Numbing sameness


Have you ever thought about how you acquire inspiration, if it is different from just a couple of years back, and if the mass of blogs and feeds out there has made you smarter and more brilliant, or just number and more like everybody else?

For months I have been wondering if this volume of information, available to me through thousands of blogs (by brilliant and hard working people), are doing me a disservice? And if I would get more from taking the slower route through a book or exploring further outside my comfort zone and field
. Last week, due to two insights I am leaning towards the latter:

    1
    . Secrets

    “As long as you follow the same sources as everybody else you will think and do the same as everybody else.” … “What you have to do is go out there and find for the secrets.” – Lizzie Finn.

    2. Reflection.
    Thomas Geuken at the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies believes the days of small boring breaks are long gone for some people, as we no longer just sit and wait, but rush to fill every break with content or an activity
    . The problem is that these “boring” breaks are more important than we think:

    “We live in a time with more than enough information, but to little reflection
    . And it is in the breaks reflection occurs”

    these details during the history will educate the oftenStatus upon How long does cialis last?.

    . – Thomas Geuken

Are we reaching a point were we are continuously stuffing ourselves with content but unable to create anything from it that is original
. Is our eagerness to take in everything inhibiting our ability to do anything with the same content? Are we entering a situation of numbing sameness.

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8 Comments

  1. Byron
    May 12

    Ignore Everybody: And 39 Other Keys to Creativity (Hugh MacLoed)

  2. May 13

    How wonderful to accidentally find myself on this blog post, for I, too, have been wondering, with angst, about much the same thing. I subscribe to blogs and tweets of people whom I consider thought leaders in topics I think important. Over 200 of them. I cannot possibly get to most of them. I have several books which I would love to devour, and which I know will increase my knowledge and competency to make a contribution to others, and it is difficult for me to concentrate on reading an entire book.

    What to do? Which path(s) to take? I live in those questions. However, there is one practice I have, call it a magical thinking practice if you wish, which works for me. By that I mean, whenever I allow myself to use it, I find a truly fascinating and important treasure or insight that moves me. The practice is to randomly choose a blog post or a tweet from the crowd. Call it an accidental find, call it destiny. It works.

    I sometimes dream about deleting all the RSS feeds and quitting Twitter.

  3. May 13

    Hi Lowell, thanks for the contribution. We are obviously in the same place.

    I will have to try your theory of randomness. I hope it works.

    Personally I’m also going to leave RSS alone for a bit (only follow a couple of highly important sources), and start reading the books which are gathering dust in the window post.

    And start looking for secrets…

    Best
    Helge

  4. Alex Keenan
    May 13

    What I am seeing is voice of the masses. Ideas are created every day in large quantities and put into the Web. Each idea is competing within the Web for people to give it a voice. Those ideas that can accumulate enough support will have a loud enough voice to be heard. I see this working for both good and bad ideas. It is not so much the nature of the idea itself but the emotional connection the idea can make with people that give it voice.

    So we have entered the age of the emotional. Where some of the loudest ideas are not about science, new business ideas, and so forth, these ideas are about making the emotional connection with the masses on the Internet. The ideas that develop a voice also develop Search HITS which mean they generate advertising dollars. Such a relationship further enforces the age of the emotional.

  5. May 15

    @Rune, thank you for the link

    @Alex, I think it was Danah Boyd who once tweeted something in the lines of: If people only tweet the things they like, what happens to the things they dislike?

    As you are saying: “ideas that can accumulate enough support”, I think then it is already too late. People looking for secrets are searching were other people aren’t and we need those people to infuse originality and fertility to our thinking.

    As soon as ideas accumulate enough support they are no longer secrets.

  6. July 18

    […] a response to an article on numbing sameness a friend of mine, @runeb, suggested that we build the idea into an application. It’s a simple […]

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