Rethinking Repair An Essay by Steven J. Jackson sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu This chapter is an exercise in broken world thinking. It asks what happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points in thinking through the nature, use, and effects of information technology and new media. The modern infrastructural idealThe fulcrum of these two worldsA creature of bones, not wordsThe world is always breakingA side that goes unrecognized+8 More 104. Site RepairMakers and MakingMaintenance and Care repair
Mediocratopia An Article by Venkatesh Rao www.ribbonfarm.com I once read a good definition of aptitude. Aptitude is how long it takes you to learn something. The idea is that everybody can learn anything, but if it takes you 200 years, you essentially have no aptitude for it. Useful aptitudes are in the <10 years range. Leveling up aptitude You need to make the step forward skill
Leveling up aptitude Your first short story takes 10 days to write. The next one 5 days, the next one 2.5 days, the next one 1.25 days. Then 0.625 days, at which point you’re probably hitting raw typing speed limits. In practice, improvement curves have more of a staircase quality to them. Rather than fix the obvious next bottleneck of typing speed (who cares if it took you 3 hours instead of 6 to write a story; the marginal value of more speed is low at that point), you might level up and decide to (say) write stories with better developed characters. Or illustrations. So you’re back at 10 days, but on a new level. This kind of improvement replaces quantitative improvement (optimization) with qualitative leveling up, or dimensionality increase. Each time you hit diminishing returns, you open up a new front. You’re never on the slow endzone of a learning curve. You self-disrupt before you get stuck. The interesting thing is, this is not purely a function not of raw prowess or innate talent, but of imagination and taste. learningcreativitytastepractice