Students I know created this show:
Other students I know produced two shows this evening, and they’ll be online tomorrow. And in between this and that, on a hectic night of shooting, where I might have just been accidentally getting in the way on purpose, I did get one of the better jokes I can make in a studio …
Meanwhile, at @IUSTV, #WUW and @iustvnews be like … pic.twitter.com/2IITcZV19B
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) October 8, 2019
We got one in last spring, too …
Here's @Matt_Cohen_ and @m_dugan44 on the award-winning™ @IUSTVsports. Tune in. #gifdbykenny pic.twitter.com/5C3CCQvI04
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) April 4, 2019
The infinity effect is a classic joke. Maybe I appreciate it more than other people, but that’s OK. There was a great cartoon, probably from the 1960s or 1970s, that I can’t find today, but I’ve never forgotten and it probably predisposed me to the bit. At some point you have to be able to amuse yourself in the course of your day.
Elsewhere, this evening, I saw a presentation from the great Doc Searls, who has been a fellow at Harvard, NYU, UC-Santa Barbara and a widely published journalist. He’s also a best-selling author. One book he co-wrote, The Cluetrain Manifesto, was an important component of a class I used to teach. So this was a great opportunity to hear an important thinker. I could say a lot more about the guy, but you’d think I was overselling it.
This, @dsearls says, is the media ecosystem we're in now.
(Obvious and important realities are often difficult to see.) pic.twitter.com/CtQViSscAE
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) October 8, 2019
Isn’t it interesting how well that applies to everyone, except for those to whom it does not apply? And then, for fun, go live in that lifestyle for about 12 hours, or try to conduct your daily business therein. Where is the water that fish asked us about?
Talking about, we as "bodied" creatures, and the disembodied nature of the Internet. Prepositions don't apply. "On" the Internet. We're not "on" anything.
I've long said we shouldn't talk Internet vs the "real world." We should talk about the mediated experience as real.
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) October 8, 2019
I remember the first time I said this, in a political communication panel at a little regional convention. The room was full and there were some seriously accomplished scholars in the room. The looks I got when I said “We should stop differentiating between the real world and our time online.” This would have been immediately after Barack Obama’s first presidential election, when online strategies had been so critical to many of the campaigns we saw the previous fall. I can only assume it seemed an odd thought to the more accomplished scholars because they were of a vintage that, when they thought about it, were still thinking of other mediated formats.
The bigger problem, tonight, is that more people should have heard him speak. But that’s a problem for a different day.
I made a joke today about the vulnerability of the Internet, one demonstrable weak spot, of course, being …
Have you ever been to lunch somewhere when the credit card machine goes down?
Chaos. Hungry chaos. Hungry, on-a-schedule-and-tense-about-it chaos. Pure hungry, on-a-schedule-and-tense-about-it chaos. https://t.co/Av1wdRVp7P
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) October 8, 2019
Then The Yankee and I went to lunch. She dove into her purse to pay and pulled out … cash. I saw an Out of Order Post-it on the little loyalty card sticker. As I am convinced the societal part of our world will come to an end just after the adhesive of hastily scrawled notes on carefully applied squares of paper gives way, this was not a good sign. Especially after that joke I made this morning.
But she just wanted to pay with greenbacks today. Sometimes you go with the classics. It was only the loyalty scanner device which was down. We won’t put too much thought into that as a metaphor. All of this, I guess, made sense, given the moment (the moment is the message, by the way) wasn’t typified by people stacked up at the cash register how they were going to get by this guy who was between them and their noontime habits.
If you know anyone looking for a project …
What young scholar needs a research topic? https://t.co/JAgYDc0Dbk
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) October 8, 2019
Someone out there is thinking big thoughts about the intersection of sports media and geo-policy and geopolitics. With the world getting smaller and sports getting larger and the money … well, the money is just a form of communicating these days. That’s the moment we live in. That’s the adtech that Doc Searls was talking about tonight.
Real thing: Geopolitically, this is now an old and established pattern. As it pertains to domestic expression/social media signaling, this model will return with every enterprise trying to do business in that part of the world. (Except for Silicon Valley, which is already cozy.)
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) October 8, 2019
And it won’t be going away any time soon, no matter how I mangle the spelling of Silicone Valley.
More important than all of these things is this beautiful expression:
😍 The glee this 6-year-old girl with cerebral palsy has when walking without any aide will just melt your heart! pic.twitter.com/u52aAF75PX
— RTV6 Indianapolis (@rtv6) October 8, 2019
You go have yourself a wonderful Wednesday tomorrow.
