The Sum of my Curiosities, or Why Social Q&A is Awesome.

Lots of people mostly like to talk about subjects they know a lot about. I do too. Who doesn't? It's comfy to stay within our own realms of knowledge.
And also dull. You might teach someone else something by talking about things you know. But what will you learn?

I want my conversations, and therefore my relationships, to be based on what I want to know, not what I know already. I am much more excited about the questions that I have than the answers that I have.

According to a recent study I did by looking at the internet for five seconds, there are a jillion question and answer websites. Many, many people are trying to commingle Q&A style interaction with social networking technology. My two favorite such sites, Kommons and Quora, are doing a great job of making shared curiosity a basis for relationships in social media spaces like Twitter and Facebook.

Myspace and Facebook were/are all about molding an online identity. You curate the events of your life in pictures and text, so that you can show people who you were, are, and are becoming. Whether you portray yourself accurately, or carefully redact parts of your life to present a tamer self for your online audience is (mostly) up to you. Either way, most of what you post is about the past.

Question based social networking is much more forward looking, and therefore thrilling, in my eyes. Kommons allows you to "follow" questions that have been posted by other users, thereby grouping you with those users solely on the basis of a shared curiosity. By choosing questions to follow, you curate an identity for yourself, not based on what has been, but what you want to be. You and someone else have the same question. You're trying to grow your knowledge in the same direction.

Quora (whose budget, it must be mentioned, is tens of thousands of times that of Kommons) goes a step further and lets you follow people and topics as well as questions. This is one more step towards making mutual curiosity the basis for deeper relationships.



Discourse based on experience will always be valuable in its own way, and mutual curiosity has always been a basis for relationships. I am excited about online explorations of how to make all of it easier.

People often define themselves by the sum of their experiences.
I'd rather be defined by the sum of my curiosities.
Not what I do know, but what I will know. Not what I have been, but what I will be.

Find the Buddha

Scroll down if you don't like "fun" 'where's waldo?' type games.

Found him.

Tools Matter

My Macbook Pro quit its job this week, and during the few days between when it stopped working and when I took it to the repair place, I felt a surprising sense of relief...that the computer was out of my life for a while.

When I first got this computer, it was shipped to my dad's office so it wouldn't be stolen off our porch or something. I remember feeling euphoric and breathy when I finally got my hands on it, and rode the elevator back down to the office block's main floor thinking of all the projects I was going to do with it. I could make music with it. Electronic music. (I had failed to master an instrument.) I could make music videos and web sites. I could finally learn to animate. Now that I could compute anywhere I'd basically be living my creative dream during every waking hour.

Fast forward almost five years, to last week, the day before my computer stopped working. I watched six episodes of Gossip Girl on DVD that day, on my laptop. The endless creative possibilities offered by my laptop had been overruled by some horrible, sexified Stepford teens on teevee. When my computer broke, the weight of all that "creative potential," (and all that teevee that needed watchin',) was magically lifted. I was able to look around and ponder what I should really do, with what I had, where I was.

New creative tools always give me goose bumps.

"With this, I'll make something awesome!" I always tell myself.

...and then, whatever-unit-of-time later...I find myself staggering under the guilt of not having actually done as much as I had imagined I would.

I have misconceived the relationship between tools and creativity. Tools can't make me create. By being creative, I make space in my life for tools.

Inevitably, after pretending for too long that I'll become a productive, creative genius if I buy the right...markers...sketchpad...software...computer...I have to dig myself out from under my pile of tools and their weighty potentials and decide, without the help of inanimate objects, what I should actually do.

The above cartoon's caption comes from a Twitter exchange I had with Hugh MacLeod. I was gushing about these pens that I really want (which he draws his cartoons with), and I said "Tools Matter."

He said, "Yeah... Until they don't."

Creative processes get easier with tools. But the real creative spirit can use any raw material to make something great.

I am constantly forgetting and relearning this.

Do my powers of link-forwarding make me dumber...or just less thoughtful?

How much of what is in your mind do you know the origin of? How many of the things you say can you also describe why you are saying them, and why you thought of them in the first place?

Ah yes, punks. "Rock the nation." That'll tell 'em.

I am of two minds about this Nepali 10 rupee bill. On one hand, I feel more at home in a country where disaffected youth like to vandalize currency. On the other hand, the slogans these vandals used are clearly lukewarm refries of old "revolutionary" propaganda.
The vandals received signals about change, about uprising and revolution, and instead of taking those signals to heart, flipped them. Perhaps these money scribblers were working on a bigger movement, an evil plan of their own...but I doubt it. Likely, the evanescent thrill of writing "The F Word" was good enough... This is the danger of signal repetition. Sometimes it feels better to pass something on than it does to ponder whether the message is worth passing on at all.

In a wonderful scene from the movie Waking Life, a woman describes the "byzantine conduit" of experiences, memories and references a single word (like "love") must traverse in our brains for us to "understand" it. Our brains are labyrinthine networks, and though they work fast (200 calculations per second per active neuron), the signals we perceive are complex, and they take time to process. With accelerating modes of communication, we devote less time to processing signals. Ideas only have moments, and can only reach the nearest, most tread corridors of our minds before they're yanked back out and passed along, contemplated so little that they might as well just have bounced off the walls and echoed.

As we increasingly feel pressure to be fast at communication, we are transformed. Under increasing pressure the idealists, artists, contemplators, theorists...thinkers... are transformed into megaphones.

Marketing sensei/blogmaster Seth Godin recently wrote a post called "The Danger of Repeating Signals," in which he described a scene from The Count of Monte Cristo.  In the scene, a man characterizes himself as a machine, not to be blamed for what he says, for he is only passing on signals, and if he passes them on accurately, how can he be judged for the content?

I'm also guilty of mindless signal repetition. When I forward links, I hardly stop to think whether what I'm sending is trustable, or even worthwhile. I assume that by transmitting the information, I will be providing the same basic, sensorial reaction to it that I had, to the target of my forward. This is dangerous. When I do it, I stop thinking. I become a node in someone else's meme-distribution network. I am used by people who are consciously/unconsciously trying to propagate memes and "go viral" on the Internet.

There are times when most of my communication goes out in the form of links. I bookmark URLs prodigiously, and often I find it easier to 'curate' a list of links on a subject than to actually say what I think about it.

Eventually, maybe I'll become too lazy to even think what I think about it in the first place.

Then what...?

Platonic Form

Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid) just tweeted "People think 'success' exists out there in the ether, like some Platonic form. It doesn't."

I do so much reading about how to succeed, and by succeed, I mean make goals and then reach them within some reasonable timeframe (if there is such a thing as reasonable.) Ultimately, none of the reading helps at all, unless, in a moment when I am on the fence, it pushes me to make a decision...to translate an amorphous 'goal' in my mind into a schedule, a set of activities, and a plan. Whether I reach the actual goal in the end doesn't necessarily determine whether I have succeeded. But there is no possibility of success at all unless I drag it out of the "Platonic form" state, and into reality.

Thanks for the continued inspiration Hugh.

P.S. As of this posting, Hugh's tweet is only about half an hour old. Am I quick on the draw (and on the pun) or what?