study also found significant percentages of Americans who had
never previously banked online or bought from internet sources have now been
pushed into the online experience because of the pandemic.

“We are exploring the biggest disruption of our lives,” said Jeffrey Cole,
director of the Center for the Digital Future in the USC Annenberg School for
Communication and Journalism. “Daily life is far more disrupted by the pandemic
than after 9/11 or the beginning of World War II, and anxiety is at levels only
seen after Pearl Harbor and the Great Depression.

“Yet in spite of the upheaval,” Cole said, “we also found that Americans have
positive views about their relationships and hope for how their lives will
proceed after the pandemic ends.”  (more)




WHAT WOULD YOU DO FOR LOWER HEALTH CARE COSTS?

From the Center’s Future of  Health Care Study.

Infographic by Kelsey Dempsey.

See all of the Center’s infographics here



WEB INSIGHT: RESPONDING TO ONLINE MESSAGES — WHEN SHOULD USERS REPLY?

How quickly should one reply to a personal message received online? What is the
appropriate length of time? And has the perceived appropriate length changed
over the years?

We have asked this question in our Digital Future Survey since 2012… (more)




TENTH EDITION OF WORLD INTERNET PROJECT REPORT PUBLISHED

The Center has published the tenth edition of World Internet Project report, the
collaboration between the Center for the Digital Future and partner
organizations in countries worldwide.

The 47-page study explores views and behavior about internet use and non-use,
devices for internet access, years online, user proficiency, reasons for not
going online, politics and the internet, freedom of expression online, media
reliability, online security and personal privacy, and activities on the
internet.

Download the tenth World Internet Project Report here.




COLE DISCUSSES EMERGING MEDIA TRENDS

Center director Jeffrey Cole explores transformation of the media for the
keynote address at the leadership meeting of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

View the video here.



THE CENTER ON TWITTER

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The Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg tracks the global evolution
of digital technology and studying their worldwide impact.


The Digital Future @digitalcenter ·
December 14, 2022


Most dystopian fantasies concern monsters we can see conquering us, but with new
technologies will we even know if we’ve been conquered? Center Strategic Advisor
@bradberens weighs in. https://bit.ly/3FwFgJY

Reply on Twitter 1603074085268791297 Retweet on Twitter 1603074085268791297 Like
on Twitter 1603074085268791297 View on Twitter 1603074085268791297
The Digital Future @digitalcenter ·
December 7, 2022


The new Netflix series about the daughter from The Addams Family going to a
Hogwarts-style high school doesn’t ignore the earlier versions of the story: it
embraces them, which is part of why it succeeds. https://bit.ly/3utPi9E

Reply on Twitter 1600507623903830016 Retweet on Twitter 1600507623903830016 Like
on Twitter 1600507623903830016 View on Twitter 1600507623903830016
The Digital Future @digitalcenter ·
December 2, 2022


As media continues to fragment in the face of changes in legislation and
technology, where will new big audiences come from? Center Strategic Advisor
@bradberens weighs in. https://bit.ly/3ixK2za

Reply on Twitter 1598704517565980672 Retweet on Twitter 1598704517565980672 Like
on Twitter 1598704517565980672 View on Twitter 1598704517565980672
The Digital Future @digitalcenter ·
November 30, 2022


As CNN and FOX News pivot in the face of turbulent times, four other cable news
organizations are waiting to grab big audiences: One may disappear, one is
waiting to be noticed, one is happy where it is, and one faces a big
opportunity. https://bit.ly/3H0oaGY

Reply on Twitter 1597994608289411080 Retweet on Twitter 1597994608289411080 Like
on Twitter 1597994608289411080 1 View on Twitter 1597994608289411080

NEWS

 * Center strategic adviser Brad Berens talks about online app scams
 * CNN Business: Center director Jeffrey Cole describes the key role of Disney+
   in the company's future -- and present
 * FinancialPlanning.com highlights Center's findings on banking with
   non-banking firms
 * Berens talks about digital currency on The Current on CBC (conversation
   starts at 26:00)
 * Jeffrey Cole explains the new "Streaming Giants"
 * Center intern Rachel Lee, research director Michael Suman featured in
   coverage of "pink tax" activism
 * Cole describes the escalating war for original content among streaming-video
   providers
 * Entertainment becoming a key element of Apple's strategy, reports Cole
 * Cole goes on a ride to show how driverless cars will change the world in ways
   never before imagined
 * Cole describes technology and disruption at Ad:Tech 2019
 * Berens describes changing technology for New Zealand TV
 * Suman appraises fake news for Slate
   __________

Center presentations, speeches, executive briefings

All Center presentations

Brad Berens, chief strategy officer for the Center, discusses liquid behavior
ahead of his keynote address at ad:tech Sydney.

Phone: (310) 235-4444

Email: info@digitalcenter.org

11444 W. Olympic Blvd., Suite 120
Los Angeles, CA 90064

info@digitalcenter.org




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