Women Don’t Need Exposure

Tech Crunch founder Michael Arrington argued in “Too Few Women in Tech? Stop Blaming Men” that he and other men already do plenty for women: he has a female CEO, two out of four of his senior editors are women, and he begs and pleads for women to speak at his conferences.

Arrington’s counter-point, an article in the Wall Street Journal, is equally insidious. The Journal reports that Mediaite founder Rachel Sklar “co-founded a group called ‘Change the Ratio’ to shine a light on women in entrepreneurial roles, and to address the dearth of women at start-ups” and goes on to report that technology investor Fred Wilson said “the industry needs catalysts to spark a virtuous circle of more successful women-led tech start-ups leading to more women in tech start-ups.”

Wilson pledges to “write about successful women entrepreneurs and prod conference hosts to include women on panels. ‘Little things like that will make a big difference,’” he says.

Arrington, Skylar, Wilson, and the many, many other opinions in an uproar about this are really arguing the same thing:  we need more exposure and awareness around women and tech. Their points of differentiation center on how much exposure will actually move the needle and create an acceptable number of women in tech. But how much or how little is irrelevant.

Women don’t need exposure. We need strategy. We need equality.

Interviewing women and inviting women to conferences and reporting on women-founded start-ups and creating women-focused events and so on and so forth might make everyone feel a bit better and be politically correct, but does little to actually support women.  These obvious proof points make it easy for Arrington and Wilson and Sklar to say, “Look! I’m doing my part!”

But women are less likely to advance in their careers despite all this “support.” And that’s because they’re not actively sponsored the way men are, the Harvard Business Review reports. “Many women explain how mentoring relationships have helped them understand themselves, their preferred styles of operating, and ways they might need to change as they move up the leadership pipeline.”

Arrington’s ideas are a good example of such encouragement; he argues that women may be too nurturing and risk averse for tech and alludes that changing that behavior is the key to more start-up companies founded by women.

“By contrast, men tell stories about how their bosses and informal mentors have helped them plan their moves and take charge in new roles, in addition to endorsing their authority publicly,” the study says. Men develop a special kind of relationship with other men that goes “beyond giving feedback and advice” and instead has men using their influence to advocate and ensure the success of male friends.

The rules of the old boys club have already been passed down to the young boys and without the key, women have somehow garnered special attention and kid glove treatment. But we need more than well-meaning supporters and intentions.

Just let us play the game on the same field.

To Michael Arrington’s credit, his walk seems to outpace the talk of Fred Wilson and Rachel Sklar. But watching the pendulum swing between who to blame neglects the obvious: equality isn’t about keeping score. That’s what business is for.

See you in the club.

Start-Up Games.

Are Meetings Passé?

Meetings are a dying breed of face-to-face engagement that have taken on more angst, agony and abuse in recent years than even the lowly cubicle.

“There’s nothing more toxic to productivity than a meeting,” Jason Fried argues, author of the best-selling book, Rework, “They break your work day into small, incoherent pieces that disrupt your natural workflow. They often contain at least one moron that inevitably gets his turn to waste everyone’s time with nonsense… The goal is to avoid meetings. Every minute you avoid spending in a meeting is a minute you can get real work done instead.”

Did you get that? It is painstakingly difficult to form everyone around the table for a discussion. More than that, it’s unproductive. It’s time-consuming. It’s inefficient. Your co-workers are morons. Feelings could get hurt. Souls misunderstood. We should avoid each other at all costs. Don’t talk. Crouch and hide behind a monitor, like you learned to drop and roll for a fire.

Fried argues if you absolutely must hold a meeting, you should set up a timer and invite as few people as possible. Which really describes an industrial factory full of machines, not a cadre of smart people in a pioneering workplace, does it not?

More and more, solutions toward a better workplace include making sure we’re as far apart from each other as possible. Escapism is cloaked in flexible schedules, location-independence, and working from a coffee shop to the point of being revered; it’s okay that most people could never see another person and still do their job effectively.

We intentionally court the label of recluse as status symbol; evading a meeting is hip and progressive. Conversation is out.

A good deal of this obsession can be credited to our educational pedigree, where the American obsession with rote learning and standardized testing has married that old and outdated hag of work, the industrial model. Their child is the monstrosity of a workplace that we have today. Such systems, the trappings of knowledge and innovation, have actually killed creativity to the detriment of the current and future economy, and of course, our spirits.

We’re running away and far away in the wrong direction. Away from each other and towards nothing at all more grand, preferring the safety and fortitude of our screens more than the uncertainty and uncontrollability of real-life interactions.

Creativity once required a lone artist with his canvas or an eccentric inventor toiling away in his garage. But the new economy will increasingly require us to work together, to learn through the discovery of dialogue, the challenge of ideas and the experience of being in the same room – after all, the subtleties of a person’s mannerisms just don’t come through in a smiley face emoticon.

So maybe you could start a new kind of work revolution. One that doesn’t push away from each other but attracts us closer. Get up and talk. You know, within a physical distance that doesn’t require the use of email, text or gchat. Throw out your timer. Fight over something. Be interesting. Interrupt someone’s work.

Reach out and touch someone.

Work is the constant sifting and winnowing of how we make sense of the world. And real work can’t be done solely inside of a screen.

Speak Out.

A New Residence for Home

Ryan is so very tall and my condo is so very small. So it was not without reservation that we recently moved in together.  We talked about it a lot – the important things, the mundane, the humdrum. In talking about moving in together, we broke our record in effective communication. And then we talked some more. “If we could communicate like this for the rest of our lives,” Ryan said, “we’d be the best couple ever.” And so it went… until.

You know, moving is very stressful, and moving in with someone you intend to spend your life with is this gigantic life decision, and somehow all of the pressure and insanity of it all got put into one question – did we need to buy another dresser?

Perhaps the most romantic notion I had of combining our belongings and everyday lives was that we would be able to use my library card file (currently in use as my sock drawers) as our dresser. But, no. No, no, no.  Ryan needed a place to store his t-shirts. All forty-six of them. And he didn’t find it at all romantic, never mind practical, to store a lone t-shirt per tiny drawer.

I won’t take this moment to comment on the romanticism or practicality of forty-six t-shirts, but I do recommend that you, my dear reader, come to your own conclusion on that point.

Besides his t-shirts, Ryan also likes to hang his towel on the closet door instead of the towel hook we bought specifically for the purpose. He takes out the trash and cleans if I cook. I don’t know when, but he watches ESPN because that’s the channel that appears when I turn on the TV. I am always on the computer and he is always on the phone. He leaves his eye glasses on the bathroom counter, but little else. His shoes are lined up across the top and bottom shelves of our closet, and underneath the bed. Waiting for Cribs, I guess.

He overtakes our small white couch like a dog. If Ryan could be animal, he has said that he would want to be a big, slow dog, so please don’t think I am insulting my incredibly sexy boyfriend publicly. Well, a dog or a lion, he said. There are a lot of similarities.

He has a repertoire of several particularly esteemed dishes that he can cook: pork chops, meat spaghetti – in which the spaghetti is actually egg noodles – and chicken and broccoli “stir-fry.”

He locks the door when he leaves in the morning and says to me when he’s home: “You know you don’t have to lock the door when I’m here, right? I will protect you.”

“It’s a habit,” I reply.

He opens the shower curtain from the wrong side, and never closes the blinds. If you touch him when he’s not expecting it, he will unreasonably flinch and exclaim “ow!” like he means it.

When we watch a movie, he will lie down and I will lie down, and we will spoon and watch the screen and out the sixth-story window. When I get too tired, I will turn around and settle into his chest, and he will kiss my forehead and I will go to sleep.

Ryan moved in on the anniversary of our first kiss.

This weekend, I think we’ll buy a dresser.

Good Hearts.

Originality & Influence in Personal Branding, Architecture and Walmart

We are told to show streaks of our soul, to be original. To show irreverence. And especially, place your mark on the world. Eschew tradition.  And while you should be yourself, you should also, somewhere along the line – if you’re lucky, between high school and turning thirty – find that originality is only the beginning.

Renowned architect Frank  Lloyd Wright is known for pioneering one of the most important movements in architecture. His mastery of the compression and exaltation of space has little to do with inspiring awe (although that it does), and much more to do with a space that is living. That shows you how to act, impresses upon you what to feel and has a conversation with you. The building has a conversation with you, not Wright.

Which was probably a great mystery to those who knew Wright while he was living since he was quite the arrogant bastard. But his architecture lacks ego. Wright matched a structure to its environment. The infamous Guggenheim intentionally looks nothing like the home of Taliesin.

In contrast, Santiago Calatrava or Frank Gehry, two of the celebrity architects of present-day, are very recognizable. No matter where you are. No matter what city you’re in. A Calatrava or Gehry building has a distinct stamp, an identifiable arrangement with their hand apparent. An impression, of themselves.

And however distinct those buildings are from each other, they are also, ultimately, more of the same.   The type of sameness that dominates strip mall suburbia where big-box retailers have stamped their own identifiable arrangement with the ease of reflecting the last box onto the next, so it is the same from town to town to town.

It isn’t quite fair to compare a Walmart to a Calatrava, of course. A Calatrava is beautiful and a Walmart is most certainly not. But it is fair to compare this obsession we have to create and stamp our brand – in all of our novel and impertinent glory – across our careers, and projects and relationships.

Maybe if we all tried a little less to leave our imprint on the world, something might rise that’s a bit more meaningful than ourselves alone. We need to concentrate less on being special, and more on matching ourselves to our environment. Success isn’t about you.

Wright did this through architectural structures. You’ll do it through a lesson plan. Or diving. Or an iPhone app. Or parenthood. Whatever.

But if you say, “That’s not part of my brand,” you are missing the point. Match your skills and talents to the environment around you – those jobs, projects, affairs, and challenges that form our lives. That is change; listening to the milieu and giving it a voice.

Dilute your brand. It’s less than you think anyway. Pay attention to what’s bigger than you. Match your rhythm to what needs to be done. Respond.

The Young, Motivated & Unsatisfied

I recently met a young woman who wanted to start a blog from a teacher’s perspective that revealed a teacher’s real and true thoughts. Like how bratty the kids are. How she cusses at them in her head and makes fun of how they dress.

She wasn’t alone; a whole group of her teacher friends were planning to anonymously co-author the venomous expose together. I felt sorry for her students. So very deeply sorry and guilty, but Ryan had left my side and I didn’t know anyone else at the party and I was stuck and uncomfortable and anxious for the future of kids I didn’t know and would never meet.

So we kept talking, and she told me more of what she wanted to do: Get into education administration, lobby reform to politicians, overthrow outdated lesson plans, revolutionize school requirements, change the whole entire educational system.

Turns out? Not so jaded. Just so desperately and achingly unsatisfied.

“Worker satisfaction in the United States is at an all-time low,” reports the New York Times.  “Only 45 percent of workers are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61 percent in 1987. The findings show that the decline goes well beyond concerns about job security. Employees are unhappy about the design of their jobs, the health of their organizations and the quality of their managers.”

And it’s not just those people that have settled and resigned their dreams to the attic who are so unhappy, but a large percentage of what the Harvard Business Review calls “high-potentials” – those young rising stars that have the ability to have an enormous impact on how we work and live.

“One in three emerging stars report feeling disengaged from his or her company, and admits not putting all of his effort into his job,” the HBR study reports. These highly disengaged high performers have more than doubled from 8% in 2008 to 21% in 2009. And one-quarter of these highest-potential people intend to jump ship within the year despite the recession.

High-performance workers are being consistently and abhorrently under-utilized. Companies and managers must give motivated and ambitious young employees the ability to perform or risk irrelevance.

“When emerging talent is never truly developed and tested, the firm finds itself with a sizable cadre of middle and senior managers who can’t shoulder the demands of the company’s most challenging (and promising) opportunities,” the researchers warn.

So maybe it’s time to stop making young people pay dues. And stop assigning fluff projects. And maybe managers could stop putting the kind of hold on workers that is so tight that they’ll pop right out of their slippery control.

We are your sick, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free of the industrial age molds that keep us shackled in our desks from nine to five. Your greatest challenges are our greatest thrills. Let us execute, and then execute again. Let us fail, let us win. Let us do. Let us work.

“True leadership development takes place under conditions of real stress – indeed, the very best programs place emerging leaders in ‘live fire’ roles where new capabilities can – or more accurately, must – be acquired,” the researchers report.

Yes, let us work.  Stimulating and meaningful work that leads to compelling career paths and the chance to prosper if you do.

We’ll hide the red tape in the breakroom.

Re-Thinking Workaholism

“Work is the only thing which makes life endurable to me,” Charles Darwin wrote, later remarking that work was his “sole enjoyment in life.” Darwin’s work allowed him to withdraw from the world to concentrate entirely on his genius.

Burying yourself in work is so ingrained and glorified in our culture to survive, that nowhere is safe, even the previously safe haunts of creativity where the tradition of daydreaming and an idle nature were once protected rights. Such inefficiencies are now subject to intense bright-lights examination.

One ad agency describes the process they went through to obtain ISO 5000, a certification previously reserved only for factory lines and manufacturing. The process revealed some “surprising inefficiencies” but came at a price. “All the hyper-efficiency can be exhausting,” reported the Chief Creative Officer Jeff Gabel. “You’ve removed your slop factor.”

Exhaustion is now the modus operandi. As such, workaholism is not a reaction to passion, but the inefficiencies of the modern workplace.

“The fact is,” Dave Balter, founder and CEO of BzzAgent, says, “few white-collar employees work 9-5 at all anymore. We’re expected to address work issues on weeknights and often on weekends. We’re constantly reachable and it goes without saying that many are reviewed on the merits of their ‘always on’ capacity.” (via Max Kalehoff).

Most of us are working the usual 9 to 5, but also when inspiration strikes. Whereas in the industrial revolution, work was indeed done when you completed your widgets for the day, the knowledge society demands your energy when it’s seemingly most inconvenient. Right before bed and long into the night, for instance, or first thing upon opening your eyes in the morning.

There’s a credible explanation for these 9 to 5 outliers, which is that the productivity pockets are cushioned by breaks – a tweet, sleep, dinner, interaction with friends and family. Such idleness is great sustenance.

Alain de Botton, best known for his philosophies on everyday life, agrees. There’s a glorious stubbornness to human nature, he says. We need a break, we need a pause, we’re not made for continuous action. Looking out the window is a fundamental part of human nature, he argues.

“Periodic breaks relieve our conscious minds of the pressure to perform — pressure that can lock us into a single mode of thinking,” argue the authors of Creativity and the Mind, a landmark text in the psychology and neuroscience of creativity. Their research suggests that regular breaks enhance problem-solving skills significantly, Wired reports.

We’re working all the time, not because we need to, or even because it’s effective, but because our jobs require us to show up, be seen, and scrub through the afternoon slump. But the truth is, no one is working at 3 pm. That should be nap time, argues De Botton. (Interestingly, those who nap have a higher capacity to learn).

The culture of workaholism, worn with a badge of narcissistic and perfectionist pride, isn’t mixed with a lot of real work, he says. In our squeeze for uber-efficiency, we’re making a giant mess of inefficiencies.

A recent Wall Street Journal post profiled a young “superhero” who “rises at 3:30 a.m., works out before work, takes three of his four kids to school, works flat-out all day, gets home for dinner and bedtime with the family and then works until midnight.”

If you were counting, the young superhero gets a whopping three and a half hours of sleep. Disgusting.

Workaholism is sick and it’s wrenching to watch the pedestal we build for it.

We are not drones,  and we should not  indenture ourselves to workaholic servitude. Our rhythms, what truly brings about the bliss of efficiency, require not the constant ticking of the clock, but a restful mind, a glance in the other direction, a check mark in a box that doesn’t exist on any spreadsheet.

That is, sometimes work needs a little life.

How to Deal With Big Jerks

In accordance with the laws of motion, anger and vengeance, I have desired for suitcases to fly satisfyingly through windows, for nasty notes to appear in an inbox or two, or three, and for glasses to break into a great many sharp pieces in response to those big mean jerks who insist on climbing up my backside and making a home.

In some cases, I have succeeded. In many more, I have deftly restrained myself.

It’s an extraordinary kind of derangement to rip into another, and to do so continually and rancorously. The derisive nature of such a person and their seeming hero quests for revenge are certainly not encouraged, although I admit to feeling such pangs myself.

To get that son-of-a-jerk who was not-so-politely requesting the appearance of my middle finger that one time. For instance.

The motivation of a big mean jerk is jealousy gone for the jugular. A normal reaction amplified in an abnormal way. Successful people get the brunt of it of course. Nobody kicks when you’re down, so you don’t see much of that. More, you see unhappy people just trying to be happy, and not having a good run at it.

I’ve been there – short glimpses of what it would be like to be a total creep – so I reply with deference to big mean jerks if at all possible.

Mostly though, I let it go.

A big mean jerk, their demons and their decisions should not be of great concern to you, and are better left to psychology. You can’t possibly know what they’ve been through. Maybe they’re just having a bad day. Or maybe, a bad life.

As such, not engaging a big mean jerk is quite a suitable course of action, one that those individuals will be grateful for at a later date. Because who wants to be like that? No one does.

If a big mean jerk continues to bully, insult or assassinate your person, or if you believe a preemptive attack is necessary, then you can utilize two powerful phrases for such endeavors: “I’m sorry,” and “I understand.” Possibly both, if it’s particularly cankerous.

We need a place to debate ideas, to say no, to be ourselves, to live, to judge a little less along the way. A simple, “I understand where you’re coming from and respect your viewpoint,” goes a long way.

Then, keep going. Keep going on. You can only dwell so long.

3 Ways to Design Your Career

John Besmer confirms our meeting with “Word,” and signs off with, “Yup!” like he’s in the middle of a Jay-Z video. At the corner of corporate and hipster, I arrive to his office to discover him in a plaid button-down shirt, designer-rimmed glasses and a whole lot of Midwestern charm.

I first saw Besmer in a similar uniform on stage. Ten designers shared twenty inspiration slides for twenty seconds each, but Besmer’s stood out; he was the only person to play electric guitar, read from a book and live-tweet during his – he later told me – “horribly lashed-together” presentation.

Besmer, Principal and Creative Director of Planet Propaganda, is one of the creatives that has been paving the way for design to take a front-seat in how we approach everything, from education to careers to business. His client list includes long-standing relationships with big-timers like Jimmy John’s sandwiches and MTV to the young and hip Trek bikes and Red Wing shoes.

“Design is becoming more relevant because things are becoming more complicated” Besmer tells me. And with that, a relative army of people are now claiming the term designer of one sort or another.

Should you need a speedy determination as to whether you’re business or creative-minded, take my test. Ask yourself, what time do I rise and fall?  Scoring: Businessmen get up early. Creatives stay up late.

What links designers today “is their belief that everything today is ripe for reinvention and ‘smart recombination’” Warren Berger reports in Glimmer. And such foundational values are the backbone of innovation and business. Here’s how to take advantage:

1. Reframe your job, your tasks, your day-to-day. The concept of job titles are horribly outdated. Accept whatever title you’re given, but expand and burst the borders into far-away corners. Do as designers do and switch up “a familiar problem or challenge [like your job] in an unconventional way…. often the way a problem is framed will determine the solution,” Berger suggests.

Most successful people do this automatically. I know a young lawyer that was just recruited as partner at a prestigious law firm – this, at a time when lawyers are hurting badly – and it’s because he never saw himself as just a lawyer. He was always a leader first, the contracts and depositions came second.

So reframe your career in a new way. Ask stupid questions: Where should I really be living? Could I work from home? If I ate tuna for lunch every day, would that increase my productivity? What makes me happy?

2. Problem-solve to success. “I’m here to help my clients sell stuff,” Besmer tells me, but later admits that problem-solving is what really drives him. When you solve a problem, you get more responsibility, more challenge, new problems to solve. And that is what’s so exciting about successful careers. You solve lots of problems one after the other. It’s the difference between working hard and working smart, between an empty job and a fulfilling one.

Designers are extra good at this since it’s their explicit job description, but problem-solving is really the function of every job, of un-sticking yourself, of true creativity, regardless of the field you’re in – administrative to professional to creative.

3. Gain momentum by doing more and more. Berger reports this is the “’upward spiral’ of solving problems, wherein the more you do it, the more you can do it.” Solving problems, after all, is actually quite daunting and it can be paralyzing to jump in to such high pressure and stress. But once you’re guaranteed the win, it’s just as assuredly guaranteed that you’ll want another one.

“Through constant acts of creative [problem-solving], you also re-create yourself,” Berger continues. “You help propel your own growth spiral, feeding off the energy of creation. That’s not just a feeling, it’s a fact: Being in that state of “design flow’ raises the levels of neurotransmitters in you brain, such as endorphins and dopamine and that keeps you focused and energized.”

My friend Besmer is a testament to such endorphins and energy, and as we wrap up our conversation, he tells me the story of how he moved to a new house a few years ago. He relates that on each moving box, he would write what that box contained.  “I’d write ‘old photos, clothes,’ and whatever was actually in the box… then I’d add ‘glass eyes’ just to keep it interesting for the movers. I thought, why not make it interesting for those guys?”

Why not, indeed.

So, how do you make it interesting? Do you work only within the confines of your job title? Are you creative or business-minded?

Can you have any job you want?

Alexandra Levit has just published the book, New Job, New You: A Guide to Reinventing Yourself in a Bright New Career, which is a great resource if you’re looking for a job or trying to find more happiness in your career. And it got me thinking, one of the myths I see over and over is that job-seekers or those looking to switch careers don’t think they have the skills or experience they need.

What a cop-out.

Of course, any career has a set of knowledge specific to that field. As an architect you probably have some technical knowledge about the size of a door jamb as well as general education about your specialization, like hospitals. But now that you’re ready to move to a new field, you don’t feel you have the gutzpah (experience, skills, knowledge) to apply to that journalism position or get into business development.

Very few employers are actually looking for someone with high level of expertise in a topic, but rather someone who can gain results. This is especially true the higher up the ladder you get. Look at the CEO of Yahoo Carol Bartz who originally came from the AutoCAD industry (architecture and design software).

As an unintentional job-hopper, the next job never hired me because of my body of field knowledge, but my track record of results which is a skill-set suitcase that travels with me and increases (one day, I hope it’s bursting open) to any job.

Those transferable skills are what’s most useful to employers: problem-solving skills, project management, marketing skills, business development, staff management, training and development; communication skills, etc. – and those are what should show up on your resume, how you should talk about yourself when networking, and what to include when writing your cover letter.

New Job, New You goes into great detail on these issues so definitely check it out for a motivating way to start the New Year. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you:

Could you have any job you want? If not, what’s hindering you or holding you back? Do you have a skill-set suitcase? How do you define it?

Bloggers Are Not Writers

There are exceptions, okay. But very few bloggers can actually write. Bloggers pander to a crowd trying to satisfy the hive mind. Blogging is entertainment. Many bloggers are good at marketing, building community, relationships, and especially aggrandizing self-promotion, but not writing.

Crowdsourcing is a bloggers’ anthem. I remember my first blog. I deleted it. The posts didn’t get commented on and weren’t passed around. That wasn’t the point. But for bloggers, that is their mission; to create 500-word packages, bold-faced and headlined, read and digested in two minutes or less, bursting with lackadaisical opinion and junk epithets.

“Blogging is not writing,” the author of You Are Not a Gadget Jaron Lanier agrees. “It’s easy to be loved as a blogger. All you have to do is play to the crowd. Or flame the crowd to get attention. Nothing is wrong with either of those activities. What I think of as real writing, however, writing meant to last, is something else. It involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday’s moves in a conversation.”

Blogging is in its essence, not about originality, but about the aggregation, recycling and digesting of ideas. It is the darling of the open culture ideology of the web, where mediocre collaborations have produced a destructive new social contract, reports the New York Times.

“The basic idea of this contract,” Lanier argues, “is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”

We posit ourselves into believing that we’re taking down the establishment, but we’re only contributing to the dull masses, eager for mega numbers of comments, subscribers, fans and followers, and other easily influenced analytics. In an age where anyone can be famous with the push of “Publish,” we have lost the creation of enduring legacies that enthuse, provoke and delight.

Bloggers are not writers, nor are they press, or superior to old media. Where disintermediation in the media shines, where a cadre of reporters has eliminated the need for a specific background (say, a degree in journalism or the need to pay dues at the right newspapers), is not evidence of bloggers taking over the world, but rather that the term blogger is now so broad that its definition no longer suits the myriad stacks of people and posts underneath.

Take a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, a reporter for the Huffington Post, a novelist, a Mashable blogger and a Gen Yer typing about their quarter-life crisis. They are not the same, nor equal, and certainly not held to the same standards or expectations. They are, despite the fact that we’d like to give little credence to the notion, entirely different.

“It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump,”  Lanier writes. “Creative people — the new peasants — come to resemble animals converging on shrinking oases of old media in a depleted desert.”

Blogging is entertainment. Maybe it didn’t use to be. Maybe when bloggers were first getting started, it was about thought and connection. But increasingly, it bows to the “appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise.”

Writing is something more. And it is in the reading of such writing that enduring ideas, observations and philosophies satiate what we spend hours a day trying to glean from skimming any number of blog posts.

There is nothing wrong with blogging. But let’s give credit where it’s due – to the true writers, journalists, novelists, reporters, columnists, and others who inspire us to boil their ideas down in an effort to hold onto them just a little longer.

Written Word.