Archive for the 'Culture' Category

Blogging and Work-Life Balance in a Digital World

Published
by
Taylor
on April 9, 2008
in Blogging, Careers, Culture, Health and Sociology
. Comments

blogstressA recent NY Times article is (predictably) getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere.  The article uses the deaths of two bloggers (and a heart attack suffered by a third) to wonder aloud whether blogging as a profession carries inherent stress that causes folks to blog themselves to death:

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

John Batelle wonders what the fuss is about: after all, in any profession there will be those who unfortunately work themselves to the brink of personal collapse.  Just because blogging is a relatively new profession doesn’t mean that we should be any more shocked than we are are by, say, a lawyer who works him or herself to death.  But in a comment on Batelle’s post,  reader JG offers a  great and thoughtful response (I encourage you to read the whole thing; emphasis mine):

Even people who work themselves to death in their offices, late into the night, eating bad take-out, had [sic] to leave their offices at some point. In order to go home, they have to walk outside, catch some fresh air, walk up or down a couple of stairs to get to the subway. That travel period gives them a modicum of real contact with real people. A nod. Maybe sometimes even a smile. An eye-flick of recognition from the newspaper vendor on the corner. Those small things are sustaining, life-affirming, human. And those things, no matter how small, do help reduce stress.

The internet changes that. Again, this is what we have to admit to ourselves that we believe. The internet makes things different. Yes, we’d like all of it to be different-better. But sometimes it is different-worse. And one way it could very well be different-worse is that blogging for a living, from home, means you lose all those little moments of human contact, of a little bit of exercise, of a little bit of fresh air.

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Suburban Life In Perspective

Published
by
Taylor
on April 4, 2008
in Culture, Energy, Environment and Sociology
. Comments

I can’t call this a “money quote,” but it might qualify as a “mind-numbing quote.” Via NPR:suburbs

The average Atlanta resident with a job drives 66 miles every day. In fact, people here drive so much that if you added up every commute and every trip to a store or soccer practice on just one day, you’d get a number that’s larger than the distance between the Earth and the sun

Still with me? Does this not strike everyone as profoundly disturbing and yet–if you’ve ever driven through metro Atlanta–possibly a conservative estimate? Morning Edition featured a two-part series this week called “Life in the ‘Burbs,” detailing the environmental costs of American dreams involving jobs in high-rises miles away from bucolic suburban homesteads (these people work for NPR, so don’t assume for a second that they didn’t consider how many folks listen to the show during their morning commute).

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Mashups and Conversational Media

Published
by
Jarred
on March 27, 2008
in Copyright, Culture, Music and Web 2.0
. Comments

I wrote a little while ago about mashups, and defined them as “two or more sources of information on the web ‘mashed’ together to make a new, useful tool.”  As it turns out, mashups are actually much more encompassing than that.  The two or more sources of “information” do not necessarily have to create a “tool”; indeed, the sources don’t have to be “information” in the traditional sense at all.

For example, there are music mashups — entirely new creations that consist of clips and samples of tracks already in existence.  Remember The Grey Album, which spliced together Jay-Z and the Beatles?  Mashup.  There are also video mashups, which combine video and audio from different sources to make something completely new.  There are countless examples of these, but one hilarious illustration that I’ve just happened upon called There Will Be Vader mixes audio from There Will Be Blood with clips from Star Wars.

So just as “utility” mashups are useful remixes of several sources of information, “creative” mashups are expressive remixes of several sources of inspiration.  The tricky difference between the two is this: utility mashups generally make use of what are called APIs, or application programming interfaces, to obtain and manipulate data.  The easiest way to think of it as a sort of Rosetta Stone that a company provides to developers to allow them to access and interpret the information in their products.  For example, Google Maps and Twitter each have an API that, when correctly manipulated and designed by a developer, can become something like Twittervision.

Music and video, though, are not really the same.

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Monday Links (a little late): March 24, 2008

Published
by
Taylor
on March 24, 2008
in Blogging, Business, Culture, Google, Monday Links, Social Entrepreneurship and Web 2.0
. Comments

Sorry for the posting delay. Here are a few Monday links…still nice and fresh for a Tuesday morning:

  • If Tropophilia makes you want to branch out and explore more of the blogosphere, but you’re not sure how or where to find good blogs, I recommend you check out Alltop. Tropophilia fans might particularly enjoy the Green, Venture Capital, and the Social Media categories. Take a look and get hooked on a few more blogs (it’s a healthy habit, I swear).
  • Russ Quackenbush, the head of Google’s engineering department, brags to Fast Company about his employees:

“Google is investing in brains. And that’s a pretty good investment, because that way, you don’t have to know what the next thing is. Those people are going to figure it out. [...] The odds are pretty good that if you bump into someone in the cafeteria, they are way better than you at something. They are world-class at something.”

  • Social Innovation Camp brings software developers and social entrepreneurs together “to find ways that easy-to-build web 2.0 tools can be used to develop solutions to social challenges” in 48 hours. The projects for London on April 4-6 range from Barcode Wikipedia (”A site for storing user-generated information–such as carbon footprint, manufacturing conditions and reviews–against a product, identified by its barcode number”) to Prison Visits (”A tool to support the families of prisoners coping with the experience of being apart from a loved one”).
  • This business card that grows seems like a pretty cool way to make an impression…as long as your business contacts save your email address on their computer before the roots sprout.
  • Finally, in light of the happy distraction that occupies the minds of Davidson alums across the globe (and fans of those other schools too…), Mental Floss offers NCAA Tournament Pitfalls to Avoid.

Sorry again for the delay–on the positive side, it’s one day closer to Friday.

Addicted to Information, or Wired For It?

Published
by
Jarred
on March 18, 2008
in Culture, Science and Sociology
. Comments

In Tropophilia’s first guest post, Dan wrote about information saturation in our increasingly connected world:

Will we ever reach a point in which our desire for information, for advances in technology, science, medicine, etc. is quenched, where the demand weakens, and the bubble bursts? It seems that an ever-increasing demand for knowledge has fueled, since the beginning of time, most of our scientific and technological advances. And at the beginning, our needs necessitated these advances. But have we, or will we ever reach a point when our daily lives have no direct needs that can’t be satisfied by previously existing knowledge? What do we need to know now, that we didn’t know before, to help us be better humans or citizens?

Interesting questions indeed, and it seems that Dan hasn’t been the only one posing them.  In his “Portals” column for the Wall Street Journal, Lee Gomes wrote last week about how human beings are more or less “wired” to consume endless amounts of information.

Gomes cites a study where researchers found “increased production of the brain’s pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids” when test subjects were shown certain images.  Those images were determined to contain more processable information than others, and so a correlation arose between the consumption of information and pleasure experienced by the brain.  As lead researcher Dr. Irving Biederman put it:

When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’

So it appears we crave information just like we crave food.  But as Dan asked, doesn’t basic economic theory tell us that “every market can reach a point in which demand is decreased due to abundant availability”?  Why doesn’t our demand for information decrease as the scarcity of information decreases?

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