internet

Geekdom And The Wars Of Infinte Freedom

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I want to follow up on my post about how I missed Geek Evangelism. I had stated that I frankly missed the passionate outreach, even when it was annoying, as it had been replaced with stark territoriality. What, I wondered, had happened?

My conclusion was basically too many geeks had gone into the internet echo chamber, where even more marketing echoed, and sealed themselves off.  Some of us, many of us didn’t end up in echo chambers (or ended up in larger ones that were well-aired), and those echo-chambers confused the hell out of us.

Yet I had noted that the internet also let people re-invent fandoms and themselves. Harry Potter fandom seemed to spring to life on the internet, cultivated not from any origin in earlier fandom, but by fans itself.  Many that followed seemed the same way, springing up everywhere, diverse, wide, and often crazy.

Yet these too would end up in fan wars and conflicts and battling echo chambers.

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The Rabbit Hole Of Stupid

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You may be late for a very important date, but then something stupid on the internet appears and you become even more late.

The internet allows us to get all kinds of news, information, commentary, and of course, examples of blatant human ignorance and venality.  The latter can come in many forms: it could be ignorant comments on a news article, a story on an excessive idiocy, or an artifact of pure drivel.  Whatever form, it’s distracting.

When you see the stupid, you get curious.  You have to read the comment, then see how people respondent.

When you see the stupid, you have to find out more.  You click the link to read about the latest atrocity of human intellect.

When you see the stupid, you have to face the stupid.  You read an entire article manufactured from delusions and deliberate idiocy just to find out how bad it is.

Then, your time is gone.  It won’t be coming back.  The stupid grabbed your curiosity and absconded with your time, and you helped it.

Anyone can spend hours down the rabbit hole of stupid.  It’s intriguing, fascinating, horrifying, and you have to follow it.  Don’t think I’m immune, my natural curiosity has taken me to some dark places where idiocy shined brightest of all.

I’m not proposing a moratorium on avoiding dumb things; just we be more aware of how we’re easily distracted by them.  If you don’t think this is a problem, then remember you just spent how many minutes reading a blog post on how stupid things can be, so I may have just become part of the problem . . .

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

Thoughts on future media models, and freeness.

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Right now on the internet there's a lot of discussion on the book "Free", a book exploring, well, the impact of freeness (and the internet's way of delivering it) on business models.  I've not read it yet, I probably should, if only to know where I'm going to fall on what appears to be a lot of inevitable arguments.

The discussions have made me speculate on the future of media – because media is a repository of geeky jobs.  Comics, books, reviews, games, etc.  What does free mean to us in such industries – or those of us who want to go into them.  I will attempt to keep my thoughts somewhat above the level of "ramble".

So imagine you're going online to provide some media – a game, a comic, an online novel delivered in snippets, etc.  You're going to do free because Free gets attention and there's a lot of competition.  Here's what I think it means for you, the professional geek

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