inquiry

CJ Eller spoke to something I do a fair amount of – although I had no idea it might be called hyperclipping.

This:

It makes me think about how we embed writing into other writing on the web. A newspaper article clipping is replaced by a hyperlink to take you to said newspaper article. Sure, the tactility is lost, but deep down I wonder what else is.

had me remembering how for years and years a high school buddy and I exchanged fairly large snail mail, sometimes handwritten, often typed, and from time to time with said clippings embedded courtesy of Scotch tape, Elmer's glue, rubber cement, or whatever else was handy.

I rather miss that. The pace was, well, that of escargot, relatively speaking. But how momentous a moment it was when such a tome arrived.

Makes me wonder if those who designed and then coded the internet into place ever wondered if “supply and demand” might come into play in the sense that abundance has a way of devaluing – and rarity, valuing – things to humans? Being able to fire off an email whenever means so much less to me than those works of paper/ink/clippings art did, and ditto on being able to so easily put paragraphs before lots of others simultaneously.

Glad to see mso got back to writing:

I got back to writing recently. I'm not sure exactly why, but I felt like jotting down my thoughts was helping me organise my thoughts and learnings. I like that when you write you create something. That something can be shared, used, interpreted.

The key word being “can”.

But simple attention arithmetic suggests everyone constantly writing means they have proportionally less time for reading.

(Makes me wonder if perhaps an interesting twist on a place like write.as might be a mechanism that promotes/enforces people taking turns so that those whose turn it is not to write can luxuriate in reading?)

It's a simple act but so complex at the same time. Anyway, I first went back to Medium. I love the idea behind it — a platform where writers can connect and share stories — but I got disappointed by the paywall they've set-up. It feels as if the articles you write there belong to Medium. It's also not ideal to share Medium links since at times people already reached their reading limits and can't read what you wrote without paying. Not good, right?

Evil never has been.

It feels to me like write.as is medium done right. The idea of a network of people writing good content, discovering good stories. It seems like it's done with the right mindset and I'm looking forward to use it more, and share some of my uninteresting thoughts here now!

Excellent!

Elsewhere:

In response to Tobias Van Schneider's love letter to personal websites, in which he is right that they are the “place where we can express, on our terms, who we are and what we offer” but a bit annoying in how he focuses on how it's about presenting your work to the world, Eric L. Barnes correctly observes that “social media keeps winning because it’s easy and we are all lazy”, except that if there's one thing I've learned from being diagnosed as autistic it's that sometimes what conventional wisdom would have as laziness in fact is a kind of cognitive inertia (in the mental health realm, often the result of executive function issues), and it's why as we try to motivate people to find their own opportunities to switch gears back to things like blogging, we need to push social media platforms to introduce friction.

Whatever it is, it's no match for “we are all lazy”.

So it looks like we have to change ourselves first and – surprise, surprise – discover even plain text is pretty gosh-danged wonderful – if not exciting – when those wielding it have more than half a lazily inert brain in their head.

Honestly. It's been the same story over and over: people making it easy for literally any idiot to participate, and then wondering how that keeps leading to falling far short of the lofty mark.

We simply don’t know if anything qualifies anymore as a “game changer.” For crying out loud, the Russians helped Trump defeat Hillary Clinton! Robert Mueller spent two years investigating. He came up with 10 different ways Trump broke the law. Yet the Republican Party said all that was jim-dandy. So tell me: Why wouldn’t the president ask for foreign help a second time, and why would the second time change anything?

The reason “we simply don't know if anything qualifies anymore” is that's what happens when boys, girls, and whatever other genders cry wolf incessantly to the point of endlessly. There's not a single claim in that paragraph that isn't mostly – if not entirely – based upon the gossipy facts-changing-along-the-way murmuring of haters of a particular individual. Even if the man is a complete psychopath, in my view his haters are even worse for carrying on as they have while insisting they're the woke adults in the room – including the one that considered all of one exchange to be sufficient reason to shun another 'til the end of eternity.

yourintrinsicself asks:

Where might you be able to start leading from stillness?

Well, obviously not here.... ;–)