“My original sin wasn’t making a Facebook account, it was abandoning my own website that I controlled (the original site was hosted on Tripod, but if I had to do it all over again, I'd pay for web hosting.) All these years later, maybe it’s time to update Jason’s Site.”
“...the endlessly rewritable surface of the screen dispenses with that arrangement” “The distinct identity that a particular cover conveys has been traded for a standardizing consistency that unifies everything displayed on a screen as data flowing in a broader stream.” “The euphoria of endless choice and convenience is counterbalanced by a sense of anomie, in which things that used to matter — like taste — don’t seem to anymore and lack an obvious substitute. Meanwhile, the platforms themselves, in their totalizing ambition, take advantage of our disorientation and choose behavior for us.” “For centuries, the cover has functioned as the gateway to a work, priming us to receive what’s within.” “But another approach is to view infrastructure as context — that which establishes a relationship between one thing and other things. Infrastructure creates adjacency where it wouldn’t otherwise exist, frequently in the form of a physical connection. For instance, the massive Denver International Airport, opened in 1995, put an otherwise relatively remote city at the doorstep of the world, replacing a small regional airport with a major international hub. Urban street systems link houses, stores, and workplaces, defining neighborhoods and cities as coherent entities. Airports and roads, however, are only the most tangible examples of infrastructure. Organizational schema like geographic coordinates or the Dewey Decimal System are also infrastructure, as is the internet and everything it comprises, at a global scale.” “The platform’s huge selection doesn’t overwhelm us because we believe more choice is good for us whether we can handle it or not. Regardless, we never have to face the blinding totality of that variety all at once.” “Legible, contextualized environments are something humans deeply desire. Urban theorist Kevin Lynch, in his 1960 book The Image of the City, called this “imageability.” He argued that “a vivid and integrated physical setting, capable of producing a sharp image, plays a social role.” Such a setting provides “the raw material for the symbols and collective memories of group communication,” which in turn “gives its possessor an important sense of emotional security.” So a bookstore, from this point of view, is not just a place to find books, but a place to confirm a sense of belonging, one rooted in a shared sense of how things are categorized and organized.”
“I think that the opposite is true too—the writing should be able to exist alongside the image without being redundant. Writing simple summary or description of what is in the picture is not enough. To attempt and recreate what the photo is already doing is a fool’s errand because describing the contents of a picture can never compete with or replace the actual visual thing. The best we can do is try to translate what the pictures make us feel, and try and understand why they affect us in the way they do.”
“Viewed through this lens, employment takes on a feudal quality, where companies no longer provide the tools or resources for getting work done, but instead primarily offer security, a mission, and a tribe to be part of.”
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“10. After a task, project or pairing session, ask them what they would have done differently to expedite their learning. This will encourage them to reflect, gain meta-awareness about how they best learn and iterate for future work.”
“Mentorship, by contrast, is inherently performative. It will be imperfect. It will be messy. But it can be so valuable, and so rewarding. Embrace the messiness.”
“The process of remembering memories rewrites them, revises them, and this ability to re-envision ourselves is a central part of the creation of seemingly stable life narratives that allow for growth and change.” “As the work of memory keeping is offshored, Instagram by Instagram, to social media companies and cloud storage, we are giving up the work of remembering ourselves for the convenience of being reminded.” “McAdam’s life narrative is made up not so much of memories as it is by the active, personal, and performative act of remembering. The inputs into Facebook or Timehop are not bits of narrative. A Facebook Memory cannot be a narrative fragment because it is static. But to state the obvious, it is also not a memory: It is a socially contextualized performative expression. Facebook’s re-presentation of these “memories” strips them of context, recategorizing them as “events” or “moments.” They are both separate from their own context in time and, as memory objects, unavailable for the remembering and rewriting that would be necessary to interpolate them into a coherent personal narrative.” “These physical evocations age, and their value and veracity as objects of testimony ages with them and us. They date, they fade, they display their distance from the events they are connected to and their distance from us. Digital memory objects, on the other hand, although they might abruptly obsolesce, do not age in the same way. They remain flatly, shinily omni-accessible, represented to us cleanly both in the everlasting ret-conned context of their creation and consumption. The user interface of Facebook doesn’t time-machine itself to the design it had when you composed whatever memory it is showing you from 10 years ago. In the visual context presented, you could have written it yesterday.” “‘Inside Google Maps,’ she writes, ‘I live with you, and I live without you.’” “if living in one present moment is good, living in endlessly arrested presents must be even better. A continual living in the present means there is no space for reflection, for coherence-building. There is just the continual, lepidoptery-like collection of “moments.” Memories turned into mere mementos. Remembering turns into reminding.”
“I think that’s how marriages end. Very slowly and then all at once. There are lots of little things that happen and then the flood comes, then the big things happen. The question is, can we stop the little things that take us further away from each other before it’s too late?” “At the risk of sounding unromantic, I think you have to look at a person and say, ‘Okay, is this a person who is going to make sense at all different phases of this journey? Because my life is going to change. I’m going to change. What’s important to me is going to change. Is this a person who can change with me so that we end up [moving] in the same direction? Or is this someone who makes sense for me at this chapter and may not in the future?’” “In the book, I urge people to just ‘hit send now,’ which means always call out those little things immediately in the moment, always address them right now. If you don’t do that, if you let the resentments grow, those raindrops become a flood and it’s too late to put everything back together again.” “It’s the same thing with love. I think you fall in love really fast, then fall out of love slowly. And if you want to keep your love alive, you have to be attentive to all the little things that go wrong along the way, and constantly course-correct. If you can do that, you’ll never set foot in my office.”
