Trends

Mind the hype cycle

I’ve been finding myself making the same hand gesture on a lot of Zoom calls recently. I flick my finger up, wiggle it up and down, and trail off to the right in a straight line.I draw this oscillating line when I talk about AI. Or crypto. Or the “metaverse.” Or even Taylor Swift tickets. It’s the hype cycle.

March 15, 2023

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Be so good you can be bad

In physics, our understanding of the universe “breaks down” at extreme scales. The equations and models we learn in high school don’t hold up when we look at massive black holes and at the infinitely small quantum scale – the math has a pesky habit of going haywire. The same phenomenon happens when we look at how some people and organizations communicate.

March 1, 2023

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The season of sharing… content

Milestones make us reflective. The “homo economicus,” a figurative human that is only interested in purely rational action would say that January 1 and December 31 are no more different from each other than May 12 and May 13. The digit at the end of the year shouldn’t make a difference – but it does. Thankfully, we’re irrational creatures by nature.

December 2, 2022

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The unscientific state of social media, according a bunch of 21 year old students

Last night, I ran one of my favorite classes of the semester – the focus group. After a couple months of me doing most of the talking, in this lesson we turn things around and I spend an hour and change asking the students questions about how they use social media, their phones, and everything else we talk about in our course. Increasingly, the results have been putting me in my place.

October 18, 2022

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Podcasting is in a pretty weird place right now

If you haven’t done so recently, take a quick look at the top podcast charts. There are basically just three things that make up the first few dozen spots: Murder or other gruesome crimes, politics and news, and guys talking. After a few years of what felt like a constant stream of blockbuster podcasts, starting with "Serial," the industry is in a bit of a funk – sorta.

October 6, 2022

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Ben Guttmann