Tweet at reporters. Write letters to editors. Engagement is a fantastic opportunity to improve our understanding of the news. Here’s how to go about it.
In 2015, Drake, a meme-generating and Grammy-winning R&B artist, released a new track to lyrically slam one of his largest rivals, Meek Mill. In Back to Back, Drake claims that Mill’s trigger fingers had turned to Twitter fingers, lambasting him for a spat started on social media.
Drake’s lyrics have always been particularly in-tune with the lives we live. This one hits home exceptionally well, nailing our information age. At the first sign of dispute, a source of recourse is to go online, and there to battle the source or just to vent. Drake paints the phenomenon as cowardly enough to warrant a diss track, but it is also common enough to relate to. In this era, we engage with the world more and more through our digital selves. That has a laundry list of pros and cons. …
Employees will exercise new-found abilities to work where and how they please.
Imagine, if you can, a future where you sit comfortably with an umbrella swaying overhead, gazing at an empty white beach and a coloring-book blue ocean beyond. In one ear, the calming distant sound of crashing waves, in the other, aided by Bluetooth, the less calming voice of a co-worker chatting blithely about a shared assignment.
Remarkably this is no interrupted vacation. It is where you chose to set up your desk. …
Audio plays a significant role in how we perceive others and how they perceive us. When degraded and interrupted audio affects the workplace, here is what we can do about it.
It was a few minutes past the hour when the rest of my team joined. Their faces appearing in a burst on the carousel at the bottom of my screen. A previous meeting had kept them too long, they claimed, and after trading a few Happy Mondays, our cheerful project manager called the meeting to order.
From the crackle and distortion of her voice, I assumed she was sitting in an echo friendly area, possibly in her car, or more likely, my own internet connection was as unstable as it had been all week. “Sorry for the background noise,” she said, disproving the latter before bustling along. A few minutes later, something that sounded like a kitchen blender cut her off mid-sentence. She called out, “Can whoever that is please go on mute?” …
Mobile app teams must ask themselves what is most valuable to release during a pandemic?
They say we grow the most at night during our sleep. Our phones do as well. With the correct settings in place, the app store begins its nightly routine of updating our phones’ apps.
Come morning, and a brand new feature was added or vanished. Open Uber, a ride-sharing app, happily stumble upon Wait and Save, a new feature that saves money on a morning commute. A change can be a special treat, a much-needed respite, or irksome. More commonly, we never notice the change occurred. We rarely think about our apps as living things that change. However, this characteristic is well worth careful examination, especially during a global pandemic. …
We tend to trust what we hear from others is true and we consistently misunderstand each other. The result is that we miss opportunities to build the products our customers need. But there are ways to avoid this trap.
The founding journalists at the Washington Post might agree with Malcolm Gladwell, the best-selling author of Talking to Strangers when he wrote that “defaulting to truth is a problem.”
When listening to others there is a tendency to walk away with a surface level of understanding. We contextualize what others say with our own experience and not theirs. It can be a fatal flaw in understanding them.
When what people say or do is not necessarily what they mean, we must dig deeper. A tendency to truth-default is why journalists have to seek out the truth and why the Washington Post’s first mission is, tell the truth “as nearly as the truth may be ascertained.” …
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