Category: Quote

Identity vs Efficiency

I read 300+ blog posts a day thanks to Google Reader. It’s my homepage. Every time I open my browser I’m bombarded with new postings. I’ve done this for almost a year now. Before that I visited the individual blogs.

Jakob Lodwick makes the following point in a post today:

This urge to make everything automatically syndicated and aggregated into custom streams does have a trade-off. You’re trading identity for efficiency.

This provides a few shocking realizations for me.

1. All that I’ve done online lately is consume and reorganize. I don’t create enough. Sure, I’m creating right now. But, it’s not enough. This is partially a result of being in law school, which has significantly squashed the time I have to think about meaningful creative endeavors. Or even read a novel.

2. In the past I’ve spent hours modifying the look and feel of my other blog – Yugflog.com – so that it is appealing and appropriate to the subject matter. If all of that was never seen because it was only read through RSS feeds, that would be a lot of wasted work on my part.

So what? While the 2D web-space is becoming increasingly visually stimulating and full of rich content, my way of dealing with it is to reduce it to uniform text in a linear stream. Not only that, but no one blog, micro-blog, tumblelog, video site, or website stands out. All of the information is slurred together.

I should care more about who is saying what.

I should care more about what it looks like.

I should care more about giving back as much as I take in a qualitative, not quantitative, manner.

To do that I’m going to stop reading my RSS feeds every spare second. I’m going to evaluate what I can do with my time that would be either (a) more productive or (b) more creative.

Funny Quotes From Boo

Book Weekley, one of the guys representing the U.S. in the Omega Mission Hills World Cup played in China November 22 – 25, is notorious for his quotes. Here’s a recent sample:

Q: Boo?
BOO WEEKLEY: I’m excited to go over there, and like Heath said, it’s an honor to represent your country. I wouldn’t have gone by myself, though; it’s not that I didn’t want to represent my country, but I ain’t into traveling, especially during hunting season.

Q: What season is it?
BOO WEEKLEY: Deer.

Q: It would be deer season if you were at home now?
BOO WEEKLEY: I would have gotten up at 4:30 in the morning, and I’d probably still be in the woods right now.

Q: You would be looking around and —
BOO WEEKLEY: I’d be up a tree, about 35, 40 feet.

Transparency and Blogging

This is my website. If you don’t want to hire me for this transparency, maybe I don’t want to work for you. If you don’t want to date me for this exposure, maybe I don’t want to date you. And if you can’t handle this, there are millions of other sites you should probably be reading. Because anonymous just isn’t for me – I want you to know me and accept me and to support me. If not, find something else to read. (link)

Great post. I’ve never written anonymously. Or posted videos or pictures that way. It doens’t seem worth it to hide my content. Why not share it with the public?

Knox seems to be going a step further in saying that he won’t censor himself. That is a harder and more dangerous goal. People have expectations. An employer will care about it’s employees’ images. A prospective significant other will care how, and if, they are viewed.

He just doesn’t care what they think.

Transparency is a bold goal. It’s ironic – but true – that being a truer version of one’s self (online) can be a life-limiting move.

It’s difficult for me to take a side on this concept of total transparency versus censored disclosure. I practice the later because I hope to have a career and don’t want to be disowned by my girlfriend and family. I’ve made the mistake of sharing the wrong content. It’s annoying and whatever value total transparency held wasn’t worth it.

Good luck with it, though, to anyone who attempts a transparent “blog.”

(I’m not sure there is a transparency gradient. At first I thought of using “opacity,” but what I intend to post isn’t deliberately not transparent. It’s not cloudy. I practice selective transparency, which contradicts the intended goal as well. Hmmm…)

Harry Potter 7

Something doesn’t seem right about the following headline from today’s China Daily:

Chinese bookworms going potty bout Potter

I bought Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows today for RMB 208 at the Foreign Languages bookstore in Wang Fu Jing, Beijing, China. I bought the kids cover version and Skye bought the adult version. We’re waiting to read them on the plane ride home.

50,000 copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows were imported into China. Typically, about 100 copies of English language best-sellers are imported.

More on Personal Timelines

Mark Cuban wrote (link):

Our past, and really our profile was defined by the contents of shoeboxes and milkcrates. The places where we kept old papers, pictures, grades, notes we passed to the girl we had a crush on.

Over the last few years, its evolved to the equivalent digital placeholder. Its on Flickr, photobucket, Myspace, Facebook, wherever we host and store all the digital pictures, videos,blog entries , comments and discussions we participate in that we share publicly. Or its in an email database that is hosted or backedup online that we may or may not choose to make public.. And these are just the elements we self maintain.

Our lives are being documented , cataloged and indexed whether we like it or not. But since its a relatively new phenomena, there really isnt much history out there . Our pasts, even of high school kids has far more offline and out of the reach of search engine spiders, than online.

All of this is very true and there is very little we can do to stop it. Information is power, and it flows more freely than ever today.

Creativity Crunched

Steve Jobs makes an interesting point:

You know, we don’t grow most of the food we eat. We wear clothes other people make. We speak a language that other people developed. We use a mathematics that other people evolved… I mean, we’re constantly taking things. It’s a wonderful, ecstatic feeling to create something that puts it back in the pool of human experience and knowledge.

Writing has been my creative outlet since college. Whether it is public or private, it is what I do to express my thoughts, feelings, and imagination… to get away from the stuff I have to do.

Learning to balance my school obligations with my other interests has been one of the most difficult tasks this year. Having been away from a school setting, and entering a more intense school setting than I’ve ever experienced has been shocking. Still is, and will probably continue to be so for the next few years as I chase my diploma, a job, a family, etc.

What’s my point? Not sure… just that I agree that being creative, whether on a large or small scale is an incredibly rewarding endeavor.

UPDATE: I just came across this video of Sir Ken Robinson talking about the role of creativity in education at the TED conference.