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Interesting
Apr. 3rd, 2009 12:32 pmit's a concept that pretty much every new product out there - be it blog, service, column, or toy - has to engage. You can get attention easily. That can be done through recommendation, flash-burning our retinas, whatever. However, interest is what keeps it going. it's what gets us to pick it. Keep watching for more than two seconds. Remember it. Click on it. Pick it up the next time it appears. Tune in again. Seek it out. Interest is what the advertising dollars are really about, and what millions of dollars of market research sometimes so spectacularly fails to do because they mistake attention for interest. Excitement can peter out within a few seconds. Mild interest and the 'hmm' reaction means you've captured their attention to the point that they're going to remember you and they're thinking about it.
Picked up Wired UK magazine on the recommendation of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
warren_ellis because he's been roped into writing a column for it. Time will tell if they engage enough interest to get people to keep picking it up, or to reach for it on the shelves because they've read or flicked through it before and found it interesting.
Judgement so far is... some stuff's decent. Not much indepth. But varied enough and new enough. And not stupid. Rather amused that all the ads are for men. (male perfume, male clothing, whisky, etc) I almost miss The Face in its heyday because it was a mag that was pitched at both sexes so the ads were all kinds. Got an interesting bit on 'future timeline' (the issue's focus is futurism) - products and events we ought to expect in the next 10 years. IKinda fun because some of them I remember reading about in stuff like 2000 AD, which as a sci-fi focussed object specialises in coming up with weird tech. Some of it utterly ridiculous. And then come the ones like active contact lenses, which I think I first saw in Sinister Dexter, a strip about assassins. Where you get readout across contact lenses, which now looks like it's really not that far off. And I do love that they mention Minority Report, the Tom Cruise future detective/chase/whatever story. Which people cite a lot when it comes to tech. Not the reading minds bit, but the changing billboards and the 'ability to control readouts with a gesture'.
One of the events was flooding in various countries. Flooding and its causes and aftereffects have become *the* major weather event preoccupation of the current era. That which we saw in the Blade Runner film as a glimpse shot. Come the late nineties, we got the Tsunamis. The way it became a certainty to be dealt with in the UK (I still get a tad weirded out how it was once used as an example of climate change in a lecture - because it's treated as as 'one more bloody bit of weather', since we don't have climate, we have weather and is therefore completely fucking unpredictable). New Orleans. Islands in the Pacific that're having to be abandoned because the sea level's rising. I remember it had been talked about as a possible back in the 80s and early 90s as a result of ice cap melting, but now it's a certainty rather than a 'someday' that people could dismiss as an extreme event and therefore ignore. Makes you wonder what the climate preoccupations and fears were way back when they were previously predicting the future. Everyone remembers the gadgets and food pills and so on from the 60s futurist predictions, but what were the climate predictions and preoccupations? I have vague memories of all the apocalyptic stuff describing drought and dustbowls, which was of course influenced by the last major change the US could remember.
oh dear. last.fm's just brought up Patti LuPone's rendition of 'As Long as He Needs Me' from the what I presume is the Broadway rendition of Oliver! Ways to get me to turn off immediately due to snorting in derision : a Nancy who isn't singing in a cockney accent. And then there's something very off about her accent in Sweeney Todd. Mind you, then it brought up Bernadette Peters. ...still not convinced by her voice. I like her acting, though.
Random-arse fact resulting from reading medical papers all days : Suicide stats in the US, 1999-2003, nearly double that of homicide. 11 vs 6 per 100,000.
Picked up Wired UK magazine on the recommendation of
warren_ellis because he's been roped into writing a column for it. Time will tell if they engage enough interest to get people to keep picking it up, or to reach for it on the shelves because they've read or flicked through it before and found it interesting.Judgement so far is... some stuff's decent. Not much indepth. But varied enough and new enough. And not stupid. Rather amused that all the ads are for men. (male perfume, male clothing, whisky, etc) I almost miss The Face in its heyday because it was a mag that was pitched at both sexes so the ads were all kinds. Got an interesting bit on 'future timeline' (the issue's focus is futurism) - products and events we ought to expect in the next 10 years. IKinda fun because some of them I remember reading about in stuff like 2000 AD, which as a sci-fi focussed object specialises in coming up with weird tech. Some of it utterly ridiculous. And then come the ones like active contact lenses, which I think I first saw in Sinister Dexter, a strip about assassins. Where you get readout across contact lenses, which now looks like it's really not that far off. And I do love that they mention Minority Report, the Tom Cruise future detective/chase/whatever story. Which people cite a lot when it comes to tech. Not the reading minds bit, but the changing billboards and the 'ability to control readouts with a gesture'.
One of the events was flooding in various countries. Flooding and its causes and aftereffects have become *the* major weather event preoccupation of the current era. That which we saw in the Blade Runner film as a glimpse shot. Come the late nineties, we got the Tsunamis. The way it became a certainty to be dealt with in the UK (I still get a tad weirded out how it was once used as an example of climate change in a lecture - because it's treated as as 'one more bloody bit of weather', since we don't have climate, we have weather and is therefore completely fucking unpredictable). New Orleans. Islands in the Pacific that're having to be abandoned because the sea level's rising. I remember it had been talked about as a possible back in the 80s and early 90s as a result of ice cap melting, but now it's a certainty rather than a 'someday' that people could dismiss as an extreme event and therefore ignore. Makes you wonder what the climate preoccupations and fears were way back when they were previously predicting the future. Everyone remembers the gadgets and food pills and so on from the 60s futurist predictions, but what were the climate predictions and preoccupations? I have vague memories of all the apocalyptic stuff describing drought and dustbowls, which was of course influenced by the last major change the US could remember.
oh dear. last.fm's just brought up Patti LuPone's rendition of 'As Long as He Needs Me' from the what I presume is the Broadway rendition of Oliver! Ways to get me to turn off immediately due to snorting in derision : a Nancy who isn't singing in a cockney accent. And then there's something very off about her accent in Sweeney Todd. Mind you, then it brought up Bernadette Peters. ...still not convinced by her voice. I like her acting, though.
Random-arse fact resulting from reading medical papers all days : Suicide stats in the US, 1999-2003, nearly double that of homicide. 11 vs 6 per 100,000.
