I got an interesting email from Surat Lozowick about my post on coffee houses and creativity. He pointed me to a piece he wrote called Working at the coffee shop: the right environment and the right distractions — a very interesting post that concludes with a great perspective on the issue:

Creativity does not exist in a vacuum; experiences, conversations, reading, writing, the constraints of time and the distractions of life are just as important as quiet moments of focus. And conveniently, the coffee shop is there to provide them.

He also links to Conor Friedersdorf’s Working Best at Coffee Shops, in which Conor presents four possible theories to answer the question, “Why are many telecommuters most efficient in noisy public places with lots of distractions?” It’s worth a read not just for his theories, but also for this goose bump-inducing Ernest Hemingway quote:

It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old water-proof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write.

It annoys and inspires me in equal parts when I see language like that — simple and elegant, yet dripping with meaning and emotion. So jealous.

In The distractions of social media, 1673 style Tom Standage provides an excerpt from his upcoming book “Cicero’s Web”. He points out that public officials and university authorities were very much against coffee houses, because they kept people from doing real work. According to one critic in the 1600s:

And the scholars are so greedy after news (which is none of their business) that they neglect all for it, and it is become very rare for any of them to go directly to his chamber after prayers without first doing his suit at the coffee-house, which is a vast loss of time grown out of a pure novelty. For who can apply close to a subject with his head full of the din of a coffee-house?

It’s that last sentence that I find particularly amusing. For who can apply close to a subject with his head full of the din of a coffee-house? It is precisely in the din (“A loud, unpleasant, and prolonged noise”) of coffee houses that I find I do my best work. In fact, coffee houses have a long history of being spaces where creativity tends to thrive. For example, in Claudia Roden’s Coffee, she notes:

Catering equally for the working and the leisured classes, [coffee houses] have tended to be democratic in character. As a French periodical of the 1850s entitled Le Café pointed out in its slogan: “The salon stood for privilege, the café stands for equality.” Coffee has been called the intellectual drink of democracy. In times of upheaval, coffee houses became revolutionary centers, encouraging the interchange of ideas and usually generating liberal and radical opinion. It has been said that the French Revolution was fomented in coffee-house meetings, and the Café Foy was the starting point of its mob spirit.

Coffee houses have been linked to intellectual activities for a long time:

The French coffee shop ennobled the ways of its frequenters by inaugurating a reign of temperance and luring people away from the cabaret. Today the institution is still one where everything is discussed and where people sharpen their wits in debate.

The influence of coffee houses was enormous on the political, social, literary, and commercial life of the times. They were the stage for political debate, fringe centers of education and the origin of certain newspapers. Insurance houses, merchant banks, and the stock exchange began in coffee houses.

There is just something about coffee shops that helps me focus. It’s the ambient noise. It’s the knowledge that I’m not alone, that there are people around me whose diverse lives are happening in the background. It’s the constant, nagging thought that some of those people might be the audience for what I’m making. It’s like working inside a contextual inquiry all the time.

Also, coffee is pretty great.

Tim Kreider in The ‘Busy’ Trap:

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. [”¦] More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

Trust me. You need to read this article.

I think Kottke nailed it:

Maybe the reason the whole “can’t use the iPad/iPhone for creation” thing persists is that everyone is using the damn things to play tower defense games instead.

John Carey makes an interesting observation about the Macbook Pro with Retina Display in Progress:

Photography is a place where philosophy and technology mix with art and its ease of entry has diluted its user base to the point of over saturation. While chemistry and technology have always been a central pillar in this space, I fear it could drag it down even further unless we start to greet some of this forward momentum with at least a whisper of skepticism. I guess the best way to break this down is simply to ask, when will we ever be satisfied? When will sharp be sharp enough, or big be big enough? When do we reach the point within some areas of consumer technology where we are making progress simply for the sake of progress?

Just when I thought maybe we’re starting to come to terms with certain technological advancements and actually enjoy ourselves within our technically enhanced lives I have been quickly reminded that it will never end. I don’t mean to be overly pessimistic but you have got to admit it does feel a big daunting at times does it not? It is a subject I have long explored on these pages and I know I am not alone.

Even though he’s speaking from a photographer’s perspective, it’s easy to relate to John’s point. Yesterday, while the Google I/O keynote was going on, my only emotion was relief. I was relieved that I’m so securely locked up in Apple’s Prisonâ„¢ that I couldn’t care less about all the tweets and live blogs about Google Glass and the Nexus 7. I was relieved that I’m not a reporter for Engadget or The Verge, who have to live and breathe every single new thing that comes out day after day after day. Most of all, I was relieved that it wasn’t another Apple keynote, because those take up all my time and attention since I ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO KNOW WHAT I’M ABOUT TO MISS OUT ON.

All this to say that I empathize with John’s mixed feelings about the Retina MacBook Pros. I, too, want more from technology while knowing that more isn’t necessarily what we need. What we need are bicycles for the mind, and to do that, we need some time to practice so we can take the training wheels off. Could it be that continuing to invent better bicycles all the time are actually preventing us from riding the damn things?

Jack Cheng takes a shot at defining The Slow Web:

Timely not real-time. Rhythm not random. Moderation not excess. Knowledge not information. These are a few of the many characteristics of the Slow Web. It’s not so much a checklist as a feeling, one of being at greater ease for the web-enabled products and services in our lives.

It’s a very interesting post where he also describes some of the web sites and apps that exemplify this movement. It reminds me of Clay Johnson’s call for healthier information diets.

(link via @retinart)

Paul Ford gave the closing keynote at the 2012 MFA Interaction Design Festival, and published the text in a fantastic piece called 10 Timeframes. He spends most of the talk discussing units of time, using rich and provocative stories like this:

I can never remember if we are supposed to live each day as it were our last, or if it’s the first day of the rest of our lives. It’s hard to tell sometimes. We make movies about it over and over again. The Bucket List and Terms of Endearment and so on. Or even zombie movies. And the core assumption of those movies is usually that your life is kind of inconsequential up until that moment, that now you’re going to learn what really matters. Of course these movies are made by people who are totally dedicated to making films. They give up their lives and neglect their children to make movies about the value of family.

He ends up reframing the way we view our time to think more about how the things that we do affect other people’s time:

If we are going to ask people, in the form of our products, in the form of the things we make, to spend their heartbeats on us, on our ideas, how can we be sure, far more sure than we are now, that they spend those heartbeats wisely?

We have a responsibility to make sure that we create things that help others spend their time wisely. It’s a sobering thought. This is my favorite article of the week — so well written.

In The Great Big Opportunity Matt Salisbury talks about subsidiarity — the idea that decisions are better made where they have immediate effect:

There has been a lot of talk about the advent of the “information age.” For the first time since the industrial revolution, we have experienced a real disruptive change in business context. The age of communication is now, but if you pay too much attention to the technology, you’ll miss what’s really happening.

What’s “really happening” is that we now have the chance to work like humans instead of machines.  Communication and information’s advance is restoring subsidiarity to our brave new world.

I like his conclusion:

Ultimately, the information age is not about the information. It’s about human dignity and happiness informing how, where, and why we work.

In Facebook threatens to ‘Zuck up’ the human race, Andrew Keen makes the following observation:

Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, tells us there’s a shift from an analog world in which our identities are generated from within, to a digital world in which our sense of self is intimately tied to our social media presence.

In other words, on Twitter and Facebook, we become who we follow. Or perhaps more accurately, we envy who we follow. The big problem with this is that none of us are really who we portray ourselves to be online. We are all the better, happier, more successful versions of ourselves:

(Source: Comical Concept)

But even though we take in all this information from people who we know aren’t real (and sometimes don’t even like), we are incapable of stopping. There is always more to know, more to discover, another person to compare ourselves to. In Noise and Signal, Nassim Taleb explains why this is so counterproductive:

The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part called the signal); hence the higher the noise to signal ratio. And there is a confusion, that is not psychological at all, but inherent in the data itself. Say you look at information on a yearly basis, for stock prices or the fertilizer sales of your father-in-law’s factory, or inflation numbers in Vladivostock. Assume further that for what you are observing, at the yearly frequency the ratio of signal to noise is about one to one (say half noise, half signal) ”” it means that about half of changes are real improvements or degradations, the other half comes from randomness. This ratio is what you get from yearly observations.

But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95% noise, 5% signal. And if you observe data on an hourly basis, as people immersed in the news and markets price variations do, the split becomes 99.5% noise to .5% signal. That is two hundred times more noise than signal ”” which is why anyone who listens to news (except when very, very significant events take place) is one step below sucker.

Most of the information we get on social media is not just noise, it also makes us less likely to discern between what’s important and what’s not. Greg McKeown explains in The Unimportance of Practically Everything:

Social media did not create the problem of distraction, but it is clearly an amplifier. Indeed, a study [PDF] by Clifford Nass et al. at Stanford showed that heavy media multitaskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli than light media multitaskers. Heavy multitasking may encourage even heavier multitasking because it leads to a “reduced ability to filter out interference.” Could the part of our brain that is processing deeper cogitative thought actually be atrophying in the process?

None of this would matter if activity and reward were linearly related. But we live in a world where almost everything is worthless and a very few things are exceptionally valuable. This is a counterintuitive idea. After all, the idea that 50% of results come from 50% effort is appealing. It seems fair. Yet, research across many fields paints a very different picture.

As I read through these articles it became clear to me that most of us are not being very good stewards of our time and attention. We are seduced by the lure of constant affirmation that social media promises, and blind to the reality that what we mostly get from it is a sense that we’re not as good, happy, and successful as those around us.

We have a responsibility to ourselves to follow and interact with those who support us and want to make the world a better place. And we have an obligation to cull and surrender the people and the information that make us feel inferior and stunt our growth. This is difficult, because we’ll never get rid of our fear that we might be missing out on something. But it’s necessary if we want to hang on to our sanity and our ability to tell the vital from the trivial — so that we can continue to do good work.

Of course I can’t tell you what to do. But for myself, I’m going to start ignoring constant negativity, unimportant noise, and empty criticism. I’m actively going to seek out positive, driven people and honest critique. Nassim Taleb says it well at the end of his article:

To conclude, the best way to mitigate interventionism is to ration the supply of information, as naturalistically as possible. This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what’s going on, and the more iatrogenics (“an inadvertent adverse effect or complication resulting from medical treatment or advice”) you will cause.

Be careful who you listen to, because sooner or later, they end up defining you.

Seth Godin sums up the dilemma of the digital age quite nicely in Dancing on the edge of finished:

Facing a sea of infinity, it’s easy to despair, sure that you will never reach dry land, never have the sense of accomplishment of saying, “I’m done.” At the same time, to be finished, done, complete—this is a bit like being dead. The silence and the feeling that maybe that’s all.

Happy weekend, everybody!