I donât believe in Zoom fatigue An Article by Matt Webb interconnected.org Itâs not Zoom fatigue, itâs Zoom whiplash. Itâs a hunch. I canât prove this. The trick to get around this is to move smoothly up and down the gradient of social interaction intensity, never dropping below a basic floor of presence: the sense that there are other people in the same place as you. Instead of having two modes, âin a callâ and âon my own,â we need to think about multiple ways of being together which, minimally, could be: In a video call In an anteroom to a video call, hearing the sound of others In a doc together On my desktop but with the sense that colleagues are around And the job of the designer is to ensure that their software ensures the existence of these different contexts, instead of having the binary on-a-call/not-on-a-call, and to design the transitions between them. communicationworktransitionssoftware
The surprising effectiveness of writing and rewriting An Article by Matt Webb interconnected.org The act of writing the first draft creates new âessential dataâ that feeds the imagination and makes possible figuring out the second draft. Or: In your head, ideas expand until they max out âworking memoryâ â and itâs only be externalising them in the written word that you have capacity to iterate them. Or: Good writing necessarily takes multiple edits, and the act of writing and act of rewriting are sufficiently different that performing both simultaneously is like rubbing your tummy and patting your head. ââThe McDonaldâs Theory of Creativityââ writingthinkingiteration
Primitive design An Article by Matt Webb interconnected.org I want it to feel intuitive I want any new features to be platform features, not one-offs. And the second of those is weird, right? Itâs like sketching out a toy spaceship, having a list of rules about play, and attempting to simultaneously invent the shape of the Lego brick. Thatâs platform design I suppose. Redesigning a newspaper will mean bouncing between comps and style guides, designing both. Inventing the iPhone user interface will have seen apps and app paradigm evolving together. ââCo-Evolution of Problem and Solution Spaces in Creative Designââ designsystemsmaking
Micromorts AÂ Definition by Matt Webb interconnected.org Thereâs a standard way to understand the relative danger of any activity. A micromort is "a unit of risk defined as one-in-a-million chance of death." For example: skydiving is 8 micromorts per jump running a marathon: 26 micromorts 1 micromort: walking 17 miles, or driving 230 miles Generally being alive averages out at 24 micromorts/day. deathchance
Four years of noting down my favourite words An Article by Matt Webb interconnected.org I like words, and I note down ones that catch my eye as we cross paths. Sometimes I read over the list, random access style, just to remind myself of forgotten thoughts. Each word is a bookmark into a little cascade of concepts in my brain. So because Iâd like to keep these words somewhere I can find them in the future, Iâm putting them here. Storm Doris Mimecom Cloudbleed Athleisure Cromwell H7N9 Trappist-1 ... (+448) wordseuphonycollections
Clues for software design in how we sketch maps of cities An Article by Matt Webb interconnected.org Given thereâs an explosion in software to accrete and organise knowledge, is the page model really the best approach? Perhaps the building blocks shouldnât be pages or blocks, but neighbourhoods roads rooms and doors landmarks. Or rather, as a knowledge base or wiki develops, it should - just like a real city - encourage its users to gravitate towards these different fundamental elements. A page that starts to function a little bit like a road should transform into a slick navigation element, available on all its linked pages. A page which is functioning like a landmark should start being visible from two hops away. ââThe Image of the Cityââ urbanismcitiessoftwareunderstanding
Social Attention: a modest prototype in shared presence An Article by Matt Webb interconnected.org My take is that the web could feel warmer and more lively than it is. Visiting a webpage could feel a little more like visiting a park and watching the world go by. Visiting my homepage could feel just a tiny bit like stopping by my home. wwwsocializing
Ancient magicians as innovation consultants An Article by Matt Webb interconnected.org The Codex Justinianus (534 AD), being the book of law for ancient Rome at that time, banned magicians and, in doing so, itemised the types: A haruspex is one who prognosticates from sacrificed animals and their internal organs; a mathematicus, one who reads the course of the stars; a hariolus, a soothsayer, inhaling vapors, as at Delphi; augurs, who read the future by the flight and sound of birds; a vates, an inspired person - prophet; chaldeans and magus are general names for magicians; maleficus means an enchanter or poisoner. I happen to have spent my career in a number of fields that promise to have some kind of claim to supernatural powers: design, innovation, startups⊠Itâs not hard to run through a few archetypes of the people in those worlds, and map them onto types of ancient magician. Those like Steve Jobs (with his famous Reality Distortion Field) who can convincingly tell a story of the future, and by doing so, bring it about by getting others to follow them â prophets. Inhaling the vapours and pronouncing gnomic truths? Youâll find all the thought leaders you want in Delphi, sorry, on LinkedIn. Those with a good intuition about the future who bring it to life with theatre, and putting people in a state of great excitement so they respond â ad planners. Haruspex. Those who have the golden mane of charisma: enchanters. Startup founders. People with a great aptitude for systems and numbers, who can tell by intuition what will happen, from systems that stump the rest of us. We call them analysts now. MBAs. Perhaps the same aptitude drew them to read the stars before? Mathematicus. ââSteve Jobs: The Lost Interviewââ magicinnovation
Hints towards a non-extractive economy An Article by Matt Webb interconnected.org Thereâs a movement called the circular economy which is about designing services that donât include throwing things away. There is no âaway.â A non-extractive economy is going to look very different to todayâs economy. These points feel opposed somehow but they are part of the same movement: With CupClub, itâs all about infrastructure. With the battery-free Game Boy, itâs untethered from infrastructure: once manufactured, no nationwide electricity grid is required to play. Weâll need better tools to track and measure. There will be new patterns for new types of services. New technologies to build new products. New language. So itâs fascinating seeing the pieces gradually come together. ââIntroduction to Permacultureââ economicsrecyclinginfrastructure
What the prototype tells you AÂ Fragment by Matt Webb interconnected.org As soon as I make something, I think of the 100 things I want to have next. Thatâs why prototyping is good. You donât need to have much imagination, you just listen to what the prototype tells you. ââThe situation talks backââââCo-Evolution of Problem and Solution Spaces in Creative DesignââââThe Battle for the Life and Beauty of the EarthââââThe game discovering itselfââ designmaking
aboutfeeds.com AÂ Website by Matt Webb aboutfeeds.com Use feeds to subscribe to websites and get the latest content in one place. Feeds put you in control. Itâs like subscribing to a podcast, or following a company on Facebook. You donât need to pay or hand over your email address. And you get the latest content without having to visit lots of sites, and without cluttering up your inbox. Had enough? Unsubscribe from the feed. You just need a special app called a newsreader. This site explains how to get started. ââHow would I improve RSS?ââ rssbloggingmicrosites
Mutual appreciation AÂ Fragment by Matt Webb interconnected.org To use slightly different terms, mutual appreciation is a healthy jealousy without envy â a drive to achieve the same but without wanting to take it from the other. ââThe Small GroupââââSceniusââ collaborationteamwork
How would I improve RSS? An Article by Matt Webb interconnected.org My sense is that RSS is having a mini resurgence. People are getting wary of the social media platforms and their rapacious appetite for data. Weâre getting fatigued from notifications; our inboxes are overflowing. And people are saying that maybe, just maybe, RSS can help. ââRe: How would I improve RSS?ââââaboutfeeds.comââ rssblogging
Like, just a post complaining that screens should be better An Article by Matt Webb interconnected.org Itâs been 19 years since Pixar released Monsters, Inc. with all that CGI hair. Where are my hairy icons? Ones that get all long and knotted as the notifications number goes up. Why canât I feel my phone? I found that paper from 2010 (when I was complaining about keyboards) about using precision electrostatics to make artificial textures on touchscreens. I should be able to run my thumb over my phone while itâs in my pocket and feel bumps for apps that want my attention. Touching an active element should feel rough. A scrollbar should *slip. Imagine the accessibility gains. But honestly I donât even care if itâs useful: 1.5 billion smartphone screens are manufactured every year. For that number, I expect bells. I expect whistles. ââA Brief Rantââ interactionsoftwareinterfacesdevices
Gods of the Word AÂ Book by Margaret Magnus www.amazon.com ââImagine that we had no voice and no tongueââââMy nameââââReference and Is-nessââââIt flows out and fillsââââNo less than a Zeusââ+6 More ââPhonaestheticsââââThe arbitrariness of the signââââThe body imageââ
Imagine that we had no voice and no tongue Socrates: Imagine that we have no voice and no tongue, but want to communicate with one another. Wouldnât we like the deaf and the dumb make signs with the hands and the head and the rest of the body? Hermogenes: There would be no choice, Socrates. Socrates: We would imitate the nature of the thing: lifting the hands to heaven would mean lightness and upwardness. Heaviness and downwardness would be expressed by letting them drop toward the ground... Hermogenes: I donât see that we could do anything else. Socrates: And when we want to express ourselves with the voice or tongue or mouth, the expression is simply their imitation of what we want to express? Hermogenes: I think, it must be so. communication
My name âI am the utterance of my name.â â Thunder, Perfect Mind, The Nag Hammadi Library ââTo call each thing by its right nameââ identitynames
Reference and Is-ness There are at least two aspects to what we have traditionally called the meaning of a word. One aspect is reference, and the other is something I will call âinherent meaningâ following Ullman (1963). Inherent meaning is âIs-nessâ meaning. Inherent meaning is a wordâs identity, and reference merely its resumĂ©, where it has gone and what it has done, an itemization of its contexts. âIs-nessâ is unifying. Each word has a single pronunciation, a single inherent meaning. But reference is divisive. It makes what was one thing â the word â appear to be many things â its senses. It is inherent meaning which gives all those multifarious senses the power of being a single word. meaningwords
It flows out and fills This deeper meaning of a word isnât confined to what we think of as a dictionary definition. Rather it flows out and fills all the space available to it. Although a basic sense does affect the dynamics of a word, it has no power over its essence. Like the captain of a ship, it can control the crewâs actions, but not their minds. Each word has an aspect of meaning which lies deeper than any of its senses, and it is fundamentally on this meaning that all the senses depend. wordsidentity
No less than a Zeus I too am a true believer in the autonomy of the archetype. A /t/ or an /h/ is no less than a Zeus. The consonants are not essentially physical, but they live, evolve and influence human affairs. We overlook something essential if we deny that they can get up and walk around. This is not to say that their existence is independent of the human psyche. But then everything depends on everything.
Like a prism When you look at phonemes, you look through the perspective of morphemes, which are one linguistic level higher. The higher level is like a prism that splits the light in two. What was one thing, like âlengthâ at the phoneme level, looks like two opposite things âlongâ and âshortâ from the perspective of the morphemes. In practice, when you find both a word and its opposite, then the phoneme is not about either of these two things, but about what is common to them. information
Fracturing If we step back and view from afar this process of One-ness and Is-ness to fracturing and interpretation â of inherent meaning to reference, it follows that what lies at the foundation of language is simply what it is â sound â free of reference and interpretation. What makes what we know as language from its sound is fracturing and interpretation or using a word for a function other than what it simply is.
To evolve the language itself So in the process of talking, we might say we are putting words in slightly new contexts, and then testing them against our peers to see if our experiment in juxtaposition had âmeaning. If we succeed, we have introduced new contexts for the words we use. These contexts will be taken up by our listeners, and will gradually become clearly enough defined to be thought of as referents. Once our words gain new referents, they start affecting the underlying phonosemantic structure of the language, the clustering patterns, the network of semantic relations. That is, the purpose of talking in the long run is to evolve the language itself. evolution
Scooting over There is at this point no evidence that acquired characteristics can be inherited. It is held that all changes to a genome are random, and cannot be subject to any higher principle. However, when a word is used in a new context, as it is whenever we say something new, a new sense is permitted. This does affect the phonosemantic structure, the linguistic DNA. Words in the vicinity of this word âscoot overâ to make room and allow themselves to be influenced by its philosophy. The language itself is now different. language
The element becomes a sign Each unit can be seen purely as form, as what it is. Or it can be viewed as having a function. Its function is only understandable within the next higher level of organization. And in every case, function must succumb to the constraints of form. Once this worldly function is assigned, the element becomes a âsignâ. It falls into the realm of concept. There is a mapping from one thought system to another. ââForm follows functionââ formfunction
The demand of a new word Why are these phonosemantic classes enough, and we need neither more nor less? Why are these consonants enough, and we need neither more nor less? What determines the need for a new word? How is this demand âfeltâ by a language? How did the metabolic pathways of American English recognize that âjerkâ and âtwerpâ and âpunkâ and ânitwitâ and âdorkâ and âassâ and âgoonâ and âtwitâ and âdodoâ and âbumâ and ânerdâ and âdunceâ and âturdâ and âboobâ and âchumpâ and âbitchâ and âbastardâ and âprudeâ and so on and so forth simply were not equal to the task? We had to add âturkeyâ and âsquirrelâ as well? wordslanguagemeaning