Think back to an event that happened in your life or a movie you just watched. Try to remember what happened. Does that retelling seem remarkably like a comic strip?

I’m reading an article called “Movies in the Mind’s Eye” for my media psychology class. The authors, Hochberg and Brooks, argue that we remember movies in comic strip form. They add “Comic strips may be popular because they approximate the ways in which we think about the visual world.” It’s a technique to help us remember the salient moments without storing the unimportant data. 

I’d never really thought about this before, but now that I have I can’t help seeing it as a fairly accurate way to describe memories. Does knowing this affect how we should write? Design advertisements or commercials? Then again maybe we’re already using these techniques — think about storyboarding for movies and advertisements.

There’s been this idea for some time now that the internet is democratizing communication. Anyone can have a blog and their ideas with the world. Anyone can be a journalist. It’s easy; it takes 30 seconds to post something. But should it?

I wonder if the ease of communication is making what we’re saying shallow. If I can post on my blog whenever, do I spend as much time on each post? There’s very little opportunity cost to communicating online — clearly that leads to more quanitity — but is it decreasing quality? Mark Slouka, author of War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the Hi-tech Assault on Reality, says in a Harper’s Magazine forum “there’s an incredible shallowness to most on-line communication. I realize that there are good things being said on the net, but by and large the medium seems to encourage quickness over depth, and rapid response over reflection.” Do you think before you type?

Do you read articles written by professional journalists or hobbyists? I find this new form of citizen jouralism most helpful when it comes to tech news/blogging. Before, you would have had to subscribe to a magazine that would have become obsolete by the time it comes out. Now, I subscribe to RSS feeds of the top tech blogs and I know when a new product comes out instantly. Even if the posts aren’t always top-quality writing, what I care about is the news, the annoucement, the main idea — not who wrote it.  But who’s doing the long-term journalism projects? Who’s writing long thoughtful pieces about, well, almost anything? And does anyone read them, if they do exist? I find myself only reading the first page of articles and then skimming the rest. Is this change in journalism a demand or supply problem (or both)? We don’t have the attention span to read the long articles and so the newspapers aren’t writing them anymore.  Is this a change we’re okay with? Do we have a choice?

Now is a difficult time to be a senior in college. By which I mean it is a terrible time to look for a job. The dreaded what are you doing after college question has now changed into “You’re going to try to get a job? NOW? Good luck.” While I envy my peers who are heading for graduate school, I, and many others, must brave the job market in a time when the President recently declared “Our entire economy is in danger.” Those words sent chills to our previously optimistic hearts.

I shouldn’t complain though, because at least I wasn’t planning on doing investment banking. I know too many friends who majored in econ because it would help them get well-paid i-banking jobs… not so much anymore. One of my friends was working on her cover letters for Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch when they ceased to exist. Now she’s not sure if there are any investment banking jobs left.

I recently met with my college advisor to discuss career options. I shared with him my desire to go into online marketing or business development in the Bay Area. He basically said I shouldn’t be choosy and should try to get any job available. His pessimism (hopefully not just realism) made me worry, and certainly I am not alone in this. Are these really the worst of times?

In July, Facebook revealed the “new Facebook.” Surprisingly, they made it optional. I tried it out, decided I didn’t like, and then went back to the old Facebook. According to Mashable, Facebook says only 40% of its users have even tried the new design, and some of those, like me, chose to go back to the old design after trying it. Facebook reported that “nearly 30 million” users had stuck with the new Facebook — but thats out of about 100 million total.

Now Facebook has decided that they are going to make the new design permanent. My Facebook was just forcibly switched today. It’s hard for me to pinpoint why I don’t like it. I miss the wall now that its integrated with everything else in the feed. It might just be general dislike of change. But my personal view of the new Facebook is not my point here.

I’m curious about their idea of a gradual changeover and whether its been a positive or negative influence over all. I suspect that by giving users the ability to stick to the old Facebook they increased their attachment to it. I wouldn’t have been that upset or surprised if Facebook has just suddenly shifted over in July. Now that I’ve decided to stick to the old design for so long, I’ve become even more against the new one. By giving users the choice and then taking it away they made a story of it — there are various groups against the new facebook and many users are petitioning them to change it. Of course, the same sort of hubbub was made about newsfeed, and now everyone seems okay with that, so I think this too will blow over. However, I think it would have been a better decision to just change all at once instead of pretending users had a choice in the matter. What do you think? Was the gradual change a good idea?

My grandmother had a problem. She liked where she lived, but there was a roundabout near her house where everyone would pile their garbage. It smelled; it looked bad. It needed to go. Since this was the 1970s in Mexico City she couldn’t rely on the government to clean up. A master of spin far ahead of her time, my grandmother had an idea. She went out and bought a four-foot-high statue of La Virgen de Guadalupe (Our Lady of Guadalupe - the patron saint of Mexico) and she put it the roundabout in the midst of all the garbage along with a vase of flowers.

The next time she passed the roundabout she noticed that that no one was piling their garbage there anymore. The next week people started taking away the garbage that was still there. A few weeks after that she noticed that there were new vases with flowers joining hers. Someone was sweeping in front of the statute. By the time five years had passed the center of the roundabout had gone from a garbage dump to an open air chapel where informal services were held once a week. True story.

Now, this could be a story about the power of religion, but I think its more truly a story of spin. With one simple statue, my grandmother changed the connotations of the space. Instead of being “the garbage dump” it became a shrine — she made it taboo to put garbage there. There’s a lesson in that: cultural and social norms influence our actions more than we realize. She didn’t have to yell, call the police, or pay a lot of money to remove the garbage. Instead she figured out how she could get people to want to clean up the space. My grandmother was brilliant.

How should we judge a speech from our political candidates? We talk about their charisma, their talking points, their promises, and their gestures. What about simply looking at their words? In a recent article Wired posted word clouds of speeches from the Democratic and Republican conventions. Words that are said more frequently are bigger (color doesn’t matter). I’m not seriously suggesting we evaluate our candidates this way, but it is worth a look. Can we learn anything from these word clouds? In case you’re curious, these word clouds were generated from wordle.net.

First, Barack Obama’s speech:

Second, John McCain’s speech:

In my summer job I have become inmeshed in this new world of social media. Facebook, of course, is something all college students are familiar with. But now I Twitter, I’m LinkedIn, I read blogs (and write this one), I’ve created a Facebook page for the company, I watch what’s new on Digg and Reddit, and I’ve generally allowed the new media buzz to take over my summer.

Then I was gchatting to one of my friends and mentioned something about Digg. The response was “What’s that?” While my colleagues at work seem to think college students are at the pinnacle of the social media world, I realized we’ve fallen a bit behind. Facebook is no longer the darling of the blogging world. They’ve moved on to Twitter, micro blogging, and Google Chrome.

My advice to my fellow college seniors looking for jobs is to not get left behind. Create a LinkedIn profile and start connecting with work colleagues. Sign up for Digg and Redditt. Start tweeting. Read blogs. It certainly can’t hurt your prospects.

Crazy as that sounds, Freakonomics reported that Stanford University and Japan won the same number of Olympic medals in Beijing.  And perhaps more amazing, another interesting fact was pointed out by a commenter: “Stanford with a student body of 19K was able to generate almost 25% of the total US medal count, with less than 0.01% of the US population.” Wow. As a Stanford student myself, I am aware of our good althletic programs, but this is shocking even to me.  Are they putting something in the water?

This just in. Python kills student intern. Gas costs: $50, new cellphone: $40, not getting eaten by a python: priceless.

The Spanish Olympic team created an ad that is now causing a huge uproar in Beijing and around the world. They posed for an ad for the Beijing games with the whole team pulling their eyes to the side, in attempt to create “an expression of Eastern eyes.” It was supposed to be an “affectionate gesture,” but no surprise here has been interpreted as fairly offensive instead. NYtimes has the full story.

Just having come back from 3 months in Madrid, I can’t say that the blatant cluelessness displayed here is that surprising. Spain has yet to be introduced to political correctness. While I was there my host mom shared many “pearls” of wisdom with me and my roommate…

• “Columbians kills their wives, the Spanish don’t”
• “Those Romanians are always robbing people”
• “There are too many Chinese people here, is it the same in the US?”

Furthermore, they call cheap supermarkets “chinos” (literal translation: Chinese). The first time my host mom told me to go to a “chino” to get something, I was utterly confused. I soon discovered that it wasn’t just here thought, it’s something everyone says there.

There is a reason for the combination of racial tension (at times straight-up racism) and cluelessness seen all too often in Spain. Spanish immigration is simply off the charts high. And it only really started getting that way in the late 80s and 90s so it is a relatively recent phenomenon for the country. The combination of a booming economy and low birth rates left an opening for immigration, indeed it is necessary. Even in the US we have huge issues with immigration (just look at the wall we are building on the Mexican border) and we have always been a nation of immigrants.

In Spain, immigrants stand out from what is otherwise a relatively homogeneous country. It is all too easy for to point to immigrants and blame them for all the problems the country is facing. There is a clear border between those who are “authentically” Spanish and those who are not. Will Spain ever get past this? Well, I don’t know, we’ve sure been trying for quite a while and I don’t think we’ve managed it yet. Good Luck, Spain.