technology

There's just no way to think about the future and get it right. The other night we were all watching "Back to the Future, Part 2" for about the 900th time. I got a chuckle out of the "Surf Vietnam" poster on a wall in 2015 Hill Valley. In the 1980s, when the film was made, the idea of tourism in Vietnam was about as futuristic as flying cars and hoverboards. Somehow I doubt that we'll have flying cars or hoverboards in the next seven years. But Vietnam tourism? Of course. Why not?

Martin Stabe recaps the ongoing debate about whether simple tools like Dreamweaver -- which no professional journalist is likely to ever use -- have a role in journalism education.

Disruptive innovations, in the Clayton Christensen model, typically represent a "leap down" rather than an improvement in technology. And sometimes the result might seem to be a toy, beneath serious notice.

For awhile part of the Sunday morning newspaper-reading ritual at my house has been to dig through the "guy toy" inserts from Lowe's, Home Depot, CompUSA and Best Buy.

Three of those companies are doing pretty well (in fact, Home Depot just opened another store within walking distance of my house). One is doing very poorly: CompUSA, which announced Friday that it's throwing in the towel and will close its stores after the holiday sales.

Oddly enough, there's a lesson in this for newspapers.

I've been repeating myself a lot lately: "It's not about technology. It's not about technology." Nevertheless, I find myself being drawn back into the technology frequently, and last week I spent a day at the Barcelona Drupalcon, surrounded by a bunch of really smart guys (mostly guys, anyway) half my age.

I was "in the neighborhood" because BDZV, the German federation of newspaper publishers, had asked me to speak at an annual meeting. I hopped a cheap flight to BCN and slipped in a day at the four-day Drupal conference.

In a commentary for the Pew Internet & American Life project, Susannah Fox writes that she's "struck by a phrase repeated a few times: 'good enough' technology."

The phrase actually is a key to understanding disruptive innovation as laid out by Harvard prof Clayton Christensen, and embodied in the NewspaperNext Blueprint for Change.

I have long believed that the mind is not to be found between the ears, but rather in the sum of our interactions with our environment. In a sense, we are what we do and who we know (so be careful what you do and who you know).

Technology extends and expands our reach, and therefore our minds. Tools shape the user. Marshall McLuhan famously said the media are an extension of our central nervous systems.