Two weeks without checking my RSS-feeds and my brain is experiencing a creative spring. It seems the cyclical sameness of intellectual entertainment, disguised as (RSS/Blog) inspiration does nothing more than keep our brains occupied coping with the share volume of stuff to be updated on – instead of letting our mind rest for a second and make its own creative connections.
It feels as if the whole RSS-flood numbs you down, but why is this? Brilliant stuff written by some of our most brilliant thinkers should be like rocket fuel to the brain – then why does it do the opposite?
The stream is one original thought and then a thousand re-articulations of it, over and over again. And there is a limit to how many explanations of the same social media phenomenon you need before it stops adding new perspectives and ideas.
I also find that a lot of people are searching in the wrong place… They are looking at the future through the lens of old media. In our world this place/media is “advertising” and the advertising vernacular.
Now, the future has got very little to do with the increasingly niche industry of advertising and more and more to do with the digitization of our culture and economy.
Using the same language (the advertising language) as a framework for discussion narrows our conversations and limits our ideas. We are only as visionary as our language permits us. We need new words and new images.
According to McLuhan:
- “In the name of ‘progress’, our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old”.
What is interesting is not yet another presentation explaining how mobile connects us 24/7, with slightly original analogies (which is the nature of the self publishing web) – what we need is people moving the whole arena of digital into new contexts – these are the people we need to find and follow…
Like this, Matt Jones and The demon haunted world:
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Matt Jones at Webstock 09 from Webstock on Vimeo.
Join me and turn off!
Image by: -Rejik
Original Post: http://www.180360720.no/index.php/archive/turn-off-we-are-only-as-visionary-as-our-language-permits-us-to-be/