by Giles Turnbull
"Cities are full of noise and scuffle, and they don’t always reveal their history. Armed with a fistful of maps from 1901, and a smartphone bristling with data-recording apps, one man tries to uncover a city’s secrets.
The modern explorer has it all. Every gadget you can think of combined into a pocket-sized smartphone. There’s no need to be lost, or lonely, anywhere. Ever. Unless we explore with our eyes closed, figuratively speaking.
I like that idea, though. Exploring with my eyes closed. I want to try it. For help, I’ve turned to a man called Alan Godfrey, an unsung hero of modern England. Mr. Godfrey owns a small publishing company.
From an office in the little town of Consett in the northeast, Mr. Godfrey republishes old maps of towns and villages of England. These maps are sold at the bargain price of £2.50 each, so cheap you can subscribe to have them delivered to you every month, probably for less than the price of a newspaper. Armed with one, you can reexamine your surroundings to see what remains and what has gone. You can read the fascinating notes Mr. Godfrey or his associates have written on the reverse. You can explore time and space simultaneously, for less than the price of a pint of English beer, then fold up space-time and put it in your pocket.
I am in Bristol, England’s sixth largest city. In my hands I hold a selection of Godfrey’s marvelous maps, dated 1901. Whole chunks of the 1901 city have gone, destroyed by war and progress. But larger chunks of undisturbed history remain.
My plan is to roam with my maps and a smartphone, noticing as much as I can. I’m going to notice the hell out of things. I’m going to immerse myself in the detail of the city, and attempt to mirror Godfrey’s historical details with modern data-details of my own.
Eleven Fifteen A.M.
This is the center of Bristol. It is 19 degrees centigrade. There are no buses here. There are no bikes here. I can see eight strollers, and many shops. Battery level on my iPhone is 87 percent. My phone is loaded with extra apps today, for the purposes of data collection—to record my route, measure the environment, and capture the scenery...."
long & worth the read...
But I'm not here to talk about technological innovation, I'm here to talk about a different kind. It's not about inventing a new machine or a new drug. It's about inventing your own life. Not following a path, but making your own path. The kind of imagination I'm talking about is moral imagination. "Moral" meaning not right or wrong, but having to do with making choices. Moral imagination means the capacity to envision new ways to live your life.
It means not just going with the flow. It means not just "getting into" whatever school or program comes next. It means figuring out what you want for yourself, not what your parents want, or your peers want, or your school wants, or your society wants. Originating your own values. Thinking your way toward your own definition of success. Not simply accepting the life that you've been handed. Not simply accepting the choices you've been handed. When you walk into Starbucks, you're offered a choice among a latte and a macchiato and an espresso and a few other things, but you can also make another choice. You can turn around and walk out. When you walk into college, you are offered a choice among law and medicine and investment banking and consulting and a few other things, but again, you can also do something else, something that no one has thought of before.
Let me give you another counterexample. I wrote an essay a couple of years ago that touched on some of these same points. I said, among other things, that kids at places like Yale or Stanford tend to play it safe and go for the conventional rewards. And one of the most common criticisms I got went like this: What about Teach for America? Lots of kids from elite colleges go and do TFA after they graduate, so therefore I was wrong. TFA, TFA—I heard that over and over again. And Teach for America is undoubtedly a very good thing. But to cite TFA in response to my argument is precisely to miss the point, and to miss it in a way that actually confirms what I'm saying. The problem with TFA—or rather, the problem with the way that TFA has become incorporated into the system—is that it's just become another thing to get into.
In terms of its content, Teach for America is completely different from Goldman Sachs or McKinsey or Harvard Medical School or Berkeley Law, but in terms of its place within the structure of elite expectations, of elite choices, it is exactly the same. It's prestigious, it's hard to get into, it's something that you and your parents can brag about, it looks good on your résumé, and most important, it represents a clearly marked path. You don't have to make it up yourself, you don't have to do anything but apply and do the work—just like college or law school or McKinsey or whatever. It's the Stanford or Harvard of social engagement. It's another hurdle, another badge. It requires aptitude and diligence, but it does not require a single ounce of moral imagination.
Moral imagination is hard, and it's hard in a completely different way than the hard things you're used to doing. And not only that, it's not enough. If you're going to invent your own life, if you're going to be truly autonomous, you also need courage: moral courage. The courage to act on your values in the face of what everyone's going to say and do to try to make you change your mind. Because they're not going to like it. Morally courageous individuals tend to make the people around them very uncomfortable. They don't fit in with everybody else's ideas about the way the world is supposed to work, and still worse, they make them feel insecure about the choices that they themselves have made—or failed to make. People don't mind being in prison as long as no one else is free. But stage a jailbreak, and everybody else freaks out.
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce has Stephen Dedalus famously say, about growing up in Ireland in the late 19th century, "When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets."
Today there are other nets. One of those nets is a term that I've heard again and again as I've talked with students about these things. That term is "self-indulgent." "Isn't it self-indulgent to try to live the life of the mind when there are so many other things I could be doing with my degree?" "Wouldn't it be self-indulgent to pursue painting after I graduate instead of getting a real job?"
These are the kinds of questions that young people find themselves being asked today if they even think about doing something a little bit different. Even worse, the kinds of questions they are made to feel compelled to ask themselves. Many students have spoken to me, as they navigated their senior years, about the pressure they felt from their peers—from their peers—to justify a creative or intellectual life. You're made to feel like you're crazy: crazy to forsake the sure thing, crazy to think it could work, crazy to imagine that you even have a right to try.
Think of what we've come to. It is one of the great testaments to the intellectual—and moral, and spiritual—poverty of American society that it makes its most intelligent young people feel like they're being self-indulgent if they pursue their curiosity. You are all told that you're supposed to go to college, but you're also told that you're being "self-indulgent" if you actually want to get an education. Or even worse, give yourself one. As opposed to what? Going into consulting isn't self-indulgent? Going into finance isn't self-indulgent? Going into law, like most of the people who do, in order to make yourself rich, isn't self-indulgent? It's not OK to play music, or write essays, because what good does that really do anyone, but it is OK to work for a hedge fund. It's selfish to pursue your passion, unless it's also going to make you a lot of money, in which case it's not selfish at all.
Do you see how absurd this is? But these are the nets that are flung at you, and this is what I mean by the need for courage. And it's a never-ending process. At that Harvard event two years ago, one person said, about my assertion that college students needed to keep rethinking the decisions they've made about their lives, "We already made our decisions, back in middle school, when we decided to be the kind of high achievers who get into Harvard." And I thought, who wants to live with the decisions that they made when they were 12? Let me put that another way. Who wants to let a 12-year-old decide what they're going to do for the rest of their lives? Or a 19-year-old, for that matter?
All you can decide is what you think now, and you need to be prepared to keep making revisions. Because let me be clear. I'm not trying to persuade you all to become writers or musicians. Being a doctor or a lawyer, a scientist or an engineer or an economist—these are all valid and admirable choices. All I'm saying is that you need to think about it, and think about it hard. All I'm asking is that you make your choices for the right reasons. All I'm urging is that you recognize and embrace your moral freedom.
And most of all, don't play it safe. Resist the seductions of the cowardly values our society has come to prize so highly: comfort, convenience, security, predictability, control. These, too, are nets. Above all, resist the fear of failure. Yes, you will make mistakes. But they will be your mistakes, not someone else's. And you will survive them, and you will know yourself better for having made them, and you will be a fuller and a stronger person.
It's been said—and I'm not sure I agree with this, but it's an idea that's worth taking seriously—that you guys belong to a "postemotional" generation. That you prefer to avoid messy and turbulent and powerful feelings. But I say, don't shy away from the challenging parts of yourself. Don't deny the desires and curiosities, the doubts and dissatisfactions, the joy and the darkness, that might knock you off the path that you have set for yourself. College is just beginning for you, adulthood is just beginning. Open yourself to the possibilities they represent. The world is much larger than you can imagine right now. Which means, you are much larger than you can imagine.
Original long post By William Deresiewicz
October 3, 2010
The essay below is adapted from a talk delivered to a freshman class at Stanford University in May.
Impressive though this is, how many times have you been frustrated at the first few links on a search page? It's easy to spend too much time plowing through a bunch of suggestions that turn out to be irrelevant (and possibly dangerous if you're repairing small home appliances — take my word for it). Searchers have no way of parsing the content itself. What Google has done is narrow the set of possible pages that could contain the answer. But the results contain lots of other stuff as well.
"Content platforms" are emerging that are designed to solve precisely this problem. A content platform is a standardized means of presenting information. Take, for instance, Yelp. If you want restaurant information, it gives you a list of possibilities with a ranking that can be sorted on distance or user reviews. But if you want to delve deeper, you know what you will find: the same layout for every restaurant, showing you were it is, some pictures, contact details, and a review. There's a lot of content but it has been arranged in a standardized, easy-to-use format. That makes it easy to understand what you are getting.
To be sure, both Google and Bing are moving toward standardized content formats for information on restaurants or movies or travel. But the real challenge is organizing the vast wealth of information that is not part of common searches — for instance, when you want to find a reliable small-appliance repairperson.
Twitter and Facebook represent alternative content platforms, each of which focuses on their users' scarce attention. They make it easy to scroll through hyperlocal news. In Twitter's case, the 140-character limit makes this particularly easy, freeing up consumers' time.
Excerpt from original post by Allison Mishkin:
"imagination, fueling the resources needed to inspire better scores: creativity and passion.
Starting Monday, October 17, two classrooms of students --one in Montreal and one in Los Angeles -- must work together to return a lost robot to its home in Outer Space (actually, Los Angeles) by October 28. The classes will work together, sending clues to one another as they guide the robot from its "crash-landing" in Montreal to the classroom in Los Angeles. The students will combine creative writing, geography, math, and science and more in trying to navigate the robot home. Wherever their minds take the robot, filmmakers and photographers will follow, documenting the robot's struggle as it travels across North America. Upon completion, the robot will board an actual rocket with a camera, allowing students and viewers across the world to watch its journey home. The creators hope that the students will come away in awe of just how far technology, creativity, and imagination can travel...."
Excerpt:
Not long ago Netflix CEO Reed Hastings had to apologize for something unusual and unpleasant; he dropped the ball in terms of matching the needs and desires of a huge number of his company's customers. In case you've been living under a mountain of DVDs and missed the rumpus, it all started with the odd decision to separate the firm's DVD-rental and streaming content businesses, and the oddball choice of the new businesses' name, Qwikster.
In his blog post offering a personal apology, Hastings set straight to work to explain why the "DVD" (the word was used 22 times) are important to both the future of Netflix (11 uses) and its "members" (8 uses). "Streaming" (13 uses) is equally so, he claimed. The decisions were made about "our" (18 uses) service (15 uses) and systems though, Hastings accented, not for the convenience of "you" (7 uses) and "yours" (1 use).
Qwikster (10 uses) and Qwikster.com (2 uses)--a name already well-occupied by a frequent Twitterer not affiliated with Netflix--was an interesting choice. And while it's usually good that a company "changes" (3 uses), the decision may have been an "error" (1 use).