Conversations about who we are online.
A conversation with Jaron
Jaron
"I feel a lot less creative now, now that I've spent so long on reddit, metafilter, hackernews, designernews, hubski, listening to podcasts, reading books, and so on, because it's like a lot of ideas that I've wanted to do have already been done, or will pale in comparison to something else."
You turn to blogs, social media and other sites for inspiration. But the more you read, the more you realise that all the good ideas have already been had by someone else in the world. Ever get that feeling? At what point does consumption of others' creativity online stop being motivation and start preventing you from developing your own ideas?
I spoke to Jaron about exactly this. To be honest, I think he is very hard on himself. He has started so many projects, is a wonderful photographer and writer, and is obviously a deep thinker. Have a read of our conversation - have you had similar experiences?




I sympathise with his feeling that there's nothing new under the web sun. I'm still getting forwards of email urban legends I read in 1990. And I see the same lousy links being recycled and re-shared on social media with little introspection attached. Sometimes the sharer hasn't even read the article they are sharing. It only matters to be seen to be sharing in the group's buzz.
Tech Times reports that the dwindling amount of personalised and original content being posted to Facebook is a major source of concern for the company:
"According to a report from The Information, sources familiar with the matter have let on that as of mid-2015, Facebook witnessed a 21 percent decline year-over-year in "original" sharing."
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/148829/20160409/decline-in-original-sharing-worries-facebook-heres-whats-happening.htm
The pressure to simply keep up (each person becomes their own little content mill) ensures that quality and originality are not always the most important things to consider when securing online validation. It's also a human habit that leaves behind a lot of digital litter, making it even harder to find something insightful and original to read.
I get excited when I find something special in an obscure blog. It still happens! But if all I read was online and I only looked to blogs, social media and other sites for inspiration, I'd be pretty despondent. Thankfully, the world is bigger than that. It should be a force of habit for creatives to deliberately switch off and go explore it, and to seek out people unlike themselves.
Thanks for sharing that article - super interesting! And to your last point - absolutely. I like to remind myself to go outside and look up at the sky for inspiration every now and again. I think the searching for online entertainment/information sources can become very habitual and directionless sometimes, at least for me, so I have to force myself away from it sometimes...
For sure. A friend of mine recently confessed to me that he spends hours scrolling through his Facebook feed, but never actually reading anything. Just scrolling, scrolling... it made me think of Ulysses' lotus eating episode. All those people, just dithering, not really knowing how long they've been there, in the thrall. And it doesn't matter, so long as the ads keep getting served.
Also - for anyone interested, Jaron has just launched an online literary magazine: http://lit.cat/