Though Banister mostly places a new body on an old chassis, he gives a profound sense of the individual and societal power...
Media industry executive Banister offers sharp insights into the latent value of networked media, plus some admittedly hazy speculations into the value of its application relative to user creativity.
The author builds a strong base by simply asking the right questions: What is media? What is networking? And “how to employ networked media (whether existing or nascent) in ways that are native, self-sustaining, and profitable (if that is the aim)”? First, Banister wants to get past the net con, the marketing of promises with inordinate faith in the unknown, all those disastrous IPOs in which “they were selling a religion, more than a company.” While the burst bubble may have hampered investment and made innovation more difficult, he suggests that all our digital tools can be molded into a metamedia, an evolutionary catalyst in myriad point-to-point combinations for business and society, an interconnectedness that must aspire to predictability, responsibility, and profitability (though Banister never overplays the capital-generating aspects of the medium). He sees a lot of old business models behind such surviving networked companies as eBay and Amazon, which “simply ensur[e] that incoming revenue exceeds outgoings expenses” with a “dogged commitment to custom technology invented and deployed.” More problematic, or at least less intuitive, are Banister’s musings on the potential interface between virtual and actual (for instance, the expression of an artist’s intentions versus actualization) or on how “storydwelling,” a participatory, experiential, and immersive form, will compare to the ancient art of storytelling. As the author notes, the influence of networking on the marketplace in terms of consumer demand has already been immense, but perhaps his most intriguing speculations concern the part a network could play in enacting issue-by-issue political expression, putting the beauty of participatory democracy within grasp.
Though Banister mostly places a new body on an old chassis, he gives a profound sense of the individual and societal power inherent within networked media.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-9724562-6-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Agate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
