Something I learned recently is that I need to stop doing things by myself. I’m an extrovert, and I work better with other people. We inspire each other, check each other’s work, and push each other to excel. To be completely fair, I learned that last week, but this week I put my money where my mouth is. Well, not my money, but my creative endeavours.
I’ve spent a few months now talking about how to think about social media and communication, with a mind toward exploring how we can communicate better. But I’ve been remiss. I’ve been missing something important that I wasn’t ready to talk about yet, which is what “Better” actually means to me. Depending on your goals, it’s going to mean different things, but in communication, I think there are some things that are universally desirable, and opportunities that social media creates for everyone. These are some of them. (more…)
So it’s been a busy couple of weeks, hence no post last weekend and some sporadic posts during the week. My Engage case study is coming to a close, and I’ve been working on a lot of things. Busyness isn’t really an excuse, but it’s giving me some good perspective on the things that are actually really important to me, and one of those is these posts. I like having a space to just sort of ramble and be me without having an agenda, like communication, gaming, or philosophy.
My Katy Perry cover last week was a lot of fun to put together, and I’m looking for ward to playing around with some other pop songs, though my musical tastes are a few years behind the times. Links to that and other things past the jump. But the thing that really hit me in the past few weeks was how I learned to save money.
We’re all busy. Our lives are saturated with events, information, and things to do, so many that it’s more common to feel that things are slipping through your fingers like a buttery sponge than that you have nothing to do (side note: If you don’t have anything to do, I can find something for you to do). Your message, whether it’s an event, a vote, a lesson, or an idea, has to penetrate the cloud of tasks and commitments a human carries around with them. Automation does not do that, it just adds to the cloud. It piles one more thing into it, more often an unwelcome intrusion than anything else. If you want to make sure you reach someone, you have to focus on them as a person. One way to do that is to think of it as a birthday party.
This is one of those things that everyone in communications has to talk about at some point, preferably early on. I like to think of it as smashing your looms, after the fictional General Ned Ludd, but what it really means is that automation kills communication. Well, it wounds it gravely, and your messages will ultimately limp rather than leaping like they should.
Other things which are dead: this analogy.
Automation can be your greatest ally when communicating with large groups of people or when using a lot of different media, but it is an ally of the most insidious sort. It breeds a level of laziness which can poison your efforts in the long run. Today I will prove that this is the case. That is my mission.