This blurry, out-of-focus shot from our agents in Shenzhen shows that Apple is hard at work on the latest new iPhone and iPad. The part looks extremely similar to a part in the current iPhone and iPad, but different in subtle small ways that may mean Apple is adding a new, cool hardware feature. My current iPhone and iPad now look and feel as obsolete as a Palm Treo or a Windows for Pen Computing tablet. Clearly, Apple will make a new product announcement any day now.
Apple Rumors from an Apple-Unfriendly News Site
This blurry, out-of-focus shot we copied from an Apple rumors site shows that Apple is hard at work on the latest new iPhone and iPad. The part looks extremely similar to a part in the current iPhone and iPad, but different in subtle small ways that may mean absolutely nothing. It looks completely out of date next to the Android smartphone and tablet I promoted in my recent product review. Clearly Apple is falling behind in the smartphone and tablet markets.
Apple Rumors from a Financial News Site
Apparently, Apple is making another iPhone and iPad. This news has had a negative effect on Apple’s stock price, because the spy shots of the new iPhone and iPad parts show that the new iPhone and iPad look very similar to the previous iPhone and iPad, and will not have the trendy new feature in the latest Android phones. This shows a lack of innovation compared to Samsung. A Wall Street Analyst for some firm has lowered the outlook for Apple in response to these rumors.
Apple Rumors from a General Audience News Site
Is Apple working on a new iPhone and iPad? You may be surprised to know that the answer is yes. The next iPhone and iPad will feature an amazing new feature, according to a report from an analyst that is in no way connected to Apple. Possible features include: a bigger screen, NFC, support for the Apple iWatch, holographic projection, or a physical keyboard. Apple has yet to announce the new iPhone and iPad, but when they do, you can expect there to be lines around the block to buy it.
I used to be the sort who hung on every crazy Apple rumor that came down from the big rumor sites. For a while, I even ran my own parody Apple rumor site, until I found that I couldn’t keep bringing the funny with the time available, and that there wasn’t much to joke about anyway. Once I realized how every rumor story was almost completely the same, except with a few minor details, I quit. Mostly. Apple’s good at this secrecy thing. There are only two real, solid details come out early about any new Apple product. Either there’s an event in the next day or two, or some engineer left a prototype at a bar. Only one of those is likely to happen again.
This was a topic I was going to write anyway, but now I have an example to use with it. As so often happens in the aftermath of tragedy, false reports fly with abandon. Today, CNN reported that a suspect in the Boston Marathon attack was arrested. This same story was reposted by news outlets large and small, shared across Twitter and Facebook, and then recanted by CNN, hours later. Chartgirl has a great chart (of course) of the cluster-expletive and who posted what, if you want a visual analysis. In my second, longer post on the tragedy, I mentioned two words: “patience” and “prudence.” We need patience that the facts will shake out, and prudence in what we do and say until then.
In the endless race to be first that typifies media today, patience and prudence are oft ignored to varying degrees. While CNN’s particular rush to post may be egregious, the New York Post’s wildly inaccurate excuse for journalism in the aftermath is much worse. Once again, The Onion makes the point better than anyone else could. This occurs because news publishing on the web is so driven by the need for page views. Patient and prudent reporting that brings hard, verified facts is usually not rewarded by lots of clicks, lots of shares, and lots of ad revenue. As useful of a service as CNN and other major news networks can be, don’t forget that they are companies that work to serve their own bottom line before they serve us. It’s why even websites that don’t focus on current events news stories were posting about the attack.
On Twitter and App.net, I’ve read comments that wistfully recall the days when you had to wait a day to find out what happened in the newspapers. While the nature of that medium made a certain degree of patience a necessity for publishers and readers alike, don’t get the illusion that prudence is a necessary function of that as reports from the Titanic, over a hundred years ago show. The days of Yellow Journalism aren’t that far behind us. In fact, they never truly ended, and probably never will. Let’s not kid ourselves. As long as a sensational headline guarantees that you will move whatever commoditized thing makes you money, physical papers or ad impressions, it is in the financial best interest of media organizations to post first and fast, and to hell with accuracy.
When my Father was in the Army during Vietnam—stationed, thankfully, in Germany—he would read three newspapers: an English-language German newspaper, an American newspaper, and The Stars and Stripes. He only accepted as truth the things all three papers agreed upon. The days when we can do that aren’t over, but when everyone is getting their news from everybody else in what may be the largest game of Whisper Down the Lane the world’s ever seen. [1] You’d need a much, much larger pool of news sources to compare, and there isn’t much time for that, though there’s a potential startup company idea in there for someone. [^2]
It’s now the job of us as news and media consumers to do the heavy lifting of evaluating a story and being choosy about our sources. Blind trust in the sources of our information has never been a good idea, but now we have enough control over what we see that we don’t need to place our trust in any one source. Because of this, more than ever, we need to be patient in trusting that the real facts will come, and we need to be prudent what we consume. Media literacy isn’t being taught in schools, but it’s becoming an necessity. In the meantime, the readers, and the publishers, are all flying by the seat of their pants.
I’m just waiting for a news site to say purple monkey dishwasher in a headline.
[^2]: Just give me 2% equity. ↩
As Depeche Mode says, “everything counts in large amounts,” and the prevailing wisdom of the day for social media is to get big numbers of people who follow, like, retweet, share, pin, or whatever is you do on the buzz worthy service du jour. To this end, there are services that promise, for a price, huge numbers of new Twitter followers, Facebook likes, fans, increased Klout scores. It’s big business, but what does it get you? A big number, and nothing else.
If you’re of an “old media” mindset, you’re used to thinking of media as a one-way thing, and the value coming from the number of eyeballs looking at whatever you put out there. But eyeballs are just eyeballs, they see a lot, but the power of social media is that you can reach more than eyeballs, you can reach living, breathing people with ideas, voices, and a way to talk back to you. A propaganda mouthpiece isn’t likely to make anyone care, unless it’s doing something as bizarre as horse_ebooks, and nobody who follows that is buying anything. (I hope.) Even worse for the “old media” types, is that you can’t buy eyeballs on most social networks, only the illusion of eyeballs. If you have a six-digit Twitter follower number, and none of them actually interact with you, or your thing, all you have is a number next to your name that cost you a lot and makes you nothing.
What’s better is to have a smaller number of people who really, really, really care about what you’re doing and want to interact. Let’s call them fans. Kevin Kelly suggests you need 1,000 true fans, but the number can be bigger, or smaller, depending on what you’re doing and how engaged they are. These people are the most important. Satisfy them, and you’re made in the shade. Kevin Kelly’s piece is aimed at musicians and other artists, but this same philosophy can work for a startup company, a freelancer, or anyone else who needs to win the love of people to make their bills at the end of the month.
After all, people have no compunction towards giving money to things they truly love. Even when I was on unemployment for a year, barely scraping by, I saved my pennies to buy the new album by my favorite band, see my extremely talented friends play concerts, and support the local businesses that made my favorite coffee and falafel, and I felt no guilt. It’s the principle that makes sites like Kickstarter work. It’s how writers I admire big and not so big are making money. It’s what keeps Apple and any number of App Store apps in business. Even if money isn’t your goal, nobody wants to shout into a void. It helps when people shout back, good or bad. Now they can. Embrace it.
Nearly fourteen years ago, two teenagers committed an unspeakable act of brutal violence against their fellow high school students. That day, seventeen-hundred or so miles from that tragedy, I was in my own high school, unaware. This was before social media as we know it was even a dream, and before even a high school student had an Internet connection in their pocket. Still, somehow, word got around about what was happening in Colorado. As we left that day, I noticed a number of odd looks in my direction. I was already a bit of a loner in my school, and for some reason that morning, I’d opted to wear army fatigue pants and an olive drab t-shirt to class. Still, confusion mostly reigned that day.
It wasn’t until any of us got home that we could see the disaster unfolding. Pictures of students running from a sprawling suburban high school, rumors of bombs under cars, gunshots, terror. The next day we had names, faces, reports of last words, and scapegoats to pin the actions of two who would be forever unable to speak for themselves again. In its wake, metal detectors and X-ray machines were stuffed into my inner-city school’s entryway, more to assuage the fears of parents and administrators than our own. Our student fears were more grounded, knowing full well that if anyone tried to shoot up our school, to “Pull a Columbine” in the parlance, would find the new security measures to be a nuisance at best.
In the intervening decade and a half, we’ve seen countless tragedies on scales as grand as 9/11 and as seemingly small as the man who crashed his plane into an IRS field office in Texas. Each time, it seems the reaction cycle becomes shorter and shorter. It used to be that we wouldn’t know anything that we had not seen with our own eyes until we read the newspaper the next day. Radio and then television shortened the time span so that for decades, we could learn the horrors of the day over dinner or just before bedtime. The earliest days of the Internet made breaking news all the more immediate, but until only a few years ago, it was largely a one-way communication medium.
I first heard about the Boston Marathon explosions on Twitter, while posting something on my company’s social media feeds, and immediately thought “I’ve seen this film before.” Whether it was the Newtown massacre, Aurora, to whatever else you care to name in the last few years, I knew there would be finger-pointing, false reports of further horrors, and tasteless jokes written to deal with the tension of not knowing. In darker corners of the Internet, there would be claims of “false flags” and conspiracy. None of this is new. It’s a quirk, to put it mildly, of human psychology, where in the face of ambiguity, we fill in the details with our own experience and knowledge, or the lack thereof.
The instant nature of modern communication, the disintermediation of social media, and the even footing these technologies offer our voices has made it easier for misinformation to spread and blame to be assigned. The biggest difference between now, and then, is that they spread at exponentially faster speeds, to exponentially larger audiences. And yet, there’s an upside to this. Starting with the Aurora massacre, and continuing today, citizen journalists on Reddit and elsewhere have taken on the task of sorting the misinformation from the information, posting as many facts as they can verify, and keeping people up to date. They do a service that is all too necessary these days, with no recompense.
For the rest of us, it comes down to this: be prudent about what you read and be prudent about what you post. Technology is a transformative tool, but the fundamental decisions of how we apply this tool have not changed. There’s no reason, no excuse, for us to use this tool to bring harm, deliberate or otherwise. The facts of what has occurred will shake out in time. Patience is what we need most in trying times, a patience that seems almost contrary to the nature of things. Yet, if we can tolerate that ambiguity, trust ourselves, and trust those we’ve tasked with the job of answering our questions, we will be all the better for it.
When tragedy strikes in this hyper-connected age, it’s easy, far too easy, to jump to conclusions. Whether you’re a professional journalist, or an armchair commentator, it’s easy to score points by posting your opinion on why and how, and all of it filtered through your own political and social views.
I beg of you not to.
In the face of disaster, we should focus not on the cause, but what we can do to help. Figuring out motivations, assigning blame, those are things that should come later. Much later.
For now, do what brings comfort to yourself and others. Pray. Give blood. Contact your loved ones, no matter how close or far they are from the horror. That is what we should do first.