Letter b Media

Anything you do for fun is a hobby, no matter how serious you are about it, whether others perceive you as being good at it, or if you don’t care about improving your skills at it. (Adapted from a conversation with @emery)

It’s hard for the competent to scale back the areas to which they erroneously believe they have the bandwidth to apply their competencies.

We’ve been conditioned to think of social media as a stage where we play out and exaggerate conflicts for the financial benefit of the owners. We must kick this habit to survive.

Alternate title: Why is there never an Orson Welles around when you need one?

With Twitter melting down, Facebook contracting, and even Amazon laying off 10,000 it’s time to reevaluate what we’ve let the web become. This isn’t how it was supposed to be, and we have the ability to reclaim our creativity and our identities from those who commoditize them.

The New Yorker cartoon is a classic, familiar to most people who’ve ever felt themselves not just a user of the web but truly part of an internet community made up of technologists, creators, and power users. A community whose living history goes back to a time before social media, before Gmail, before the Dancing Baby, before the World Wide Web itself.

But maybe it was really only in the last 15 years when we were all pretending not to be dogs on the internet.