Pirkka’s posterous

Oprah Winfrey is fleeing broadcast television for cable. NBC, once arguably the biggest cultural tastemaker in the United States, is being shopped to Comcast, the country’s largest cable company.

Have we finally reached a tipping point that suggests a remarkable decline in the fortunes of broadcast television in America?

So we're finally welcoming television to the real digital era. Check what has been happening for newspapers, it's now TV's turn.

And please, let us embrace the change and learn from past mistakes made by record and publishing companies.

Our business leaders have been trained as weightlifters, and now they're being asked to perform gymnastics. And management wants to implement innovation, but it's stymied by its own desire to be "effective" and "efficient" and to defend and extend the base business.

I feel that innovation fails because most of the big organizations concentrate mostly on their own existence. The biggest reason to innovate is to stay alive, after which comes the will to create something new.

Fear of future or protecting the current structures hasn't been the best soil for flourishing new innovations.

International concern for the minority who can’t read may soon extend to those who can’t publish. Reading—a defining characteristic of civilization as far back as ancient Greece when all Athenian citizens were expected to know how to read—is now taken for granted in industrialized democracies. Publishing by the few Athenian authors brought us drama, philosophy, science, mathematics, literature, and history. As readers, we consume. As authors, we create. Our society is changing from consumers to creators.

Many professionals have been worried about this development. Where's the quality, they are asking. Language will detoriarate, just see all the internet writing.

I don't think the question is really about quality. Content and meaning will be valued, and what will valued is decided by many more people than before. It has to be a good thing.

But at the same time I feel that publishing is taking responsibility for what you write, and that is something the creator turned consumers haven't all really understood, yet.

You may write bad English (touché) and publish poorly constructed texts, but the real question is do you stand for what you publish?

Recently, I have been thinking about how our food consumption and information consumption habits actually closely resemble each other. Just as food is the energy source for our bodies, information is the energy source for our minds. Our body’s health is heavily influenced by the quality of our nutritional habits. Consuming foods high in fat, sugar, and other unhealthy elements can lead to a variety of health problems, causing a deterioration of one’s quality of life. Similarly, if we have a poor information diet (i.e. consistently watching reality TV and internet meme videos), our mind’s performance, clarity, and ability to achieve goals can be severely negatively impacted. Although network TV and comedic YouTube videos are fun, they can also be addicting like a sweet sugary snack. Consume too many of these snacks and you will soon find yourself gasping at the scale in disbelief. However, the rate and ease of access to these sugary information snacks has only increased in recent years.

Snack size of information does indeed work pretty much like candies or fast food: you get some fast energy, but then again, there's soon plenty to burn in your waistline.

I'm working constantly both on my real and my information waistline.

Social media detox is a thing a few friends of mine have talked about lately. Rushing to yoga class after hectic work hours to clear your mind isn't enough, one needs to cut down on information too.

We cherish the number of followers and friends - the more the better - but how long will it take for quality to become more important?

I don't need hunderds of daily tweets. Even one that makes me really think should be enough.

Pienessä ajassa neiti X:n yksityiskohtainen kertomus valloitti maailman FB-käyttäjien seinät – myös minun. Käyttäjät kohisivat: voiko joku olla niin tyhmä, ettei ymmärrä, miten yksityisiä viestejä lähetetään Facebookissa.

Ihmisiä on helppo leimata tyhmäksi ja idiootiksi. Entäs jos seuraavalla kerralla ennen tyhmyydenjulistusta vastaisit kahteen kysymykseen:

Miten neiti X olisi voinut tietää oikean FB-käyttäytymismallin?
Miten itse opit, ettei FB:ssä kannata laittaa ihan mitä tahansa viestejä toisten seinille?

Kaikki, mitä itse pidämme itseselvyytenä, on kuitenkin opittua.

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L'ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

I came across this old Washington Post piece on world famous violinist Joshua Bell. It's been couple of years since I read this fascinating story for the first time, and this time it still made me think.

We buy expensive tickets to see Joshua Bell, but still very few stop by to listen him playing when he does it for free.

Maybe people just don't enjoy classical music, or they were in such a hurry as always. Maybe seeing a guy with jeans, T-shirt and baseball cap just doesn't fit your image of a real violin player. Besides, the setting was also all wrong.

So we just pass a great musical experience because the reality doesn't match our presumption of how this kind of music should be presented.

I think we are every now and then too obsessed with the way thinks look and how they are presented to us, especially when we are talking about new ideas.

If the whole package doesn't fit into our own presumption, we just easily discard it. We don't even spend a small moment really thinking about the idea, which might actually be the best ever. It just doesn't look like that!

We allow the first impression to deceive us, which is rather natural, but is it something we should fight against? Should we before discarding something really think if the idea is actually good, but it just needs improving?