The Internet
The internet has brought with it a tidal wave of information, both deep and broad in nature. The access has made it easier for people to discover more of the world and to also specialize in areas of interest to them; for generalists to specialize and for specialists to generalize. Paradoxically, it has also accelerated the rate at which the volume of both general and specific knowledge is growing, thereby reinforcing the need to either generalize or specialize.
Chris Turner, writer and editor of the now-defunct technology and culture magazine Shift described this phenomenon particularly well in an article he wrote about The Simpsons television program and the decade that it helped shape:
On the one hand, the internet [is] unfathomably vast, encompassing enormous stretches of territory – and not just physical space, but limitless tracts of cultural and psychological terrain, as well. On the other hand, the new medium [is] proving to be as deep as it was wide. Stop in any one place, and you’d soon realize that that spot – whether a web ring cataloguing Simpsons references or a discussion group bent on changing the world – contain[s] a microscopic universe as complex as the whole.
In terms of specialized knowledge, the internet has opened up many areas of knowledge that were once closed and reserved only for those of privileged status. “This new accessibility of specialist knowledge may naturally deconstruct the hierarchy where specialists, isolated behind a wall of jargon, assume a superiority over those with general knowledge,” says Steve McCarty, President of the World Association for Online Education. “The multidisciplinary nature of the Internet for one thing is forcing academics to clarify what they mean to a general audience if they are to compete in the marketplace of ideas.”
At the same time, in terms of generalized knowledge, everything and anything is documented somehow on the internet. Surfing the web can take one on an exploration of the profound to the ridiculous and undoubtedly puts us in touch with more information than any previous generation. “In a world of deepening connections, individuals, organizations, and entire countries draw strength and personality from places as near as their local neighborhood and as far away as a distant continent. Mixing is the new norm.” In fact, one of the web’s latest phenomena, weblogging, is an exceptional account of life in general. Webloggers post commentary, critique, cross-linking and sometimes just nonsense, acting much like a highly specialized and robust yet tremendously broad and balanced newspaper or TV station. While still piggybacking on the (so-called objective) content from traditional media, it has taken curiosity and discussion in the human tapestry to a whole new level.
With a membership of over 17,000 users and over two million pageviews each month (and growing), one of the most popular and informative weblogs is Metafilter. Created by Californian Matt Haughey, Metafilter is a community of curious and generous people, posting links to information and entertainment all over the internet and discussing and debating the same. The posts are often timely, obscure and, in total, incredibly diverse. The topics can range from The Mars Gravity Biosatellite Project to Italian coffin makers to details of the Scrabble world championships. It’s a spirited awareness of all things around us. Other similar successful websites of the same theme include Memepool, a weblog connecting common threads of human consciousness, and Everything2, an ambitious project to hyperlink definitions of everything with everything else. If interest in these sites is any indication, a genuine generalist movement is mounting.
Why are poems important and enriching? Because if Paris Hilton wrote poetry this is what we'd get.
Seth Godin's ideas always seem to ride a fine edge between being profound and shallow. His latest project, ChangeThis, most definitely seems to fall on the side of the former. It has good intentions and is, as Godin is no doubt adept at, perfectly timed in its relevancy. The mission of ChangeThis is to encourage the creation of intelligent, balanced and sharable manifestos; to spread important ideas and change minds. Striking back against irrational, partisan and hateful discourse Godin and his crew of volunteers and headlining contributors (including Malcolm Gladwell, Tom Peters and Guy Kawasaki) are trying to take his Permission Marketing, IdeaVirus and Purple Cow theories to the next level.
(via augustdiva)
A book cover is an opportunity to condense thousands of words down to one salient and marketable idea. Some of the simplest and most clever graphic design ideas today are gracing the jackets of our favourite hardcovers. A couple designers that have carved out widespread praise for their work: in the States Chip Kidd, and no one does it better in Canada than David Drummond (who just launched his website last week).
Attack of the killer peas.
Worth checking out is this new magazine and accompanying blog Worthwhile. Based in Atlanta it's positioned as "Fortune meets Oprah with a dash of Vanity Fair" and focuses on the purpose, passion and profit of work. At first glance it strikes me as a new Fast Company or Business 2.0, and even comes with the same participants. Worthwhile fratures a cast of heavyweight contributors - Tom Peters, David Weinberger and David Batstone to name a few. Looks like an interesting endeavour.
(via the ever-curious augustdiva)
Radio's future in iPod's hands:
New research suggests the iPod - rather than the Internet, 3G or media fragmentation - will have the greatest impact on the future of radio. The research, undertaken by The Knowledge Agency, found interest in the iPod among 18-30 year-olds to be "phenomenal".
"Two consumer trends have contributed to the popularity of MP3 players and the growth of music downloading, and both present the radio industry with a knock-on effect. The first is the shift towards personalization. The second is a growing demand from younger consumers to have greater control over their media. As a result, 18 to 30 year-old radio listeners now want content that is more personalised and more directly relevant to their own tastes and needs."
(via RAIN)
CG would be remiss not to make mention of generalist superhero-of-the-moment Ken Jennings. Jennings is the 30-year-old software engineer from Utah who his on an amazing 33-game, $1,100,460 run on TV game show Jeopardy. His rapid-fire knowledge seems to know no bounds.
Jennings has averaged more than $33,000 per episode and has correctly answered more than 1,000 questions on everything from rock music ("Who is Kurt Cobain?") to opera ("What is Madame Butterfly?").
He credits his streak to a curious mind, good memory and astute buzzer technique.
''A lot of it is just God-given memory that I can't take any credit for,'' he said. ''I've always been interested in a lot of different fields. It's not just that I'm a computer engineer and all I care about is computers."
Struck by how many US founders and writers - Ben Franklin, Noah Webster, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, and so on - were polymaths, people with incredibly eclectic interests and broad knowledge of their world, former "Librarian without Walls" Marylaine Block remarks how very different things are now, 200 years later:
What is it that has changed, then? Perhaps the boundaries. In the time of Franklin and Jefferson, only 200 years ago, so little was actually known and understood that the contributions of amateurs were not only welcome but invaluable. Amateurs played with physics and astronomy, tinkered with machines, discovered stars and explored continents. Now, I suspect, a Benjamin Franklin might not be taken seriously. Now credentials matter, as do the institutions that sponsor the researcher--do you doubt a scientist from Harvard would automatically be granted more credibility than putterers like Franklin or even Edison?
Nor would Jeffersonian eclecticism be honored in the professional or academic world. It's not just that historians who chose to write about biology would be pooh-poohed by biologists; their biological treatises would get them no recognition among historians, either, nor would they count toward tenure. The other members of the English department at Columbia never quite knew what to make of the murder mysteries their colleague Carolyn Heilbrun wrote under the name Amanda Cross, and scholars in the business of criticism or theory look down their noses at fellow professors who write sonnets or commit actual art.
Creativity is finding new patterns in existing order, and animals on the underground is a cute example of it. The animals are simple line drawings based on maps for the London underground. It began 15 years ago when Paul Middlewick spotted an elephant while staring at the tube map during his daily journey to work and it is now a media talking point and small scale merchandising venture.
(Thanks Nathan!)
TV commercials not yet ready for TV. The Spec Spot.
From Friday's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, an article highlighting a 10 percent drop in the amount of literature (novels, short stories, poetry, plays, etc.) Americans are reading. The study is from 1982 to 2002 and it reaches across gender, age, race and ethnicity lines - with the biggest decline among people 18 to 24 years old (28 percent). Some quotes:
"It got to the point that I felt I was sounding like I was from feudal times if I mentioned something from a book. I got more response by alluding to 'Seinfeld.' "
"More interesting was the fact that reading literature isn't seen as a component of learning how to write."
"But sometimes, the world's so busy that young people are afraid to be alone. It's not a familiar state to them."
For many people, "the reading muscle is atrophied because the head is doing something else."
"Readers will never grow out of the need for the imagination."
Drawing on the Starbucks approach to marketing by taking a basic item, repackaging it, surrounding it by an experience and dramatically upping the price, Cereality seems to be trying the same thing for something so everyday as breakfast cereal (presently only at Arizona State University). Judging from the website, this cool new concept appears to be well considered. Their offering includes basic cereal but also such things as toppings, make-your-own-blend, milk variety, cereal bars and snacks and pyjama-clad servers.
(via Adland)
[Welcome back, me!]
Ideas change the world. And idealists are the clever dreamers that work on such ideas. If you put a lot of these super intelligent and incredibly passionate people in the same room to discuss their ideas and to learn about what others in other different fields are doing you get something very special. ideaCity is just such an event and it is indeed a remarkable gathering.
The 5th annual ideaCity conference, an offspring of the successful US-based TED conferences and now hosted very capably by Moses Znaimer and CityTV, was held just a few weeks ago at the Isabel Bader Theatre in downtown Toronto. Top thinkers in a wide variety of fields are invited to speak about what moves them. The only rules are that they get just 20 minutes and they can't read notes. The result is an inspiring and provacative melange of viewpoints, discoveries and performance.
This year's presenters included: painter Robert Bateman, photographer Edward Burtynsky, environmentalist Severn Cullis-Suzuki, architect Jack Diamond, space elevator developer Brad Edwards, pet cloner Lou Hawthorne, designer Chip Kidd, PC inventor Mers Kutt, musician Sook-Yin Lee, NASA researcher Darlene Lim, lawyer James Lockyer, military commander Lewis MacKenzie, physician Gabor Mate, astrophysicist Jaymie Matthews, author Robert Munsch, cartoonist Terry Mosher, investor Francois Parenteau, IOC member Dick Pound, scientific artist Alexander Tsiaris, Alzheimer's researcher Eva Vertes, columnist Paul Wells, blues prodigy Jimmy Bowskill, activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (an absolutely amazing presentation!) and, if you can believe it, many more. Three days of ideative intensity. Beautiful!