I’m off to a nice long(ish) holiday in Israel so won’t be posting much if at all - I really want a mental detox from everything online…
Don’t forget if you’re around Likemind Tel-Aviv next Tuesday 13th May at The Streets Cafe on King George (corner of Hanevi’im). I’ll be there from 10ish for some good couple of hours - come say hi, nice coffee etc.
See you in couple of weeks
A.
Yesterday I stumbled upon the very first episode of Sex and the City and was quite amazed how dated it felt. The whole liberating sex talk, smoking in NY bars, Miranda’s haircut…
But the most brilliant thing was Skipper’s job title:
I personally know one Internet Professional but never met a website creator…
Is it really?
What is it with smart academics that can’t resist the urge to tell us whats good and whats bad for us? Or that doing A is better than doing B?
Clay Shirky is one of my heros and a very very clever person and, in principle, his argument of a seismic change in media (from passive consumption to active participation) is spot on.
And as much as I share and support his optimistic vision of future of mass participation and creativity his argument has sometimes more holes than a block of dutch cheese (I don’t know where to start and probably miss some points…anyway…)
Talking about surplus of free time he writes
Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn’t know what to do with it at first–hence the gin, hence the sitcoms.
Dear Clay….Humans got pissed since they invented booze. And sitcoms have evolved as a cultural form of expression like theater and films before them, NOT as a reaction to a downtime crisis!
And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list.
C’mmon….Downtime is as important today as it always has been if not more considering the fact that the stimulus we’re surrounded with are 100 times greater than in the past. What’smore, TV is only one, albeit the most popular downtime activity tool. So even with all the most convincing mathematical calculations it is rather daft to assume that if people will watch less TV they will start writing more wikipedia articles or produce more LOLcats images - they can do million other things.
To paraphrase one of his calculations (”Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing”) you might argue that instead they will go jogging or the gym - hey, we just solved America’s obesity problem!
Culture production indeed has become a collective endeavor and we only now begin to realise what amazing opportunities we are presented with. But people don’t change. Technology changes, the world changes, but people still are the same - and since the very early days of homo sapiens, in some parts of our daily lives we like and NEED to do nothing. We NEED passive consumption. And occasionally we NEED to get pissed as well…
Whats with that Christian work ethics??? You really should read Tim Hodgkinson
This is fantastic. It really made my day. A small but very REAL example of how we all have the power to change. I wanna hug this guy, really.
Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.
Cheers Dino
Really great tools (web applications) are those that allow you enough freedom from the original intention of the developers and therefore can be used by more people for more purposes. The immediate example of course is twitter.
One such gem I recently discovered is Instapaper which meant to facilitate easy reading of long text content. The original purpose of instapaper is simply to save long reads for when you have time to read it. So when a friend passed the link I thought - why do I need another bookmarking tool? I save whatever I need on de.licio.us as well as occasionally on my browser as a Read Later folder. I wasn’t really inclined to use it.
But when I saw the ultra clean and simple interface it immediately reminded me an idea I had in my mind for some time now, called The Wisdom Bin:
A tool/application that will allow you to save words - from a single sentence to few paragraphs. In some ways it aims to be to de.licio.us what Twitter is for blogging (only slightly different). Better example is that it’s like FFFFound for words.
Here how I envisioned it working: You read something on ‘The Internets’ and there’s a line or a paragraph that really resonates for whatever reason - a good thinking, a gag, a quote, data, fine words of any sort - ANYTHING that makes you think, ” i need to write it down / I wish I remember that” and you usually will either save the link to your delicious or just forget about it. The wisdom bin will allow you to highlight the line/paragraph and with a simple right click or a bookmarklet you open a save-box de.licio.us-like and tag what you highlighted (as well as the link to source).
So although this has been done already, none of the tools really gave me the ease and simplicity I had in mind when thinking of the wisdom bin (even clipmarks is too cluttered and shouty for me) until I started using Instapaper. It allows me to highlight anything from a single word to full paragraph and it’s all very very simple and clean that I immediately fell in love.
Previously album of the week but sounds too old world….here are the albums that I can’t live without these days:
Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago
One of the saddest, most beautiful albums I’ve heard in a while. A haunting soulfulness, captivating vocals and a deeply introspective album from Justin Vernon.
Plants and Animals: Parc Avenue
Fantastic hybrid of pop, jazz, rock, folk and jamming from the latest Montreal darlings. Serene doses of melody, quirky lyrics and seriously groovy vibes. A delight.
The Shortwave Set: Replica Sun Machine
Produced by Danger Mouse (one half of Gnarls Barkley ) this second south London trio’s album has callbacks to 60s psychedelia and 70s pop-folk songwriting yet it manages to sound very very now. Deeply interesting.
On the 1st May Cookie (The man, the tach, the painfully talented illustrator) & his mate Paul plan to take their first step from dusty northern Mexico, over the border into the United States, they’ll keep on marching until they finally walk across the border 3,000 miles further north into Canada.
To make it a bit more interesting, the route they’ll take sticks as close as possible to the Great Divide which splits the entire American continent in two, from the tip of Chile to the end of Alaska.
They are doing this to raise funds for The Cystic Fibrosis Trust. The money raised will help fund research to find a cure for the most common life-threatening inherited disease. Your generosity will be greatly appreciated.
Check out Cookie’s blog for live blogging and updates throughout this amazing journey
Best of luck Cookie - I’m your #1 admirer!
I only know Jacques Lacan - the French intellectual and psychoanalyst through his compelling articulation of the “mirror stage”. The mirror stage involves the moment during which the human being first recognizes himself as Self, as Other, possibly even as others see him. This moment marks the true beginning of history for the individual by establishing his separate identity. By establishing the “I,” the individual verifies the context of his personhood (which includes the context of his universe) and provides some form of meaning for experience (read more here).
I always wished I had more time to read his stuff and until yesterday I don’t think I ever saw a video of him (he died in 1981). It surely was a delightful find to see the man in what looks like a practice of a lecture (but it’s not) where he passionately, yet incomprehensibly argues with his friend and enemy - Sigmond fraud about love and the unconscious. A gem.
I know that some of the few readers of this blog are brothers and sisters residing in Zion, some of them I know, most I don’t and this morning I woke up with an idea - in 3 weeks time I’ll be visiting home so how about Likemind Tel Aviv?
For those who never heard about Piers and Noah (PSFK) Likemind morning coffees meme take a look here but the idea is very simple: it’s an opportunity to enjoy coffee and conversation with Likeminded people Why? because drinking good coffee with likeminded people is fun (note: this is NOT a networking event - just a chance to meet interesting people. It’s too early in the morning for that and we don’t like the word and being in few of Russell’s legendary morning coffees we usually don’t talk about work, but then again, there are no rules)
So I suggest Tuesday 13th May 10AM in a nice cafe in Tel Aviv.
Please leave a comment or send me an email if you think it’s a good idea. Ayelet , Yuval, what do you say?
