INTERNET

Substance vs. Sensationalism: Navigating News in the Era of Clickbait

Bill Thompson

Breaking news … this just in … a major new development….

Did I catch your attention? Perhaps. But how do you know I have anything of substance to say, or am I just bloviating?

In fact it is getting harder and harder to distinguish between what is real, substantive news and what is just some guy commenting on the latest rumor from a webcam in his mom’s basement.

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Get your copy of Bill Wasik’s book

New York Times Magazine editor Bill Wasik identified this phenomenon 16 years ago in his book called And Then There’s This.

And back in 2009 Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were all still pretty young. Tik Tok had not emerged, and podcasts were relatively new. So the phenomenon Wasik described has simply gotten bigger

He and I met one afternoon in the summer of 2009 to talk about his book. So here now, from 2009, Bill Wasik.

Internet pioneer Michael Daniels on how the web became commercialized

Bill Thompson

In its infancy, the internet was simply a way for government agencies, educators and academic professionals to speak to one another. Today, of course, virtually every business in the world is built on or relies on the internet as a form of commerce.

But what if the internet had never turned to commercialization? What if it had remained just for government and academics?

Get your copy of Michael Daniels’s book

Much of the transformation goes back to the early to mid-1990s when the US government awarded a contract to a small company in Northern Virginia called Network Solutions. They were granted the exclusive right to sell the domain names that we all know so well – .com, .org, .net and so forth.

The chairman of Network Solutions was a guy named Michael Daniels and in 2013 he wrote a book about the early history of the commercialization of the web. His book was called Names, Numbers And Network Solutions. And that’s when I had the chance to talk with him.

So here now from 2013. Michael Daniels.

Simon Winchester

Bill Thompson
Photo by Wes Washington

On Independence Day, the Fourth of July, most of the attention is paid to the men who founded the United States of America, and rightfully so.

The actual process of uniting the states didn’t end with the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, it was just beginning.

Actually creating a single nation out of multiple independent states required an infrastructure in addition to a political statement. And that has taken more than two centuries.

In his 2013 book The Men Who United the States, journalists Simon Winchester took a deeper dive into the stories of innovations as diverse as the telegraph, the interstate highway system, and the internet.

And perhaps the irony Is that Winchester was born in the very nation from whom we declared our independence.

So here now, from 2013, Simon Winchester.

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