Clubhouse, Spaces, Fireside… the “pivot to” season is opening again. Here’s what will work and what can go wrong with the “next best thing” in media — emphasis on the quotation marks — Remixing is the technological force (and chapter) number 8 from Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable (2016), a seminal work we’ve already debated here and aims to interpret “the 12 technological forces that will shape our future.” In Remixing’s second paragraph, Kelly says: “We live in a golden age of new mediums…

Behold media’s otherworldly talent of keeping the hope alive: the recycled hype around “new” methods of presenting (and charging for) online content is back — Eleven years ago, at a press event on January 2010, Apple introduced the iPad in that memorable keynote that The Wall Street Journal anticipated with the famous “last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it,” a hell of a sentence that…

By hiding channels from subscribers who ‘disliked’ a video, YouTube undermines a user’s rights, does the content creator a disservice, and sets up a strategy that only serves its own interests — In 15 years, a company called Soul Connex will develop an algorithmic test that can determine, with 100% accuracy, who your soulmate is. At first, still incensed by the idea of romantic love, people will reject the proposition that an algorithm can unequivocally select the love of your life. Over…

A world that is ready to live without all those iPhone plugs is a world prepared to live without journalism (despite Bon Jovi's poignant epiphany) — At this point it’s impossible to determine whether Apple is very good at getting rid of “unnecessary” features or if it ingeniously made us believe it is. A brief retrospective would recall the floppy disk drive, the CD drive and all USB-A ports on Macs, and the headphone jack, the…

Why it is vital to know which companies will corner the “everyware” industry, the ultimate business that will change all of our personal, professional, and commercial interactions — There are some books that belong to a rarely recognized, yet very popular, category called “the books that everyone loves to quote but very few have actually read.” The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997), by Clayton Christensen, would easily secure a lifelong place on the Top 10 if this was an actual…

Multiple reports and studies — each one with its own agenda — have been warning that sports industry has a Gen Z problem. The “problem” part is real, but they’re blaming the wrong player — Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (2014) and Homo Deus (2016) are two of the best non-fiction books of the last decade. Or, at least, two the best “brainy” books of the decade, as The Guardian weirdly put it. Among the many paths taken in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow…

Who’s winning — and losing — the battle to sign (and keep) the most subscribers, and why analysts should stop celebrating news media companies’ numbers — Three years ago, I have gathered birds of very different feathers to rock together within a list that comprised streaming services, messaging apps, and social platforms. Just for fun. Well, that and the educational purpose of demonstrating that Spotify could be as popular as Instagram.

Despite the distorted narrative created by social platforms and indulged by key media figures, misinformation is not led by robots, foreign spies, or algorithmic aliens — David Kirkpatrick’s book The Facebook Effect attributes to Mark Zuckerberg a saying that became an instant classic. …

Why have neither the virtual assistant AI technology from Amazon (nor the one developed by Google) reached the promised land? — Remember when guilty pleasures were a thing? I'm well aware that 2020 mercilessly redefined that term and now they’re just “pleasures” but, kids, there was a time when we used to work hard to hide these peculiar preferences of our lives. For those who have been Tigerkinging their way to…