EPIC
Rupert Murdoch Forgets He Ever Saw That Crazy Flash Movie
Five years ago, Rupert Murdoch sat down at his computer and spent a few minutes watching a movie made by two journalism students. When he rose, he proclaimed that “he and his fellow newspaper proprietors risked being relegated to the status of also-rans if they did not overhaul their internet strategies.”
Then he bought MySpace and the WSJ. He also bought a locket with Matt and Robin’s picture inside.
But now, instead of following the clear lesson of that movie — that is, merging these two properties to make WallSpace? MyStreetLiveJournal? — he just might out-grey-lady the Grey Lady by contending to become King Cash on Paywall Mountain.
EPIC 1960
Thomas Baekdal has a nice schematic history of news and information from 1800 to 2020. I like his 1900–1960 entry:
By the year 1900, the newspapers and magazine had revolutionized how we communicated. Now we could get news from places we have never been. We could communicate our ideas to people we had never seen. And we could sell our products to people far away.
You still had to go out to talk other people, but you could stay on top of things, without leaving the city. It was amazing. It was the first real revolution of information. The world was opening up to everyone.
During the next 60 years the newspapers dominated our lives. If you wanted to get the latest news, or tell people about your product, you would turn to the newspapers. It seemed like newspapers would surely be the dominant source of information for all time to come.
Except that during the 1920s a new information source started to attract people’s attention — the Radio. Suddenly you could listen to another person’s voice 100 of miles away. But most importantly, you could get the latest information LIVE. It was another tremendous evolution is the history of information. By 1960’s the two dominant sources of information was LIVE news from the Radio and the more detailed news via newspapers and magazines.
It was really great times, although some meant that “The way for newspapers to meet the competition of radio is simply to get out better papers”, an argument that we would hear repeatedly for the next 50 years.
The stuff about 2020 seems very familiar.
Via Lone Gunman.
Near-Futurism
Speaking of Kevin Kelly, I had basically taken for granted that one of us had already posted his call for more visions of the near future, given our recent spate of near-futurism. It appears no one had. Well, that’s fixed.
Genre
LoadingReadyRun.com gives Halo 3 the EPIC treatment. Funny how the visual language is so recognizable — and actually quite a bit slicker in this execution! I’m impressed. (Though the voice has got nothing on Matt, and the music’s no Minus Kelvin.)
iPhone Snark
All I have to say about the iPhone is it sure took Apple long enough to create the wifiPod. :P
Google’s Master Plan
Speaking of Google: Scope out this super-slick anti-Google manifesto. Not too deep but wow, that is some fantastic animation. (Unit Structure-iffic.)
Goople
I think Eric Schmidt just made a thinly-veiled EPIC allusion at MacWorld: “I’ve had the privilege of joining the board and there’s a lot of relationships… if we merge the companies we can call it Applegoo — but I’m not a marketing guy.”
What think you? Can we take credit for that one?
The Art of Verification
This is, by a wide margin, the coolest use of EPIC I have yet seen: A professor at Lehigh Carbon Community College in Pennsylvania sets it up as the subject of an exercise in critical media consumption and information verification. Nice use of a wiki, too. Note the contribution of student sleuth Jennifer Jones midway down.
Googlezon Auf Deutsch
If you’ve seen previous versions of EPIC, maybe you’ll love this as much as I do: EPIC 2015 in German!