Author Archives: Jon Lowder

Accelerating Art

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I'm not a music afficianado by any stretch of the imagination, so it wouldn't surprise anyone that Yo-Yo Ma is probably the only classical musician that I can name.  I don't know what the experts think of Ma but I think he does an admirable job of promoting the arts, and I love that he's so open to doing things outside of traditional venues for cellists.  The video below (found on BookofJoe) is a perfect example:

The video was accompanied by this quote from Spike Jonze:

"The other day, I was lucky enough to be at an event to bring the arts back into schools and got to see an amazing collaboration between Yo-Yo Ma and a young dancer in LA, Lil Buck. Someone who knows Yo-Yo Ma had seen Lil Buck on YouTube and put them together. The dancing is Lil Buck’s own creation and unlike anything I've seen."

That quote reminded me of an article I read a while back in Wired about the impact that Youtube and other video sharing sites on the rate of innovation:

"A series of challenge videos by rival groups of street dancers had created an upward spiral of invention as they strove to outdo one another. The best videos were attracting tens of thousands of views. Much more than pride was at stake. Chu knew something weird was happening when he saw a YouTube video of Anjelo Baligad, a 6-year-old boy from Hawaii who had all of the moves of a professional.

In fact, he wasn’t as good as a professional—he was better. This tyke, known as Lil Demon, was demonstrating tricks few adult dancers could pull off. If 6-year-olds could do this now, Chu imagined, what was dance going to look like in 10 years? As he remarked at last February’s TED conference, where the LXD gave a breathtaking performance: “Dancers have created a whole global laboratory for dance. Kids in Japan are taking moves from a YouTube video created in Detroit, building on it within days and releasing a new video, while teenagers in California are taking the Japanese video and remixing it to create a whole new dance style in itself. This is happening every day. And from these bedrooms and living rooms and garages with cheap webcams come the world’s great dancers of tomorrow.”

Pro Basketball Coming to Camel City

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The American Basketball Association has three expansion teams slotted for North Carolina and one of them, the Triad Tre4 Cheetahs, will call Winston-Salem home.

One item of potential interest to a few guys down at the Y: tryouts for the three teams will be held May 21 in Durham. Registration is $125, but hey, dreams don't come cheap these days.

I don't know if they play with the red, white and blue ball of Dr. J's ABA, but they do have some wacky rules like the old ABA did.  My faves:

  • Four points for any shot taken from the backcourt.
  • Players can stay on after picking up a sixth foul, but each subsequent foul they commit leads to a free throw and ball possession for the other team. Basically it's unlimited technicals for "sixth foul" players.
  • 3-D Rule – I've read it once and I can honestly say it makes the NFL's QB rules seem straightforward.

Could be fun to watch.

Breaking News via Facebook

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There's a bit of a political kerfluffle brewing right now in Greensboro over a recent redistricting vote by the City Council.  It's been a hot topic at Ed Cone's blog, which everyone in Greensboro knows is where you go to be seen, er heard, er read when you want to vent your spleen about the goings on in what is likely North Carolina's whiniest city. What's interesting to me is that Ed just broke the news that one of the City Council members announced that she's going to ask that the vote be reconsidered, and she made the announcement via her Facebook status.  

It would be easy to just say that this is a sign of the times, and it is, but upon further examination I think there are some fairly interesting ramifications in this simple act. Here are some that have come to mind:

  • Any reporter "friended" by a public figure who uses Facebook as a primary communication vehicle will have a competitive advantage over a reporter who isn't. Public figures have always had preferred members of media and I suspect they've always cherry-picked who they leak news to, but this is a very public way to play favorites with members of the media. 
  • Of course the public figure can also completely "disintermediate" the media by friending everyone but the media, thereby communicating directly with their audience and excluding the media.
  • Whether or not a member of the media is included or excluded, the news will be old to a healthy chunk of the audience by the time the 5 o'clock news airs or tomorrow's paper is printed.
  • This development has only reinforced my conviction that "news" operations need to move away from the shallow "breaking stories" MO and move quickly towards deep and analytical stories that provide context and avoid titillation and tattling.  In other words most of us now know what happened with the Greensboro redistricting, but few of us really know why.  Giving us the "why" is where the professional media can make hay.
  • In another interesting twist I've found that most of the really good comments on Ed's blog are posted by the professional journalists (I'm thinking of Joe Killian here) who often provide context and expert understanding of the issues in response to other commenters on Ed's posts.