But in Ender’s mind, madness. Thousands of competing contradictory impossible visions that make no sense at all because they can’t all fit together but they do fit together, he makes them fit together, this way today, that way tomorrow, as they’re needed. As if he can make a new idea-machine inside his head for every […]
Category: thoughts
Group flow
I was telling a friend about the Buffy singalong today and mentioned that one of the reasons it was so enjoyable was because everybody in the theater was a Buffy fanatic, or at least Buffy-fanatic-friendly. Because the show had sold out earlier in the week, only the fanatics had tickets. And that created a really […]
Competition
I went for a bike ride last Saturday. I rode on up to Central Park, and started cruising around the 6 mile loop there, which is closed to cars on the weekends so all I had to watch out for was slow-moving families. I’m cranking along, pedalling away so that I get a good workout. […]
Optimization Multiplicity
Religion fascinates me. I am not religious myself, but I sometimes yearn to be. It’s fashionable among the intellectual set to disparage religion, especially when the discussion is political, but having grown up in a religious town, I try to stay away from that (not always successfully). I knew lots of good people whose faith […]
Language imbalance
[ed.note: this is a short post to make up for not posting last night] In conversation last night, I was grasping for the female equivalent of emasculate. When a guy has his masculinity taken from him, it removes his strength, his power. There’s no equivalent word for women; defeminize doesn’t have the same connotations of […]
Community Capital
I mentioned in the sharing post that community was built off of social capital. Then I wrote a whole follow-up post on community without ever addressing that hanging thread. Oops. Here’s where I was going with that. One of the reasons that humans have evolved such ludicrously large brains is that we need to be […]
Thoughts on Community
One of my long-time obsessions is trying to understand community. What makes a community work? How do communities form? Why do people fit in some communities and not others? It’s probably obvious that a large part of this obsession is me feeling like an oddly shaped Tetris piece in the social world. I try spinning […]
Sharing
Somebody posted on the Social Media Club New York list a couple days ago, asking why people share. Sharing is a big component of social media and of all Web 2.0 companies, and companies are basically assuming that it’s human nature to share. From open source to Web 2.0 to the Attention Economy, our world […]
Transactional exchanges
I mentioned in my post about customer service that there are certain kinds of experiences which I call transactional. I’m not sure where I heard that term (or if I made it up) (Google makes transactional experiences look like a legal term), and my usage of it is probably not common based on Batman’s reaction […]
Social Media Club
Last month’s initial meeting of the New York chapter of the Social Media Club went well enough that they had a second meeting last night. As previously noted, Social Media Club is one of the things that BrainJams is doing now. It’s still in the formative stages, and it’s unclear what it’s for and what […]
