Hunger For Something New
“Bigger, better, and faster” isn’t enough. Well, sometimes it is. For example, Alta Vista was a better search engine than Webcrawler and Google is a better search engine than Alta Vista. However, there’s nothing that nips at our sense of desire like an entirely and truly new experience. It seemed that there wasn’t much left to explore in skiing when I first strapped on a snowboard. It was a day of severe punishment that left my mind exploding as I fantasized about the new medium of play and expression. I was charged.
The scope of “new” is relative. Snowboarding lies somewhere in between surfing, skating, and skiing. The Internet was a revolution, but it’s just a really big network. Web browsers changed the way we use computers, but they borrowed from Gopher. Social Media is all the rage right now, but the Internet was always social. Rarely is something new really new.
Twitter is the next great social space; however it’s not a revolution but rather an evolution. It’s a Web app based chat client with a unique twist, the follow model. Instead of having rooms like IRC, it has a social networking approach of choosing who you pay attention to. Even more evolved, you can follow without the gesture being returned. The scope of impact compared to the actual technological advancement is incongruent at best.
Social networking itself is little more than exposing your address book publicly. It’s sad how little has been done in this space. It’s still unintuitive to determine who are my friends, family, business contacts, or just publishers of content I like to consume. It’s still also hard to zoom out from a macroscopic point of view and see where I fit in the global network. Worse still, the whole system is hindered by the fact that every site wants to maintain it’s own networking model. I wonder how well my friends list on MySpace matches my friends list on Facebook.
Trends are powerful things. A friend recently made the connection that Twitter’s popularity likely relates to the nature of Mac users who seem to dominate the Twitter user base – or at the very least, dominated the early adopter demographic. Still, it can be frustrating when a trend is identified as having very little true innovation backing it up. Bobbie Johnson’s post about being done with social media touched on this nicely.
Yes, trends are powerful. The idea of Web 2.0 was enough to get the crippled Internet industry back on it’s feet. Thank you O’Rielly. There really was some innovation behind the Web 2.0 craze. Still, I feel that most of the change came in the way people thought about building things for the Internet and less about technical innovation. The ideas of exposed APIs, syndication, and interoperability are bold steps towards a mindset akin to the OSS community.
I’ve been exploring a new PHP based programming framework called CodeIgniter.While exploring and learning, I took a deep look at a piece of software written on the framework called Open-Blog. The framework itself is a lot like Ruby on Rails, only more immature, less feature rich, and in a different language. Open-Blog is one of the most refined and well written CodeIgniter applications I’ve found thus far. It’s a carbon copy app modeled after WordPress.
It’s everywhere. True innovation is rare, at best. Still, we long for it. What is it that drives us for that “new” experience? Whatever it is, I think I have more of it than the average person. I live a lot of time with my head in the clouds dreaming about different ways a thing could be. Sometimes it’s not even an improvement so much so as a curious exploration of possibilities.
My friend, Allan, said I have an “artisan” archetype. As a side note, hearing about that model of personality evaluation was one of those “new” moments I appreciated so much. That brings up the whole new scope of “new and innovative” versus just being “new to me”…
My “new to me” job is building something that’s been built by other companies dozens of times over. Sure, we have the advantage of learning from their mistakes. Still, knowing that we’re creating something that could, if business didn’t prevent it, just be digitally copied and slightly modified – is somewhat annoying and ultimately demotivating.
You get less than a dozen decades in life. We spin around the sun pretty quickly. Here we are, so much collective mental power and we burn so much of it solving the same problems over and over. “So what?” some ask. “Who cares?” some may say. Well, I care. A bit more collaboration, a better model of sharing the fruits of our efforts, and I might be typing this blog post from a 5 star resort on Mars.
Maybe most folks don’t care about seeing and doing as much as they can with what little life we’re given. I can’t even begin to tell you why it’s so important to me. I just love to explore and can’t really understand why anyone else wouldn’t. Call me closed minded if you like.
I just saw a Tweet related to the “new” Palm Pre fly by. I care about the Pre because it seems to innovate. Even that innovation is at risk because of our society’s current social model where people can “own” ideas. It’s sad knowing that the greed of a few outweighs the benefit of the many.
I hunger for something new. I hunger for a whole lot of something new. I don’t think I’m alone. I figure that’s partly why we have a new president. Obama is changing a lot of stuff. I bet he makes some pretty dumb mistakes, but at least change is happening.
I’m working an office job and drawing a salary. I just spent 9 months trying to “break free” of this slavery style institution of work. If you find the analogy of full time employment and slavery offensive or bothersome, speak up as I’d love to debate the point.
Anyway, seeing the rest of my life as the repitition of this same work pattern where personal exploration is squeezed between the cracks of attending my job and managing my personal responsibilities (which reminds me, vehicle registration is due again)…seeing this pattern projected through the rest of my life makes me wonder if that’s a life worth living.
I’ve found that I don’t like waking up in the mornings because of what I am waking up to. I just assume keep dreaming. I deeply desire things in my life that are so engaging and refreshing that I wake up each morning looking forward to the day.