This kind of reminds me of my mother’s favorite movie, Two for the Road with Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney. Lovely, non?
via Grain Edit.
Categories
Bloggers Are Not Writers
There are exceptions, okay. But very few bloggers can actually write. Bloggers pander to a crowd trying to satisfy the hive mind. Blogging is entertainment. Many bloggers are good at marketing, building community, relationships, and especially aggrandizing self-promotion, but not writing.
Crowdsourcing is a bloggers’ anthem. I remember my first blog. I deleted it. The posts didn’t get commented on and weren’t passed around. That wasn’t the point. But for bloggers, that is their mission; to create 500-word packages, bold-faced and headlined, read and digested in two minutes or less, bursting with lackadaisical opinion and junk epithets.
“Blogging is not writing,” the author of You Are Not a Gadget Jaron Lanier agrees. “It’s easy to be loved as a blogger. All you have to do is play to the crowd. Or flame the crowd to get attention. Nothing is wrong with either of those activities. What I think of as real writing, however, writing meant to last, is something else. It involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday’s moves in a conversation.”
Blogging is in its essence, not about originality, but about the aggregation, recycling and digesting of ideas. It is the darling of the open culture ideology of the web, where mediocre collaborations have produced a destructive new social contract, reports the New York Times.
“The basic idea of this contract,” Lanier argues, “is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”
We posit ourselves into believing that we’re taking down the establishment, but we’re only contributing to the dull masses, eager for mega numbers of comments, subscribers, fans and followers, and other easily influenced analytics. In an age where anyone can be famous with the push of “Publish,” we have lost the creation of enduring legacies that enthuse, provoke and delight.
Bloggers are not writers, nor are they press, or superior to old media. Where disintermediation in the media shines, where a cadre of reporters has eliminated the need for a specific background (say, a degree in journalism or the need to pay dues at the right newspapers), is not evidence of bloggers taking over the world, but rather that the term blogger is now so broad that its definition no longer suits the myriad stacks of people and posts underneath.
Take a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, a reporter for the Huffington Post, a novelist, a Mashable blogger and a Gen Yer typing about their quarter-life crisis. They are not the same, nor equal, and certainly not held to the same standards or expectations. They are, despite the fact that we’d like to give little credence to the notion, entirely different.
“It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump,” Lanier writes. “Creative people — the new peasants — come to resemble animals converging on shrinking oases of old media in a depleted desert.”
Blogging is entertainment. Maybe it didn’t use to be. Maybe when bloggers were first getting started, it was about thought and connection. But increasingly, it bows to the “appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise.”
Writing is something more. And it is in the reading of such writing that enduring ideas, observations and philosophies satiate what we spend hours a day trying to glean from skimming any number of blog posts.
There is nothing wrong with blogging. But let’s give credit where it’s due – to the true writers, journalists, novelists, reporters, columnists, and others who inspire us to boil their ideas down in an effort to hold onto them just a little longer.
Written Word.
Quick, which is more difficult – work or life?
Up until a year ago, both competed for my attention, each piling weight onto the seesaw to rise towards the favored position. A year ago, however, I started working at Alice and Ryan and I started hitting our stride (both of which were not without challenges, however… many, many challenges).
While working for a start-up demands hours, it demands more in mental energy, in spikes of time about as predictable as a bingo game, where the only invariable is that you know work will be stop and go. This means it’s often difficult to separate work and life, especially in the statuesque pursuit of balance, but while I used to recognize and promote blur, I’m now mindful of the distinct delineation between the two.
Smart people don’t balance two sides of the same coin – your work and life are, after all, inseparable from the backbone of your binding. You can’t push one to one side and one to the other and hope equilibrium presents itself because the entities are glued to each other and to you.
What I mean, for example, is that I cannot see Ryan and refrain from discussing at length our work. I have long agreed that behind every good man is a good woman, and likewise, the same holds true for Ryan and I on both sides. While he is the one that shows up to Brazen headquarters each day, my ideas fill his head. While I’m the one who walks into Alice each morning, Ryan’s sense and advice follows me.
More to the point, I guess, is that there is a mutual respect for what we choose to do with the majority of our day and into the night, and sometimes into our sleep and into dreams. Although when we do relate to each other our dreams from the night before, it’s not very likely to include the mention of a spreadsheet.
Right now, Ryan is across the street from me working. His offices are located diagonal from my condo, but I have yet to see him this week except for when he dropped me off from our weekend in Philly together on Sunday. I was working on a Wall Street Journal exclusive early this week, and he’s working on big plans for Brazen later this week. We also have friends, family, a basketball league, dance classes, books, blogs, grocery shopping, the gym, bill-paying and other magnitudes and minutiae of daily life competing for our attention.
Oh, and the new season of Chuck just started.
When I walk into work, much of that has to go away. I imagine this is natural for most people who enjoy their jobs, but particularly at start-ups you have to be ready to do whatever is put in front of you that day. Everything planned for the day will get eaten up by new priorities, larger plans and whether or not the toucan (our CEO) monopolizes all the time with the dolphin (our President and my direct boss). This can be best described as acting as a pivot, keeping your center, but spinning to each new person and project that appears.
One of the best parts of working at a start-up is that an idea spun in the morning has the potential to be fully realized by the afternoon. It can be that quick and magical and exhilarating. Also, the customers. When I worked for a non-profit in a trailer across from the food pantry that I was raising money for, I thought I wouldn’t again experience the rewards of being in such direct contact with the people I helped. But Alice has that.
One of the more challenging things is that blurring my work and my blog and my life to such an extent can make me very unhappy. Sometimes I feel like I’m always working which is frustrating, so I’ve tried to have clearer boundaries. I don’t really believe in work/life balance as an ideal, but no longer do I trust in work/life blur so much either.
As a generation, we’re always on. Is it okay to tweet during your workday? How often? What about talk to your significant other? Send personal emails? Do you work with your partner at night? Accept calls from the boss? Check your iPhone during a movie? Where is the line drawn and what is acceptable?
For Ryan and I, we have chosen to spend the majority of our day, not with each other, but with two different start-up companies. Our lives and relationship are more difficult and more enriched because of it. What about you? Work/life balance: truth or myth? Does it stand a chance?
Categories
The Miseducation of a Woman
Florida at Christmastime isn’t particularly warm, but it’s near tropical for Wisconsinites (of which I am finally one), so it is not the light breeze that causes my arms to hover close to my core while sitting at the pool. In fact, it is something that exists entirely in my head, and I have to consciously and decidedly lift my elbows and hands away from my hips and stomach towards the armrests so as to appear confident.
The right to be a woman, in the finest sense, relies on such confidence.
My two-piece bathing suit beguiles a certain flirtatious composure (it’s got polka dots), and at 5’8” (okay, 5’7” and a half) and 130 lbs, I wear it well. According to my original Illinois driver’s license, that identifying information hasn’t changed for ten years. I still weigh the same as I did in high school, but there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think I feel fat.
When I look at pictures of myself, I can see rationally that I am skinny, that I look skinny. That I am healthy, and I look healthy. That I am beautiful, and I look beautiful. Rationally, these are all facts that can be written and entered into evidence.
Quite irrationally, I can tell you that the daily struggle of being a woman is that my stomach expands when I eat, my thighs are big and my hips are large. I also worry about the backs of my arms, the portion of my leg directly underneath my butt, and the meeting place of my neck to the space underneath my chin.
Necessary qualifiers: I have an active lifestyle, I love to cook, I love to eat, I don’t read so-called women’s magazines and I usually love my biggest “flaws” – my thin lips, pale skin, imperfect nose and uneven eyebrows, thin fingernails, fine hair, big feet, small breasts, large rear. I’ve been known to run errands without make-up.
But I am looking in the mirror more often lately. Ryan says this to me, over Christmas vacation, while we sit in a high-rise condo that has a mirror on every wall and round every corner. There are a lot of mirrors here, I reply, but I know what he is talking about. He is worried about me, he says.
I don’t wonder at air-brushed models but the pre-teen girl walking down the street in West Palm Beach, dressed with too many inches exposed on her sapling thighs. Or the girls at the Philly wedding whose legs are the size of my arms and whose arms are the size of my wrists. Is this sickness? Disease? Good genes?
A couple mornings later, I spend too much time getting dressed considering I work for a start-up with a casual dress code. I dress up because I like to. I try not to stand out too much from my colleagues who wear jeans and sweatshirts by wearing a cotton t-shirt fabric scarf, or nice boots over leggings. I wear a lot of casual dresses with tights. I try to match the VPs (all men), but since there are no women executives, it’s difficult to know if I’ve got it right.
I could go on.
And then, on any given day, I read about why there are fewer women CEOs, that women are better CEOs, that women are less promising as candidates for promotion, that surgeons can now relocate fat from your thigh to your chest, that kids see housework as a women’s domain, just 4% of venture capital goes to women, wives earn more than their husbands, and just being a woman is a pre-existing condition in healthcare.
I find the truth somewhere, not in the piling up of research, like clothes discarded on my floor, but in accounts from real-life women, between the lines in their interviews, bluntly stated in their ethos, and shared and protected among friends.
“The truth is,” Joanne Lipman says, a former deputy managing editor at The Wall Street Journal and founding editor in chief of Condé Nast Portfolio magazine, “women haven’t come nearly as far as we would have predicted 25 years ago. Somewhere along the line, especially in recent years, progress for women has stalled. And attitudes have taken a giant leap backward.”
Some Friday awesomeness.
via SwissMiss.
Categories
Antii Sullivan
I don’t usually like such obvious floral patterns, but this is a gorgeous so-called “doodle.”
By Antii Sullivan via Design for Mankind.
Categories
The Jungle
I’ve had an education theme going this week and don’t want to give that up quite yet. The discussion on the posts has been fantastic, and I’d love for you all to take the conversation off my blog, onto other blogs and sites, into your classrooms and next to the water cooler.
I’m off to Philly this weekend for a wedding and plan on bringing the subject up to my table at the reception once they’re good and rowdy. Should make for an interesting convo, don’t you think?
Without further ado…
Good Weekend Reading:
“Learning could happen everywhere through pop-up education. Much like TED Talks, pop-up education opportunities would be produced by experts, professors, and every individual based on something they know well and can train others on. They would pop up in locations like theaters, YMCAs, elevators, break rooms, restaurants, and wherever there is wait time…”
– Ideas for Cities: Pop-up Education, 10/27/09, @good
“Mandel finds that college costs in real terms are up by 23 percent since 2000, while real pay for young college grads has fallen by 11 percent.”
– Widening College Cost to Earnings Gap, 9/13/09, @Richard_Florida
“During the years Salman Khan spent scrutinizing financials for hedge funds, he rationalized the profit-obsessed work by telling himself he would one day quit and use his market winnings to open a free school. Instead, he started one almost by accident.”
– Math Master of the Internet, 12/14/09, @sfgate
“I propose this instead – have the awkward drunken sex, live in abject poverty, eat the bad food and pretend to understand Marshall McLuhan for a couple of years without the burden of having to knock out 5,000 words on Ford Maddox Ford’s ‘The Good Soldier’.
Make the choice not to rack up an IOU to the federal government to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars and have only a vague understanding of Foucault to show for it. Choose to tread your own beer-stained path to nebulous maturity unfettered by Union fees or having to actually read Ulysses (or pretend you’ve even started the damn colossus).”
– Tune in, drop out, get drunk, become a hairdresser, 7/17/09, Daniela Elser
“Despite calls to more closely link higher education with job needs, colleges are only ‘moderately responsive’ to changes in the labor markets, a study found.”
– American Colleges Lag in Meeting Labor Needs, 1/4/10, Karin Fischer
The U.S. government has poured $100 billion of stimulus money into the Education Department, but does paying more lead to better results?
– How Education Spending Affects Graduation Rates, 11/10/09, @good
“The decline of the MBA just makes sense. After all, the world continues to move. For about 20 years in American history, it was good to be a farmer. Then, it was good to work in the automotive industry. Then (and perhaps ending now), it was good to have an MBA. We’re all dreaming bigger…”
– Decline of the MBA, Increase in Social Good? , 1/5/10, @cdilly
“A grand total of zero states got an A. A few predictable ones got Bs (New York, Arizona, California, Massachusetts), a scary amount got Cs and Ds, and three got big fat Fs.”
– Which State Has the Worst School System?, 11/11/09, @good
Links cited in this week’s posts:
The Case of the Vanishing Full-Time Professor, 12/30/09, @nytimes
How being educated can render one helpless, 9/08/09, Natalie Lange
Are They Students? or ‘Customers’?, 1/01/10, @roomfordebate
Students as Customers – Not!, Edward Snyder
Colleges are Failing in Graduation Rates, 9/08/09, @nytimes
The Costs of Failure Factories in American Higher Education, 10/08, Mark Schneider
Making College ‘Relevant’, 12/29/09, @nytimes
Categories
3 Ways to Upgrade College
Yesterday’s post on how colleges are failing Generation Y explored the collapse of our education system. There were so many good comments from that post, I incorporated several into today’s post which explores some ideas on how to re-build:
1. Get rid of most tenured full-time professors.
This is already the reality. The New York Times reports that in 1960, 75 percent of college instructors were full-time tenured or on the tenure-track. Today, a mere 27 percent are.
Talented faculty employed purely on a per-course or yearly contract basis don’t receive any benefits, earn a third or less of their tenured colleagues, and are “treated as second-class citizens on most campuses,” the Times aruges. So, we need to create a system that rewards – and grants tenure – to those instructors who aren’t working full-time.
Why? Consider that “professoring part-time is already a hobby for overachieving architects, graphic designers, lawyers and entrepreneurs, all of whom can share insights from real-world experiences that full-time academics haven’t had.” Professors who solely exist in the academic vacuum will never contribute to an educational system that keeps up with today’s frenetic pace.
Instructors could divide their time between 20% research, 30% teaching and 50% real-world experience. Those same instructors would be awarded tenure to garner the respect, input and weight as a resident professor does today. What a luxurious and significant appointment that would be!
2. Create cross-curricular programs focused on foundational skills, not breadth of topic.
Carol Phillips teaches marketing at the University of Notre Dame and noted, “I work very hard to make the class relevant, but reality is that what I teach is likely to be old hat by the time my students graduate… Five years ago I was talking about BMW Films, now it’s Twitter. Five years from now it will be something else. It doesn’t really matter, the principles endure. Relevance is overrated.”
It’s quite possible that the field you work in today won’t exist in five years, or will be unrecognizable in its current form. Today’s jobs aren’t representative of a factory line, but instead require employees to make connections between fields and ideas, and be responsive and flexible to change.
No longer is your career a set of skills applicable to a single position. Colleges need to concentrate less on checking on the latest trends in their syllabi and more on foundational skill sets that will transfer from job to job, and moreover how to apply those skills in a myriad of areas.
3. Build continuing education, not grad school.
“I’m supposed to learn everything I need to know for the rest of my life in 4 years between the ages of 18 and 22? Give me a break,” says Sam Davidson.
When education fails, so too do the businesses and innovations built upon its foundation. Graduates move into real-world jobs that leave them confined to cubicles, engaging in little professional development, and otherwise left to reading books, and in some cases, writing blogs for further intellectual development.
Conferences aren’t built for learning, but networking. Grad school isn’t much better. You could turn to your alma mater’s continuing education program, but the classes offered are based more on a person’s hobbies than scholarly achievement. Like, I love taking the adult dance classes, but I really wish UW offered some history classes. Maybe philosophy. The exact courses many colleges are cutting, let alone offering as a continuation after your graduate.
An educational system that views learning as continual and ongoing would go a long way towards alleviating the fears students have of picking a major, picking a career, a life path, and trying to squeeze all of their erudition into four to six years. It’s a tragic disappointment that we look at education as something to be finished. It takes the fun and curiosity out of learning, and it’s why a great number of students don’t enjoy school or are just plain bored.
Students will always have a choice of how hard to push themselves. A university’s job is to serve up the challenges when you do. This list is only the beginning; I’d love to hear your thoughts.
What do you think? Are these realistic? What are your ideas to improve education? Do you expect change to happen any time soon?
Hindsvik Vintage has some terrifically-priced treasures.
$85, Metal Movie Lamp; $60, High School Clock.
Some terrific duvet covers, blankets and throws that are simple, modern and cozy textiles.
Starting at $180 at Area.
Built-ins after my own heart.
via MadeByGirl.