Category — free speech

I know that, in blogging, you’re supposed to “change your content” regularly but following such a directive can be an empty exercise.

I would love to think that someone else might be interested in reading what I might jot down here, but I don’t really have any illusions about it. While I might fancy making money as a blogger, that desire is not the reason why I write here. I don’t want recognition, although it would be nice. I don’t necessarily even want to be right, although I would love the change to be proven wrong. I am mainly here because I can be, it’s central, and I like to think, and occasionally write down those thoughts.

What I caught myself thinking tonight was in the context of having an email conversation, although the same idea could be applied equally to Twitter “conversations.” I’m focused on the notion of a conversation because it is a measurable artifact of who we are, and I am presently architecting a solution to the problem of being able to track and make sense of your networks of communication. As a side-note that’s probably not totally unrelated, I’m also working up an idea for a website called dadrage.com; an aggregator of authentic conversations about being a father.

All that aside, what I wanted to say is that I really enjoy the re-emergence of the type of conversation that used to take place through the postal service in the form of letters.  Email is so much simpler and immediate, so the delays aren’t nearly as long, but the fact is the rules remain the same, and I think people are starting to recognize this.  Unlike the telephone system of conversations, if someone doesn’t email us back in four days, we might wonder for a moment, but will probably let it go at for ten days before following up or jumping to conclusions.

I like this first of all because it allows us some to time to take in what was said to us, which may leads to a more carefully constructed response, which is the second thing like like about this pace of conversation.

The rules of escalation are pretty straightforward. If you need an immediate response, use a medium where that is possible: the telephone network.  Short of that, you’ve just got got to sweat out the wait. Like your mom says, it’s probably good for you.

Third thing: the refinement of patience.

Fourth thing, building on the previous three: More authentic relationships.

I know that last is kind of an escalation of sorts, and probably violates principle number three, but it’s really an order-of-magnitude evolution, and should be treated as such.

In blogging, you’re also supposed to have a well-crafted structure, with a rousing conclusion.  Sorry. It’s just a random jot.

I would say something to preface this, but…

If you’re going to blog a lot and you develop a circle of loyal readers, if you ever get successful in your life, don’t be a dick and stop blogging.

I love the idea of Social Media. As with any tool, you have to watch out for the ingenuine bastards who will turn it for their own advantage.  Fortunately, they’re easily spotted.

Even for the best-intentioned, be careful that your social media strategy isn’t just putting lipstick on a pig.

People who argue over political ideologies usually miss the opportunity to solve actual problems.

Karaoke can be fun if you sing something totally out of character and don’t pick a song designed to make you look cool.

Freedom comes from technology as much as meat comes from the grocery store.

You can’t make me do anything, but I love getting turned on.

Pissing in the wind may get you covered with urine, but it’s still fun.

If you look for answers where they should be, you’ll be late for tea.

My custom security question on websites is “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

Cheers!

Bonus guest quote: If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason. (”Jack Handy” from  SNL “Deep Thoughts” segment circa Oct. 1991.)

Perhaps you may have wondered this question yourself.

As I’ve gained some technical competence in the area of photography I have been, of late, trying to answer for myself the question “what kind of photography do you want to do?”  This question was recently asked of me by my godfather, a well-established photographer for about as long as I’ve been alive, and someone whose work fundamentally instilled in me a love of the photographic form.  When he asked me this question a couple months ago, I didn’t have a ready response.

Perhaps now I can begin to answer his question.

In all sincerity, I don’t enjoy doing general portraiture for its own sake.  This includes families, events, and weddings.  I loove good photography of almost any nature, but I’ve tried these forms on for size, and found that none of them capture  my heart.  I suspect that the best way forward in regard to such forms may be to combine talents with my wife, who is an excellent director, with an excellent eye for composition and an amazing ability to be with people.  Together, to specialize in wedding photography, would bring much more enjoyment to such endeavors.

For myself, what I do enjoy (and this is something that has never changed since I was quite young) is the beauty of the female form.  Every young boy at some point has probably said, in safe company, that they wanted to be a Playboy photographer when they grow up.  I did.  From what I understand, it is almost a rite of passage.  While I do not aspire to actually take pictures for that magazine, I do appreciate well-composed and executed photography of the female form.  As an old friend of mine related to me that his mother once said, “There is nothing more beautiful than a beautiful woman.”

Two of my favourite photographers on Flickr happen to be beautiful women who, with some regularity, take incredible photographs using as their model their own selves.  They also happen to be two of the most popular photographers on Flickr (to see the following links, you’ll need to take a moment and sign up!), and their reputation is moving quickly into other parts of the world.

My favourite (and first encountered) of these two is the Icelandic beauty Rebekka Gudleifsdottir.  She is a highly creative photographer who I would say is at her best when she combines sublime landscapes with figures in the foreground.  These might take the form of wild Icelandic horses, or human models, including herself.  If you’ve never seen her work before, it’s not too late to hop on the bandwagon.  She’s got a lot of devout followers!  Again, you’ll have to sign up for Flickr to see them.  (Don’t worry — it’s free, and totally worthwhile!)

The second of my favourites (and she is no runner-up) is Carmen Gonzales, of the Netherlands.  Another Flickr celebrity (Flilebrity?), Carmen evokes a beatiful, dreamlike experience in her imagery, in which she oftentimes prominently figures.  She is also quite effective both in her use of other models and in creating otherworldly landscapes.  She recently posted an absolutely killer photo which represents the latter.

I’ve invoked both of these photographers primarily as exemplars in the way they express the beauty and intricacy of their own selves in their photography.  If I were a woman as photogenically gorgeous as these two, I’d be set,  But, alas, I’m a 40-year-old man who has (momentarily) fallen out of shape in the wake of raising two children.  It’s a shitty excuse, but it is what it is.  And while I am eager to get myself “cut” again I am, for the moment, generally uninterested in taking pictures of myself.

I love beautiful pictures of beautiful women.  Thankfully, perhaps, I am able to see beauty past the superficial level.  It is in fact difficult for me, with any level of scrutiny, to see much real beauty beyond where it exists only superficially.

As the grown-up (?) version of a child who inherited some portion of Puritanical mores, it’s far too easy for me to see this as a bad thing.  At the same time, however, it is a worthwhile challeng for me to even pursue my stated the claim that I would love to do nothing more with my photography than take gorgeous photographs of beautiful women.  What bliss!

This is something I’ve only just begin to explore and is, ironically, difficult territory for me to navigate.  We shall see how it goes…

I hope it goes well.

It is said that knowledge is power, particularly knowledge of self. “Nosce Te Ipsum,” in the Latin version, was written above the Oracle’s door in the movie “The Matrix,” taken from the Greek γνῶθι σεαυτόν (gnothi seauton).

Lately I’ve been thinking about this dictum in relation to my experiences with the current wave of social networking software. There are aspects of these systems I really like and, predictably, aspects I find missing.

One thing that I appreciate is the ability to learn more about people.

I’ve noticed, generally, that while the systems in place today are organized primarily around the individual, what I find most interesting about them is what you can glean about a person in terms of their relationship to other people.

The observable artifacts of relationships, online or off, are the conversations that take place between people. Immediate interactions certainly can be in the form of spoken conversations, but they also exist in body language or, more specifically, our interpretation of others’ body language. Other interactions take a purely written form.

I have a great appreciation of immediate interaction, which is a large reason why I dedicated myself, at one time. to the art of Theatre. And in this wide arena I found myself both most closely drawn to, and most challenged by it’s written form: playwriting.

From the studies I’ve pursued since my tenure at college, I have come to understand the idea of community in a different way than that which I inherited. The question “Of what is community comprised?” is traditionally answered with “people.” People comprise the parts of a community (or of many communities). On this subject, I declare that this is the conventional wisdom.

Community, as a concept, is complex. Communities, human communities at least, certainly cannot exist without individual persons. They arise, somehow, in their presence. But I have a difficult time seeing people as the building blocks of community. For one thing, people are far too complex. Even the notion of a person is quite difficult, in every way except under the most superficial lens, to pin down.

As an hypothetical example, consider a person who does not speak at all. In an immediate community setting such a person will be a participant in the community simply by the fact that they are perceived by other members of that community. Not only does this person have interpretable body language, but he or she is subject to the conversations of others. This is where things get interesting.

In the mind of the “mute” person, while they may have one understanding of who they are, without direct participation in their community’s conversations, the other members of that community will be free to assign whatever interpretation they come up with to that person. And the interpretation of other members of the community will be based partly upon their direct perceptions of that person, but also heavily influenced (more or less depending upon the affinity of that person to the person opining) by the expressed opinions about that person by other members of the community.

Without privileging any particular person’s interpretation, it may be said that who we are is our network of conversations.

This brings me to my point.

I am actively involved in the research and development of a technology that will, in tracking and in some way organising the network of conversations within a broad community (its user base, to speak technically), empower ourselves and each other in an authentic understanding of ourselves in terms of the conversations in which we participate.

Part of this, difficult but essential, is the ability to not only keep track of as much of our conversations as possible, but to be able to measure our actions against who we say we are and what it is, whether implied or explicitly stated, with what we do.

True power will necessarily arise from the alignment of our words, our being, and our actions. My goal is to design and implement a technology that enables this vision.

Your feedback is humbly requested.

I recently read (can’t recall where) some business advice. I think it may have actually been in the paper (The Arizona Daily Star), in an article about business owners leveraging technology (by which they meant the Internets) to assist their business. Anyway, the advice, in the context of using social networking platforms to promote your business, was this: Don’t mix your business with your personal life.

At first blush, I have to say that it sounded pretty reasonable Then again, I was observing nature’s call at the moment I read it. Subsequently, I was thinking about how there have been only a very few people with business ideas whom I have actually followed over the past years. The reason for my interest has not been due to some gloriously fabricated business facade, but because they have been so downright authentic in sharing themselves and their humanity.

Take as an example the exploits of one Derek Powazek. His business pursuits have included co-founding JPG magazine with his wife Heather Champ (before being forced out), 8020 Publishing, with Heather and CNET founder Paul Halsey (before leaving for ethical reasons), and creating the community-powered story-telling website fray.com (from which you can still see archives), which birthed Fray magazine.

Now, I’ve been following Derek’s blog for several years, having originally been led to it, as I recall, by Caterina Fake, whose blog I used to read (even though she once lambasted me for making a 48-hour publicly viewable copy of her site (in an effort to understand the technical aspects of her layout) — sorry - she removed her old archives, or I would cite it!) until she apparently got too busy to update with much regularity since her Flickr website was acquired by Yahoo. Unlike Caterina, Derek has published and continues to regularly publish interesting links and personal content which holds my interest.

As a case in point, Derek’s recent (as of this writing) 35th birthday post. If you click-through to anything in this post, click-through to that. I think it’s a great example of what the mentality behind “keep your personal life out of your business” would like to censor.

I, on the other hand, say that that sort of thing is what makes him, for a reader, most valuable and interesting. In fact, that very post made me interested to the point that (a) I subscribed to his magazine, and (b) write about it now, in the wee hours of May 20th, 2008. He is the kind of man that I appreciate in a world otherwise filled with people after their own self-interests and who would rather pretend to be some pristine image of their selves rather than simply being real.

Perhaps I, like Derek, am out of touch with the traditional ethos of American business practice. Or, as I prefer to see it, maybe we’re aligned with some emerging new trend. All I really do know is what it was like to grow up with a father who was too subsumed in his traditional “upwardly-mobile” business life to be able to relate to his own son and daughter, let alone anyone else in his community outside of his business dealings (and I suspect I’m not even close to being the poster child for this). And I have always known that I neer wanted any part of such a life.

But such realms as this are complex. Now I am grown (if a 40-year old can make such a pronouncement), have a family, and must play, for my own part, in the world of commerce so as to be able to afford my family the best that I can provide. I am content to have found a position with a small company who values family and whose ethics I can jibe with. And I, like Derek Powazek, have an entrepreneurial streak — not for the sake of making more money, but for the sake of creating personal value. Outside of my work as a software engineer, and outside of my family life, I am attracted to doing photography, making films, performing music, and writing. But I’m interested in how to fit all these seemingly divergent interests into something new, workable, and in its workability providing something of value for others.

I am a long way from having a life where this is realized, but when I read Derek’s aforementioned post, I am at once brought down to the essentials, and am synchronistically empowered by the raw power of the unadulterated authenticity of true self-expression.

Improv Everywhere first captured my attention with their “Frozen Grand Central” stunt. This morning, my current mood was lifted when I cam across a couple other other productions of theirs. Check them out:

• First, a funny but heartwarming one: The Best Game Ever
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• Next, for lovers of musicals: The Food Court Musical

For those of you interested in participating in such goings on in, but don’t live in the NYC area where they are based, they have sprouted a global network, Improv Everywhere Global, which you can sign up for.