David Weinberger's Blog, page 8

TV Triumphs over Theater. At Last.

At Medium.com I’m maintaining that television as a rhetorical form has reached a turning point — not that we’re at Peak TV (which we are) in terms of streaming services and network television, but that we are expecting and appreciating serious information and events to be presented in the ways pioneered by entertainment TV. And […]

What’s missing from media literacy?

danah boyd’s 2018 “You think you want media literacy, do you?” remains an essential, frame-changing discussion of the sort of media literacy that everyone, including danah [@zephoria], agrees we need: the sort that usually focuses on teaching us how to not fall for traps and thus how to disbelieve. But, she argues, that’s not enough. […]

Race, Memes and Surveillance: Apryl Williams in conversation with Allissa Richardson

Apryl Williams (@aprylw) is talking with Allissa Richardson about “Surveillance and Black Digital Publics”  at a Harvard Berkman Klein Center event. Here’s a paper by Apryl on the topic. I am live blogging, and thus making so many mistakes you could plotz. Mistakes of every sort: Missing points. Getting points wrong. Paraphrasing everything, and doing […]

Reinstalling Windows from a boot USB made on a Mac

[SPOILER: Nope. Not the way to do it. Except for the sentence in green.] My Windows PC has died rather dead. It does not recognize my boot drive, nor does it boot from my two back-up external drives or from the boot USB I prepared a year ago. Thus continues my 30 year streak of […]

Mom at 100

My mother, Sherry, died 29 years ago today. On this birthday she would have been 100. Here’s what my sister-in-law, Meredith Sue Willis (“Sue” to us) posted on Facebook about her. This would have been the 100th birthday of my mother-in-law, Sherry Weinberger, Andy and Ellen and David’s mom. She was a magnificent lady, a […]

Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is a mess

There are no spoilers in what follows because I couldn’t spoil Tenet if I tried. I am a huge fan of Christopher Nolan. Several of his movies rank among my favorites, including Memento, Inception, and Interstellar. But I like and admire all of his movies for their ideas, technical virtuosity, music, and sometimes unnecessary cleverness. […]

Parler and the failure of moral frameworks

This probably is not about what you think it is. It doesn’t take a moral stand about Parler or about its being chased off the major platforms and, in effect, off the Internet. Yet the title of this post is accurate: it’s about why moral frameworks don’t help us solve problems like those posed by […]

Beyond the author’s intent

We can now see how readers interpret what they read, further reducing the traditional authority of the author.

Orange Bee Martini

I’m drinking more during this pandemic than I ever had: I’m up to having a cocktail 3-4 times a week. Pre-pandemic I’d have perhaps two a month, so this is statistically a serious increase, but does not yet concern me or my wife. There aren’t a lot of cocktails that I like, although there are […]

My First Rejection Letter

When I was 10 and my next-door-neighbor, David Stolzenberg, was probably 13, we wrote a short story and submitted it to Boys’ Life, the magazine for Boy Scouts. In an ancient box in a forgotten corner of our basement, I found the rejection letter. It is, I believe, my very first, kicking off a series […]