Category: Editorials

It seems 2006 will be the year that everyone will have to face up to the fact that Print is dying and while you can choose to blame The Internet, cable tv, or even such technologies as RSS Feeds, the simple truth is that newspapers and magazines no longer compete on content alone. The one exception that I can think of are glam publications which are all about showing hot celebrities in bikinis like the psuedo-porn Maxim and FHM, but even the classic Playboy Magazine is a former shell of itself. Hardest hit though are technology magazines and newspapers which cannot keep up with the 24 hour world of the Internet, and whose editorials and opinion pages pale in comparison to the abundance of online blogs.

I for one cannot understand how MacWorld magazine chooses to become even more irrelevant with each passing year, when the Macintosh market is steadily growing now. Here is a magazine that had a long tradition of editorials and in-depth reviews that you could trust. Now MacWorld costs about $8 and has so little content that it is not even worth consideration. More often than not, I am picking up expensive copies of British magazines like WebDeveloper, WebBuilder, and GigaHertz. At least these magazines still have good content and honest product reviews.

If I became a tech magazine editor, I’d add more product reviews, more tutorials, and cover stories which no other magazine covered. It’s not hard. Why devote yourself to just writing another review of the lastest Mac laptop, when you can cover things like the top ten laptops not available in the US, or what schools are doing to integrate computers into the classroom (or even better a story on how they are integrating it wrong!), or go underground and do some real investigative reporting and dish out some interesting industry news.

Think Secret has a full story the decline of US based Mac magazines like MacWorld and MacAddict. Personally you can also add PCWorld and all the other PC related magazines in there too, except for CPU User which I find interesting still.

This all reminds me of something most grade school teachers tell kids all the time: you can’t expect an A, if you only put half an effort into it. The same goes for magazines and newspapers, if your content is not compelling enough, you probably can’t expect huge sales.

I am sitting in my local school’s gym, and talking to other democrats. It was my first Democratic Caucus and I was excited and there to support Howard Dean. I had even given Dean’s campaign some money a week before. But about a half hour into the caucus I knew something was wrong. I started having feelings of distrust, usually I reserve such feelings for the public education system, but this time I had them about the political process. Clearly the Kerry supporters were in the majority and were courting most everyone in the room. The Dean campaign had failed to really organize; we were mostly made up of twenty-something college kids and optimistic thirty-somethings which had somehow found ourselves in the political process for the first time. We had a lot in common with the Edwards supporters, but we were both up against an organized and seasoned political group that were in favor of John Kerry.

By the time Dean made his now famous rant speech at the University of Iowa Student Union, (just a few miles away), the Dean campaign had failed, but I was still stuck at my local school’s gym, as we were ironing out what our local group would send to the state Democratic Party. As I sat there listening to the few people that stayed, I knew the Democratic Party would no longer matter, but I at least still hoped that we could defeat the Bush ticket. The few of us left discussed the important agendas for the party and what mattered to us: education, healthcare, jobs, and so on. By the time Kerry and Edwards had their convention, none of our concerns ever made it to the national politicians and our voices became irrelevant and drowned out in favor of more dull Kerry slogans. In a sense the Democratic party became ineffective the moment it stopped listening to its local supporters and instead tried to elect a boring and seasoned politician, no matter how well meaning Kerry was, he was still the wrong candidate. Edwards in the end, showed to be the correct choice for most of us, but on a Kerry ticket, Edwards was just a sideshow.

Now in 2006, the Democrats think they can beat Republicans, because of the scandals, because of a hurricane, because Republicans are now seen as too greedy in comparison. I doubt the Democrats can succeed on this alone. They are the inept party, the party of no ideas, in a sense they are everything I hated about politics: the combination of pride and prudence. I am in my thirties, too young yet to claim the wisdom of men in their forties and fifties, too old to cling to my rebellious and naive twenties, stuck in the middle between men who dream of making the world a better place, and those who would have you believe it cannot be done.

One of the most remarkable concepts to grasp about people is to understand the way they think, or as often is the case, do not think. It may surprise you that what we refer to as common sense is not in actuality thinking! It is actually what I call a shortcut to thinking. This is the idea that people put very little thought into forming their conclusions and in our society it is more common than you think.

Everyday, people make connections, where they take what they see and hear and draw a certain opinion. Though opinons are not facts, we often take opinions and attribute the same validity to them, especially if we somehow come to believe that the opinion in question is actually our own. The easiest way to explain this system is the terms that French critics came up with, The Sign and The Signified. In a system where everything that we encounter is a sign and that each sign signifies different things to everyone of us, you can see that actually would require a lot of mental thought, but if we do not calculate or try to comprehend what we think is being signified all the time, we realize that in a lot of cases, we do not even see the sign, just the signified.

Think of the term: Teenage Mothers. Do you already have an opinion? Does the term signify for you young unwed mothers? Or did you think of mothers who have teenage children? I bet you totally thought of the young unwed mothers. The reason is because you did not think, you simply made a connection to the signified image, in this case that one being of young unwed mothers. This occurs daily in our lives and we simply go through most of our day reacting instead of being proactive thinkers.

Con Artists

Next time you listen to the news, read an article, or are being convinced of something, think about just how much proactive thought you have to the information being given to you. The most persuasive people, tend to understand that the best way to win over people is not by giving them a sound argument, but by getting them to think less about your actual position, to make them feel passionate and less likely to oppose you. The most simple of con artist uses distraction, having you keep your focus on something while he does something else behind you, but the really successful con artist is more like a politician, who uses rhetoric to make you believe in something you may have questionable doubt about. In fact, many politicians, lawyers, and salespeople use the exact question: How can I remove any doubts? Sometimes by stating an open ended question, you end up convincing yourself of a proposition you yourself do not agree with.

Perils of Quick Conclusions

Not all shortcuts to thinking are bad, but one does need to understand that all shortcuts are essentially quick conclusions, and quick conclusions do in fact have consequences. It is these consequences that we have to live with, whether we make the wrong conclusions about a simple term as teenage mothers, or if we find ourselves on the wrong side of a political issue for all the right reasons but our own.