If people want to be celebrated for being smart or for having exceptional taste that’s all fine and good, everyone can go right on congratulating one another in their little mutual admiration societies. But please spare the rest of us all this moralizing on why we should be giving people who share links anywhere near the same amount of credit we afford that singularly special act of original content creation.
Stop Calling It Curation (via Gizmodo)
What it all boils down to is people wanting to feel important. In a world where your talents are a commodity and you can’t put a finger on how to get someone to pay you for the artisinal quality of your linkspam; people rage on tumblr about receiving proper credit for crap they didn’t produce all because they’re hoping to “make it big” American Idol style with their tumblr (you know, that free thing I’m using right now) as the vehicle.
There was a time I’d get mad privately if someone I follow posted a link that I’d posted rather than reblogging it from me. Then I realized how stupid that was 1) for assuming they hadn’t seen it elsewhere first & 2) like I deserved credit for posting some crap on my blog while I was (probably) at work.
If we were all more concerned about doing awesome things, paying it forward and worrying less about who gets the credit in the matter of our everyday lives, things would work a lot better than they do. Everyone thinks they’re brilliant and feels like if they just had the money/connections/vehicle/someone to vouch that they’d be perfectly capable of handling the so-called big time.
Maybe it’ll happen, but it’s not going to happen how you think it is. So let’s complain less via reblog and perhaps focus on something more productive?
Texting and e-mail and posting let us present the self we want to be. This means we can edit. And if we wish to, we can delete. Or retouch: the voice, the flesh, the face, the body. Not too much, not too little — just right.
Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation to connection is part of this. But it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves. Worse, it seems that over time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference.
We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have their places — in politics, commerce, romance and friendship. But no matter how valuable, they do not substitute for conversation.
It’s Not Enough To Have An Idea, You Have To Own It
Brainstorming can yield some great ideas. When we put our minds to it, we can come up with all sorts of things. But unlike playing in the playground, the sand castles we build in real life have to be things people can live in.
Sometimes in a frustrating situation, I find that it’s easy to reflect on the course that would’ve been the easiest and in retrospect, it seems like what should’ve happened. Maybe because it seemed like the most logical thing at the time or rather because I didn’t consider it more seriously. The reasons are plentiful, but hindsight is 20/20.
When you’re working at a glacial pace or trying to introduce something that’s never been done before, it’s critical that as the person proposing the change that you understand the path. It’s your responsibility to be a sort of tour guide, project manager and leader without making the “tourists” feel like they lack control of what they see and when they see it. Of course, there’s a reason for “guided tours.” You know the path and if it’s a safari, it’s better to have you there than to have someone untrained walking you through a place where wild animals live.
This came up in the classroom once and a student asked me, “How do you not doubt knowing what’s really right if you’ve never been in that exact situation before?” It was one of those oddly timed questions that I needed to think about, because it wasn’t immediately relevant to the discussion even. But when I came back to it, I was able to say very simply… “It’s not enough to have an idea. You simply have to own it. And if you can’t own the idea, then it’s probably not a good enough idea for what you’re trying to do and you need to head back to the drawing board or seal the fissures where they exist as you find them.”
I felt like one of those “easier said than done” kind of things. But the more I reflected, the more it made sense. As an idea person, you can sometimes fall in love with all sorts of possibilities that seem right at the time or that you don’t “market test” thoroughly before proceeding. In an institutional environment, I’ve always done this, recognizing how critical buy-in can be. But it’s a lesson applied well to all aspects of life, I believe.
When someone starts a conversation with me on Facebook, in public, I’m mortified. There’s a message function for that! I have email and a cellphone. Let me respond when I can, away from the watch of hundreds. Sometimes I disable my Wall so people can’t write things there, until someone points it out and I feel guilty that I’ve done this so I change it back. I don’t like to talk on the phone in public and when a friend speaks too loudly in a cafe I am nervous that someone will overhear our conversation.
At home I don’t like the sensation of my husband overhearing me order pizza, let alone having more sensitive conversations with friends. I have never been one to kiss and tell, and I like to keep my private life private. Why I have a Facebook account at all still perplexes me. I like the idea of seeing what’s going on, but I don’t want to always be a part of it. I don’t want to not be a part of it either. I want to swoop in and swoop out.
But Facebook doesn’t allow for inconsistency without amplifying it, a constant record of our obsessions and our contradictions to the point of caricature.
“A Beer With..” S2E3: Baratunde Thurston
Baratunde, one of the most viral people on the internet, digital capo for The Onion, author, and recent magazine cover boy drops by for a pint and some conversation. We discuss his upcoming book “How To Be Black”, calling out social media “gurus”, #BlackTwitter, and a lot of other stuff.
This is the best episode we’ve done. More to come.
Very funny. Very timely. Watch.
Hashtags at their best stand in as what linguists call “paralanguage,” like shoulder shrugs and intonations. That’s fine. But at their most annoying, the colloquial hashtag has burst out of its use as a sorting tool and become a linguistic tumor—a tic more irritating than any banal link or lazy image meme. The hashtag is conceptually out of bounds, being used by computer conformists without rules, sense, or intelligence, a like yknowwwww that now permeates the internet outside of the tweets it was meant to corral. It pervades Facebook, texting, Foursquare—turning into a form of “ironic metadata,” as linguist Ben Zimmer of The Visual Thesaurus labels it.
You know how people define character as “how you act when nobody is looking”? Well, with scrobbles, somebody is always looking. One of the things Laura draws parallels with is Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. It’s a prison designed to allow guards to monitor the activity of all the prisoners from a central vantage point, but with no clear knowledge on the prisoner’s part of when exactly he’s being watched. Jeremy Bentham called it “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” Except this time, nobody is exerting this power over our mind, but instead we’re exerting it over our own minds.
I have no idea when somebody might look at my scrobbles, but the very fact that they might changes my behavior. So, does it change me? Maybe, maybe not.
Child's Play 2.0: Game Designers Should Create More New Sports
Apologies on the use of 2.0 in anything, but in this particular instance I thought it’d drive home the message a bit better. When I come up with conference proposals, my idea usually starts with “could someone else give this talk better than me?” If the answer is yes, I usually don’t bother.
With this one, I knew I’d hit a jackpot and here’s what I came up with:
We live in a world where unprecedented gains in technology have advanced us to bold new worlds. So why is it that all of our games come from bygone era? Money, that’s why. The business of sports has taken recreation out of the hands of kids and into the hands of grown ups.
Gone are the days of sandlot games. While adventure and extreme sports continue to push the envelope, more traditional ball games suffer from the fatigue of overscheduled kids who have more distractions than ever.
Ron Bronson, creator of the sport of Tennis Polo (better known as Toccer) will discuss how we got here and how people sitting behind computers can save a new generation from the perils of childhood obesity, while stoking their creative fires beyond what’s going with a joystick in their hands.
Riffing on two articles on this subject from several years ago and my own experiences creating an actual sport that people play, I figured I’d throw this into the fray for DC Week next month. Whether it makes it or not, is anyone’s guess.
I did a ton of research back in 2004-05 during the really nascent days of toccer about the history of most popular sports around the world and save for dinner parties, I’ve never really shared my insights with many people. It’d be a fun way to meld some interests and give a very unique talk to boot. I’m pretty confident that while someone else could give this talk, no one could present it like I could.
The overhaul Facebook rolled out last week is meant, first and foremost, to keep users sticking around. But, hyperbole aside, Facebook is already crushing the rest of the Web when it comes to stickiness.
