Gongol.com Archives: March 2021
March 11, 2021
An observation on Clubhouse vs. podcasting
There's always been a niche place for drop-in conversation (just look at ham radio). It's never been enormous, but it has been durable. People like to be surprised, and if an application like Clubhouse can replicate that ham radio, "drop-in" conversational feeling, then there will be a place for it. ■ There will always be a big place for live-to-tape conversations, on radio or podcasts. So long as there are interesting people, there will be others who want to hear them speak. And a good interviewer (like Anne McElvoy) is capable of asking conversational questions of an interesting person that exceed the quality of the content that person may be able to generate on their own. ■ What podcasting has brought to America is scripted, heavily-produced audio programming. It's not something we've done very much -- certainly not by contrast with the work of public broadcasters like CBC Radio One and BBC Radio 4. In those markets, speech-based radio programming (that isn't "talk radio" in the American political sense) is very popular. That makes similar programming a growth market in America, and it ought to long persist in growing as producers become more sophisticated.
What would your Y2K-era self have said if you came back to report that in 2021, everyone is required to wear masks inside of banks, we don't know yet where Donald Trump is going to put his Presidential library, and Apple is selling a Dick Tracy watch with a built-in electrocardiogram?
Women in our armed forces are no "mockery" of defense, no matter how much a reactionary pundit tries to argue it. Women are half of our country's talent, hold half of America's skills, and possess half of our national brain power. Tucker Carlson and Fox News should be ashamed for advocating that we only half-defend ourselves.
If you thought these definitions were difficult before, they're an order of magnitude harder with the arrival of deepfakes. It's not just that the train has left the station -- it split into twelve trains, each leaving in a different direction, and two entered new dimensions.
Someone voted "present" as the Chinese government voted to break Hong Kong's democracy. Everyone else voted "yes".
Snapshot from the big-tool economy
We'll always need industrial work to be done, but it's often taking place farther and farther away from our view
Should the President hold a press conference?
Americans should expect their Presidents to be accountable, and direct accountability to the press is a component of that. But the reaction to whether President Biden has held a press conference yet is a bit over-wrought. Even the staunchest defender of the press has to temper that criticism through the lens of the recent performance of the White House press corps, and it would be easy to care a great deal more if the last four years had been characterized by tenacious and detailed on-the-record questioning rather than by "access journalism" and an infinite loop of anonymous quotes. Some did right. Many did not.
