Monday, January 28, 2008

Rebellion makes gains

Even prodigies who avoid burnout and resist social pressures are unlikely to make a big splash as an adult. The problem, notes giftedness researcher Ellen Winner, is that to make a major contribution in the arts, and even the sciences "you need a rebellious spirit and the type of mind that can see new things
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Sunday, January 27, 2008

TV and the arts

The Web can be the new TV promise!
clipped from www.artsjournal.com

Today I want to make an argument about the rise of arts culture. In the 1950s, at the dawn of TV, the medium's pioneers believed that television would be the great democratizer - exposing culture to the masses. The best of the world's culture could be brought into the living rooms of America. The early shows were full of high-art culture - symphony orchestras, plays, high-minded debates.

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Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Thinking outside the box

From Today's NYT:
"When everybody knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’,” said Andrew S. Grove, Intel co-founder. In other words, it becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself.

"This so-called curse of knowledge, a phrase used in a 1989 paper in The Journal of Political Economy, means that once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do. Your conversations with others in the field are peppered with catch phrases and jargon that are foreign to the uninitiated. When it’s time to accomplish a task — open a store, build a house, buy new cash registers, sell insurance — those in the know get it done the way it has always been done, stifling innovation as they barrel along the well-worn path...

"To innovate you have to bring together people with a variety of skills.

"When experts have to slow down and go back to basics to bring an outsider up to speed it forces them to look at their world differently and, as a result, they come up with new solutions to old problems."

This is why we need to think differently about television. This is why old media is threatened.