It’s almost a year since I last posted to this blog. So it’s not much of a web log. But I’m back. I’ll be on Tumblr. I’ll be on Twitter. I’ll even be on Facebook. But, I promise, I’ll be here, too.
P.S. Yes, I’m on Linkedin, too. And I’m part of the NPR Community, naturally.
The Web is a visual medium. Humans are visual creatures. Understanding this is one key to designing an engaging and useful Web site.
Sao Paulo (Photo by andredeak via Flickr)
As I was leafing through the FT, I came upon an amazing photo of two soaring towers in Shanghai. In the foreground was a construction site. The photo was sexy enough to lure me into reading the paper’s mining-industry analysis.
Mining! What was I thinking? Well, it was all worth it for this one little nugget – buried under reams of text about copper prices and the stockpiling of zinc by China:
Rio Tinto, the multinational miner, reminded investors of these fundamentals … . The urbanisation rate of the Chinese population is still only 45 percent, and that is not even mentioning India or Brazil — “50,000 new skyscrapers are needed by 2025″, it adds.
Really? Fifty thousand skyscrapers in the next 15+ years? That’s about 3,300 per year, or 63 a week or nine a day for 15 years!
OK. So I have no idea how Rio Tinto built its projection. For instance, how do they define what qualifies as a “skyscraper.” And I also don’t know how many skyscrapers have been built, on average, each year over the last 15 or 20 years. Maybe Rio’s number is not so amazing.
On the face of it, though, it’s kind of mind boggling.
I recently read a piece in the Financial Times that seemed to be another sign that the future will not be one where being well read is a common trait.
The front-page story told how many in the City of London has been enthralled by a 15-year-old intern’s observations about media consumption amongst his friends. From the FT article:
Mr Robson had little comfort for struggling print publishers, saying no teenager he knew regularly reads a newspaper since most “cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text” rather than see summaries online or on television.
It just so happens that I was having a conversation with a professor of philosophy(!) over the weekend who said much the same thing. She said it was difficult to get her students to read. She was talking about college students. Isn’t that what most of their education consists of, reading and discussing complex texts?
It seems like we’ve been hearing for years about how fewer and fewer people are reading books and newspapers. The learned have complained that information is being chopped into smaller and smaller bits, to the point where coherent arguments can no longer be made in the time allotted by society.
But the ability to think for yourself and puzzle through problems big and small comes — in large part — from reading and understanding the structure of ideas and relationships. As a colleague said to me, the mind is like any other muscle. You must exercise your mental faculties to build them up and use them.
Are we on the road to a time when a small class of thinkers who have an unnatural predilection for things like reading will rule over a class of people who are happy to consume without thinking?
Well, that’s a drastic conclusion to draw. Still, I’m concerned that people seem to be seeing less value in reading substantial works and reports. It surprises me since I find such pleasure in those pursuits, while also living much of my life in the digital domain.
We have a number of new blogs at NPR that show promise:
Take a look and let us know what you think!