I am the sum of the different things I have seen, read, heard and experienced...
"Anyone can knock ideas down. You don’t have to be clever to do that. What you do have to be clever to do, is suggest ways to make them better. Being negative isn’t difficult. Being positive is difficult."
Dave Trott Negative People v Positive People, 22nd November 2011 "A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow"
Ovid 43BC
"When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost"
T. S. Elliot
T. S. Elliot
"We now live in a world where information is potentially unlimited. Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive. Where is the meaning? Only human beings can tell you where it is. We’re extracting meaning from our minds and our own lives."
George Dyson The European, 17th October 2011
"People have always been afraid of new technologies, but in the end we assimilate them and they improve the quality of our lives."
Jason Siga Singularity Summit, 2011
"Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I may remember. Involve me and I will understand."
Confucius Philosopher, 450BC
"Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected."
William Plomer South African Author
"News is what somebody, somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising."
Lord Northcliffe Founder of The Times, Daily Mail, etc
"Look at what the monkey’s doing, not what kind of phone he has."
Faris Yakob Converged Communications New Ideas Of Influence, 2008
"Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring… It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen."
Clay Shirky Here Comes Everybody, 2008
"…Complex adaptive systems have many niches, each one of which can exploited by an agent adapted to fill that niche. Thus, the economic world has a place for computer programmers, plumbers, steel mills, and pet stores, just as the rain forest has a place for tree sloths and butterflies. Moreover, the very act of filling one niche opens up more niches – for new parasites, for new predators and prey, for new symbiotic partners. So new opportunities are always being created by the system. It is always unfolding, always in transition. In fact, if the system ever does reach equilibrium, it isn’t just stable. It’s dead."
Mitchell Waldrop Complexity
"Humans do not engage in activities that are meaningless. If you think you see people doing things you find meaningless, look again and try to understand what the activities mean for them."
Henry Jenkins If You Saw My Talk at South By Southwest…, March 10 2008
"Although we’ve used the concept brand communities a couple of times, it’s important to reiterate that communities aren’t created, they are courted. Most brands will need to court a range of different communities and travel across pools, webs, and hubs if they want to reach the full range of desired consumers."
Henry Jenkins If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead (Part Five), February 20 2009
"(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print; (ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do; (iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out; (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active; (v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent; (vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."
George Orwell Politics and the English Language, 1946
"Let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around"
George Orwell Politics and the English Language, 1946
"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?"
George Orwell Politics and the English Language, 1946
"If old consumers were assumed to be passive, then new consumers are active. If old consumers were predictable and stayed where you told them, then new consumers are migratory, showing a declining loyalty to networks or media. If old consumers were isolated individuals, then new consumers are more socially connected. If the work of media consumers was once silent and invisible, then new consumers are now noisy and public."
Henry Jenkins Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, 2006
"What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."
Andy Warhol The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
"Social technologies that make things more efficient reduce the cost of action. Yet, that cost is often an important signal. We want communication to cost something because that cost signals that we value the other person, that we value them enough to spare our time and attention. Cost does not have to be about money. One of the things that I’ve found to be consistently true with teens of rich and powerful parents is that they’d give up many of the material goods in their world to actually get some time and attention from their overly scheduled parents. Time and attention are rare commodities in modern life. Spending time with someone is a valuable signal that you care."
Danah Boyd Valuing inefficiencies and unreliability, December 14 2007
"No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead."
T. S. Elliot The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 1922
"Your online ambitions can only be as grand as the quality of the relationships you foster. What would you like to accomplish online? As you move your audience from Passive Interest to Investment the possibilities grow."
Mike Arauz Spectrum of Online Friendship, April 13 2009
