At the very beginning of the year I created a Reading Schedule for 2022 note topped with: “Goal is 20 books. 5 Japanese books.” As I looked over the snowy countryside in Canada last January,…
Browsing Category media
From intergalactic villains to badminton
(The following started off as a tweet, which quickly developed into a tweetstorm, so I decided to move it to the blog, for this is where longer thoughts belong, right?) I have been trying to…
“Area CIS white Man applauds diversity”
I got cornered at the park during lunch today to offer a “Random Area Man” soundbite about our mayor’s attendance at the Sugarplum Ball, a cool little event put on by my pals at the…
Sectioned — On tech coverage in local media
Our mayor ran on a platform including tech. Our premier seems to have shifted her economic policy to tech. Our downtown is physically changing thanks to tech. Dozens of new tech companies start here each…
Nice coverage of tech issues at the local level
Kudos to Kelowna Capital News, one of our local newspapers, for running a special on technology last week. Tech is one of the dominant problems in the global zeitgeist, and it is not often that…
Who watches the watchers?
Full disclosure: I back CANADALAND on Patreon. Turning a critical eye towards the national news media is an important and valuable endeavour. But the daily lives of Canadians are influenced far more by local news….
Kelowna news media audit
I was inspired by the story of Joey Coleman, an independent and crowd-sourced reporter in Hamilton, who I learned about from this great episode of CANADALAND about the collapse of local news. It made me…
Hack startups — The state of ink-stained disruption
Two of the scariest areas in startupland are healthcare and education. These are monolithic, highly regulated sectors with long sales cycles — not particularly prone to “disruption.” In this year’s Kleiner Perkins annual internet trends…
Arguments v. Beliefs and responsibility
Eviscerating pundits who use boatloads of clichés is akin to shooting fish in a barrel (I took a couple of shots myself recently). But that doesn’t stop Thomas Frank in the latest edition of Harper’s…
Smart Masses
In my last post I explored the characteristics of public intellectuals and pointed out that they are defined somewhat by their audience; which has recently become fragmented to the detriment of the occupation of public…