https://hardhistoriesjhu.substack.com/

Taking a moment to send a warm thank you to all the work (both visible and invisible) that Dr. Martha S. Jones and her lab are doing for the Johns Hopkins Community and far beyond. Where ever you live, I heartily recommend their newsletter Hard Histories at Hopkins.

When manufacturers, like Pietra, help influencers manufacture their own product lines, we've taken another step from big celebrities having their own product lines (think Martha Stewart cookware and other lifestyle plays her company has made).

This is splitting the difference between the Tupperware parties of old where you're empowering your users to sell your product and having celebrities sell your product.

What is the next step along this evolutionary path of breaking down the sales funnel? Can it be disintermediated further?

Another example of this are the thousands of small Etsy shops that are churning out products as intermediaries. An example of this is the proliferation of sticker companies that are selling somewhat custom designs for 2-3x the going rate and adding a rather large mark up for themselves. In this case there are at least some modest creative pieces being added in the value chain, but at what overall cost?

Will everyone be a manufacturer? When does it all become Amway?

Recognized a few, but not everyone. Would need to watch Meredith Fierra’s full film (with lower thirds, one might assume). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9dGAAe-emY

As in Reston, VA?

This is a pretty useful example of a paragraph with subtext, don’t you think? Could easily imagine future readers and annotators coming to this passage and scratching their heads for a minute while looking at the date. What happened nine months before June 2017? Living outside the US, it took me a few seconds to guess it (and my guess may be wrong). Of course, Martha was “playing for the audience” (though DoOO is having an impact outside the US). There’s indeed a shared understanding that events in the political arena may be relevant in our work on digital literacies.

Not the tool or the product (both are valuable), but the greater experience for students to understand how the web works, what caused it to break, and how to work collaboratively to fix it. All big learning opps.