A recent resolution of mine is to spend as little time as possible with people who wholly prefer commentary to creation.
An analog example of this would be the decision to spend less time with friends who like to hang out chatting in bars and join an amateur racing outfit as a mechanic.
In the digital world, there’s some crossover between commentary and creation. One could say that in writing this post I am creating something. Am I? If so, it courts the line between creation and commentary with a definite lean toward commentary.
And that’s okay. Just not all the time.
What I’m seeing more and more of lately online, especially in social media circles, is the drive to comment rather than create. We’ve a rash of punditry that doesn’t give any signs of going away. The heart is in the right place. Haven’t we been told that if the whole world would just sit down for a talk we’d figure out all our problems? A good conversation has the ability to inspire, challenge, and even heal.
But there’s a problem when we have conversations for their own sake. Like the child who sings because the darkness is less frightening when there’s familiar noise, we shuffle toward our best guess at success.
You don’t need to sing louder than your fears anymore. Use your favorite social media platform, grab a friend, and take some time away from commentary to create something you can be proud of.
To say that it will be difficult to do so is an understatement. You’ll sweat blood for it. Good luck to us both.
Image: Fire
Very good. Our news media is almost entirely built on a foundation of commentary. Ya gotta have bread in the bakery window, as the saying goes in news media. I see the digital expansion of this in photography. A walk down Fifth Ave in New York and every second person is pointing a phone at a building. So our visual standards have widened to accept the shaking cellphone night time video from a war zone without any sense of judgement for its quality. Perhaps because it’s authentic. So when it’s a creation, of the movie studios for example, we need wide screen plasma. There are people I listen to who are excellent commentators. As far as I can tell it’s all they do. There used to be the creators and commentators on the creators. I always lived on the creation side. Now we have a blurred middle. The phone photographers. I wonder what it does for photography? I’m trying to become a better commentator.
For a small part of my time. But one never really becomes good at anything part time.
I just went to BarCamp Canberra (This is a nice wrap up: http://www.slideshare.net/event/barcamp-canberra-3).
Much of the conversation was about how we have to stop talking and start taking action. It went across a range of topics, but the theme was the same, and some were about action taking place (so wasn’t all just talk).
I have seen several examples of, between the talk, social media participation creating action. I think it is the same as any other circle. It all depends on who you hang with.