Journal #1
The Internet's Back to the Land movement
I found a couple parts of this article particularly interesting. The first is
the pattern of WELL and the World Wide Web starting off as a community driven
decentralized media landscape then slowly becoming a space twisted for profit
and taken over by large corporations. I think that we see this pattern in the
rise of crypto and NFTs. Starting off as a space that is decentralized, I wonder
whether its future is destined to follow that of the World Wide Web.
I found this article's discussion about utopia and the limits of our growth to be
fascinating. In many ways, growth has always been at the forefront of every aspect
of our lives. We are told from a young age to grow our minds, grow our interests,
grow our relationships. This article made me think a lot about our obsession with
growth. Is it a healthy obsession? Is growth a part of human nature? A part of me
wants to believe that our potential to grow and the amount of growth a person can
undergo is limitless. Yet time presents itself as a limit to even the most
fundamental versions of growth. This made me wonder whether we will ever be able
to perceive a “realistic” utopia if we have never seen unlimited growth. I wonder
if we should focus our attention on finding the beauty in limits rather than chasing
a limitless utopia.
On How to Grow an Idea
From a young age I have always been action oriented. When I fought with my sister
we would make a terms agreement in markers of all the things we shouldn’t fight
about. When my friend cried on the playground I would always ask how can I fix
this? As I grew older, the lines between my actions and results became blurred.
I began to think that if I could control the outcomes and results by my actions.
This article made me think a lot about the weight of my non-actions and the power
of doing nothing. I feel like I often get caught up in making every minute of my
life productive. This is a byproduct of me wanting to control my actions and the
results. I realized when I am in this mentality of all action and not giving myself
time to breathe and take a step back, I am at my least creative. It’s funny how
sometimes the most creative actions (doing nothing, letting your mind wander)
are considered “unproductive” uses of time in our modern world. By cutting and
slicing these quiet times in our schedule, we put ourselves in a dangerous spot
of letting creativity slip out of our hands.
I love the discussion of ideas as not products but intersections between ourselves
and something else. I’ve always thought of ideas as taking two seemingly unrelated
topics and finding a connection between them through your unique perspective.
You act as the unique link between topics that form ideas. I am excited to see
how this class shapes my perspective of ideas.
Learning trail:
I find the idea of an information trail to be incredibly fascinating in thinking
of the way we interact with information. At every hiking trail no person has
taken the exact combination of steps. Perhaps your walking pattern is unique,
your choice of shoes that day. The trail you walk, despite it being walked before,
is uniquely you. I wonder how we can implement this learning trail within education
infrastructures. I imagine tracking or journaling one’s learning hike from a young
age would be incredibly intricate and beautiful.
On Building Knowledge Networks
I’ve always thought I was a little scatterbrained. I’d sit in the car and tell
my dad about how an emotion based eyeshadow palette would be cool or how something
I was learning in philosophy would be a cool way to think about an economics problem.
As I’ve begun looking for jobs, I tell recruiters that I want to take two ideas
and find synergy between them. I’ve never been able to explain it well but reading
this article I feel like I understand my knowledge patterns better. The idea of
conceptual isolation as the death of meaning particularly resonated with me. I
think that we need to create spaces for the mixing of seemingly unrelated ideas
and cultivate less fear in crossing the boundaries between subjects. We should
want to live among the links and not within the nodes.
Are.na:
This year I started a community called Learn20 focused on growing as a life long
learner. The idea was sparked after talking to Diana Tsai about a learning journal.
In a 500+ page document, she does little learning sprints where she learns about a
range of topics that fascinate her and documents it.
Sites like are.na and projects like a learning journal are things that change
the cycle of creativity. Instead of relying on the randomness of learning and
idea connections, being able to have a trail to trace back is something that
I hope to incorporate more into my life. A question I have about are.na is
whether people have found themselves creating more after. I wonder if there
exists any dangers of tracing and organizing the random things that fascinate you.
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