“A World Is Coming in Which Our Thinking Is Riddled with Gaping Holes”
“To write well today, the writer must not always be thinking of the reader,” says Rayko Baychev. He is a rare phenomenon these days: a writing journalist who knows how to say what needs saying with exactly the right words, in a way no one can imitate. “The fear of missing out has something in common with gambling, too. It is well known that a devious idea went into the design of the newsfeed: that scrolling through social media should mirror the way the mind falls into a feverish frenzy as it follows the fast-spinning symbols on a slot machine screen and waits for them to land on a winning ‘status.’ For your political views to line up with other people’s, the way cherries, lemons and gold bars line up on a trembling payline.” What might the future of how we get our news, how we read and how we write look like through a journalist’s eyes?
02Digital Stories Wins a Prestigious Award… for Storytelling
For the fifth time, Digital Stories is among the big winners of Bulgaria’s most hotly contested and well-established journalism competition, the Web Report awards, organized for the seventh year running by the news portal Dir.bg. The honor means a great deal because of the respected jury and the stiff competition: 230 pieces of journalism were entered. Digital Stories has been among the winners every single year since the project began, and this year the award comes in the True Stories category for “Jesus: The Programmer Who Came Out of the Ghetto,” while a second piece, “How to Generate Yourself an Influencer,” was one of the three nominees in the Technology and Innovation category.
03Can Algorithms Make Art? 15 Viewpoints That Matter
Can algorithms create? Is artificial intelligence a tool or an author? Could AI give birth to the arts of the future, or has creating already become a pointless pursuit? What will we do when its works in every field become indistinguishable from ours? For three years now, I have been collecting viewpoints on this site about the big questions of today's technological day. I believe it is vital to bring more and different voices into the discussions on important topics, and art and creativity is unquestionably one of them. Here are 15 of the most interesting and substantial opinions I have gathered in that time. Do the words of tech people, writers, artists, clergymen and… tomcats contradict each other, or do they complement one another?
04What Do You Want to Read Tomorrow?
How do we want tomorrow to look, and will we still tell truth from lies as we sink ever deeper into our bubbles? Over the past 20 years we have forgotten how to read long texts and changed our very relationship with the truth. My answer to how we save the future may sound idealistic, because I am betting on the contender losing the battle for attention most badly today: traditional media.
