Tag Archives: media

iPod Touch FaceTime: Teen Sexting is so Last Year

The new iPod Touch with FaceTime video conferencing support isn’t even available yet, and yet teens are already using them for immoral acts.

Ok, not really, but I’m sure it is only a matter of days before there are news stories and blog posts about the latest threat to “the children,” (won’t someone please think of the children?).

Further, I anticipate the following variations:
* teens revealing their privates to other teens in real time
* teens revealing their privates to other teens who then show them to other teens, in real time
* teens having sex in person and sharing the moment with other teens in real time
* teens being exposed to the privates of random non-teens in real time
* teens exposing themselves to random non-teens in real time
* teens doing any of the above for gifts and/or money.

With this blog post I am putting the rest of the world on notice, if you do a story or blog post that resembles any of the above variations on this theme, you are a cheap, sensationalistic and unoriginal hack.

That is all.

Wither the Newspapers, Whither the Advertisers?

Clay Shirky’s great essay on the past, present, and future of newspapers begs the question of what will happen to big advertisers whose drive for economies of scale allied them with the big publishers and broadcasters who were driven by the same Industrial-age imperatives.  What’s to become of the national brands?

If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other.