Pop Loser

The “Kardashian” as a unit of measurement.

Conceptually, the Kardashian is the amount of global attention Kim Kardashian commands across all media over the space of a day. In an ideal, frictionless universe, we’d determine a Kardashian by measuring the percentage of all broadcast media, conversations and thoughts dedicated to Kim Kardashian. In practical terms, we can approximate a Kardashian by using a tool like Google Insights for Search – compare a given search term to Kim Kardashian and you can discover how small a fraction of a Kardashian any given issue or cause merits.

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I choose the Kardashian as a unit both because I like the mitteleuropean feel of the term – like the Ohm or the Roentgen – and because Kardashian is an exemplar of attention disconnected from merit, talent or reason. The Kardashian mentions how much attention is paid, not how much attention is deserved, so naming the unit after someone who is famous for being famous seems appropriate.

Rex Sorgatz declares that LA is the future because LA (or rather the entertainment industry) is currently broken.

Let’s start here: Right now, I pay over $200 per month to have 1,600 TV channels pumped into my apartment. How many of those channels do I watch? A dozen, max.

This is clearly broken. Really broken. Stupid broken.

And we all know this has to end, somehow. And we all know it will end, somehow. But no one knows quite how. Maybe it will be fixed by Apple, maybe Hulu, maybe Netflix, maybe Google; probably, by something we haven’t even seen yet. But I think we can all agree that this broken system is going to be fixed, somehow.

Today would be Marshall McLuhan’s 100th birthday. Some links:

★ The return of Marshall McLuhan from the Globe and Mail.

★ McLuhan’s legacy (don’t downplay the comics) from CBC.

★ A 1965 piece from the New Yorker (subscribers only, I’m afraid).

★ Why McLuhan’s chilling vision still matters by Douglas Coupland for the Guardian.

12,000 screenshots of the New York Times homepage taken from September 2010 to July 2011. (By accident.)

Having worked with and developed on a number of content management systems I can tell you that as a rule of thumb no one is storing their frontpage layout data. It’s all gone, and once newspapers shutter their physical distribution operations I get this feeling that we’re no longer going to have a comprehensive archive of how our news-sources of note looked on a daily basis. Archive.org comes close, but there are too many gaps to my liking.

This, in my humble opinion, is a tragedy because in many ways our frontpages are summaries of our perspectives and our preconceptions. They store what we thought was important, in a way that is easy and quick to parse and extremely valuable for any future generations wishing to study our time period.

Jay Smooth doing that thing where he says wildly interesting things about media and culture.

Interesting: We are the medium. Not fully thought out yet, but there’s something there.

“We are the medium” means that, quite literally, we are the ones through whom information, messages, news, ideas, videos, and links of every sort move — and they move through this “channel” because we decide to move them. Someone sends me a link to a funny video. I tweet about it. You see it. You send a Facebook message to your friends. One of them (presumably an ancient) emails it to more friends. The video moves through us. Without us, the transport medium — the Internet — is a hyperlinked collection of inert bits. We are the medium.

Regret the Error looks at media errors and corrections from 2010. Best year-end list yet. [via]

Kayne West, media cyborg.

When you think of someone like Kanye West or Lady Gaga, you can’t think only of their brains and bodies. Lady Gaga in a simple dress on a tiny stage in a no-name club in Des Moines is—simply put—not Lady Gaga. Kanye West in jeans at a Starbucks is not Kanye West.

To understand people like that—and, increasingly, to understand people like us (eep!)—you’ve got to look instead at the sum of their brains, their bodies, the media they create, and the media created by others about them. All together, it constitutes a sort of fuzzy cloud that’s much, much bigger than a person.

RWW has a roundup of traditional media outlets currently using Tumblr. The great Pop Loser move to Tumblr is not mentioned.

Chris Anderson interviewed for Spiegel.

Spiegel: Mr. Anderson, let’s talk about the future of journalism.

Anderson: This is going to be a very annoying interview. I don’t use the word journalism.

Spiegel: Okay, how about newspapers? They are in deep trouble both in the United States and worldwide.

Anderson: Sorry, I don’t use the word media. I don’t use the word news. I don’t think that those words mean anything anymore. They defined publishing in the 20th century. Today, they are a barrier. They are standing in our way, like a horseless carriage.

It was at this point that the interviewer removed his shoe and beat Anderson to death with it. Or at least that’s how it happens in my head.

There’s some more fallout here and here. (That second one features the excellent headline: Chris Anderson less intellectually curious than George W. Bush.)