A couple of months ago I got an email from the wonderful people at A List Apart, asking if I’d be interested in starting a regular column on ALA. I believe my response was something to the effect of “1,000 times yes!!” How could it not be? I’ve been reading ALA for such a long time, and I really enjoyed the one time we’d worked together before, on an article called Usable yet Useless: Why Every Business Needs Product Discovery.

In an effort to figure out where to take the column, my editor asked me what kind of topics I’m interested in. I sent back a response that I was pretty sure would make her delete the email and step away from her computer very slowly. Here’s what I wrote:

• My background is in sociology. My PhD dissertation was about social network theory — the real, mathematical kind, not what the phrase “social network” has since come to mean. So I like thinking about how our networked society is changing us. I’m much less interested in the “Google is making us stupid” view, and much more interested in the positive side. Clive Thompson’s Smarter Than You Think comes to mind immediately. (When I grow up, I want to write like Clive)
• Following on from that, I like thinking about what parenting means in this new era. As I’ve been thinking about what my next side project should be after the book, I’ve toyed with a site for tech-oriented dads with young kids. What are the products they should be interested in, how do we teach our kids about technology and that it is not to be feared, but also not to be abused, because it is not neutral (see What Technology Wants. When I grow up I want to write like Kevin).
• And again, following on from that (at least in my weird head), how does Sci-Fi culture play into all of this? (I know, weird, but stick with me). Our science fiction has become increasingly dystopian. The last positive science fiction series was probably Star Trek TNG. So what do our visions of the future tell us about living (and designing) today?

To my surprise, my editor didn’t freak out, and instead encouraged these topics. So we came up with the column name A View from a Different Valley. A column about technology, but from a perspective we don’t always expect. My first article for the column is called Work Life Imbalance, and it came out last week. It’s about the blurring lines between work and life:

There is a blending of work and life that woos us with its promise of barbecues at work and daytime team celebrations at movie theaters, but we’re paying for it in another way: a complete eradication of the line between home life and work life. “Love what you do,” we say. “Get a job you don’t want to take a vacation from,” we say—and we sit back and watch the retweets stream in.

I don’t like it.

I don’t like it for two reasons.

And this is, of course, where I ask you to read the rest if you’d like to find out why I don’t like it…

I’m really excited about this column, and hope to keep it going for quite a while. Thanks again to ALA — they’re awesome people. I like them a lot.