Comments on: An improbable future? Absolutely!

By: Ambigulous

Ambigulous — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 23:30:08 +0000

glen

Daniel Boorstin “The Image”, circa 1961?

By: J.L. Borges

J.L. Borges — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 14:00:44 +0000

“Digg like betting markets will be created around these projections and billions will be won or lost by a new kind of master of the universe…”

Hey, I thought of this first. As usual.

By: mister z

mister z — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 12:00:49 +0000

In ten years time, Prince will provide 12 months subscription to The Australian as a freebie tucked inside his hot new album-comic-novella-parfum-video-shoe release.

By: professor rat

professor rat — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 08:10:41 +0000

The walking corpse media could do worse than list the names of all known gray nomad caravans and pop-tops. This would provide occupational therapy for them in their golden years.

By: Mercurius

Mercurius — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 07:58:23 +0000

But what we really want to know is - will there be flying cars?

…all our news will be based on the idea of probability, offered up by a giant near sentient super computer…With the full contents of the worlds history in its archives…it will project the daily news based on precise self created mathematical algorithms.

Heh. Sounds like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. Of course, history ain’t deterministic as far as anybody has been able to deduce, and doesn’t unfold according to parameters that we can discern.

If it did, then Paul Burns @ 2 would be wrong…but he ain’t!

By: Tolmides

Tolmides — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 05:56:32 +0000

I’m not so sure that Mark Day is wrong. I read his article and the thrust of it seemed to be that newspapers shouldn’t be dumbing down because the websites are already there to cater for those who want entertainment news and so on. I think that the current youth of today, as they get into their 30s, 40s and beyond, will still want to read newspapers and watch ABC news. So newspapers should keep their focus on that demographic. They shouldn’t abandon the youth by any means, but they shouldn’t completely change their newspaper format and layouts in an attempt to re-interest today’s youth.

By: Paul Burns

Paul Burns — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 05:31:22 +0000

Wherever we might now think it will be, we’ll be wrong.

By: glen

glen — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 04:14:35 +0000

“News is understood to be a creation of our attention and interests”

This is already the case. Hard news to soft news, the media apparatus cultivates the interests of its readers and sells them to advertisers like a farmer sells a crop.

Plus news already shapes probabilities. Lyotard once wrote that myths were humanity’s first attempt to control time (contingency) by providing narratives through which random events and happenstance could be made sense of. The news already colonises the future by reproducing the conditions of expectations and narratives eventualities through which it makes sense of contemporary events. Daniel Boorstin really nailed this notion of ‘news making’ when he diagnosed his contemporary society (1950s US) as having ‘exaggerated expectations’.