I graduated at the top of my high school class. Number one. But that didn’t make me feel particularly smart.

The people I’d learned about, whose work I’d read, were clearly better educated. They knew Latin, Greek and, usually, a modern language other than their own. They had to study far more than students were expected to in my day, and they went on to colleges where collegiality was just as important as learning.

Going down?
In the 1980s, the U.S. began to dumb down. Education was important in theory but, in practice, it was being under-funded. The bar for accomplishment was lowered, and the K-12 curriculum became more of a painful obligation in most politicians’ minds than a mandatory requisite for national growth and prosperity.

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I despise podcasts. They're radio without the basic discipline of time.

Instead of providing information with precision and brevity, they tend to drone on in free form -- as if listeners have the luxury of time (and nothing better to do or get on with). And if a listener indulges the speaker(s), gets to the end, and realizes he or she has wasted 30, 20, or even 10 minutes, resentment sets in... and makes the listener leery of the next podcast they come across.

A possible rationale
For people who commute in their cars, a podcast might make sense (or, based on too many I've sampled, create a traffic hazard by putting the driver to sleep). That's one of the reasons why drive-time radio includes so many shifts in sound and tempo, however annoying some of them may be. They bring the listener back from inattentiveness.

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Jim Murray, a man whose prose I enjoy in spite of his location in Canadia (that's not a typo; if Jim's Canadian, he must be from Canadia), re-published a post about how he promotes himself and what he does. In that article, he takes a gentle swipe at content marketing. I think he should have taken more of a smack.

His post dates to 2014. While that may be pleistocene to current "content" marketers, his pitch would have been valid generations ago - back when content was referred to as collateral, product literature, and sales aids.

Then and now
Thirty years ago, I worked with SMBs to refine their use of printed, audio, and video material to a) generate leads, b) overcome objections raised by prospects, and c) meet the specific expectations of a prospects' various influencers (the people who are asked for advice and analysis but aren't a product's end users). One difference, of course, was that, back then, the vendor was in charge of who got what. Another was that the information wasn't fluff.

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