Future of News

[methodfuturenews-blog]

"Ten Thousand Cents" is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon's Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool...The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, "crowdsourcing," "virtual economies," and digital reproduction."

In the same vein, what is a ten thousand word article?

[methodfuturenews-blog]

Amplified coveillance will shift society to become even more social; more importantly it will change how we define ourselves as humans.

http://www.wired.com/2014/03/going-tracked-heres-way-embrace-surveillance/

[mobilefirstnews]

If all content is displayed in a linear, single column fashion (as is commonly the case on mobile devices) how do we establish a connection between an image and it’s related content?

[methodfuturenews-blog]

Poetic algorithms, Algorithmic poetics

Algorithms can already imitate the tone of voice. Can algorithms be poetic? Can an imitation supersede the original. And if it's not attempting to imitate - is there a new aesthetic in the toneless voice of objectivity? If data and robotic journalism could put an end to subjectivity, could we find poetry where there is none? 

[endofjournalism]

Here’s my question: If you publish a piece you expect to draw summaries from other media – why not create a summary yourself? It won’t prevent others from doing their summaries, but you get to keep some of the traffic. You no longer attract only those readers who want the full story, but also those who want the quick fix.

[methodfuturenews-blog]

Powerpoint newspaper

BuzzFeed invests in an algorithm that will produce listicles, more extensive than ever before. What is the appeal of looking through a list of 125 entries? Could it be seen as a symptom of a culture that had begun a drift towards a new paradigm, a machine world-view? Does the database replace the narrative? 

Imagine if the narrative is superseded or subsumed into this new paradigm  - what does the newspaper look like? Is it a printed Powerpoint entirely made up of charts, graphs, title screens?

[methodfuturenews-blog]

Brands in an age of crowdsourcing

Brands that re-assemble and re-invent everyday - a new identity everyday - each time addressing a new audience. This is the new temporality for news platforms in an age of crowdsourcing and citizen journalism. No more long traditions, established readerships; instead reactionary, responsive, fluid brands that survive on targeting trends as soon as they emerge. 

[methodfuturenews-blog]

Newspaper, a hybrid

The black and white photograph taken by Kubrick in the mid-1940's shows a train carriage full of people reading newspapers. Today's rush hour tube or overground train will present us with a very similar image. However, the newspaper although it seems to remain a constant accessory of the daily commute, is now often operating in ensemble with other (information) technologies. Particularly, the mobile phone enabled audio stream via headphones, speakers, etc.

Is there an opportunity to design this hybrid media / format layering? Each format or each device could perform a specific task that would be meant to work in tune with the other device, thus creating a deeper, more immersive, or contrary, more modular, flexible, adaptable experience. As an example, imagine the newspaper only filled with visual content - only images and illustrations to the daily news. The speakers would supply the specific audio content meant for each section in the newspaper.

What implications such a modular information consumption experience bring? In what other ways can we re-imagine this hybrid co-existence? What other information technologies could we imagine as a hybrid?

Kubrick's photograph of the 1940's commuters.

Photograph of an NYC subway train, a person in the foreground reading the newspaper with earphones on.

[methodfuturenews-blog]

Citizen Press - the citizen run news agency

With the emergence of the citizen journalist (-ism), can an entire news agency be built on an adhock self-organised community level? What possibilities could this open? Would the structure become more adaptable, more modular, run like an internation network with anchor hubs in key geographic locations. 

What possibilities does this open for design?

[methodfuturenews-blog]

Mediactive - Kindle edition by Dan Gillmor, Clay Shirky. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Mediactive.

[methodfuturenews-blog]

By returning to forensis this book seeks to unlock forensics original potential as a political practice and reorient it. Inverting the direction of the forensic gaze it designates a field of action in which individuals and organizations detect and confront state violations.

[methodfuturenews-blog]

Memory

Is Internet (and Google) becoming an extension of our neural network? Do we remember less? How do we memorise - have the patterns been affected? Is having constant access to the endless archive equal to remembering or knowing? 

[methodfuturenews-blog]

Time

Technology enables us to carry out our daily operations ever quicker, but does it save us time? How did our time perception change, affected by technology? 

[methodfuturenews-blog]

Buy Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2, 000 Years by Tom Standage (ISBN: 9781408842065) from Amazon's Book Store. Free UK delivery on eligible orders.

[methodfuturenews-blog]

"Today, when you're talking to one person, you're talking to a thousand", finger on button to press post after her ex-employer's ill-considered remark.

[methodfuturenews-blog]

Online news platform dedicated to crowdsourced news annotation

http://news.genius.com/

[methodfuturenews-blog]

Knowledge Graph

The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do. Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. It’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.

http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/introducing-knowledge-graph-things-not.html