Anand Giridharadas. The Persuaders. Winning Hearts and Minds in a Divided Age, Allen Lane 2022 Anand Giridharadas wrote a highly successful book in 2019 called Winners Take All. It dealt with the strategy of the world’s rich who set themselves up to serve equality and justice in order to counter threats to the social order that keeps them in the privileged position they have won. They do good, but not at the cost of doing no harm. Giridharadas wondered how it was possible to believe in a class of rich people running for office to solve problems that would be better left to public...
english (sort of)
The big media decoupling. Could be good news
Facebook is abandoning its newspaper collaboration project, it seems: Columbia Journalism Review has an article about it. Facebook stops investing in the project that began in 2019 with great fanfare. The reason: only 3 percent of posts circulating on the platform have a link to a newspaper article. It may be because people on Facebook are into other things and don’t want to know about newspapers. Or it may be because people have become accustomed to finding links to newspapers on Twitter. Or it may be because newspapers are increasingly visible only to subscribers. The fact is that...
Elon’s mask
Twitter used to be a platform to share stories. Now is the story. And it demonstrates the power of media ecology in explaining what is happening and imagine what can happen. Elon’s mask The expression “elon’s mask” is used here to designate a formidable, controversial, post-modern and very risky kind of communication stlye. The champion of this kind of communication is of course Elon Musk. But since the Southafrican entrepreneur bought Twitter, it is also becoming the worst danger for his companies. It could be his Waterloo, says Vivek Wadhwa, author, academic and entrepreneur, in a...
The risky weaponization of ESG and other media ecology problems
What are the consequences of treating the ESG Index as a political tool? What happens to the media during a war? What can people do in order to improve their “collective mind”? Here are some hypothesis. For a very hard job, but one that needs to be done. This article was first published on the Oecd Forum. Elon Musk, a serial and vocal entrepreneur, has violently objected to Tesla’s exclusion from the S&P 500 ESG Index. He used a language that made the technical body in charge of compiling the index look like a partisan, leftist, organization. Of course, the index takes...
Lyon. Vivre par(mi) les écrans. The challenge of context. Media Ecology is the message
Next Wednesday and until Friday, at Université de Lyon, the conference “Vivre par(mi) les écrans“. Here is my speech (still in progress). The challenge of context. Media Ecology is the message Media ecology Media ecology is programmatically less focused on messages or individual technologies than on the relationships between contexts, messengers and their worlds of meaning, technologies, and grand narratives. The mediasphere is the environment in which human cultures evolve. The eco-cultural niches to which humans adapt – or which humans seek to modify – are made up...
Druker: learn when to change
Peter #Drucker, 2005: “I’ve learned to run with #success and not worry too much about non-success. You know there’s an old saying ‘At first if you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.’ It’s wrong. If at first you don’t succeed, try once more, and then try something else.” #quote It’s a tweet by Bruce Rosenstein, author of the book: “Create your future the Peter Drucker way. Developing and applying a forward focused mindset”. I like it: a pragmatic approach to finding the right way to make your project come true. There is another saying: “Innovation is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”...
Four scenarios: one of them is horrible
News keep breaking. Imagining the consequences is a difficult task. We do so only by choosing a narrative that connects the events that happened to those which can follow them. We cannot predict the future, but we do it anyway: as if the future were the next chapter of the story we think we are living. This story we think we live in is not a fact. It is a choice, conscious or unconscious. Many of us think that there is only the story in which we think we are immersed. But there are people who work all day to build or recognize these kinds of stories. Those who stop and try to understand can...
Hatred and other traps
In short: everyone has the right to hate whoever they want. And to lie. And to cultivate racist feelings. Those who behave this way, most likely, do so because they feel a malaise. Sometimes they overturn their malaise towards others. Is that it? So much for the debate about hate online? Well, yes, almost. In the ecology of digital media, there are broad incentives to use the weaknesses of others to achieve commercial and political goals of all kinds. The instrumentalisation of hatred is clearly one of the most effective forms of propaganda. Its consequences can be disruptive. The problem is...
For a better curated media environment
A republic is its rational institutions. A democracy is its informed citizens. Institutions are platforms enabling citizens to decide by following a non-violent process of deliberation and voting. Citizens who know and accept their institutions in their rationality have something fundamental in common: they then can divide on opinions, but they live in the same reality. If citizens think at reality as it is defined by their passions and not by information about their republican, common, rational institutions, than they are not living a fulfilling democracy. Post-truth democracy and all the...
Post-truth democracy, politically correctness and other lies
We are debating like creazy about post-truth democracy. But we should put it in perspective. Before post-truth politics there wasn’t any “politics of truth”: lies have been the raw material of the political fabric for a lot of time (see a really great survey by the Economist). And yet there is an impression of a sort of accelerating pace for the lying side of politics. Some are trying to explain it by looking into the dynamics of social networks. Others are more convinced that the origin must be in the changing structure of Western societies. But these analytical directions are not helping...
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