Still, I think something more fundamental has been lost for all of us as social media has evolved. It’s harder to find the spark of discovery, or the sense that the Web offers an alternate world of possibilities. Instead of each forging our own idiosyncratic paths online, we are caught in the grooves that a few giant companies have carved for us... See more
I’ve recently been exploring the metaphor of work as trace – that it isn’t so much about what we put out into the world as how we put it out; that the thing we really ought to care about, the thing that ultimately matters, is the intention from which the work emerges. The rest is all mirror, representation, resemblance.
Shifts in values and beliefs slowly change the topography of our cultural landscape, but in some places we experience landslides that happen so quickly, we can lose our bearings. Cultural borders that we thought fell in one place now, strangely, fall in another, and the way we measure the distance between our values requires an update.
Human minds are not elusive, ghostly inner things. They are seething, swirling oceans of prediction, continuously orchestrated by brain, body, and world . We should be careful what kinds of material, digital, and social worlds we build, because in building those worlds we are building our own minds too.
Within a larger, and more political, point in his column, George Will explains something about structuring systems so as to “nudge” people toward a particular behavior pattern, without mandating anything: George F. Will: Nudge Against the Fudge
Such is the power of inertia in human behavior, and the tendency of individuals to emulate others’