by Rebecca Thorman on June 23 ////
13 Comments This is the first installment in a series of behind-the-scenes posts on Kontrary.
Ideas are common, so I’ll tell you now that how I came up with the idea for Kontrary isn’t interesting. What is interesting is how immediately I jumped into a case of “professor syndrome” where I believed that for Kontrary to work, I would have to be less personal and aspirational, and more editorial and analytical. I know better. I know better, but still, I held onto the notion.
I thought business was serious business.
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Tags: business, customer service, geico, ideation, imposter syndrome, invisible scripts, member, professor syndrome, start-ups, success | 13 Comments
by Rebecca Thorman on June 14 ////
22 Comments Work, that of pursuing a specific passion or purpose, has become irrelevant. As technology increasingly gains momentum, we’ve moved from the age of work/life blur to the age of tech/life blur.
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Tags: content, flipboard, innovation, ipad, media, member, New York Times, newspapers, splinternet, tech/life blur, technology, work, work/life blur | 22 Comments
by Rebecca Thorman on June 8 ////
17 Comments I don’t particularly like writing about women and tech. It’s uncomfortable. And it makes me uncomfortable. It means sometimes critiquing people that have been nice to me. It also means critiquing an industry that people like. It’s companies like Facebook, after all, not BP.
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Tags: career, code, member, segregation, sexism, start-ups, tech, tech blogs, tech crunch, technology, woman-only, women, women-only | 17 Comments
by Rebecca Thorman on June 6 ////
13 Comments The weather has turned, and now I am feeling restless. My eyes are glazed as I look down at the timestamp on the lower right-hand side of my screen. There is a mere splinter of sunlight on the brick wall outside our window and oh, how it makes my foot tap, my chest tighten. Can I stand another moment on my computer? I wonder.
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Tags: member | 13 Comments
by Rebecca Thorman on May 31 ////
11 Comments Gender inequality exists, but only in the workplace. Young women grow up believing in equality, but when she enters the workplace, she hits a brick wall. That will stop when Generation Z joins the workforce. Not because gendered roles will somehow evolve in the next decade, but because technology will.
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Tags: ambition, empathy, equality, gen y, gen z, generation y, generation z, inequality, member, men, multi-tasking, pleasure-seeking, remote work, women | 11 Comments
by Rebecca Thorman on May 25 ////
9 Comments Journalists are objective. Bloggers are not. The two have been duking it out since the dawn of the Internet age. Journalists think objectivity will save their jobs and bloggers know that is nonsense. Old media is not irrelevant, but they are digging themselves into a hole. Let me explain.
First, understand that journalism has never been objective. Newspapers first emerged as political publications funded by partisan parties and read by the top of society’s pyramid. Then in a move to both democratize media and increase profits, newspapers dropped their prices and attracted multitudes of immigrants and workers as subscribers in order to sell those eyeballs to eager advertisers.
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Tags: bloggers, devolution of media, investigative reporting, journalists, media, member, new media, objectivity, old media, opinions, page-view journalism, traditional media, transparency | 9 Comments
by Rebecca Thorman on May 19 ////
Comments
We talked about how reputation as currency on the web has the potential to be quite powerful. But there are drawbacks to using reputation so fluently. Here are three:
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Tags: currencies, currency, economy, happiness, identity, internet, member, money, offline, privacy, public, real-life, reputation, social architecture, web | Comments
by Rebecca Thorman on May 16 ////
14 Comments The boss-employee relationship is defunct. Managers think young workers aren’t willing to pay dues, but really young workers aren’t willing to be employees. Managers dangle the lure of a raise or a title, but young workers just want to build something together as a team.
The new org chart shouldn’t be based on hierarchy then, but a horizontal ladder of peer-to-peer management, where employee and boss teach and learn from each other. They share, knowledge, experience and ideas.
Working together in service to a larger vision is a more human way of employment, but it is antithetical to how businesses currently run.
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Tags: boomers, boss, decentralized leadership, employees, franchise, future of work, gen x, generation y, hierarchy, internet, member, org chart, systems thinking, web | 14 Comments
by Rebecca Thorman on May 11 ////
22 Comments There are a lot of reasons I stopped writing my last blog. Primarily though, it was because the Internet takes a lot out of you. It expects to be able to dissect everything. The Internet wants to pull you apart. Everything should be accessible and out there for all. In the Interneted world, you have to be always on.
I don’t particularly want to be always on. For starters, I am incredibly moody. Most people on the Internet seem like happy people or are on their way to being happy.
I am not happy. At least not today. Try again tomorrow?
Still, I soldiered on with my last blog until it petered to its end and took the last bits of me. And then after some distance and perspective, I started this new blog. I started showing up on Twitter. I logged onto Facebook more. But it’s even harder to be on the Internet than I remembered.
It’s exhausting. There hasn’t been a day when I didn’t crave the freedom of anonymity, if only to escape for a moment the pressure to be always right and available.
Not that I even hold anything back. I am not someone different in person. (Although how would you know, right? Or do you trust the identity I’ve put on the web?) What I write is what I experience. Perhaps a temper tantrum or two doesn’t make it in to a post, but well, now you know.
Point being, if I were anonymous, I would write the same things. But I think it would be easier.
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Tags: always on, anonymity, anonymous, Authenticity, data footprint, data legacy, identity, internet, member, technology, transparency, web | 22 Comments
by Rebecca Thorman on May 5 ////
13 Comments I am worried about how the Internet defines social.
There is a big difference between shopping online and shopping in seventy-degree weather, when someone brushes your bag, and you run into your friend on his way to a soccer game. Online shopping is solitary; real-life shopping is social. Seeing that my friend “liked” a new laundry solution on Facebook is not a social experience.
I rarely shop alone. Even on utilitarian trips to the grocery or Target, even if I don’t have an accomplice, I am still out and among other people. I want my best friend to tell me what to wear and that the very short shorts look good on me and encourage me to buy a pair when I would never do so otherwise. I want Ryan to tell me that the color of the bike I’ve chosen is great and for the bike salesperson to tell me that the particular model I’ve picked out is hot across the country and is almost sold out. I want energy. I want exchange. I want life.
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Tags: amazon, currency, data, e-commerce, identity, interest graph, member, MyHabit, online commerce, personalization, real-life, reputation, social commerce, social currency, user experience, user interface, UX, web 2.0, web 3.0 | 13 Comments
by Rebecca Thorman on May 3 ////
4 Comments Osama Bin Laden was killed yesterday and the reactions ranged from revelry to relief to wondering why the New York Times didn’t take down their paywall. C.W. Anderson, an assistant professor of media culture at CUNY tweeted, “NYT has a public obligation to place articles out from behind paywall in cases like this.”
Why on earth would they?
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Tags: blogging, blogs, citizen journalism, Facebook, journalism, member, New York Times, nytimes.com, Osama Bin Laden, paywall, reporting, Twitter | 4 Comments
by Rebecca Thorman on May 2 ////
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It’s a misnomer that the web was the innovation that gave amateurs their place alongside experts in credibility. We were actually primed for this during the industrial revolution when things like hot dogs became an abstraction of real food. Processed and pushed into its casing, hot dogs look nothing like and have no relation to anything they are made from. As meals go, this is one for the amateurs. Real foodies eat sweet pork sausage that is made on-site at the restaurant. And the real, real foodies (experts), make sure that the pork didn’t come from an industrial hog.
The web did however reinforce what we already knew – that you can’t define expertise by whether you are a blogger or a journalist, whether you have a PhD or not, or whether you have put in your 10,000 hours, so the distinction between amateur and expert remains along the line of abstraction – or hot dogs vs sustainable sweet pork sausage.
Here’s how I look at it –
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Tags: abstraction, amateur, content, credibility, expert, expertise, media, member, meta | Comments
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