About
Welcome to beyond the times. My name is Walter Frick and this is my blog.
About Me
I’m Business Editor at BostInno, covering technology, startups, and venture capital, and I contribute to MIT’s Technology Review. I’ve also written here and there for The Atlantic, as well as for other publications including The Atlantic Cities, Nieman Journalism Lab, Climate Progress, and The Energy Collective. You can learn a bit more about my background by checking me out on LinkedIn or following me on Twitter.
What I Write About
In the absolute broadest sense, what I’m interested in is human behavior. The social sciences. That’s incredibly vague, of course, and most of what I write about on this blog fits into this more specific formulation: I’m interested in how the internet is impacting human communication and collaboration. To be a bit more specific (and to touch on some topics slightly outside that formulation) here are some narrower interests:
The future of news and journalism
This one is fairly self-explanatory. I laid out some of my starting points for inquiry in this post. For my money, Harvard’s Nieman Lab is the best source of news and commentary on this topic. I wrote an essay for them on the future of arguments here.
Open-source and peer-to-peer models of production
If there’s one work that captures my interest here, it’s Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. I discuss the reasons for my interest in this phenomenon here as well as in a review of Benkler’s latest book for The Atlantic here.
The psychology of bias
I’m interested in bias in general and more specifically as related to political discourse and belief formation. I’ve written about the potential intersection of media design and bias mitigation for The Atlantic here and here. All my bias-related posts are tagged here and my Delicious links have a ton more bias-related reading should you have an interest. If you’re curious about bias as related to political beliefs and looking for something accessible, start with Chris Mooney’s Mother Jones piece. To explore bias beyond politics, Dan Kahneman is excellent (magazine length, book length).
Plenty more
What else? I hope you’ll read to find out. And please leave comments!
