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Charles van der Haegen

Global Voices · About - 0 views

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    "Global Voices is a community of more than 300 bloggers and translators around the world who work together to bring you reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media. Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online - shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard. Millions of people are blogging, podcasting, and uploading photos, videos, and information across the globe, but unless you know where to look, it can be difficult to find respected and credible voices. Our international team of volunteer authors and part-time editors are active participants in the blogospheres they write about on Global Voices. Global Voices is incorporated in the Netherlands as Stichting Global Voices, a nonprofit foundation. We do not have an office, but work as a virtual community across multiple time zones, meeting in person only when the opportunity arises (usually during our Summits). We rely on grants, sponsorships, editorial commissions, and donations to cover our costs. Our Projects Global Voices is translated into more than 30 languages by volunteer translators, who have formed the Lingua project. Additionally, Global Voices has an Advocacy website and network to help people speak out online in places where their voices are censored. We also have an outreach project called Rising Voices to help marginalized communities use citizen media to be heard, with an emphasis on the developing world. Read more about our projects. Our History Global Voices was founded in 2005 by former CNN Beijing and Tokyo Bureau Chief, Rebecca MacKinnon and technologist and Africa expert, Ethan Zuckerman while they were both fellows at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. The idea for the project grew out of an internat
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    Sourcing uncomfortable knowledge, buried under the avalange of info overload, or repressed from appearing??? To be verified
Charles van der Haegen

Michael+Thompson+Lisbon+Report+Democratic+Governance+Technological+Change+and+Globalisa... - 0 views

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    A fundamental article on how new social theory brings new perspectives on how to find and omplement solutions to the intractable problems of our time. These ideas originally developped by Maruy Dougleas, have been refined and developped into a full theory, called Theory of Socio-Cultural Viability, anso sometil$mes called "Cultural Theory". The lead researcher in this field is Michael Thompson, author of this Workshop Report
Charles van der Haegen

The Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America - 0 views

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    "THE SAGUARO SEMINAR: CIVIC ENGAGEMENT IN AMERICA is an initiative of Professor Robert D. Putnam at John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University focused on the study of "social capital" (the value of social networks) and community engagement. Our eponymous seminar from 1995-2000 involved 30 talented scholars and practitioners from across America (including then civil-rights-lawyer Barack Obama) in developing strategies for increasing American civic engagement and led to the bettertogether report. "Bettertogether" the final report of the Saguaro Seminar is now available at www.BetterTogether.org The Seminar participants were a diverse, exceptional group of 33 thinkers and doers, including articulate leaders from all parts of the country - from coast to coast, from small town and suburb to the inner city - and from all walks of life - from government officials to religious leaders, from labor union activists to high-tech and business executives, from elected officials to street workers. All participants demonstrate a deep commitment to improving the infrastructure of national civic life. These twenty-five practitioners and eight academic thinkers met for two-day sessions through late-1999 to develop a handful of practical strategies with national applicability for increasing Americans' connections with one another. "
David McGavock

Knight Foundation | Reporter Analysis - 0 views

  • The way we engage in public dialogue, coordinate, solve problems—all of it is shifting. New networks are emerging everywhere. It’s exciting—and frightening. What is this new network-centric world? What does it mean for community change?
  • How might our grantmaking respond effectively to a world in which loose networks of individuals, not just formal organizations, are becoming powerful creators of knowledge and action? What default practices should we discard and what new behaviors should we embrace?
  • We asked our partner, Monitor Institute, to take a critical look at the role of networks in community life. Our lens was apolitical.
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    we were interested in the potential of networks-to create stronger bonds or to split us apart. This essay highlights groups that are creatively connecting citizens who are making a difference today, and explores how technology might impact public participation and leadership in the future. The pages are rich with useful examples and lessons about how networks are unlocking assets in communities to support open government, care for the elderly, help disaster victims and advance women's rights. Throughout, the report considers the role philanthropy can play in harnessing the best network-centric practices, the ones that might unleash individual interactivity to achieve social impact at a scale and speed never before possible.
David McGavock

Multitasking, social media and distraction: Research review Journalist's Resource: Rese... - 0 views

  • researchers have tried to assess how humans are coping in this highly connected environment and how “chronic multitasking” may diminish our capacity to function effectively.
  • Clifford Nass, notes that scholarship has remained firm in the overall assessment: “The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They’re basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking.”
  • Below are more than a dozen representative studies in these areas:
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  • The researchers conclude that the experiments “suggest that heavy media multitaskers are distracted by the multiple streams of media they are consuming, or, alternatively, that those who infrequently multitask are more effective at volitionally allocating their attention in the face of distractions.”
  • Members of the ‘Net Generation’ reported more multitasking than members of ‘Generation X,’ who reported more multitasking than members of the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation. The choices of which tasks to combine for multitasking were highly correlated across generations, as were difficulty ratings of specific multitasking combinations.
  • same time, these experts predicted that the impact of networked living on today’s young will drive them to thirst for instant gratification, settle for quick choices, and lack patience
  • similar mental limitations in the types of tasks that can be multitasked.
  • survey about the future of the Internet, technology experts and stakeholders were fairly evenly split as to whether the younger generation’s always-on connection to people and information will turn out to be a net positive or a net negative by 2020.
  • said many of the young people growing up hyperconnected to each other and the mobile Web and counting on the Internet as their external brain will be nimble, quick-acting multitaskers who will do well in key respects.
  • The educational implications include allowing students short ‘technology breaks’ to reduce distractions and teaching students metacognitive strategies regarding when interruptions negatively impact learning.”
  • The data suggest that “using Facebook and texting while doing schoolwork were negatively predictive of overall GPA.” However, “emailing, talking on the phone, and using IM were not related to overall GPA.”
  • Regression analyses revealed that increased media multitasking was associated with higher depression and social anxiety symptoms, even after controlling for overall media use and the personality traits of neuroticism and extraversion.
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    Clifford Nass, notes that scholarship has remained firm in the overall assessment: "The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They're basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking." - See more at: http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/social-media/multitasking-social-media-distraction-what-does-research-say#sthash.I21dv2wV.dpuf
Charles van der Haegen

Shareable: About Us - 0 views

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    About Us Shareable is a nonprofit online magazine that tells the story of sharing. We cover the people, places, and projects bringing a shareable world to life. And we share how-tos so you can make a shareable world real in your life. In a shareable world, things like car sharing, clothing swaps, childcare coops, potlucks, and cohousing make life more fun, green, and affordable. When we share, not only is a better life possible, but so is a better world. The remarkable successes of Zipcar, Wikipedia, Kiva, open source software, Freecycle, and Creative Commons show this. They tell a hopeful story about human nature and our future, one we don't hear enough in the mainstream media. They show what's possible when we share. They show that we don't act merely for our own good, but go out of our way to contribute to the common good. They show that we can solve the social and environmental crises we face, and thrive as never before. They show that a new world is emerging where the more you share the more respect you get, and where life works because everyone is motivated to help each other. We tell this story because a shareable world might be just what's needed to enjoy life to the fullest today while creating a better tomorrow. And it's being built by people from all walks of life right now. Shareable is your invitation to join these innovators today. Want to start sharing? Check out our top 20 how-to share posts and our complete index of how-to share posts. Want to get involved in Shareable? You can contribute stories, feedback, and money. You can follow us on Twitter Facebook, and Identi.ca and share our stories with friends. You can register and join discussions about your favorite posts. You can subscribe to our e-mail list. We have more ideas for getting involved here. Want to know more about sharing? For the big picture on sharing, check out the following features: "Four Degrees of Sharing," by Janelle Orsi; "Ten Ways our World is Becoming More Share
David McGavock

Shambhala Sun - Wisdom 2.0: The Digital World Connects (July 2011) - 3 views

  • Soren Gordhamer, author of Wisdom 2.0: Ancient Secrets for the Creative and Constantly Connected, has made it his business to explore how technology alters our patterns of living and how we can work creatively with those changes.
  • Wisdom 2.0 is a conversation among people who have accepted technology and its benefits, but who are also deeply concerned about the inner life.
  • Gordhamer says that Wisdom 2.0 is occurring whenever people realize that “each of us longs for wisdom, and that is what’s really important in life. It’s easy to get caught in the speed of life and forget what we’re here for, our true path.”
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    "Unprecedented communication and information-but also speed, stress, and 24/7 distraction. BARRY BOYCE reports on a group of far-thinking digital leaders who are using mindfulness to humanize the brave new world they have created. "
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    Soren Gordhamer's book, Wisdom 2.0 is a very good read in t his regard.
Charles van der Haegen

New Media Literacies: Greening a Digital Media Class - 0 views

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    Blogpost by Antonio Lopez, co-learner at MindAmp I've been a media literacy educator for a dozen years, although as a consequence of participating in the punk movement during the early '80s, I've been a lifelong proponent of do-it-yourself media. Since entering the field of education I've worked in numerous arts programs with youths, spending considerable time with disadvantaged groups. Working with Native Americans, Latinos and Afro-Caribbean youth has helped me to formulate a multicultural, multi-perspective approach to media literacy that has pushed me to reconceptualize cultural assumptions embedded in traditional media education.* Learners in those communities are under greater stress than mainstream Americans, and their particular needs call for attention to social justice, environmental issues and cultural citizenship, things that many privileged Americans take for granted. At one point when I was working on the rez, a Native American elder opined on the information highway by remarking, "any road can get you somewhere." Unfortunately, many programs that embrace digital media tools are too enamored with the technology to think more critically about the "somewhere" we are moving towards. It was during this period that I realized the importance of appropriate applications of technology and also understood the ethnocentrism embedded in the idea of "progress." More importantly, I was forced to think more carefully about who or what I was ultimately serving in my work as an educator. As a fellow media geek it might surprise you, then, to suggest that my approach since then has been to serve the planet: humans and nonhuman alike. In particular I feel a strong calling to speak to the best of my abilities on behalf of our silent partner: nature. These days in my current role as a professor of media studies at an American University in Rome, I have taken to heart the task of incorporating lessons I learned beyond the walled garden of academia to green the field of m
David McGavock

Theory of mind - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • The emerging field of social neuroscience has also begun to address this debate, by imaging humans while performing tasks demanding the understanding of an intention, belief or other mental state.
    • David McGavock
       
      Mirror Neurons
  • The theory of mind (ToM) impairment describes a difficulty someone would have with perspective taking. This is also sometimes referred to as mind-blindness.
  • Individuals who experience a theory of mind deficit have difficulty determining the intentions of others, lack understanding of how their behavior affects others, and have a difficult time with social reciprocity.[27]
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  • ToM deficits have been observed in people with autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenics, persons under the influence of alcohol and narcotics, sleep-deprived persons, and persons who are experiencing severe emotional or physical pain.
  • Research by Vittorio Gallese, Luciano Fadiga and Giacomo Rizzolatti (reviewed in [51]) has shown that some sensorimotor neurons, which are referred to as mirror neurons, first discovered in the premotor cortex of rhesus monkeys, may be involved in action understanding.
  • Neuropsychological evidence has provided support for neuroimaging results on the neural basis of theory of mind. A study with patients suffering from a lesion of the temporoparietal junction of the brain (between the temporal lobe and parietal lobe) reported that they have difficulty with some theory of mind tasks.[49] This shows that theory of mind abilities are associated with specific parts of the human brain.
  • However, there is also evidence against the link between mirror neurons and theory of mind. First, macaque monkeys have mirror neurons but do not seem to have a 'human-like' capacity to understand theory of mind and belief. Second, fMRI studies of theory of mind typically report activation in the mPFC, temporal poles and TPJ or STS,[54] but these brain areas are not part of the mirror neuron system.
    • David McGavock
       
      Contrary Mirror Neuron Evidence
  • The presumption that others have a mind is termed a theory of mind because each human can only intuit the existence of his/her own mind through introspection, and no one has direct access to the mind of another.
David McGavock

Q&A: David Eagleman, Director, Initiative on Neuroscience and the Law | SmartPlanet - 1 views

  • David Eagleman is about as close to a rock star that a neuroscientist can be.
  • Eagleman was excited to talk to SmartPlanet about his work at both the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law, a national, interdisciplinary organization he founded that’s looking at how to remake the U.S. legal system; and the Laboratory for Perception and Action, at Baylor College of Medicine. The former initiative tackles topics such as how brain imaging and analyses of “Big Data” on crime patterns can help communities better understand and prevent violent behavior in new ways. The latter looks broadly at how individual brains are not at all alike — and how the differences might be significant for how we construct and manage our societies.
  • His work is particularly relevant in policy-related discussions in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy in Connecticut.
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  • “To the newsreaders who feel that mental illness is best viewed as an excuse, let me suggest instead that we might more effectually recognize it as a national priority for social policy,” he wrote on his blog shortly after the shootings.  “If we care to prevent the next mass shooting, we should concentrate our efforts on getting meaningful diagnoses and resources to the next Adam Lanza.”
  • Because we are able now to measure things we have never been able to measure before, this allows us potentially to customize sentencing and rehabilitation. The goal is to have the whole system be more just and have more utility.
  • Our system is built on the assumption that if you’re over 18 and over the IQ of 70, you’re a practical reasoner, free to choose how you act. But modern neuroscience suggests that those are not good assumptions.
  • I have to emphasize, though, that this is not about exculpation. I have to be very clear that this is really about customized sentencing and rehab that works.
  • It’s helpful to be able to talk about science in basic ways that anyone can understand. What I tell my students in my lab is that they need to be able explain their research to an 8th grader.
  • I’m an amateur history buff, and if I want to read about the Roman Empire, I don’t want to read an academic debate, but instead a narrative by a trusted guide who’s done their homework, who will offer the filter of how they understand the Roman Empire, to shepherd me through its history in only 200 pages.
  • Rather than “playful,” I’d say that my approach is simply the opposite of boring. It’s about looking for and then trying to answer questions that are poweful enough to get you out of bed at 5AM.
  • My intuition on this idea: being a good scientist or creative writer is about maintaining the wide-eyed wonder of a child and asking questions all the time. That’s what really makes discovery happen in any field.
  • Science is changing really rapidly. One way is that lots of scientists are moving into Big Data
  • Right now we’re involved with serious crunching to pull out statistical info on recidivism and crime. Our first challenge is visualizing it. So in this sense, creativity and art also relevant. Data visualization is really valuable stuff; you can discover a trend when you see, wow, I didn’t realize that bump would be there. To be able to tie together data in beautiful ways allows us to see and discover patterns.
  • I don’t have any fear about losing the mystery of creativity. If I explain every single chemical piece in the process of why you enjoy the taste of a soy latte, it wouldn’t diminish your enjoyment of a soy latte. It might even enhance it
  • Neuroscientists work on how to understand how brains construct reality in general, but we are in the position of fish trying to understand water. What I mean by that is that we only know one way of seeing the world very well, like a fish only knows water.  Learning about how synesthesia works allows us to get out of our fishbowl,
  • You don’t need to know anything about the brain to understand what shape or style will be appealing. We may come scrambling up behind advertisers and product designers and validate them. If Apple wanted to hire me, sure, I’d say yes immediately and do the best job I could! But honestly, they already know how to do it. They’re the design experts. We neuroscientists would in come with our fancy machines and theories and explain why what they do is already true.
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     "To the newsreaders who feel that mental illness is best viewed as an excuse, let me suggest instead that we might more effectually recognize it as a national priority for social policy," he wrote on his blog shortly after the shootings.  "If we care to prevent the next mass shooting, we should concentrate our efforts on getting meaningful diagnoses and resources to the next Adam Lanza."
David McGavock

Astonishing - Sagarika Bhatta - 0 views

    • David McGavock
       
      As Sagarika Bhatta said in the hangout, this is a response to the effects of climate change rather than a response to decrease CO2 emissions. The traditional practices have an important role to play in the protection of agriculture in Nepal. The traditional practices are a protective factor for sustainability.
  • share urgency
  • expose and publicize
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  • critical mass who understands the urgency
  • exploration, discussion, documentation and promotion of the knowledge
    • David McGavock
       
      Find out what practices have sustained agriculture in the 3 climates within Nepal. Document it and disseminate it to the people and outside public.
  • Global movement
  • esearch and promotion of Knowledge that helps to combat climate change
  • helps in adaptation to climate change
  • indigenous Knowledge
  • plight of citizen
    • David McGavock
       
      This is another story: how do impacts and inappropriate technologies impact the local people.
  • documentation through research
  • community-based adaptation (CBA) to climate change
    • David McGavock
       
      CBA - community based adaptation to climate chage
  • possibilities of rain water harvesting and other means of water storage
  • watershed degradation, urbanization, growing population are the major factor for water crisis here
  • making it part of national development policy
  • Nepal is vulnerable to rising global temperatures and has already been dealing with the impact of erratic rainfall, frequent droughts and floods, which have been affecting food security
    • David McGavock
       
      Problem Statement for Nepal.
  • experiment with a bottom-up approach using Local Adaptation Plans of Action, or LAPAs, in 10 districts across the country in 2010
    • David McGavock
       
      what has been tried.
  • ultimately question the status of food security
    • David McGavock
       
      The bottom line problem is that these impacts - problems above will threaten the security of the people of Nepal - food/shelter/quality of life..
  • promote the Indigenous Traditional knowledge (ITK) as Community Based Adaptation techniques that has been practiced by different indigenous community in Nepal in agriculture
    • David McGavock
       
      This is the goal. Promote traditional knowledge in support of the people of Nepal - their agriculture, livelihood and social welfare.
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    This is a good summary of the goals of the work of Sagarika Bhatta in support of Nepali agriculture. It describe the idea of community based adaptation (CBA) to climate change and the Indigenous traditional knowledge (ITK).
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David McGavock

Final Report: Introduction | DIGITAL YOUTH RESEARCH - 1 views

  • What is generally lacking in the literature overall, and in the United States in particular, is an understanding of how new media practices are embedded in a broader social and cultural ecology. While we have a picture of technology trends on one hand, and spotlights on specific youth populations and practices on the other, we need more work that brings these two pieces of the puzzle together. How are specific new media practices embedded in existing (and evolving) social structures and cultural categories?
  • we describe how our work addresses this gap, outlining our methodological commitments and descriptive focus that have defined the scope of this book. The first goal of this book is to document youth new media practice in rich, qualitative detail in order to provide a picture of how young people are mobilizing these media and technologies in their everyday lives.
  • In this section of this introductory chapter, we outline our methodological approach and how we have defined the objects and focus of our study. The descriptive frame of our study is defined by our ethnographic approach, the study of youth culture and practice, and the study of new media.
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  • How are new media being taken up by youth practices and agendas? Our analytic question follows from this: How do these practices change the dynamics of youth-adult negotiations over literacy, learning, and authoritative knowledge?
  • We have developed an interdisciplinary analytic tool kit to investigate this complex set of relations between changing technology, kid-adult relations, and definitions of learning and literacy. Our key terms are “genres of participation,” “networked publics,” “peer-based learning,” and “new media literacy.”
  • The primary distinction we make is between friendship-driven and interest-driven genres of participation, which correspond to different genres of youth culture, social network structure, and modes of learning.
  • We use the term “peer” to refer to the people whom youth see as part of their lateral network of relations, whom they look to for affiliation, competition, as well as disaffiliation and distancing. Peers are the group of people to whom youth look to develop their sense of self, reputation, and status.
  • In contrast to friendship-driven practices, with interest-driven practices, specialized activities, interests, or niche and marginalized identities come first.
  • nterest-driven practices are what youth describe as the domain of the geeks, freaks, musicians, artists, and dorks, the kids who are identified as smart, different, or creative, who generally exist at the margins of teen social worlds.
  • Rather than relying on distinctions based on given categories such as gender, class, or ethnic identity, we have identified genres based on what we saw in our ethnographic material as the distinctions that emerge from youth practice and culture, and that help us interpret how media intersect with learning and participation
  • Genres of participation provide ways of identifying the sources of diversity in how youth engage with new media in a way that does not rely on a simple notion of “divides” or a ranking of more- or less-sophisticated media expertise. Instead, these genres represent different investments that youth make in particular forms of sociability and differing forms of identification with media genres.
  • Our work here, however, is to take more steps in applying situated approaches to learning to an understanding of mediated sociability, though not of the school-centered variety. This requires integrating approaches in public-culture studies with theories of learning and participation.
  • A growing body of ethnographic work documents how learning happens in informal settings, as a side effect of everyday life and social activity, rather than in an explicit instructional agenda.
  • Our interest, more specifically, is in documenting instances of learning that are centered around youth peer-based interaction, in which the agenda is not defined by parents and teachers.
  • What counts as learning and literacy is a question of collective values, values that are constantly being contested and negotiated between different social groups. Periods of cultural and technological flux open up new areas of debate about what should count as part of our common culture and literacy and what are appropriate ways for young people to participate in these new cultural forms.
  • While what is being defined as “new media literacy” is certainly not the exclusive province of youth, unlike in the case of “old” literacies youth are playing a more central role in the redefinition of these newer forms. In fact, the current anxiety over how new media erode literacy and writing standards could be read as an indicator of the marginalization of adult institutions that have traditionally defined literacy norms (whether that is the school or the family).
  • our work does not seek to define the components of new media literacy or to participate directly in the normalization of particular forms of literacy standards or practice. Rather, we see our contribution as describing the forms of competencies, skills, and literacy practices that youth are developing through media production and online communication in order to inform these broader debates.
  • Although the tradition of New Literacy Studies has described literacy in a more multicultural and multimodal frame, it is often silent as to the generational differences in how literacies are valued.
  • The chapters that follow are organized based on what emerged from our material as the core practices that structure youth engagement with new media.
  • Media Ecologies, frames the technological and social context in which young people are consuming, sharing, and producing new media.
  • introduces three genres of participation with new media that are an alternative to common ways of categorizing forms of media access: hanging out, messing around, and geeking out.
  • following two chapters focus on mainstream friendship-driven practices and networks.
  • instant messaging, social network sites, and mobile phones
  • making friendships, gossiping, bullying, and jockeying for status are reproduced online, but they are also reshaped
  • chapter on Intimacy
  • examines practices that are a long-standing and pervasive part of everyday youth sociality.
  • flirting, dating, and breaking up.
  • these norms largely mirror the existing practices of teen romance
  • The next chapter on Families also takes up a key “given” set of local social relationships by looking across the diverse families we have encountered in our research. The
  • use of physical space in the home, routines, rules, and shared production and play. The chapter also examines how the boundaries of home and family are extended through the use of new media.
  • final three chapters of the book focus primarily on interest-driven genres of participation, though they also describe the interface with more friendship-driven genres.
  • Gaming examines different genres of gaming practice: killing time, hanging out, recreational gaming, mobilizing and organizing, and augmented game play
  • Creative Production, looking across a range of different case studies of youth production, including podcasting, video blogging, video remix, hip-hop production, fan fiction, and fansubbing.
  • Work examines how youth are engaged in economic activity and other forms of labor using new media. The chapter suggests that new media are providing avenues to make the productive work of youth more visible and consequential.
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    "What is generally lacking in the literature overall, and in the United States in particular, is an understanding of how new media practices are embedded in a broader social and cultural ecology. While we have a picture of technology trends on one hand, and spotlights on specific youth populations and practices on the other, we need more work that brings these two pieces of the puzzle together. How are specific new media practices embedded in existing (and evolving) social structures and cultural categories?"
David McGavock

Transom » Radiolab: An Appreciation by Ira Glass - 0 views

  • Real journalism – and by that I mean fact-based reporting – is getting trounced by commentary and opinion in all its forms, from Fox News to the political blogs to Jon Stewart. Everyone knows newspapers are in horrible trouble. TV news continually loses ratings. And one way we broadcast journalists can fight back and hold our audience is to sound like human beings on the air. Not know-it-all stiffs. One way the opinion guys kick our ass and appeal to an audience is that they talk like normal people, not like news robots speaking their stentorian news-speak. So I wish more broadcast journalism had such human narrators at its center. I think that would help fact-based journalism survive.
  • particularly the places where the story turns, or where the hosts are to take different sides of an issue, those moments are always improvised.
  • Thus the utterly effortless chitchat that floats you so cheerfully from plot point to character moment to scientific explanation to the next plot point is actually worked over second by second and beat by beat, over the course of weeks.
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  • Jad’s an Oberlin-trained composer so he’s always either writing the music to fit the stories on his show, the way a composer writes a film score, or he adapts other people’s music so well you can’t tell it wasn’t custom made.
  • And all that meticulous work is in the service of something that’s the opposite of careful and meticulous: this totally chatty, happy, loose, spontaneous-sounding conversation between Jad and Robert and their interviewees.
  • on Radiolab. They invented this insanely concise, entertaining way to tell that story, and they have no problem hurtling through it quickly.
  • For my part, I find it comforting that this level of excellence is so labor intensive that they only can make ten full shows a year (plus, sure, 16 “shorts” that they distribute on the Internet). If they could do an hour of this every week, I think I’d have to quit radio. What would be the point of continuing? How could anyone compete with that?
  • There was an entire hour recently that took up the provocative question: from an evolutionary perspective, why would it be useful for us, or for any creature, to ever help one another? To ever be good? That’s a really hard premise for stories with ideas and emotion and strong characters and interesting plot lines.
  • “In an almost comic attempt to make their job hard, the duo take only the most difficult subjects from science and philosophy: ‘Time,’ ‘Morality,’ ‘Memory and Forgetting,’ ‘Limits.’”
  • What’s striking is the ambition of all this. Jad and Robert seem to be inventing their effects and techniques as they go.
  • Sometimes it seems like the only people who understand how terrific the show is, are listeners.
  • Radiolab also does a beautiful job figuring out a mix of stories that’ll move us from one idea to the next over the course of an hour. Lots of their episodes have a coherent argument to them, an argument that takes an hour and several stories to lay out.
  • Radiolab: An Appreciation I marvel at Radiolab when I hear it. I feel jealous. Its co-creators Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich have digested all the storytelling and production tricks of everyone in public radio before them, invented some slick moves of their own, and ended up creating the rarest thing you can create in any medium: a new aesthetic.
  • A 2010 NPR/SmithGeiger survey of news consumers who rightly should be in the public radio audience, showed that one of the biggest reasons adults say they choose not to listen to public radio is that they’re put off by the tone. One survey respondent said: “This type of story could be interesting, but the reporter’s voice and intonation is soooo affected, upper class, wasp, Ph.D. student-like, it detracts from the story.
  • This information is presented quickly and cheerfully. There’s a bounce to the whole thing. Music plays behind. Jad looks at a map, as he’s talking to Laura, naming the cities the balloon passed on its flight across England. It’s visual. Do I need to explain here that part of making great radio is remembering that you always need to give the audience things to look at?
  • All this banter also helps them solve a storytelling problem
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    Radiolab: An Appreciation I marvel at Radiolab when I hear it. I feel jealous. Its co-creators Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich have digested all the storytelling and production tricks of everyone in public radio before them, invented some slick moves of their own, and ended up creating the rarest thing you can create in any medium: a new aesthetic.
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    Telling a story - capturing the attention and curiosity of people. Sparking our humanity.
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