June 5th, 2013
The 20th anniversary issue of Wired magazine is a digital education, perhaps the best one I know. Self-congratulatory anniversary issues tend to be flaccid stuff, but this one is chock-a-block full of goodies, many by they-were-there journalists. I enjoyed the issue first as a trip down memory lane. Wired magazine, particularly in its first few years, deeply influenced my understanding and appreciation of the digital culture in which I was then immersed. When Conde Nast bought Wired they settled it down in ways that didn’t settle well with me, although unquestionably it continued to provide some of the best journalism afforded to the high-tech industry.
What I find especially remarkable about the 20th anniversary issue is that it manages to be a textbook of the digital transformation of media and of life in the last two decades. The topics should be controversial, but instead I find them mostly obvious. And very important. As an occasional teacher of the next generation of publishers I wouldn’t hesitate to put this topic list up against the curriculum of any of my colleagues.
Here’s the challenge to the publishing class of 2013: In a few sentences, explain what each of these concepts, technologies or individuals mean on the digital landscape today. (To simplify things in a reasonable fashion I’ve added the company name most connected with individual names).
Here we go:
Angry Birds
Apps
Arab Spring
Ballmer, Steve (Microsoft)
Banner ad
Beta
Big data
Blogger
Busque, Leah (TaskRabbit)
Carpal tunnel syndrome
Chen, Steve (YouTube)
Chesky, Brian (Airbnb)
Code
Comics
Convergence
Cook, Tim (Apple)
Crowdsourcing
DARPA
Denton, Nick (Gawker)
Design
Dorsey, Jack (Twitter)
Dreams
Electric car
Emoji
Epitaphs
Etsy
Failure
Faking it
Ferdowsi, Arash (Dropbox)
Flickr
Friendster
Gates, Bill (Microsoft)
Geek
GIFs
Gmail
Goatse
Hacker
Hartz, Julia (Eventbrite)
Hartz, Kevin (Eventbrite)
Haughey, Matt (Metafilter)
Higgs boson
Hoffman, Reid (LinkedIn)
Houston, Drew (Dropbox)
HTTP
Hurley, Chad (YouTube)
Hypertext
IPO
Jargon
Jobs, Steve (Apple)
Khan, Salman (Khan Academy)
Kickstarter
Kottke, Jason (kottke.org)
Kozmo
Laws
Levchin, Max (PayPal)
Maker movement
Martin, Erik (Reddit)
Mayer, Marissa (Google and Yahoo!)
Memes
Microsoft
Musk, Elon (PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors)
Napster
Neurodiversity
Nintendo
Ohanian, Alexis (reddit)
The Onion
Online dating
Porn
Printing
QR code
Sandberg, Sheryl (Facebook)
Science
Screen names
Share economy
Sharp, Evan (Pinterest)
Silbermann, Ben (Pinterest)
Silicon Valley
Silk Road
Snark
Sony
Stoppelman, Jeremy (Yelp)
Storage
Stuxnet
Systrom, Kevin (Instagram)
TED talks
Trolling
Turing, Alan (Turing machine)
Tweet
University
UX (user experience)
Viral
Virtual communities
Wikileaks
WIRED 01.01
xkcd
Yelp
Zeus
Zuckerberg, Mark (Facebook)
I wanted the list to be long. Exhausting even. I can tell you that while I failed to recognize several of the individual names, I missed less than 10% of the terms/concepts (and by adding the company affiliations to the names, my score improved.)
How about you?
If you can’t score a 51% on this test, are you certain that you’re qualified to work in publishing in the 21st century?