"really deep appeal of Instagram…It changes the way I look at the world around me.<br />
<br />
I’m not a super visual person; I do not normally take a lot of photos. But now I am, & do. Whenever you join a new social network, there’s this sudden, gentle pressure to be more interesting. In the case of Twitter…a pressure to post ever-more-cool undiscovered URLage. In the case of Instagram, it means posting ever-more-nifty snapshots. And this in turn means that I’ve begun looking at the world around me anew. I used to walk around my neighborhood blissfully — or stressfully — ignoring my surroundings, while staring at the sidewalk (or, ironically, my iphone). Now I find myself spotting unusual bits of graffiti, or patterns that fall trees make against the sky, or how super strange the robot is on Yo Gabba Gabba when my kids watch in the morning. Or that blue door on the brownstone in the picture above: How did I not notice how pretty it was? It’s like my third eye has opened up!"

You may have heard about Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon before. In fact, you probably learned about it for the first time very recently. If not, then you just might hear about it again very soon. Baader-Meinhof is the phenomenon where one happens upon some obscure piece of information– often an unfamiliar word or name– and soon afterwards encounters the same subject again, often repeatedly. Anytime the phrase “That’s so weird, I just heard about that the other day” would be appropriate, the utterer is hip-deep in Baader-Meinhof.

You've heard that this is a book about boredom, and the potential for transcendence that exists beyond the featureless horizon of boredom's endless Midwestern field. That if we fight our instincts to distract ourselves from the reality of our adult lives, which are not by nature "fun," and instead pay complete and focused attention to that reality, boredom might reveal to the most focused of us a kind of heaven, a constant atomic bliss.

I find it increasingly difficult to read. This year I read fewer books than last year; last year I read fewer than the year before; the year before I read fewer than the year before that. The phenomenon of writer’s block is well known, but what I am suffering from is reader’s block.

f you’re original, you don’t even need to be good to advance in the popularity game. Simply by virtue of producing something yourself, of broadcasting an opinion in a slightly different form than anyone else, by expressing your interests and feelings through original creations rather than through recycled garbage, you suddenly become that much more interesting.

Delicious (backed up locally and in Pinboard) has assumed a different role in my life. No longer the bank of preference for instant notes, it’s where I’m putting things that I’ve generally sifted or gone back to (sometimes a number of times). (Of course, some things still seem worth bookmarking at once, but the reason for that can itself turn out to be depressingly ephemeral.) I’m much more interested now, much more able now, to use Delicious as a repository for things which I’ve had the time, and the perspective, to weigh.

Since my kids won't be old enough to read this for a few more years, by which time they'll probably hate me for other reasons, I'll say this out loud: I sometimes fantasize about a life without them.

I’ve not been using Delicious as much lately, having been lured away by simpler sharing services. But, I think there’s a lot of metadata value in tagging that I’m missing out on.

RT @longreads: On the new longreads.com and the future of online publishing: http://bit.ly/anW7UT #longreads

Nice review of my current read. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains http://bit.ly/ceVf98

My being a generalist is partially aptitude (I learn fast so I can pick up new ideas quickly, and I have enough mental models that adding more is easy), partially limitations (I don’t have the focus necessary to dive deep into a subject for five years, as I found when I tried to be a grad student), and partially interest (I like talking about everything). The phrase “Unrepentant Generalist” is a reminder to myself to glory in rejecting specialization, and to explore where this generalist path leads. I use this blog to help trace that path, recording my thoughts on everything from cognition to community to conversation to design to management to media to philosophy to politics to stories.

I don’t want to appear to be giving advice on something I don’t know much about, but here goes: from someone who has gained what I’d call a respectable audience and the awareness and respect of some people he admires, to people who wish for but don’t feel they have those things: all it takes is some patience (and of course effort to be great). That’s it.

So, first, care. Then, as you’ll happily and unavoidably discover, all that “focus” business has a peculiar way of taking care of itself.

In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology textbooks warned it could lead to psychosis. Neuroscientists complained that the rogue bursts of activity on brain scans kept interfering with their studies of more important mental functions.

But now that researchers have been analyzing those stray thoughts, they’ve found daydreaming to be remarkably common — and often quite useful. A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity and helps you solve problems.

Coping with the troubling tradeoff between depth of what we know and how fast we retrieve it may require something like peripheral intellectual vision

Meanwhile, Clay Shirky reads a LOT online, but like Carr's picture of a book reader: deep concentration, few distractions http://j.mp/9NxsU5
– Tim Carmody (tcarmody) http://twitter.com/tcarmody/statuses/20252287158

A few years back, my friend Steve Gillmor, the long-time technology writer and blogger, went on a crusade against the hyperlink. He stopped putting links into his posts and other online writings. I could never quite understand his motivation, and the whole effort struck me as quixotic and silly. I mean, wasn't the hyperlink the formative technology of the entire World Wide Web? Wasn't the Web a hypermedia system, for crying out loud?

I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.

Unfollowing and blocking people on social sites isn't a bad thing.

"A 2007 scholarly review of hypertext experiments concluded that jumping between digital documents impedes understanding. And if links are bad for concentration and comprehension, it shouldn’t be surprising that more recent research suggests that links surrounded by images, videos, and advertisements could be even worse."

"If I’m not laughing at your joke, complimenting your insight, or leading the Standing O for something you spent 10 seconds pecking up on your phone, it may not be because I don’t get it; it may be because I think we’re both capable of better and just need to find the courage to say so. In as many characters as it takes."

How film-makers have (consciously or otherwise) adopted the 1/f fluctuation to reflect human attention spans.

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day."

"The single worst piece of writing advice I ever got was to stay away from the Internet because it would only waste my time and wouldn't help my writing. This advice was wrong creatively, professionally, artistically, and personally, but I know where the writer who doled it out was coming from."

"If I’m not laughing at your joke, complimenting your insight, or leading the Standing O for something you spent 10 seconds pecking up on your phone, it may not be because I don’t get it; it may be because I think we’re both capable of better and just need to find the courage to say so. In as many characters as it takes."