In August 2003 — a few months before we got married — my wife and I went on a backpacking trip through Europe. You may remember that particular summer because it was the biggest European heat wave in a hundred years or something, so there was a lot of media coverage around it. Shops in Paris ran out of fans. Sweaty, half-naked tourists packed the sreets, which I’m sure made the locals even grumpier than usual about having to cede control of their cities to a bunch of foreigners.

It was quite a trip — 8 cities in 30 days. We used a hop-on hop-off bus service and stayed in youth hostels, as you do when you have no money. It was exhausting, wonderful, eye-opening, frustrating, beautiful. I’d love to show you some photos, but that’s going to be difficult because the album is sitting on my bookshelf at home.

Taking photos was different back then. Before the trip I bought 10 rolls of 24+3 Fujifilm ISO 400 film to use with my Nikon SLR. I had to weigh the importance of every photo, because not only was film expensive, we were also going to have to get the damn things developed. Once the trip was over we spent days going through the photos, reliving the moments, carefully picking the ones we deemed worthy of being put in our album.

I page through the album often. It includes some of the best photos I’ve ever taken, during one of the most tumultuous times in my life. My memories of that time are fading slowly along with the photos, but I’ll never forget the feeling of that month.

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Last month several of my friends were in Europe on vacation. I know this because I followed their every move on Instagram and Facebook. Sometimes their photos reminded me of places we went on our trip. Sometimes I was jealous. Sometimes I just thought, wow, that’s pretty.

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I wonder what it would be like if my wife and I did our backpacking trip now, almost a decade later. I imagine that I’d spend most of my time either taking photos with my phone, or hunting for free wifi with my phone. Because if you don’t post photos of what you’re doing, it didn’t really happen, right?

In a sense I’m glad we did our big Europe trip before social networks existed. We checked our email maybe once in every city — if we could find an Internet cafe. For the most part we were on our own. Just one couple amongst a sea of tourists. There was nothing different about the bottle of wine we had in that one Italian restaurant. Except that it was our bottle of wine, and we shared it just with each other. Not with anyone else. It was a whole month of secret moments in public, and we were just… there. We didn’t check in on Foursquare, we didn’t talk about it on Facebook, we didn’t post any photos anywhere. I now look back and appreciate the incredible freedom we had to live before we all got online and got this idea that the value of a moment is directly proportional to the number of likes it receives.

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I woke up yesterday morning to a few Facebook status updates from people who don’t like Halloween, and who would never let their kids participate in the evils of trick-or-treating. I was immediately filled with guilt because I allowed my daughter to enjoy herself so much the previous night by letting her dress up in her self-chosen mermaid/fairy combination.

And then I realized that I feel like that all the time on Facebook. Guilt, anger, envy… Those are the emotions that fuel activity on most social networks, but perhaps Facebook more than the others. They’re the emotions that make us share/like/comment on things. And then I thought about our Europe trip, and how much I long for that time before we became obligated to carry the burden of the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of every single person we’re connected to online. It’s what Frank Chimero once called “huffing the exhaust of other people’s digital lives.”

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I’m not saying I’m done with Facebook — and anyway, the public Facebook breakup blog post has become such a cliché that I don’t want this to sound like one. I’m just saying that I don’t like how my Facebook newsfeed makes me feel, so I’m going to “see other people” for a while, and see how that works out. And I’m going to try to rediscover the feeling of that Europe trip from a decade ago in the lives of the people around me.

In Siamese Dream Frank Chimero addresses the differences between streaming music services (access to an unlimited number of songs) and purchasing music (ownership of a limited selection):

The way you navigate a place of abundance (streaming music) is fundamentally different than how you use a place with limitations (purchased music). In abundance, you’re looking to discover pre-existing value (“Knock my socks off!”), whereas with limitations, you’re looking to milk value (“I’ve got this thing. How can I learn to enjoy it?”).

He goes on to mention how this idea applies to most digital vs. physical environments:

Systems of abundance and limitation are not exclusive, even though we talk like they are. Digital services and technology rarely displace, but frequently add and augment. Your Twitter account didn’t replace your Facebook profile. You’re just splitting time and trying to keep both plates spinning. With digital, it is almost always AND instead of OR.

This is a huge part of our information overload problem. Imagine what would happen if you could only use one social network. Which one would you choose? What would you put there?1 We create these artificial rules about what is appropriate to share on which network, and it’s only going to get harder to keep the separations straight as more and more AND services pop up.

We spend so much time trying to figure out what each network is for, but they’re all for the same thing: human connection. We get fixated on the tools and the medium, and forget that it’s people all the way down. I’m slowly realising that the real power of any network is in the off-network experiences they enable. It’s about the point where a simple Twitter conversation moves to email and a strong friendship. It’s about the point where a discovery of mutual interests online leads to a coffee and an hour-long conversation.

This horse had been beaten to death, but I’ll say it one more time. It doesn’t matter what network(s) you use, how many followers you have2, what your Klout score is, or how Internet famous you are (or aren’t). What matters is the connections you make and the conversations you have. So what we really need is the courage to ditch AND (the place of abundance that’s about the dopamine rush of discovering new things all the time), and embrace OR (the place of limitation that’s about discovering value in the relationships that we already have).

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1. Does this hypothetical scenario make you break out in a cold sweat? Exactly… ↩

2. For a bizarre look into the underbelly of follower-chasing, check out the #teamfollowback hashtag on Twitter. ↩

Back in March I wrote about Pinterest, and how I believe it gives people the illusion that they’re creating something without the effort of actually doing the hard work. Now Clive Thompson makes a strong argument In Defense of Pinterest. He talks about the power of images to communicate emotion, and the one big way Pinterest is different from other social networks:

Indeed, part of the value of Pinterest is that it brings you out of yourself and into the world of things. As the Huffington Post writer Bianca Bosker argued, Facebook and Twitter are inwardly focused (“Look at me!”) while Pinterest is outwardly focused (“Look at this!”). It’s the world as seen through not your eyes but your imagination. “In such a self-obsessed society, this is a place where people are focusing attention on something other than themselves,” says Courtney Brennan, an avid Pinterest user.

These opposite sides of the argument aren’t mutually exclusive, of course. The critique that Pinterest is for people who “will do anything to avoid having to read” remains, but the examples cited by Clive convinced me that there is a great deal of value on the site — if you know where to look.

I love the conclusion of Leah Hager Cohen’s The Courage To Say ‘I Don’t Know’:

In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Émile: Or, Treatise on Education,” the philosopher writes, “I do not know is a phrase which becomes us.” Too often we fear uttering these words, convinced that doing so will diminish us, will undermine our status and block our advancement.

In fact these words liberate and empower. So much of the condition of being human involves not knowing. The more comfortable we become with this truth, the more fully and unabashedly we may inhabit our skins, our souls, and – speaking of learning – the more able we become to grow.

I’ve been saying “I don’t know” a lot recently. It’s uncomfortable, but I think it forces me to dig deeper for the right answers.

Nishant Kothary wrote an excellent piece about the different types of signal on social media sites, and how some networks are designed to self-police dishonest signals to such an extent that it hurts the quality of the relationships. From Why Instagram Works:

Facebook requires that you craft an intricate online persona of yourself complete with demographic information, pictures, relationship status, political and religious affiliations, educational qualifications, and so on. Not only that, but Facebook broadcasts literally everything you do to everyone. And you are expected to snap to this image you’ve created. When you stray from it — that is, when you broadcast a perceived dishonest signal or one that is alien to your persona — the bluff is generally called in the form of dissenting comments and behaviors. In the long run, it means less, or worse, as we saw with MySpace, less meaningful engagement.

This ties in really well with that Google+ conversation I wrote about the other day, about how we haven’t quite figured out how to deal with hardship on social network sites.

(link via @ChrisFerdinandi)

In Living inside the Machine James Bridle writes about computers and data centres as aesthetic objects. It’s a very interesting idea and a great article. There’s one part in particular that stuck with me. James quotes William Gibson in an interview with the Paris Review from 2011, about his time in Vancouver in the late 70s/early 80s:

The only computers I’d ever seen in those days were things the size of the side of a barn. And then one day, I walked by a bus stop and there was an Apple poster. The poster was a photograph of a businessman’s jacketed, neatly cuffed arm holding a life-size representation of a real-life computer that was not much bigger than a laptop is today. Everyone is going to have one of these, I thought, and everyone is going to want to live inside them.

Everyone is going to have one of these, and everyone is going to want to live inside them. How prophetic…

James sums it up nicely in his article:

We used to posit this space, the network, the notional space, as being elsewhere, the other side of the screen. But increasingly we have these images of the machine as something that surrounds us, that we live inside, within. As something that enfolds us.

I love Craig Mod’s writing, and Paris and the Data Mind is another great piece. It starts off as an article about Fitbit, and more broadly, the Quantified Self (“a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on most aspects of a person’s daily life”). But it quickly expands to an essay about memory in the age of data that never disappears:

I think of our check-ins, our food photos, our tagged friends. I think of our steps, our Fuel Points. I think of the myriad and nearly endless streams of data—data now actively collected but becoming increasingly passive. I think of all this and I can’t help but see a hologram projected somewhere off in the distance. A reconstitution of something, someone, miles away, years out. […]

How specific and formful our collections—these collections that constitute our selves—have become. Still not entirely whole, but closer than they’ve ever been. We play them back—literally, scrolling out timelines. A life of thoughts, granular GPS, and time-coded data. Holograms of ourselves, transparent and broken, from another time and place. They skip like a worn record, or a dusty movie reel, with pieces missing here and there. But they are us, however scratchy, and their resolution increases daily.

This theme has come up quite a bit recently — how the Internet prevents memories from fading. Craig ends up challenging the idea that unforgotten memories are necessarily a good thing.

One of my favorite sites, The Great Discontent, has a great interview with designer Jason Santa Maria:

The default posture of the Internet is that you put work out and hope that someone connects with it, learns from it, and builds upon it. That isn’t unique to the web community, but it’s one of our community’s greatest traits—everyone shares what they do and we all learn from one another.

From the beginning, whenever I was in a position to tutor or mentor someone, I was always up for it. I want to leave a mark in a way that helps other people to be better and if I have knowledge that can do that, I think I have to share it. By doing so, it sets an example for others to do the same. It pays it forward and helps foster a better community.

I’m not generally a fan of interview posts but this site does them really well, and Jason’s story is inspiring.

Nicholas Carr wrote an excellent, balanced article on the rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs1) like Coursera and Udacity, and the complex data mining required to make it work. From The Crisis in Higher Education:

The advances in tutoring programs promise to help many college, high-school, and even elementary students master basic concepts. One-on-one instruction has long been known to provide substantial educational benefits, but its high cost has constrained its use, particularly in public schools. It’s likely that if computers are used in place of teachers, many more students will be able to enjoy the benefits of tutoring. According to one recent study of undergraduates taking statistics courses at public universities, the latest of the online tutoring systems seem to produce roughly the same results as face-to-
> face instruction.

This is some really in-depth reporting, and it’s not all sunshine and roses. Nicholas went out of his way to seek out and report on legitimate counterarguments to this movement as well.

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1. Yes, really. ↩

I’ve long been fascinated by the Dunning–Kruger effect and its distant cousin the Peter Principle. If you haven’t heard of these theories yet, I recommend you don’t read about it at bedtime if you value sleep. This is the kind of thing that keeps you up for days as you try to figure out how it applies to everything you’ve ever done.

Dunning-Kruger basically states that people who are incompetent don’t realise that they’re incompetent, because they lack the competence to figure it out. That’s really scary stuff.

Anyway, in June 2010 Errol Morris conducted an interview with David Dunning, and it’s a fascinating read. Among other things, Dunning gives more background about the research they did, and also goes into detail on the idea of “unknown unknowns”, that scary realm of not knowing what you don’t know. From The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is:

Unknown unknown solutions haunt the mediocre without their knowledge. The average detective does not realize the clues he or she neglects. The mediocre doctor is not aware of the diagnostic possibilities or treatments never considered. The run-of-the-mill lawyer fails to recognize the winning legal argument that is out there. People fail to reach their potential as professionals, lovers, parents and people simply because they are not aware of the possible.

This is a five-part series, and I’ve only read part 1, but I’m really looking forward to digging into the rest of the series. If you have an interest in human behavior, and you’re not scared of freaking yourself out a bit, this is highly recommended reading.

(link via @berkun)